Purple Prose (23 page)

I don't know why people talk about hearts breaking. The heart is a muscle, for Christ's sake, and muscles don't shatter. People can hurt us by retracting their love, or leaving us for others or just plain leaving us. But this is more of a bruising thing. Domestic violence, sexual and physical abuse, now that's a different thing. These
actions have huge potential to inflict long-term psychological damage. They can break us and tear us apart. And the death of people you love. That's not bruising, either. Neither is grief a long-term illness. Like cancer, it ebbs and flows. Goes into remission. It comes back to bite us, often when we least expect it.

People like to give you advice when you split up. It ranges from quick fixes to long-term game plans. Over the next few months, I found most of it annoying, amusing and, on the whole, unsatisfying. The only advice I would pass on to The Bruised is: fish, stop listening to Leonard Cohen, and buy haemorrhoid cream. Listening to Leonard Cohen is like pushing down hard on your bruise. ‘Wallowing' my mum would call it. Whatever you call it, it's not helpful. Fishing puts things in perspective: watching the tide go out dragged my angst into the open sea where it bobbed around small and insignificant. Haemorrhoid cream was more practical – it reduced the puffy eyes that came with constant crying. The advice I would give to Friends of The Bruised is to listen. That's all.

Other advice during that year was the
Getting Over It
school of thought. Like hurt was a hurdle. But I didn't believe that leaping over it and never looking back was going to work. There was also the school of
Toughen Up, Princess
. It's the sister school of
Tell Someone Who Gives a Shit.
It's a tough place, where I live, the North-West, but it's come a long way since I moved up here. We take our mental health a lot more seriously these days because of the high suicide rates. Everyone, particularly in Indigenous communities, is chalking up a suicide, or two or three, in their own family. Many of them are young men. Boys bruise too; it seems … not just on the footy field.

I became My Own Worst Enemy. Apart from going the knuckle on my bruise with Leonard Cohen, I kept a Bruise Inventory. Here are some of the items I listed:

• Bob Hawke discarding his long-suffering wife, Hazel, for his biographer, Blanche D'Alpuget.
  
• My friend's wife leaving him when she found out he had prostate cancer.
  
• Woody Allen falling in love with his adoptive daughter.
  
• Being texted by your long-term partner saying, ‘It's over' and never seeing them again.
  

The purpose of the Bruise Inventory was to put my bruising in perspective. I tried to tell myself that what happened to me wasn't really up there with Bob taking off with Blanche.

As a result of falling into Cathy's crybaby category or administering too much haemorrhoid cream, I ended up with a persistent bloodshot eye, so I carted myself off to the doctor. He took my blood pressure. It was off the scale and he asked me if my life was any more stressful than usual. I burst in to tears and told him I was separating from my long-term partner. A child was involved. I left the surgery with scripts for conjunctivitis cream, anti-depressants and anti-anxiety tablets. I was also clutching a mental health care plan. He wouldn't give me a script for sleeping tablets. Yet sleep was the thing I most needed. The psych I'd been seeing was furious.

‘Of course you're depressed and anxious. I'd be more alarmed if you didn't feel that way.'

She told me to only consider filling the prescriptions if I stopped eating, sleeping and being able to work.

‘But call me before you go down that path.'

I didn't travel that path but I got pretty close. I stood at the beginning of the end of it, time and time again, unpacking my
feelings in an attempt to understand things better. And it wasn't one path, I soon discovered, but many; the bitter and twisted one, the one that flogs you remorselessly, the trail of breadcrumbs leading to nowhere.

‘Surely, surely,' I said to one of my Listening Friends, ‘there's another way through this.'

‘Maybe you're just not at a point in your life that you can imagine a happy ending,' he said. ‘I'm the same.' He was a playwright and his strong point was satire … plunge-the-knife-and-twist-it stuff. We both laughed unhappy laughs.

‘He's right,' another Listening Friend said. I'd offered to help with the purging of her house. We'd got to the point of emptying out her built-in wardrobes and putting her junk into themed piles. We were just about to embark on the process of throwing away and delegation.

‘Don't tell me there's no happy-ever-after,' I moaned, picking up a pile of stained linen, sandpaper bath towels, tea towels and placemats. I moved towards the op-shop box.

‘No,' she said, plucking the pig of happiness tea towel from the top. ‘He's right about the “imagining” bit.'

‘You have a whole kitchen drawer stuffed full of tea towels,' I said, plucking it back.

‘And you have chosen to see what happened in your life in one way, making up a story based on that one imagining.'

I threw the pile into the box and moved towards a stack of books and magazines.

‘Being a writer, you should know that there are many ways to imagine or interpret an event,' she continued. ‘You've just chosen this story to see things through a particular lens.'

‘It's not about lenses. It's about bottom lines. You either love someone or you don't.'

‘Wait,' she said rifling through the books I was about to cull. She plucked one with a cover straight out of the 70s, all swirling psychedelic pink and green. It was Alice Morgan's
What is
Narrative Therapy? An Easy-to-read Introduction.
It was thin, the cover flimsy and the only thing that got me opening it was the fact that Alice was Australian, not American.

I frowned as I leafed through the book, stopping at one page to read out aloud, ‘The stories we make about our lives are created through linking certain events together in a particular sequence across a time period and finding a way of explaining or making sense of them … we have stories about ourselves, our abilities, our struggles, our competencies, our actions, our desires, our relationships, our work, our interests, our conquests, our achievements, our failures.'

‘That's it.' My friend tossed a few old magazines into the op-shop box and put aside the
National Geographic
s.

I pushed the mountain of clean washing to one side of the sofa.

‘Keep it,' my friend said.

‘I'll just read the first chapter,' I said, already absorbed, curling up. ‘And don't think I didn't notice,' I muttered.

‘Notice what?' she asked.

‘That the pig tea towel made it back into the kitchen drawer.'

She returned the majority of piles back into the walk-in wardrobes while I read Alice Morgan cover to psychedelic cover.

After reading the book, I realised that I'd got so caught up in the story about my failure to make my relationship with Jim work that I'd shelved any stories I had about my achievements. How had my story as a gymnast in high school come to be an achievement story rather than a struggle story? Because I'd privileged medal-winning and praise when I'd mastered flips and dismounts. I'd overcome fear when I fell and kept on going. That's how.

During our lives, we live many stories at once. Sometimes they run parallel to each other but most of the time they layer-up and are multi-storied. Plot lines and themes shoot themselves into each other. They intertwine and are coloured by social and cultural values.
At certain times in our lives, particular stories gain precedence. Sometimes these stories may also become problem stories.

My son would give his right arm to be invisible but for me, my invisibility is an outstanding problem. I can be in a group of people and feel as if I am not being seen or heard by anyone. It has me thinking that I'm not important. My invisibility is magnetic, it attracts filings of lunch cancellations, unreturned telephone calls and not being invited to parties and camping trips. It renders me speechless or makes me say stupid things, it calls me ‘dickhead', churns my guts, snorts at the way I deal with disagreements and, at times, has been known to relentlessly chant, ‘B-o-r-ing! B-o-r-ing! B-o-r-ing!' Only recently have I named this ‘invisibility'. Before that it was me being painfully shy and self-conscious. Naming it was powerful. It created a gap between ‘me' and the ‘problem'. Now I can see the problem for what it is.

Perspective is a wonderful thing. It creates a nice little lookout where I can stand and watch the problem's tricks and tactics, its rules, game plans, desires and, importantly, what forces are in league with it and the people in my life that cheer it on. I've learned a lot sitting at my lookout and watching. Not just about me, but about the huge part cultural and socio-political stories play in people's lives. Instead of seeing someone as ‘lazy', for example, I can see how much credence Western society values hard workers and shuns idleness. Australia has a word for lazy people – ‘bludgers'. At my lookout I can better identify these norms and this helps me to embrace and celebrate difference instead of categorising people in terms of how different they are from the accepted story. But it's a challenge, right? It's much easier to say someone is lazy and move on, rather than think about why we think they are lazy. When we call someone ‘lazy', the person is the problem and the role social values play in this magically disappears. If I had ten bucks for every time I've heard a non-Aboriginal person call an Aboriginal person
‘lazy', I'd be a rich woman. Yet Aboriginal people in the North-West put family above work and, instead of burning out, they tend to pace themselves, take time out to enjoy life and laugh.