Well, tomorrow is here. I'm starting this post at 8:45pm on Friday 23 December. I know I should be out rocking on tonight. It's Friday night, and it's the day most workplaces close for the Christmas/New Year break. Truthfully, tonight I just wanted to crash. I think every night this week I've gotten home at or about midnight. So tonight, by about 6:30pm, I was back at the house, in my little room on my couch surfing channels. After about 2 hours of this downtime, I feel a lot better, and I'm even toying with the idea of getting the number 96 tram from here to St Kilda Beach for a twilight coffee and maybe a sandwich.
So today: It was a casual day at work, so I was in a nice set of khakis and a maroon shirt. This didn't involve any appointments or court, so I was reviewing files for any crises that might need to be tackled presto, and otherwise getting on with work. The office did indeed close at 1pm for a firm-supplied lunch of about 20 pizzas and other food and booze and distribution of KK gifts, and also distribution of the latest piece of merchandise (black t-shirt with the firm's logo on it). You remember how I've been eating at the office most of this week? Well, this has meant a lot of tinned vegetables (potatos, red beans, chick peas, corn, carrots, etc etc), oats and fruit. As diets go it's terribly healthy - my digestive system hasn't felt this good in ages - but it has gotten a bit more monotonous than even cayenne pepper can liven up, and it's been fairly short of protein. So, faced with a buffet supplied by my employer that involved many, many meat-based pizzas, I knew what to do. I was just about waddling when I left! I didn't get hammered - just two ciders and two beers - and then went back to my office to get a few little jobs done. Then I headed out.
First, to a discount bookshop on the corner of Bourke and Elizabeth Streets where Angus & Robertson used to be (before that particular chain of book dealers went bust). The funny thing was, the store that's now there was selling everything for about 5 dollars (A&R's usual price for ANYTHING used to be at least $20.00), and had a LOT more books and a wider range of them, and the place was packed. The discount store, frankly, seems to have a much sounder business model. Now admittedly, most of the books looked to me like either vanity publishing that had gone wrong, or books that had been remaindered, but I still bought more
books there tonight (8) that I'd usually ever have bought from A&R in one go. All of them bought as gifts. It might be a gift free Christmas this year - Mum's been trying to move us in that direction for years - and apparently I get a pass for cooking the turkey - but I thought I should be safe and get something for people. Which isn't easy: we don't see each other much, and so getting things people like involves a little guesswork. Especially for my little sister, where what I really want to get her is a way to say lovingly to her "for Christ's sake, you're a good person with a lot of great qualities, so please PLEASE don't waste your life with a boyfriend who doesn't treat you especially well, and doing work you loathe and that has gotten you into a measure of trouble; life is beautful and you don't want to miss it!".
Books bought, I went and put some credit on my aircard so I can post this later, and then walked back to the tram stop. I was carrying my briefcase and two bags of books (i.e. a load in each hand), and just wanted to come back here and switch my brain off, which takes me back to where this entry began.
* * * * *
I met with Sonia the psychologist on Tuesday. She felt that I'd taken in a lot of the means of getting my thoughts under control, and in a lot of ways, I do feel much better and more in control of my ups and downs - and particularly the downs. Especially that I think I'm less prone to (if not actually immune from) going off the deep end of despair and panic as I was. Partly it's been just recognizing that I'm doing it, and seeing them for the tricks of the mind that they are, and seeing that when these ghosts of my fears hover in front of me, clanking their chains and shrieking, the thing to do is walk through them and ask what the problem is, what's really likely to happen, and what I can do to fix it. And when the worst thing happens, and the black demons start trying to seduce me and tell me that I'm just a burden and a hindrance to everyone, and start offering me exhaust pipes and hoses and lengths of rope, that there's things I can do about that too, to keep myself safe and not do something so blind and foolish.
The thing is, I don't now think I'm as bad as I often tell myself I am. Look, in the last couple of years I haven't been the best husband that Joni could have had. Sometimes I was just plain horrible to her, and cruel, and I hate myself for it. I was hideous to her best friend here, who was really close to both of us and who now can barely speak to me, and that's something I think I'll wish I could undo till the day I die. I can claim some excuse in the mess inside my head, and how little equipped I was to manage the new life we had when the girls arrived, and how much I wanted my life to be something I could manage and understand again. But, the excuse only goes part of the way. A lot of the blame has to stop with me. Still, it's not all black and white: I
still wasn't an evil person. Even at my worst I wanted to stop, and I did try in my messed-up way to show Joni how precious she is to me, and that (I think) makes me something other than a bad husband. I guess it makes me a flawed one.
The same goes for our little girls. I think I could have been a better dad to them so far. I could have tried harder to learn all the things that I should have, and to be there more to support Joni especially when they were newborn. But for all that, I haven't been a bad father either. I was never cruel to them, and I tried to play with them and make them happy and laugh, and to teach them things. I take some pride that it was me who first gave our little Picassos-in-diapers crayons and taped paper to the trays of their high chairs! And as erratically as I did it, I did always make sure there was money in the bank to buy diapers and food and keep the lights on and pay the doctors bills. I wasn't a great dad - that's surely true enough - but I wasn't a completely worthless one either. I'm kind of relieved that I've got 16 more years to help my little princesses become the awesome ladies I know they'll grow up to be!
And also: I'm not a great lawyer by any stretch of the imagination. It's unlikely I'll ever take anything before the Supreme Court of the US or the High Court of Australia. With the best will in the world I think next year will often involve just scraping by, and success will be leaving this job without being fired. But still, I'm not a bad lawyer either. I'm honest and genuinely hard working, and I've never stolen from a client or billed fees I didn't fairly believe I'd earned, and I can usually do an OK job if I've had a few coffees and the wind's in the right direction. OK, I might be professionally forgettable. But I'm not a professional failure. And maybe it reflects well on me that I've kept turning up to my job, even when so often I wanted to walk away.
All of which is a reflection on how far I've come. The thing I learned from getting my head read all these weeks has been that the very black-and-white, "you're either a success or a fucking worthless failure" worldview that I've so often judged my life by, just isn't how you live as an adult. Or at least not as an adult who is also a husband and father. Which was really why I didn't adapt well after the girls were born. All my life, the only way I could judge my worth as a person was through work. It was the only thing that I could value myself by, because that was how it always was at school and university and in the workforce. So I just couldn't assign a value to being a good husband (when it really counted) and father. It wasn't that I valued these things too low. It was just that they were stuck in a kind of blind spot. As I say, I was still stuck in a world where everything was black-and-white, success-or-worthless-dipshit. Now I can see that life is more complex than that, that sometimes OK is actually good, and that not every time you fall down means you need to question the value of your own existence.
Getting that "complex thinking" embedded in my head is the task ahead of me. Which will be a tough job, when you consider that I've had that that black-and-white mantra as part of my thinking since roughly the early 1990s. But I'm glad I can do it now. Just from reading the last couple of paragraphs I kind of feel like a weight is lifted off my mind.
* * * * *
Tomorrow I'll need to be on the road to procure a turkey and the fixings to make butter marinade and a big-gauge syringe to inject it with, and a couple of litres of fresh peanut oil. I may go to the office in the afternoon, and then to midnight Mass at St Patrick's Cathedral. I've wanted to go for a while, and this might well be my last chance. I have no idea what to do on Christmas Day. The other housemates (some of them, at least) are doing Christmas lunch here, but I don't know that that's really my thing. I may head down to Mum and Dad's that night and stay down there the night; I haven't really decided. I'll need to try and get their skype operating so I can see the girls and Joni for Christmas Day (there) when it's Boxing Day (here).
OK. Well, it's now 10:30. I'm going to post this and have a shower and get an early night. Oh, I forgot to say that I've finally broken a very long habit. I always said I didn't read fiction, and indeed I hadn't since the mid/late-1990s. Well, I've broken the drought: this week I read H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine" in about 5 tram-rides. Feels kind of good not to be locked into a habit!
See you all tomorrow.
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