Progress
Often we are our worst critics. We berate and punish ourselves for not achieving more, when what we should probably be doing is taking a step back and admiring what we’ve achieved. Sometimes, any progress is better than no progress at all.
This is a post about harsh truths, unpleasant realities and perseverance.
This is me.
I was raised on a working farm in Gippsland where we grew our own food with a massive vegetable garden and fruit orchard. We seasonally foraged ingredients like mushrooms, berries and wild fruits. We raised Hereford and Angus for market and freezer and we had a collection of chooks for meat and eggs. We cut hay every summer, bailed it and stored it for winter and did all the farm chores from wood cutting, shed building, repairing fences and hanging gates.
This farming life was a long held dream of Mums, she was the one responsible for this amazing childhood experience. She convinced my very metropolitan father to leave the city and dive deep into the farm experience. Not everyone in the family loved it, but Mum and I sure did. I have fond memories of summer evenings tending the garden when the heat had gone. We’d spend time together propagating seedlings, harvesting ingredients for dinner, weeding, mulching and collecting seeds for next year's crops. I learnt so much in those formative years. I was a nerdy teenager falling in love with the seasons, nature and the great outdoors. There was no TikTok, no social media, no such thing as attention economy, but there was nature and it was wonderful.
Admittedly, I was a bit of a loner and you'd often find me rather content sitting on the river bank with a fishing line or two hoping for trout, blackfish and eels. I’d catch freshwater crayfish and boil them in a billy by the river and trout was stuffed with lemons and dill and wrapped in tinfoil destined for campfire coals where I’d feast like a king. The love affair for all these country living experiences has not gone away, if anything my affinity for these simple things has only grown stronger. The older I get the more I covet the chance to relive similar experiences whenever I can.
Over the years I’ve rented land, from old farm houses on working stations to houses with backyards in small country towns. I once owned a 5 acre bush block and tried to replicate what I loved on the childhood farm but the soil was sandy and dry, and the bush shaded the veg garden so it wasn’t very productive. The chooks also got eaten by foxes and after a close call with a big bushfire we moved back into town for a spell.
Since then it’s been a shit fight to be honest. I got divorced and ended up in an abusive relationship with an unstable partner that always wanted a fresh start, so we moved house 6 times in 7 years. It was so disruptive. The idea of settling down was never an option. A mate would make jokes to me about it, but at the time I just shrugged it off as normal, but it was far from normal. With 2 kids and heading towards my 40’s I really needed more stability. The emotional and manipulative abuse, constant downsizing and moving did nothing positive for my anxiety and depression. My life went off the rails for a few years, and I drifted and retreated inside.
Embracing my inner loner I tried to escape my thoughts and feelings by riding my old Harley anywhere but home, whenever I got the chance. I’d spend weekends on the road heading off to random places to find solace and temporary peace. The inevitable happened (thank goodness) and that horrible relationship ran its course and I found myself back in a regional town that I loathed, renting a run down 1960’s suburban brick clinker. For my sanity I dug up the garden and started growing vegetables as I normally would, but now it felt more important than ever. It was something I’d done all my life and it felt good to be me. But a small urban garden isn’t the openness of a paddock, it isn’t the evening call of frogs and birds settling into roost. Instead the sounds of nature had been replaced with police sirens, bogan burnouts and the sounds of distant arguments for all to hear. I was so low by this point, I’d lost everything. Not just physical things but my will to give a shit and care about myself. After far too many years of medication I decided to taper off antidepressants. I was tired of the side effects and feeling like I was flatlining every emotion I was supposed to be feeling. With a few more nasty knife stabs from my ex-partner I started my decline into nervous breakdowns, one after another. I ended up in hospital a number of times, sedated and disillusioned with everything. I couldn’t trust anything or anyone. I definitely couldn’t see much value in myself or my existence.
I would spend a lot of time alone, drunk and crying like a cliche 40 something divorced dropkick. I’d berate myself - how had I reached this low point in life. I distracted myself with all the wrong things, but I hung on for my girls. On the surface to my friends, family and work colleagues, I did my best to appear functional, but I was far from it. I overthought everything and my zest and spark for life had faded so much I struggled to find joy in things that had previously made me happy. Recognising I was in a bad place I went back to therapy, which helped me understand and digest what had happened over the 7 years I’d spent in that manipulative and abusive relationship. There was a feeling of utter frustration that what I had experienced was something other people would never know about. All they saw was a fun and popular person that was my partner, not the narcissist, sociopath with borderline personality disorder who I lived with. It was frustrating to know that her friends would never believe what I’d been through behind closed doors, but my kids saw it all. Us girls supported each other as we navigated our new life post that break-up.
I tried the best I could during this time, but I was spat out on the other side of some very shit times. I’d lost my sense of self, my identity and what mattered to me - other than riding motorbikes, drinking too much and nervously chugging darts.
In these times dating is not a smart idea, but I did it. In hindsight I should have spent more time working on myself so I could be kinder to myself and the people I interacted with.
Just before the pandemic my body started having a really bad reaction to being off meds - 14 years of psychiatric medication will do that. Everyone's body will react to medication in its own unique way and for me it was horrendous. My withdrawal experience was one of the most scary experiences I’ve ever been through and I’m still dealing with it in some ways. The damage to my brain is permanent. It was such a lonely experience at this time, medical professionals didn’t believe me, but I found solace in the many thousands of people online that had or were going through a similar experience. I found that this was somewhat ‘normal’ and I wasn’t losing my mind. For anyone that goes through a similar experience with SSRI medication, I highly recommend going online and reading as many forums as possible. I see benefits in this kind of medication but it’s not without its downsides, and the pharmaceutical companies are not rushing to deal with the fall out, instead the industry continues to push these medications on people that could probably just change a bunch of environmental factors and see some results. It’s a complex reality and not one that I want to spend hours talking about right now.
In this bumpy time I met someone, someone life changing. In the early days of our relationship, when my body was doing weird withdrawal things, I had to come clean and communicate transparently about what was happening to me. For context, people have said coming off heroin was an easier experience than years of withdrawal from psychiatric medication. I actually went a little mental, this is not a joke. Often I was not myself, I was in my body but it wasn’t me. This is THE WORST TIME to meet someone and start a relationship. On top of my own personal issues, my mum passed away after a long battle. Even as my life felt more like a crumble than a cookie, my girl stuck by me. The last three years, although challenging at times, it’s been about slow progress. As cliche as it sounds, we’ve taken it one day at a time, sometimes it's two steps forward, one step back, but it's still progress.
I’ve learnt to trust in people again (some people) and I’ve found joy in things again. I’ve definitely found joy in a relationship and I’ve learned that there is such a thing as a safe space in someone you care about. I now know what a healthy relationship looks like. Sure, there’s still triggers at times, but we work through them with brave, sometimes uncomfortable conversations and honesty. It’s taken a lot of self work, therapy and patience, but I’m content. I even smile at times.
A few years ago, I took a giant leap and moved to the city into my partner's place. It’s a practical temporary city living situation that will pay dividends as we consolidate and save for our own place. To be honest, there’s a lot of things I love about living in a culturally diverse city. It's great! Downside is that it sometimes feels claustrophobic and there’s a lot of people here, and I generally don't like people. I believe you can concurrently dislike gen-pop people and still argue for things like equity and equality. And when I say I dislike gen-pop people, what I really mean is that I dislike the blandness of Australian consumer culture. What most people strive for, the ‘Australian dream’ is something I find difficulty relating to. I just can’t vibe on suburban culture where the food is cardboard and the aspirations are shallow. I don’t care how new and expensive people's cars are or how large their McMansions are. Everyones different. That’s a separate conversation for another time.
With two reliable incomes we’ve managed to buy some land in my old country neighborhood with plans to build on our dreams. Amazingly we both independently share a vision to live on country and do all the things we love to do. I guess that’s why some people hit it off, shared interests. Turns out we both like to grow food and raise animals. It’s refreshing to not feel like you’re forcing your dreams of living off the land on someone that doesn’t really want it. We’ve both experienced that in our previous lives. One good thing about getting older, you work out what you want in life and you tend to have less patience for the things that get in the way of achieving them.
We have 6 acres of grazing paddock. It’s full of woody weeds that we’re slowly making our way through removing. We’ve put house designs together and submitted plans to the local council. For our regular visits we’ve built a decent size shed to house an old caravan we bought. We’ve planted almost 600 indigenous trees, shrubs and native grasses to start the process of repairing habitat and biodiversity health. We’ve installed two large water tanks to harvest rainwater and as two impatient wogs that love to grow things, we formed a ‘test’ vegetable garden last year to test soil productivity which provided us with a modest crop. It’s been great to have dirt under our nails and fruiting bodies in our hands. We’ve cooked many dishes from the fruits of our labor and made preserves. The experience has made us both smile on many occasions. These simple joys in life should never fade. They should never lose their lustre and it’s fucking fabulous to share these experiences together. We’ve recently dug up the test garden and improved the soil so it’s more friable and a better growing medium for vegetable crops. Even though we’ve planted a winter crop, I can’t wait for summer!
Every time we visit the block we do something. It might be cutting down invasive woody weeds, planting onions or making small modifications to what is feeling more like a cabin than a caravan in a shed. One of the most lovely things about the experience is that it’s starting to feel like a home (albeit a very cold, unheated home in winter).
When we stay there we fall asleep to the sounds of hundreds, if not thousands of frogs and birds. We hear the wind in the trees and the rain on the tin roof. There’s no need to play those night time relaxy sounds on the phone to lull us to sleep, actual nature provides that for us.
In a world bombarded with fake, curated social media content, the growing impacts of climate change and political polarity and instability, it feels calming to be on land again. It’s our place of recharge, where we can reconnect with nature and we’ve both worked really hard to get here. At times we need to remind ourselves of how far we’ve both come, not just with progress on the block, but as individuals that have been independently working on themselves for years. We’ve both been through some traumatic shitty life experiences, and have made so much progress. Dare I say, the best progress we’ve both made is finding some genuine level of happiness and that even though horrible things pop up in life, it’s not the horrible things that are important, it’s how we react and deal with them that matters.
From lived experience, I know that good things, all things do not last forever, change is inevitable. I accept that life may head south at any moment, and as unpleasant as that experience might be, it will just be another experience. But for now, I’m content and appreciating this period. It’s just life after all and I think Mum would be pretty stoked for me.
