{"id":6995,"date":"2020-12-08T01:55:34","date_gmt":"2020-12-08T01:55:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newmatilda.com\/?p=139320"},"modified":"2020-12-08T01:55:34","modified_gmt":"2020-12-08T01:55:34","slug":"the-great-reveal-a-covid-19-house-party","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2020\/12\/08\/the-great-reveal-a-covid-19-house-party\/","title":{"rendered":"The Great Reveal: A COVID-19 House Party"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

DON’T MISS ANYTHING! ONE CLICK TO GET NEW MATILDA DELIVERED DIRECT TO YOUR INBOX, FREE!<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

COVID-19 has killed more than 1.5 million people, and injured many, many more. It\u2019s flattened economies and driven millions into poverty. It also happens to have forced a lot of minds to refocus, and face some uncomfortable truths. Essay by Paige Leacey.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

The time is 11.42pm. I\u2019m wrapped inside a mustard coloured corduroy doona, with my salt lamp glowing beside me. Its incandescence fills my room with a pink hue, which is fitting, because in this moment I feel like a little girl again. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The only shield between me and the gathering unfolding in my lounge is my bedroom door. The thin walls expose every cackle, every Doc Marten against the floorboards, and every occasion the name of the boy I like is screeched by girls I have never even met. Arms lengths away, he is wearing those girls like scarves and somehow, on this Saturday evening, my house has become the impromptu setting for a celebration. I\u2019m aloof when I\u2019m hurt so I don\u2019t say anything \u2014 to him or to anyone else at the party. Instead, I put myself to bed and hope that makes enough of a statement.   Or rather, I hope it gives me the upper hand in our dynamic and him the impression that I don\u2019t care. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sleep eludes me. As I lie there, encased in the heavy, buttery fabric of my bedspread, the feeling of rejection makes me want to run. As fast and as far as I can. I want to leave this town behind, go on holiday, imprison my hurt inside these rendered walls. I ache to return to Bali, to Thailand, to Cambodia. Anywhere cheap, anywhere now. But I can only run from this discomfort as far as my bedroom. The year is 2020, and there is a virus afoot. Travelling much farther than the front yard is a privilege no longer afforded to even the privileged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I switch on my fairy lights;  the flicker of the globes keeping pace with my beating heart. The echoes of the party penetrate the walls of my room, just as delicate as my ego, and jerk my self-worth into question. Running would be familiar, easier. If it wasn\u2019t for the world being forced to retreat home, I would have chosen the illusion of intrepidness over this agonising vulnerability. This violent stillness.  For a decade, I have been mostly on the move. Place to place, country to country; broadening my cultural horizons in order to expertly ask \u201cum, excuse me, where is the bathroom?\u201d in dialects that are not my own. The bathroom is across the hall from me now, and I hate the thought of what might be happening in there. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

GROWING up in Australia, I was fortunate enough to receive a traditional education and share homes with parents who always put food on the table and picked up my phone calls. They encouraged me to travel and live wildly, to learn and expand. But underpinning all of their lessons was a covert white-knuckling of happiness. Their every teaching advocated that the pinnacle of existence was the longevity of this feeling. The Dalai Lama himself propagated, \u201cthe very purpose of life is to seek happiness,\u201d and, for a long time, that relentless pursuit characterised my reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In February this year, when the Australian Government called\nall of its overseas-residing citizens home, I had been living on the island of\nBali for two years, among a significantly-sized community of expatriates \u2014 a\nlarge portion of whom had, too, been on the move for most of their adulthood. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the years I spent in Bali, I thought I was doing\ndeep, spiritual work. There were plenty of downward dogs, energy healings and\nnaps beneath tropical trees. I had complete autonomy over my time and the\nagency to create whatever I wanted each day, like a painter poised at her\ncanvas with no deadlines or briefs. I had already traversed into my late 20s so\ntried attractions of drinking by day and fleeting promiscuity had fallen down\nmy list of tourism to-dos. Instead, I absorbed the hours with, what I believed\nto be, more intention. Writing, reading, and ideation over tempeh and vegetables.\nI had invested in the promise of spiritual enlightenment and like a butterfly\nemerging from her consumerist cocoon, my living spoke of serenity and\nsimplicity, both foreign and intoxicating. But this self-devised plan for\npersonal development belied permanency, so you can imagine my whiplash when I\nwas uprooted by a pathogen and flung back into my hometown where, only months\nlater, I\u2019d be left split apart by the unrequited lust of some boy I hardly\nknew. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The lawless behaviour of expatriates in Bali had taught me about Western privilege, and that for some lonely-hearts clubs, the dress code was more suggestive of figurative layers than literal ones. You could be forgiven for thinking that the island was full of self-love campaigners. But if that were true, I might have had healthier relationships while I was there. I both witnessed and participated in a colonial culture rife with spiritual bypass and toxic positivity. A convenient \u2018last hurrah\u2019 before having to accept responsibility as a part of adult life \u2013 or the Never Never land in which people linger so as to evade it forever. The characters I did meet and grow to admire in Bali, were not steady on their own two feet by virtue of time spent pontificating over coconuts while reclined in sun bleached beach chairs. They did so because at some point in their lives, they had asked themselves real questions about who they were, and radically accepted whatever answers came forward. Despite this, I was still more interested in keeping up who people thought \u2013 or told me \u2013 I was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because of this, what I felt at my own house party cut me deeper than just one-sided lust. Something primal had been triggered within me \u2014 rejection, dismissal, abandonment. The uncomfortable truth was that none of the \u2018work\u2019 I\u2019d done in Bali, nor anywhere else, ever went that<\/em> deep. All those years I was migrating, my self-inquiry never extended far enough inward that it prodded against my truest wounds. The wounds that I, myself, had rejected. The wounds that, after years of suppression at the hands of a culture petrified by sadness, had been driven so far into my subconscious they were barely perceptible as they took control of my life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead, I was unwittingly hunting down opportunities for\nthose wounds to be reopened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Venturing to the level of self-approval (and awareness) that\nwould integrate my deepest melancholy with my most ecstatic joy would require\nme to remove and obliterate the masks I had worn since childhood. My life\u2019s\ninstruction manual began and finished with smiling, and there had been no\ninitiation into the acute pain or abrupt sadness that could arrive with\nmaturity. There was no premeditated pause where I could grab a notebook before\nthe real work began.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

FOR most of my teens and 20s, I had been blissfully unaware that the optimism I wore like a sky-blue cowgirl hat was just a convenient tool to circumvent anything that drifted too far above or below my emotional equator. Along with happiness, I had been modelled stoicism as the prime examples of emotional success. Not just by my parents but by the concrete landscape in which I was raised. And until now, it had worked. A sunny disposition had carried me through to 29 years of age. Like an obedient Border Collie, I was conditioned and rewarded for being positive. People liked that about me, so I liked that about me. And for the generations that preceded my own \u2013 the Boomers, Gen X, and elder Millennials \u2013 it was their blueprint for keeping the peace, staying safe.  My parents were born 20 years after the end of World War II. The fangs of capitalism had long sunk into the fabric of Australian life, and its values offered a beacon of hope for the broken: Get more, appear successful, be happy.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was around seven years old when my father lost our Grandmother to cancer, but no tears stained his face. Not because he didn\u2019t suffer the profound loss of a love displaced, of being forced to transform before he was ready \u2014 I know he felt that because we share the same sensitive genes \u2014 but because our family didn\u2019t have the tools to assimilate his grief into the rest of our lives. My father didn\u2019t have the foundations to accept and integrate this new, much rawer, layer of himself with his other responsibilities as a husband, a brother, a worker, a family man. That was the way of his generation. Why expose the mess when it was easier to just go on silently congratulating each other for being survivors? If no-one ever had to look their own pain in the eye then, collectively, we could permit fantasy to be our reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Growing up, I knew that if I didn\u2019t disrupt the status quo it would be smooth sailing for everyone. I was the eldest in our small family so I only had my parents to look up to. The saying \u2018it takes a village\u2019 may be true, but on the North Shore of Sydney, and then later in Northern NSW, we just kept to ourselves. The side of me that blistered with frustration, anger, sadness and confusion was repressed by a buoyant facade \u2014 an interest that wouldn\u2019t be paid for years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Returning home from life as a nomad, courtesy of COVID-19 ,\nI suddenly found myself idle. While the world was reckoning with its demons, I\nwas finally called to sit with all of my own feelings, and I didn\u2019t even know\nwhere to begin with admitting I felt vulnerable. In this ominous and exhausting\nclimate, I could no longer muster the control and energy required to feign\nhappiness \u2014 or even okayness. My reserves were depleted. Shaken completely out\nof my delusion, I wasn\u2019t half the glossy human I\u2019d written the role of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the past, any time my identity had been interrogated \u2014\nwhen romantic partners begged to see my tender side, when co-workers rubbed up\nagainst something old and festering within me, or when my family reflected to\nme the parts of myself I had long disowned \u2014 I could just check-out. Hustle\nhard. Quit my job. Board a flight. I could always find a way to physically\ndistance myself from whatever had disrupted my snug little narrative. But this\npandemic had shackled me to the scene of the latest crime against my character\nand, albeit, only a nudge, over the edge I fell. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Outside a virus threatened the health of the human world, but down the dark and uncharted grottos of my psyche was another virus: my own belief that I was never going to be enough.  For anyone, or anything. Inherent in my warped self-image also lay dormant the suffocating thought that, one day, I would actually have to confront this darkness within me. In her book Untamed, Glennon Doyle preaches that \u201cthe blueprints of heaven are etched in the deep desires of women\u201d, but would I ever be so brash as to ask myself: What do I truly want out of life? Who do I want to be, in the face of all this?<\/em> The rejection sure to follow such bold introspection felt far too turbulent to even contemplate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On a macro level, COVID-19 meant the Hollywood-horror-style\ntyranny of a sub-microscopic infection, the unveiling of oppressive paradigms,\nthe purging of world-dominant economies, and the operatic gasp of the natural\nenvironment. But for me, COVID-19 meant sharing space with my family for long\nenough to be reminded of how we hurt each other.  It meant meeting myself as an adult for the\nfirst time, back in my hometown. It meant getting intimate with a single\ncommunity\u2019s opinions and thus my own of myself. It meant rewriting and deleting\ninconsequential text messages, ripping to shreds the skin around my fingers,\ncrying in my car while checking Instagram for reassurance, and recklessly\nlumping my worth into the hands of others because the burden was too heavy for\nme to carry. COVID-19 meant living under such compression that the jokes, the\njoy and the, \u201cjeez, work\u2019s been busy,\u201d autoreply could no longer be sustained.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the peak of the pandemic, trusted health institutes\npleaded with the government to do something more about the mental health crisis\nof Australians under duress. The loss of their identities endured in\nconjunction with the loss of their financial security and material assets were\nshaping up to be just as catastrophic as the bodily hazard at hand. Beyond\nBlue, a prominent Australian mental health organisation, noted a 30 per cent\nincrease in calls following the implementation of social distancing in March\nand a further increase to 60 per cent in May (when measured against the same\ntime in 2019).  With ambiguity lurking around\nevery corner, national unrest was at an all-time high. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But outside of the physical virus, was all of this truly that<\/em> unprecedented? Or had the lid just been cracked on a more surreptitious undercurrent, finally allowing all Australians to admit they each fell somewhere on the axis of a-little-to-a-lot anxious and sad, a-little-to-a-lot of the time?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Billions of dollars cascaded from government coffers into new COVID-19 mental health schemes and collaborations. From early October the psychology rebates each Australian would be entitled to increased to 20 sessions. Inboxes were flooded with resources on how to cope, how to support, how to navigate, and how to breathe during these precarious times. Yet, from my observation, what each of these offerings missed was the acknowledgement that to be human is to manoeuvre through emotional uncertainty. Our country could have used a richer lexicon for sadness, dread and existential panic long ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

IN MY early 20s, I lived with bulimia. I felt like an alien inside of my body, with so many questions about how to exist but gripped by so much fear of being exposed. There were days when I would purge everything that came into contact with my stomach, between being at the gym for 6am weights and then again for 6pm pilates. I unconsciously punished myself for merely thinking I deserved to exist. A part of me thought that I needed to be skinny to be beautiful and valuable in the world, but I also didn\u2019t feel in control of my own thoughts. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I never told anyone about my addiction \u2014 bar one doctor, my\nmum and a masseuse I trusted \u2014 because I didn\u2019t have a polished script to\nexplain what I was dealing with. I didn\u2019t even understand it myself. It felt\ntoo reductive to admit that I didn\u2019t want to keep food down for fear that my\nribs would no longer show through the skin of my back. But I didn\u2019t have the\nlanguage to convey that my disdain wasn\u2019t really for how I looked, it was for\nhow spiritually bankrupt I felt. The dopamine hit I\u2019d receive from domineering\nmy body was exhilarating, sure, but the quest to feel good all the time was the\nunhappiest experience of my life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Move on, move on, move on<\/em>, I\u2019d tell myself. When you relocate, you\u2019ll stop self-harming. But it never worked like that. Nothing ever filled those starving voids. I wouldn\u2019t realise for a decade that the emptiness I forced myself to feel in more toilet cubicles than I can count wasn\u2019t because I needed to feel thin, it was because I needed to feel empty to feel anything at all.  All of the sadness, and weirdness, and discomfort that had proliferated in my life (amidst the joy, the pleasure and the fortuity) wanted to be realised. Only once its core had been paid attention to would I have any chance at recognising the psychological trap into which I\u2019d staggered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The body wants to surface and heal its wounds, just like the cells in our skin after an endless afternoon in the sun. The burn of any bad experience takes time to complete its natural cycle and move out of the body, but if its passage is blocked, the trauma doesn\u2019t just dissipate. There it stays lodged, awaiting its turn to be seen. The body holds no judgement for emotions that are not happiness or joy, either. It trusts it can alchemise any grief or gloom into gifts. The mind is the one far easier swayed, allowing external factors to program which feelings are most appropriate, and in which order they should be prioritised. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

MY iPhone reads 12.56am. I venture past my bedroom door for a glass of water, exposing myself again to the object of my begrudged affection as he knocks back tequila in the kitchen. His eyes are vacant, his posture proud and I see my own mask reflected back to me, like a mirror. He gulps from the bottle as if its contents were Cottee\u2019s cordial, and I ask him where he is trying to go. He ignores my question and slinks back into the party.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If we choose to recognise it, sadness has a lot to teach us.\nOur nausea, both collectively and individually, can point us in the direction\nof our problems. Through the shadows we are invited to look deeper for\nsolutions, and to lean into courage and compassion to access the freedom we\ngrapple so helplessly for externally. Our emotions are what bind us as social\nmammals and they are the truest norths we have – if we are willing to work with\nthem as neither malevolent nor virtuous. This is no easy feat. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A person who has been observed as jubilant for most of their\nlife may be received with trepidation by others as their inner world begins to\nrise and perforate the surface. But this contending of their prevailing factory\nsettings, and these moments of disjuncture as they surrender to accepting\nthemselves wholly for who they are, will pass. Just as the emotions that\nprovoked the concerns in others will too. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The antidote to shame is honour, so we must honour each other in revealing our unique truths. Beyond the numbness, the resistance, the tequila straight from the bottle, awaits exquisite beauty, and the kinds of connections this new world order calls desperately for. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

BY 1:07am, I\u2019ve retreated back to the safe confines of my bedroom. I am all alone but for the moth who perches atop my vinyl roller blinds. The weight of my heart has subsided, just for this moment. The salt lamp, a big pink rock someone decided to make luminous, is sweating onto my bedside table making the pages of my favourite books slimy and wet. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I want to lick it up but I don\u2019t. I must have licked something briny as a child and fallen ill shortly afterwards. Or perhaps I burned myself on a hot lamp? Either way, something inside me knows better than that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*Ed’s note: This is a paid contribution, and New Matilda pays better than most (we also, proudly, have a 23% ‘gender loading’ for women writers). Even so, a lot of work (and even more skill) went into bringing you this essay. If you got something from it and want to give something directly back to the writer, you can contribute to Paige’s Paypal.me account<\/a> here<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

DON’T MISS ANYTHING! ONE CLICK TO GET NEW MATILDA DELIVERED DIRECT TO YOUR INBOX, FREE!<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

The post The Great Reveal: A COVID-19 House Party<\/a> appeared first on New Matilda<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on New Matilda<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

COVID-19 has killed more than 1.5 million people, and injured many, many more. It\u2019s flattened economies and driven millions into poverty. It also happens to have forced a lot of minds to refocus, and face some uncomfortable truths. Essay by Paige Leacey. The time is 11.42pm. I\u2019m wrapped inside a mustard coloured corduroy doona, with […]<\/p>\n

The post The Great Reveal: A COVID-19 House Party<\/a> appeared first on New Matilda<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":635,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[605,1966],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6995"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/635"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6995"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6995\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6996,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6995\/revisions\/6996"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}