*Little note- I did not face war, poverty, systemic racism, oppression, or a real frontline Covid experience this year. When I was sick, hurt or injured, I was immediately able to get free healthcare and to pay for rehabilitation and medication - I have the privilege of being light-hearted.
It begins
I awake on January 1st 2020 with one of the worst migraines of my life. I can’t even leave my bed for most of the day. I suspect it is from spending too much time outside the day before in the smoke from the apocalyptic fires that are destroying houses, most of our national parks and every last koala. The migraine feels ominous, portentous even, a sign that perhaps this might not be my year.
a migraine moment:
death has become an option
worth considering
India
Mid-January the VP of the University where I lecture emails me to say she has sponsored me to be an Australian guest writer at a literary festival in India. This is wildly out of the blue. I work in an environment that does not usually appreciate creative writing, let alone my brand of off-beat, irreverent nonsense. I go alone, knowing no one and having never travelled to India before. It becomes not only the finest moment of the year (not hard), but one of my favourite life adventures (a far more rigorous list of glories). Hyderabad has such incredible creative energy that it fills me up enough to get me through most of 2020. I meet generous, brilliant and hilarious writers who reminded me that writing is important and beautiful, and that poetry is one of the reasons we survive. One of the things I love the most in life is the feeling of absolutely no one knowing where I am – being completely lost and alone in my corner of the planet. The silence of it. The self-determination. The filling up. I have that in India when I leave my hotel, negotiate an auto ride to the giant Buddha and sit there for hours drinking sweet milky coffee.
On the way home from India, I am sitting in a cafe in the Dubai airport with a guy from London I met on the plane when we were both upgraded to Business Class – we are celebrating our good fortune so far in 2020 (sorry about that, we may have jinxed it). A giant television screen above the bar describes the chaos in Wuhan and suggests that some countries are starting a process of quarantining incoming passengers. It feels like an over-reaction to me and I am barely concerned because the next story is the news of the death of Kobe and Gianna which feels much more visceral. Basketball has been integral to my life since 1990 and Kobe feels like someone I know. His death feels foreboding.
Lockdown
When we begin lectures in late February, we still believe that hand sanitizer and hope will be enough. Reader, it was not. On the 23rd of March University closes, and we take a two week break to prepare for online teaching. This isn’t as difficult for me as it is for some of my colleagues. I wasn’t teaching pottery or cello online, I have three classes and they are all writing classes. But that said, studying online is a very different skill to being in a classroom with conversation and discussion and immediate answers to your questions. Zoom doesn’t flow. I try to create a sense of artistry in our poetry workshops. It is stilted, glitched and occasionally the sound drops out.
My house is full. A person at every desk, a zoom session in every room. My children have online school, my husband online meetings and I have no desk. I set up a workspace outside my house in the backyard, underneath the small amount of cover and surrounded by plants – but also birds and insects. It sounds quite lovely and for small moments of the day, it is. However Australian birds do not sing – they scream. And twice a day flocks of at least two dozen magpies, mynas and parakeets blood curdle their way into the trees of my neighbour who feeds them, swearing wildly at my dog as they pass. If I am in a zoom meeting at this time, it is impossible to hear anything at all. It is also during this lockdown, while everyone is working from home that my neighbours’ middle-aged son moves home and games loudly through the window near my outdoor desk, yelling like a teenager at his Call of Duty team. Across the road from my house, a construction company begins to demolish an old nursing home and build a block of townhouses. There is every conceivable construction noise from 7 am until dusk.
Ode to Zoom
With measured gratefulness I thank thee
And with reluctance, thee I embrace
Times of desperation
Call for technologies of moderate adequacy
And occasional effectiveness
And thee – oh Zoom, do greatly meet these
truncated expectations
And thus we connect, repeating our phrases of worship
Doth this thing appear to be on?
Is my voice vouchsafed to thine ears?
We have much work to do,
Work of great importance. And yet, oh zoom, you force us to
Ask of our souls, much greater questions.
From whence did this second,
and third
chin appear?
I am only forty-three
Why lookest I fifty-nine?
And captured, by thy thoughtful
Consistency: life in its beauty and fluid grace.
No child! Thou must findeth thine own sustenance.
But destroyeth not, thine sibling.
Apologies, my hound hath in her enthusiasm
to locate the voices
Curtailed this important meeting
with dampened snoot
Further pardons begged
My partner in life
Hath appeared and yet chosen
With questionable wisdom
To weareth not the lower portion of his garments
Oh Zoom, how speckled is your beauty!
How grotesque my reliance upon your fickle function.
My father doth say it best:
I understandeth not. Nothing is happening.
At 10am every morning I nag my children into joining me at the table outside and make a checklist of school subjects for each of them. If they can prove they had done every task for every subject they can be done with school for the day. While their school is wise enough not to demand zoom attendance (for those children who faced this I can only send you my love and condolences), they do create an intricate web of different platforms, contradictory emails and lost passwords that made education an eye-wateringly complex minefield each day. Needless to say, the two hours we spent dealing with it every day are nobody’s favourite time. Oh… except the dog. Ziggy loves lockdown like most people love Christmas. As one of our only excuses to leave the house she is endlessly walked, sometimes four and five times a day. The house is full of her people and while she did, at times, struggle to find somewhere to sleep, it was clear that she considers this an ideal situation. The weather is balmy, but the beaches are closed. The basketball hoops are tied shut. The gyms are locked. We do yoga out the back of our house. Walk to buy groceries. We play Dungeons & Dragons (I am now a Level 7 Necromancer bitches!) A lot of it is good.
Poetry
In an attempt not to dissolve into the routine of lockdown I start a Poem-A-Day Facebook group for Poetry Month. There are about sixteen of us posting sporadically and other than a few rest days where we post poems by other people, we write a poem every day for the entire month. There is form in this, a link between the days, a small meaning to them. The poems of the other group members keep me inspired, accountable, connected. Creative.
Pillage
In May I am itching to be anywhere else. The scheduled trip to the United States is cancelled and we put our US van ‘Hunter S. Thompsvan’ up for sale. My brother is still locked down in Melbourne. We are told not to visit regional NSW. Shortly after I realise the metaphorical itch has become a literal physical one and I visit a skin specialist to discover – yes, I am completely Australian and thus have skin cancer. As self-declared Sunscreen Antifa, I am perturbed. Exactly what more can I do? The doctor cuts it out with disturbingly efficient hands and puts me on some kind of watch list with 70% of other Australians. The beaches open and I can’t swim because I have stitches. Instead, I get a wisdom tooth removed because it is threatening to crack my jaw - yay! It is the most painful thing I’ve ever experienced (I’ve done it once before so this round consolidated my view). Childbirth is far easier because it doesn’t last for WEEKS. It isn’t even possible to describe the aftermath of an impacted wisdom tooth unless you have experienced it, but the best I do is tell you that the pain settles into the very interiors of your brain, destroying function, in particular, the desire the continue existing or being nice to anyone.
Fall
In June my son goes into hospital. It is for an on-going condition, but it still puts me off balance. It is at the same time as the BLM movement explodes in the United States and my soul is overwhelmed. I am feeling too much inertia, rage, sadness, guilt. I don’t know how to help anyone. I am not just mentally off-balance. It becomes physical. I find myself running into walls. Dropping things. One morning I wake up early to try and scavenge a quiet, empty moment from the house. It is dark and cold and I fall, for the first time in over a decade of living in this terrace, on the top step of the staircase, folding and breaking my foot. I haven’t had an accident like this in years and it feels fateful. No more walking. In fact no leaving the house. X-Rays. Physio. Foot brace. Orthotics. Very lame shoes – if no one sees you wear New Balance everyday are you still a loser? It will take six months (and a few thousand dollars) before I can run. This is COVID related, I am adamant.
Crash
My child has decided he wants to ride dirt bikes. I am unenthused by the bikes but enamoured of his enthusiasm. I mention it to a friend who invites us to try theirs. I haven’t ridden a motor bike in decades and I still can’t move my foot. I ride anyway because my ability to say ‘no’ has rusted over. Halfway down a wet hill covered in long grass, the hand brake lever snaps in my hand and I am not practised enough to save the slide. It isn’t too fast or too hard, but I fall away from my broken foot to protect it and instead hit my shoulder (an old war wound involving a horse). It hurts like a motherf*cker (it is not swearing if it is accurate) but I drag the bike back across the field, smile as my son rides for another hour and then calmly drive myself to the emergency ward for an x-ray. They give me oxy, which makes me paranoid about virus patients turning into zombies while my shoulder renders me a soft target. It is not broken, but torn, pushed out of place. Painful to the point of incoherence for days. Weak and useless for months. I can’t lean on it, can’t pull with it, can’t drive without headaches. Physio. Acupuncture. Cupping. Guasha. I claw myself back with my fingertips. My son becomes an excellent and careful rider.
Run
I am re-ignited by the most unusual of things. I watch a documentary series about the World’s Toughest Race, an eco-challenge in Fiji. The rigorous hell of the race compared with the ordinariness of the contestants does something strange to me. Unrealistically, I see myself in them. I start running again. And realise that I still love it. It doesn’t quite work, my foot screams at me. But I do short, simple runs on the treadmill and eventually, a trail run that fills my heart. It is the first of a list of films and books that save 2020 for me. There isn’t a lot to do other than watch and read and so these things mean more than usual to me. My top 10 list is its usual eclectic mix (I am not high-brow). Pointedly Tiger King is not on the list, though I mention it here because it did remind us early in 2020 that the world is full of really stupid people which was still not adequate preparation for the Covid denying crew.
· World’s Toughest Race with Bear Grylls
· This One Wild and Precious Life – Sarah Wilson
· Hood Feminism – Mikki Kendall
· Em and the Big Hoom – Jerry Pinto
· Untamed – Glennon Doyle
· A life on this Planet – David Attenborough
· Soul – Disney/Pixar
· Good Omens – Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman
· Schitt’s Creek
· The Mandalorian
Teach
I plan to go to Melbourne to see my brother who I haven’t seen in more than a year. A week before the road trip Victoria goes into lockdown and just seems to stay there forever. I work through my mid-semester break instead. Work is relentless. Students are studying in several different modes – on campus, via distance, on campus – but stuck at home, via distance but in lockdown with small children. I need to give a live lecture, record the audio, provide a written version, zoom people in real time. Everyone needs something different. For one of my classes I find I’ve written 50,000 words by the end of semester. That’s a novel. Anxiety is killing my students. They can’t think. They don’t have enough paid work, they can’t go home, they are watching too much Netflix and TikTok and playing too many games. I have people in tears in several lectures and more than one ends up in hospital. 2020 is hard on youth.
Redundant
My university restructures. Or destructures. Or is it transforms? The words change but they mean “cuts things that don’t make enough money.” The lines blur on what is financially viable and what is not, and I probably shouldn’t write too much about it, but I will say it does always seem to affect the Arts. The Arts – where we specifically teach critical thinking, problem solving and communication. Heaven forbid those well-rounded individuals go out there and tackle pandemics, climate change and social justice. I am told my full-time job is no longer viable and that I need to go part-time. A “mini-redundancy” – a cute one, a puppy. Two people I work closely with are made fully redundant. The weight of their loss (they are brilliant irreplaceable people who deeply care about their students and the world) actually makes me so angry that I can barely engage with the world for a couple of weeks. 12,500 university jobs are cut nationally, just a small part of the 227,000 total jobs lost in 2020. I rage cry until I find the place within me realises that I am not my job. It is painful but liberating. I say the brutally honest things I need to say to the administration, mostly politely. And then I am offered my full-time job back because it becomes apparent that they have cut too much from the program. I take it, because I am a survivalist, but it is a different person who takes that job. I own myself.
Tr*mp.
I would happily never hear the word ‘Trump’ again. I will use it here as little as possible, but the election takes over every moment of my existence for most of November. His intolerable nonsensical rants, the ones that minimise violent racism and glorify rationalising the wealth divide chip away at my soul. Every time I see someone agreeing with him, I wonder at their sanity, at their empathy. I wonder at myself – what am I missing that I can’t understand conservatism? Why is change not magnificent and exciting to everyone? Why would you ever think that “bleeding heart” was an insult? In what universe would it be conceivable that we don’t constantly seek to find and tear out the racism within ourselves? How could anyone possibly identify as a Christian and not love? Why wouldn’t every single person identify as anti-fascist? Did they not study history? For weeks I am on edge, fearing that my deepest belief, the one that says there is more good than bad in the world, will somehow be proven incorrect. And if I am distressed, my poor American husband is manic – his home is imploding, his family under threat – he reads the news like it is a sport he can win.
Trump loses. Over and over again, he loses. But only just. His silence in the aftermath is viscerally enjoyable.
Viral Christmas
I finish the first full draft of the PhD I have been working on part time for nearly 6 years. It is about rewriting history as speculative fiction – good luck with that 2020 historians! All looks to be well. Hurray for Australia and our virus protocols. We are so much better than ev... Another Lockdown. More masks. More locations and times to check. Where were you between 4 and 6pm four days ago? Did you walk through Bondi Junction mall? Did you glance at the 333 bus as it went by? Probably. My brother is locked out again. Christmas is small. Last year we were on fire in December. This year we are underwater. Moderation would be a nice change. Nature is taking her cue from us, I suspect. I feel pretty bruised by the end of year, as everyone does. As with every injury, healing is a process of balancing the rest and the push. I can’t stop sleeping – not well, mind you - a fractured odd half-sleep that I can’t quite get out of or fall completely into. But I’m still running and hey, I wrote this. And we ended the year still laughing - though our sense of humour has darkened.
Review
Overall, my review of 2020 simple:
Boring plot, poorly executed, full of annoying characters, would not recommend. However, this writer did manage to create a montage of physical injuries to highlight the emotional trauma which was quite poetic and taught her some things – mostly patience. Have learned that pain does not equal wisdom or actualisation, just incapacitation, but that if you treat yourself very kindly, do the work you need to and wait, pain will pass, your body will heal, the world will turn. A lot of people already knew this and possibly didn’t need 2020 to remind them. The Year gets a Wong-Baker Pain Scale Reference of 8 – Hurts Whole Lot.