On a crisp autumn morning, Sydney’s Prince Alfred Park Pool is shivering with life.

Chlorine rises in the air, and the iconic yellow umbrellas which flank the pool catch the dark orange sunlight piercing the white-grey dawn above.

Even today these umbrellas spread summer, like an outcrop of sunflowers.

An Elvis-esque, aquaerobics instructor talks through an ear-mic over Zumba music from the edge of the pool, about the hat factory fire up the road that had gripped the national news cycle the previous night.

“Property developers did it, y’know! We gotta turn that rubble into green space. That’ll teach ’em. And dove kicks, ladies!”

His groupies oblige.

Beneath the Zogg bunting the water is a luminous blue, a hiding spot from the sharp breeze, inside of which one feels invincible. I slip into Lane 7, a medium-speed lane this morning. Sometimes it’s a slow lane, if 9 is booked for Learn To Swim classes.

Despite the splashing of neighbouring swimmers, and the Zumba in the far corner of the pool, it is quiet. I watch as sparrows kiss the glassy surface. Then, I swim.

Water is reflective. And swimming too, for me, has always been a reflective process. Each stroke, a meditation. Each lap, a minor enlightening. There are many things the pool, throughout my life, has taught me.

Including, how I haven’t really been swimming at all.

As far back as I can remember, I’ve swum. When I was 4, my family moved out from Sydney’s cramped Inner West to its outer suburbs, where a huge house on a huge lot went for just $300k.

There was space for a rumpus. Space for two cars. Space for two boys. And importantly, space for a pool.

“It’s like a resort,” mum would say for the first few years.

Swimming has a special spot in the Australian imagination. Most of our best athletes are swimmers — Ariarne Titmus, Ian Thorpe, Leisel Jones, Michael Klim, Dawn Fraser, and on it goes. Chalk it up to the whole ‘girt by sea’ thing, or simply the promulgation of the idea that we’re an outdoorsy people (who therefore ‘belong’ on this stolen land, implies the subtext), the short of it is there’s a lot of pools that dot Australia’s suburbs.

Our backyard swimming pool was 10m long, saltwater, in-ground, and looked like a jellybean or a kidney, depending on how dark your humour is. It was forever aquamarine, surrounded by a sun-storing slab of red terracotta bricks and a mix of tropical ferns and European firs, colonial in its confusion. A young palm sprouted by the deep end.

In this pool, mum taught me how to swim after I had very nearly become — according to the ABS data — the 65th infant to die of drowning in Australia in 1994. In doing so, I joined the ranks of another statistic, the minority of the world’s population who can swim.

The bulky styrofoam life-vest designed to keep me afloat was more an impediment to my learning than an aid. I’d roll around on the surface like a helium-less balloon.

“Kick, kick, kick, kick, kick, kick, kick!” Mum would yell from the hot brick rim.

Slowly I kicked. From dog paddle, to freestyle. From bellyflops, to dives.

I was happy the first day I did a lap sans sumo suit. I was happy the day I emerged from the pool, cloudy-eyed and fingers wrinkly, plunged into a bag of Burger Men. I was happy the days it stormed, the days my older brother and I recreated The Matrix bullet dodge underwater, the days the 4pm sunlight cut through the water in a beam, its hexagons aglow and warbling on the pool floor.

But there’s a sadness too captured in that pool.

For all my upbringing, I was a very shy boy.
Inside me, an unease.

“Why are you afraid?” mum asked outside the pre-school.

I was too afraid to answer.

“Just try for me,” she pleaded.

My fear had nowhere to go.

At night, in the dark of my bedroom, I would chew my mouth, with images of mugshots from that evening’s Crimestoppers haunting my mind’s eye. Better screams eaten than let out.

One morning, by the pool, my brother and I were playing. The sun was low and I was in my undies. My brother drew X’s with a black Sharpie all over my young body. We were giggling.

When mum came out to ask what we were doing. My brother said you draw X’s on parcels you want to return in the post.

During his Hunt For Red October phase, my brother etched a soviet star into the base of the young palm by the deep end of the pool. As I swam over the years, that palm tree grew taller, but that star stayed etched at its base. Trees grow from the top.

As I grew taller, over the years, my brother’s X’s stayed etched too, somewhere in the base of me. People also, grow from the top.

At 22, I found myself afraid to jump into the world.

“What are you doing today?” my mum would ask.

“Nothing,” I’d say, afraid of that answer.

The pool is what pulled me out of that malaise. I swam every day, from summer to winter. As the water got icier, the red rim became a spiritual precipice, an ever harder threshold to overcome.

The water will always be cold, I learned. Your body will always warm.

The water that day was like a thousand needles. I got out in split seconds and dropped in a hypothermic heap. Having thought I’d felt everything I was ever going to feel, that felt pretty fucking different.

How Two Bits of Plastic Pulled Me Out of Depression

Winter at Prince Alfred Park Pool. The air was cold. The trees, dark. In the faint purple sky a few stars still lingered. The umbrellas by the pool, still yellow.

That day, Lane 7 was a slow. In Lane 9, I overheard a swimming instructor teach freestyle to bobbing adults.

“Now, you don’t want to cross your arms across your body. Imagine they’re on separate train tracks.” She demonstrates in the air. “They should never cross your body.”

They should never cross your body? I thought.

But my arms always cross my body...

I realised in that moment, all my life, I’d been swimming wrong.

Why have I been swimming like this all these years?

Why didn’t anyone show me another way?

Consciously, over the next few months, I corrected my stroke.

A friend told me to imagine holding an invisible kickboard in front of me, only taking one arm off it at a time.

Another piece of foam. At least this time it was imaginary.

Slowly my technique improved. Rest, my arm like a spear-tip. Scoop, it back like a back-hoe. Breathe. Mechanical became spiritual.

Only then could I feel how before I’d been a submerged semi-trailer tumbling through self-made drag. And how now, I pierced through the poolwater like a Shinkansen through butter. I never knew how easy this could be.

The water took on an amniotic quality. I could feel something new being born in me. I wondered, what else from my childhood could I relearn?

In the water, memories are fluid. They can be revisited and reinterpreted. I found my younger self on that lowly sunlit morning, covered in X’s by my childhood pool. Beside him stood my brother, giggling.

“Say sorry,” I said. He kept giggling.

“You’ve made him upset.” Still, giggling.

“How would you feel?” I took the Sharpie and slashed an X across his chest. The giggling stopped.

“You don’t feel good, right?!” I paused. “You don’t feel loved. You want the world back before your little brother was born. You feel like you’re not enough.”

My brother looked down at his toes.

“But you are enough.”

I took them both to the pool and we washed the X’s off.

In anger, there is always truth.
In meanness, there is always fear.

New lap.

In the darkness of my bedroom, I found my younger self, chewing his mouth, eating his screams.

“Are you afraid?” I asked him.

He nodded.

“Do you want to let out your scream?”

I can’t, his eyes said.

“I know where we can.”

In the black underwater I watched my younger self scream, and scream, and scream, the bubbles unending. When he was done we sat on the rim and he cried and cried in my arms.

“I know how alone you feel,” I told him. “Your fears are not too big for me. You are never too much for me.”

After sadness there is lightness.
When fear is felt, it passes.

We drew pictures of all the things that scared him, and burned them — watched the embers float up. And we drew new pictures, of green and pink and purple flowers, and placed them inside his head.

“You are doing so well,” I said.

New lap.

The things I’d learned in childhood worked well in a 10 metre pool. But as we grow we find ourselves in Olympic-length waters, and we need new techniques to reach the end.

Now I’m learning to swim, and live, in quiet grace. While I may never be Ian Thorpe or Bronte Campbell or a Prince named Alfred, I am learning to be what I never was. Vocal. Spoken. Kinder to myself. I’ve learnt that when you splash and splash just right, you can, for a moment, forget you’re anywhere, or that you’re anything — that what I learned was never wrong, it was just right enough.

I’m learning to rewrite the words carved in my bark.

At the start of the year, I returned to my childhood home for the first time in a while and swam in that jellybean pool. I thrashed each lap like a thousand horses. I felt my heart beat and my muscles strong. Resting against the rim, I looked up at the pale pink sky and felt as big.

Aren’t we all just adjusting to larger pools?

There are no divisions at Prince Alfred Park Pool, besides the lane markers. Resting at the end of Lane 7, I strike a chat with the man beside me — an elderly Australian-born Chinese guy named Ben. He tells me about the Chinese Masonic Temple in Surry Hills.

“There was a huge Chinese population here, for a long time! The neighbourhood used to be so poor. Now it’s too rich.”

On the next lap, an oncoming swimmer creeps into my side of the lane and gashes my hand with his Apple Watch. I wait at the other end, assessing the pain, and seeing him cause an older woman to crash into the lane marker, speak up.

“Mate! You gashed my hand! And you almost crushed her!”

“She was swimming too slow!”

After some back and forth, he apologises.

“Look, I’m sorry, mate. I’ll slow down.”

The woman behind thanks me. Again the water is quiet.

The tall palms outside Prince Alfred Park Pool applaud me as I leave. Their thousand dark fronds clap in the crisp winter breeze. The night is the darkest shade of purple before black, and the crickets chirp slowly in the dark green dew.

New lap.

The Strange Things Swimming Has Taught Me was originally published in Human Parts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Dear Hoarder,

I don’t know how you’re able to sleep in your bed at night, knowing full-well that next to your head is a wardrobe heaving with clothes you haven’t worn in years and plastic bags that have gotten brittle and stinky with time.

I don’t know how you can find calm in a room with a coffee table full of yellowing magazines printed in the final days of the USSR.

And I don’t know how you can close off quarters of your home, room by room — a dining table overrun with unopened boxes of dinnerware and cutlery, a bed beneath piles of unworn clothes from Vinnies, a spare room containing soap from the eighties. Rooms never ventured into. Doors always closed. A home shrunk down to the size of a pea.

Because, I find I can’t sleep if even a drawer is slightly open.

I find I can’t think straight if the kettle in my peripheral vision isn’t flush against the splashback.

And I find existential joy in spraying down a surface with Ajax Spray & Wipe.

I don’t think these are superiorities of me over you. I think they’re a different side of the same coin.

The truth is, you and I aren’t that different.

I see you.

I get it.

I get it, because I have both sides in me.

My paternal grandmother was somewhat of a mystery — un-pindownable. She had no birth certificate, born in Russia (or perhaps Poland) in either 1922 or 1925 (even she had forgotten in her later life).

She was the youngest of seven siblings, whose names my father has to now put punctuation around in order to keep possible leads warm.

“Peter/Pietryk”, “Val/Valintina?”, “Barbara?/?erica/Bhsia?”

Her parents had owned a large farm in west Russia that employed a number of workers. When the Bolsheviks came through, her family had to hand it over, because they were the warm-blooded bodies of the ‘bourgeois’ who had been written about in black ink in big books by other people.

Dispossessed, my grandmother’s family relocated 25km north of the Black Sea, and nurtured a flour mill over the course of 10 years. But when the Nazis came through, my grandmother lost everything again.

She lost her home, and this time, she lost her family. Her father was taken to the front lines, her mother, away in a truck. And her siblings were divided up in various ways — some sent to forced labour camps, others to concentration camps. Never seen by each other again.

The fog says she did hard labour in Stuttgart in “horrible black shoes” (one of the only details she felt safe to share with others). At the end of the war, she married a similarly displaced man in Stuttgart, whose name is also now partly punctuation — “Jan/John/Janack?/Johann??”

Here the fog lifts and papers appear.

On the 16th of November 1948, my grandma and grandfather boarded a ship named ‘Protea’, that had been organised as part of the International Refugee Organisation’s Group Resettlement to Australia. It embarked from Genoa Port and, after making a stop in Fremantle Port, arrived in Melbourne on the 22nd of December 1948. An immigration official typed out their names with a typewriter (her husband was documented as an identity-flattening ‘Jan’), their ages (‘26’ and ‘28’), and their occupations (a ‘domestic’ and a ‘shoemaker’).

They worked for a few years and bought a stout brown-brick home on a leafy street in Stanmore, Sydney. Their daughter was born shortly after, and my father after that. The Post-War dream seemed achieved.

Seemed, because over the years as liquor crept in, Jan morphed into an abuser. And while alcohol may have softened his hurt from Stuttgart, it was felt hard by my grandma via his drunken star-stirring slaps on Friday nights — the abuse those hands had first witnessed in labour camps during WW2, retransferred in blows during the era of peace, love, and rock & roll. He was a volcano that erupted weekly, then simmered til the next Friday.

One Friday was different though. One Friday my grandfather, drunk from the week’s knock-off drinks, hit the back of his head on a metal bar behind his seat in a suddenly-accelerating bus. Later that night, haemorrhaging, he fell and died on the pavement while walking home for this week’s eruption. The police found his body in the dark of an early Saturday morning in November 1968.

My grandmother seemed forever after to live a quiet, shrunken life.

She stayed put in that brown-brick home in Stanmore for 42 more years. She grew a garden in the backyard beneath the low-flying planes, and it was thick and weedy and overrun, but also green and alive. A lemon tree grew in the sun along the side of the house. An avocado tree grew from a seed into a monster. Pink hibiscus furled out onto a path trampled through stubby grass to the Hills Hoist. Jackhammered concrete was buried beneath dirt where bygone greyhounds had once eaten cuts of meat from the butcher nearby. Layers of time and memory, heaped on top of each other.

Like her garden, her home too became slowly overrun. Rooms became closed off to her, full of too much tchotchke wrapped in brittling, stinking plastic. Cutlery and dinnerware in unopened boxes. Soap and shampoo from the 1980’s. A fruitcake that expired in 1992, kept in plastic beneath a wooden chair in the corner of an unusable bedroom.

When my father and I cleaned up her house after her passing, my fingers turned black from all the dust on that mouldy, shrink-wrapped fruitcake. I was repulsed to see what her house had become.

Now though, I see it differently.

My grandmother had lived out the wake of what had happened to her — two wars, and a man named Jan.

She had lived a life of others intruding upon her peace. Of people coming in, hurting her, and taking everything away from her. And so her quiet life in Stanmore, her slow accumulation of things, was on one hand a slow reassembly of peace, and on the other, a prolonged response to a fear — the fear of losing everything again. Best to save everything, store everything, keep everything, lest she start from scratch again.

Now when I think about that grimy black dust covering my fingers, I think of it as a strange cosmic coating — a protective veil draped gently over what I may have seen as boxes of bric-a-brac, but what my grandmother saw as blocks of safety and stability after all of her life’s turbulence, cubes as grounding as the Kaaba in Mecca. The blackness only accumulated because the items had been undisturbed for so many years, untouched, unstolen away from her. The blackness was the proof that she was safe. The blackness was the promise it was over.

The Nazis had taken away everything but they hadn’t taken away that fucking fruitcake.

I did not grow up in my grandma’s house. I grew up in a clean house — if anything a house that was “never clean enough”, and “never presentable enough” to have people over.

Because of that, I internalised a disdain for small piles of mess, a discomfort for dust, a sense of shame over stacks of paper, and a belief that untidiness was a sign of personal moral failure.

As we grow, we’re all hopefully stepping in to a kinder understanding of others and ourselves — a knowledge of how we’ve each learnt to grapple with big things, before we knew what we were grappling with. Admittedly, while I’ve had to grapple with a few big things, they’re nowhere near as big as Bolsheviks and Nazis. But this is what I now know:

My fruitcake is the closed drawer.

My 80's-era soap is the un-askew kettle.

My black dust is the white foam from the Ajax Spray & Wipe.

It’s my response to a fear — that I’m “not clean enough”, “not presentable enough”, not good enough, not perfect enough.

And it’s also the way I muffle that fear. How I protect myself from its possibility manifesting.

So, dear Hoarder, dear human — you and I are not too different. And because of that, I think there’s things we can learn from each other.

I’m learning that mess isn’t a reflection of failure, but a reflection that life is messy and complex and that sometimes, being unperturbed by the accumulation of dust-bunnies is a sign of stoicism and at-easedness with life’s endless onslaught. I’ve started to accept that mild disarray in my pantry is perhaps not a floodgate to chaos and self-pity, that the answer is rarely vacuuming, but more often gentleness. I now see a psychic link between people and their possessions (or lack thereof), and what they come to stop seeing in their houses and minds. I’ve even ventured into leaving my drawers slightly open overnight (but only very slightly.)

In other words, I’m learning to loosen the grip my fears have over me.

It’s weird how peace can be found in both a spotlessly clean home, and a home overrun with countless possessions covered in black dust.

But the truer, more lasting peace is found inside us when we start to let go.

Let’s help each other get there.

Sincerely,
A Neat Freak

So you want to be a person. You know, just a functioning, confident, contented and driven, living-to-your-full-potential-not-wallowing-in-your-bedsheets-waiting-for-your-shit-to-stop-repeating kinda person. The simple stuff. It might feel impossible — and perhaps such a thing doesn’t quite exist. But if we take the spirit of the request, the truth is that the method toward it is unusual and counterintuitive. What might feel like regression, or failure, is actually an integral step in the whole. In fact, you’re likely following the method now, and already halfway there. Here is the full recipe below.

You will need: One heart, one head, one soul, one body. Optional, but recommended: Two or more of each ingredient. Preparation time: 30+ years. Serves: All.

Method:

1. Begin as a soft neotenous sponge, born terrifyingly reliant on a series of flawed and imperfect adults. Be subject to the best of their efforts, their love — but also the withdrawal of that love, their absence and tempers and emotional shortcomings, the projection of their own anxieties and insecurities, potentially their abandonment and abuse, and so on.

2. Hastily clobber together a somewhat-functioning identity based off these interactions, the millions of cues and subtle messages the world gives you, the themes of your early childhood. Adapt your mind to this environment. Learn that this is the way to feel. Form enduring ideas about love and relationships and how safe or unsafe the world is, intuited from your most early experiences and observations. Baste for 15 or so years.

3. Be blissfully unaware of the traumas or subtle emotional deficits this basting has slowly incorporated into your hardening sponge-like mind. Now inject ungodly amounts of estrogen, progesterone and testosterone so that you think you’re the hottest shit in the world and that every adult (including your parents, teachers, the media, religion etc.) is a fucking dumbass. Or visa versa, so that you think you’re the dumbest fuck in the world and everyone else is the shit. Either way works.

4. Gain just enough self-awareness to feel like you’re your own original person, but lack just enough to realise how much of an incomplete composite you really are.

5. High off this naivety, fall headfirst into patterns of behaviour that inadvertently replicate the environments and dynamics of your early childhood — across work, friendships, and your romantic relationships. For example, if your parents felt distant, become so anxious about the possibility of your boyfriend or girlfriend leaving you, so as to make them distance themselves from you. Or, if your parents only ever communicated their needs passive-aggressively, never communicate your own needs to your colleagues, thus making you more burnt-out and resentful and therefore, more passive-aggressive. Or if your parents never showed emotion, never show emotion but be drawn to romantic partners who do because they’re novel, then grow in disdain at how ‘crazy’ they are and double-down on your own emotionlessness as a counter to their ‘craziness’.

6. Grow gradually discontented and frustrated with these dynamics, for what feels like strange and unknown reasons. Unknowingly marinate these feelings in distractions like alcohol, workohol, sexohol, and so-on-ohol.

7. Languish.

8. Reemerge.

9. Languish.

10. Reemerge.

11. Languish.

12. Move overseas.

13. Languish.

14. Reemerge.

15. Grow tired of languishing and reemerging.

16. Realise that you are the thing you are trying to escape.

17. Realise that that’s impossible.

18. Realising that’s impossible, seek earnestly to understand yourself. Stare in the eye the fact that you are looping on a script set by your past, and that only you can alter it. Feel the heat to do the work. Fire up the stove (or some other metaphor that keeps this recipe analogy on track).

19. Grow curious, not angry or afraid, about why you are the way you are. Chronicle your perceived shortcomings, your pervasive negative beliefs, the themes of your thinking. Scour your mind for their sources in your past. Grow in knowledge of human behaviour — that fear causes people to do mean things, that most behaviours are an attempt to achieve love. Journal. Attend therapy. Journal. Talk with close friends. Journal. Learn that when you are little, everything is big — people, but also the little things they do. Begin to re-remember what happened to you as a child. Revisit it with a more mature and adult understanding. Close your eyes and imagine yourself, in the present day form, coming to comfort your child form. Know that all childhoods are a life-or-death experience and that you did the best you could with what you were given. Know that your parents did the best they could with what they were given too. Cradle your child form and be for them the parent you always needed. Write. Take concrete actions that will ease their, upon assessment, genuine qualms. Talk to yourself more kindly. Treat yourself more gently. See strangely that the secret to being grown up, is to treat yourself as though you never have.

20. Let go of your patterns. Let go of the script. Let go of your stories. Let go of your Ego — that sense of self hastily-clobbered-together in the plastic of your youth. Be warmed by Carl Jung who famously wrote, “The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy Ego, the second half is going inward and letting go of it.”

21. Be served with new challenges and new uncertainties and new worries, but with a new sense of inner-gentleness and self-assuredness. Garnish with goals predicated on things you’ve always naturally valued. Continue to grow in self-awareness. Constantly re-understand yourself. Never demand perfection of yourself. Feel comfortable in feeling unfinished.

22. Be.

Van Gogh chopped off his ear.

It wasn’t an accident either — a clumsy slippage of his palette knife during a fun late-night painting romp.

Nope.

It was a hallucination-induced attack on himself, of which he couldn’t remember once regaining consciousness. It was a manifestation of an intense inner instability — one that, the inescapability of which, eventually caused him to take his life. Because as much as Van Gogh was a creative GOAT, he was also a mentally-mired human being. You know, like most creative people.

This is something I think is tragically glossed over within the current corporate zeitgeist surrounding big-c ‘Creativity.’

There are a lot of CEOs and LinkedIn thought-leaders and modern, forward-looking companies talking up creativity right now. That the imagination is the key to innovation (or less cryptically, the secret to more unbridled capitalism). That creativity and technology make “fantastic bedfellows.” That ‘Creativity Bootcamps’ are worthy investments. That Steve Jobs was Corporate Jesus.

But I don’t see anyone talking about how Van Gogh chopped off his fucking ear.

Or that in 2018 and 2020, surveys by Mentally Healthy of 1,800 people working in the Australian creative industry found that the instance of mild to severe anxiety among creative professionals was 29% higher than that of the general population. It was a similar story for symptoms of mild to severe depression — 20% more than the national data. To quote the researchers, “nearly one in five of us showed severe or extremely severe symptoms of depression, compared to 12% in the national average.”

As a creative professional who’s dealt (deals?) with terrible anxiety and bouts of depression, this math feels right. I can’t relay the number of anecdotes of mental ill health I’ve heard from others throughout my career or the volume of friends and acquaintances in my professional and personal spheres who’ve confided in me their inner turmoils. But it’s definitely more than two unchopped-off earfulls.

And yet, this is a reality I don’t see quite captured in the B2B bukkake over creativity.

I’ve long had a hunch that enough correlation tips over into causation. I think, creativity is the anxiety. Is the vehicle that generates the harmful fictions. Is the self-doubt. Is the self-criticism, and imposterism, and pressure, and overthinking.

Or perhaps more precisely: Creativity is the art of overthinking.

Think about it. The proclivity to overthink gets you over the cliche stuff and into the land of more novel, compelling ideas. Disciplined, that’s great. But undisciplined, that intense an imagination is a double-edged sword. Because the same mind that can get swept up in bright, company-changing visions of previously unimagined awesomeness is equally capable of getting lost in the darkest, most terrifying visions of futurelessness, worthlessness and failure. It’s the same tool, the same behaviour, just running at opposite poles. It’s nuclear energy, and a nuclear bomb.

“Creativity is king!” scream the cabal. “Unordinary thinking leads to extraordinary things!”, “The imagination is unlimited!”

Yep… unlimited in the suffering it can inflict on its imaginer.

Especially if the imaginer spends 40 years of their working life relying on that imagination for their financial income.

Over years, creative professionals learn to latch onto any wandering thought in the hopes it’s gold. In the course of that, very often, they also latch onto the mud. Mud about themselves, the expectations they imagine others have of them, and their quietly-held, solely self-perceived failures.

But I don’t see that in any cutesy Corporate Memphis-laden infographics of amorphous humans chucking around pie-charts like they’re volleyballs.

The tricky truth: What makes creative people special also makes them uniquely prone to mental ill health. And this is exacerbated by conventional corporate structures.

Think about that old metaphor of a donkey with a carrot, dangled in front of it via fishing line, but connected to its head by a rod so that no matter how much the donkey trots forward, it never quite claims the carotene.

That’s like a creative person under the constant pull of their imagination, the allure of ‘what could be.’ Now add in layers of bureaucracy, rounds of feedback, a wellbeing-illiterate workplace, office politics, time pressures, financial pressures, the natural flits of business, and generally speaking, reality — and that carrot’s kilometres away.

Far from buffering them, this only serves to exaggerate the sense of failure, self-criticism, and pressure that the creative professional feels — the yawning distance between their felt purpose and their perceived ability to achieve it.

They feel the duty to pull the cart by leaning into their carrot. But, very often, the normal corporate trappings coax out the cobras native to that carrot — turning it into a source of constant disappointment, a vector for pressure and self-critique, an object for rumination or worse, resentment and cynicism.

All the brainstorms and bubblegum-coloured Post-It notes on earth can’t mask the dark underbelly that creative energy often entails.

I want to make an important aside.

Creative people have a lot to do to keep their demons in check — for their own sake, not just their companies’. You don’t have to be a tortured 19th Century Impressionist. You can be like the 21st Century NYC-based artist Tom Sachs, who treats his creativity with caution — “Creativity is the enemy. Use only when necessary.” A creativity activated through discipline, but also confidence and play, is far stronger than one ruled by the tyranny of punitiveness and perfection. And this shift is eminently doable — I can attest it just takes time, self-awareness, kindness, and (likely) more than six hours of therapy over Zoom.

But the corporations that only sing creativity’s praises have some work to do too. If you really want to embrace creativity, you have to embrace its darknesses as well.

Take, for example, the workplaces cited in that Mentally Healthy research I mentioned earlier. Companies in the creative industries are generally more literate and supportive of mental ill health. They have open conversations, safe spaces, continual support, burnout warning systems, ‘Me Days’ built into leave negotiations, and contingencies for creative failure built into their business models, reducing pressure.

That’s what broader corporate culture still needs to learn. You can’t just pay lip service to creativity. You actually have to service it.

Offer wellbeing plans, not just beanbags. Cater for the whole pockmarked creative process, not just free quinoa lunches. Create a culture of kindness, openness, and vulnerability. That’s far more powerful than even the strongest masseuse’s monthly shiatsu.

But most importantly, please stop idolising creativity. Because by only saying how great creativity is, how creative people are ‘creative geniuses,’ you’re unintentionally heaping more and more pressure onto them.

Instead, when you see Van Gogh’s sunflowers, see the suffering in them too.

Strangely, it makes them even more precious.

Dear Corporates, Please Stop Idolising Creativity was originally published in Invisible Illness on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

🙂 “I’m fine! This is fine! I mean, this constant clawing sense of failure and that everyone secretly hates me and that I’m stuck in life and have been stuck in life for my whole life? All fine. Just smile. Say ‘good’ when people ask how you are. Keep taking on commitments. Bigger and bigger. Nod politely. Cry into your pillow at night. It’s fiiiiiiine…”

😐 “This is not fine. But if I let it show, then people will know I’m a failure and that I’m stuck, and then they will really hate me. Maybe if I just act cool for a few weeks it’ll all go away.”

😎 “Nope, still shit.”

😟 “OK, this is really shit now. All I think about all day is how much everyone actually hates me and how stuck I am. I can’t stop ruminating. I can’t focus on anything else. I can’t keep up a happy face. People can’t see me like this. I’m just gonna retreat for a bit. Draw inward. It’ll be like a cleanse. A detox. A getaway from it all. Yeah. That sounds good.”

😢 “Bad idea. Now all I’m surrounded by is my own head. There’s no escape. And I’m worrying about how much I’m worrying. It’s fucking meta-worry. It’s trickling into every little day-to-day task — What should I wear? What should I eat? I don’t know and that terrifies me. I’ve spent the past five days googling self-help articles and doing personality quizzes and YouTubing TED talks about how great I am, but strangely it’s all just reminding me of how shit and stuck and fucked I am.”

😴 “I’m so exhausted even though all I did today was worry. I haven’t really felt like cooking or eating for the past few days. Does a cucumber count as dinner, or a drink? Am I malnourished? I’m just gonna spend four more hours googling the nutritional content of cucumbers and doomscrolling self-help on Instagram until I fall asleep… At least I have sleep…”

💩 “Bubble bubble! Bubble bubble! I am a poo! You need to poo! PoOooOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoO!!”

🥱 “That’s a bit better. What’s the time? Fuck, 2:37am. OK, sleep now. Gotta sleep. This side’s not working. Switch sides. Hmm, not working either. Sleep on your stomach. Oooh… my stomach feels — ”

💩 “Bubble bubble! PoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoO! Runny black pOoOoOoOoOo!”

🥱 “It’s 4:18am now. All I want to do is sleep. Why can’t I sleep? I just want to sleep… I just want to…”

💩 “PoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOooOoOoOoOoOoOo!!”

😨 “Fuck. I can hear the morning birds. I can see the pink sun. My heart is racing and I haven’t really slept. In fact the past three weeks I haven’t really slept. I’ve had broken sleep and stressful dreams. Ten minutes here, ten minutes there. And now whenever I go to bed, all I’m worried about is that it’s gonna be another night where I can’t sleep.”

👹 “OOGA BOOGA!”

😨 “Who are you!?”

👹 “I AM EVERY FEAR YOU’VE EVER HAD. I AM YOUR FUTURE AND YOUR PAST. I AM THE SUN SETTING. I AM THE NIGHT THAT WILL NEVER END. I AM THE DARKNESS. I AM THE STABBER OF YOUR STOMACH. I AM THE HANDCUFFS THAT CAUSE THE TINGLING IN YOUR WRISTS. I AM THE PALE BURNING FIRE. THE GREEN SPERM OF DOOM SWIMMING THROUGH YOU. I AM YOUR DESTROYER.”

😨 “What do you want!?”

👹 “I WANT TO DESTROY YOU. I WANT TO CUT OPEN YOUR HEAD AND MELT YOUR MIND IN THE MICROWAVE. I WANT YOU TO FEEL MY RADIATING HATE. I WANT YOU TO FEEL ALL THE HATE OF THE WORLD. I WANT TO GIVE YOU NO ESCAPE. NO REPRIEVE. NO REST. I WANT TO CLOSE THE DOOR. I WANT TO TURN OFF THE LIGHT. I WANT TO SIT HERE WITH YOU IN THE DARK AND BREATHE ON THE BACK OF YOUR NECK. I WANT TO STAND BEHIND YOU AS YOU CHOMP INTO A CUCUMBER AND BREATHE ON THE BACK OF YOUR NECK. I WANT TO STAND WITH YOU ON THE EDGE OF THE BALCONY AND BREATHE MY WARM DOG-SHIT BREATH ONTO THE BACK OF YOUR NECK, AND CHEER YOU ON UNTIL YOU JUMP.”

😨 “I can’t… My heart… It’s… Where… Who… Oh fuck… Oh god… Oh god oh god oh god oh god.”

😨 “I can’t breathe. OK, breathe. Breathe… One. Two. One. Two. One… two… one… two… in… out… in… out…”

😧 “… Is he gone?”

👹 “OOGA BOOGA!”

😔 “Maybe he’s right. Maybe I deserve to be hated. Maybe I’ve been fighting this feeling my whole life, because it’s actually what I’m destined for. It’s what I am meant to feel. My fate.”

✨ “Ba-bing!”

😧 “A text?”

✨ “Hey! I haven’t seen you around lately so just wanted to check in. Everything ok?”

😔 “No. Nothing is ok.”

✨ “Do you wanna talk to me about what you’re feeling?”

😔 “I’m scared.”

✨ “What are you scared about?”

😔 “Everything.”

✨ “The world is pretty scary, hey?”

😔 “Yeah.”

✨ “But you’ve gotten through so much in the past. I remember that time when we had just finished uni and we were drunk on cheap vodka and we had cheese pizza. Do you remember?”

😔 “Kind of.”

✨ “And we were scared of what we were going to do with the rest of our lives. It was like we were at the starting line and the gun had fired and we were just frozen while everyone else had started running.”

😔 “Yeah, I remember.”

✨ “And, we started running, right?”

😔 “I feel like I’ve stopped running now.”

✨ “That’s okay. You will start running again. It will just take some time. I know it in my heart. In fact, I’ll sit here with you. On the race track. There’s no rush. I’m going to check up on you each day. Is that alright?”

😔 “That’d be really nice actually.”

✨ “OK, cool. Mark my words. You’ll wanna block my number lol.”

✨ “Hey, how are you feeling today?”

😔 “I feel the same.”

✨ “That’s ok. Mind if I come over and we can watch something on Netflix?”

😔 “Sure.”

✨ “Hey, how are you going today?”

😔 “I’m scared.”

✨ “What are you scared about?”

😔 “I’m scared I’m gonna push you away. I’m worried that you’re gonna get sick of me and leave me.”

✨ “No, I’m not going to do that. I’m gonna stay here with you. I don’t care how long it takes. It’s OK.”

🤨 “You’ve been talking to me for weeks and you haven’t left yet. Maybe you really mean it. Maybe… maybe I can be loved. Maybe it will be OK.”

👹 “OOGA BOOGA!”

🤔 “Who are you?”

👹 “I AM EVERY FEAR YOU’VE EVER HAD. I AM YOUR FUTURE AND YOUR PAST. I AM THE SUN SETTING. I AM THE NI — ”

🤔 “No. Who are you?”

👹 “OOGA BOOGA!!!!!!”

🤔 “I know who you are.”

👹 “NO YOU DON’T.”

🤔 “You are a very old feeling.”

👹 “I…”

🤔 “You’re how I’ve always felt — how I learned to feel. You’re that scared little me that didn’t feel the love of my parents. You’re that scared little me that thought everyone else in the world hated me too. You’re the me that grew up too fast. That always felt unsafe. That needed to depend on undependable people. That could never fail or else everyone would leave and you’d die.”

👹 “BUT YOU CANNOT FAIL. YOU ARE UNSAFE. YOU DON’T DESERVE LOVE. YOU ARE HATED. IT’S ALL TRUE!”

🤗 “No. It was true. It felt true. But it’s not true any more. You aren’t there any more. You don’t have to please everyone any more. You don’t have to be afraid any more. You aren’t gonna die. You are safe. You are loved. In fact, you need a hug. I’m gonna give you a hug.”

🤍

🤗 “How do you feel now?”

🥺 “I feel a little better.”

🤗 “I’m gonna try be for you what you never had, OK?”

🥺 “Ok.”

🤗 “I’m gonna treat you with gentleness.”

🥺 “Ok.”

🤗 “I’m gonna talk to you with kindness.”

🥺 “Ok.”

🤗 “And it’s OK if we have bad days. It will take some time, but we’ll get there, OK?”

🥺 “Ok.”

⌛ And this is time,

🪶 And gentleness,

🕊️ And kindness.

🙂 “Hey, I just wanted to tell you — thanks so much for helping me. You don’t know how deep a hole you pulled me out of. You showed me what I needed to be for myself. I’m so grateful to have you in my life.”

✨ “Any time! How are you going today?”

🙂 “I’m fine. This is fine.”

If you liked this story, you may enjoy ‘Insomniac’, my ongoing series about anxiety, sleeplessness, and finding calm, written from the point of view of an ex-insomniac. You can read it here:

Insomniac

Anxiety, As Told Through A Series Of Emojis was originally published in Invisible Illness on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I had surgery recently.

(I’m OK.)

But in the lead-up, I called my private health insurer to check if my surgeon’s fees would be covered. “Yes,” the kind woman on the other side said, “you’re covered for that.”

Fast forward a couple months and it turns out I was, like… 5% covered.

Which… isn’t really covered at all.

In fact, I don’t think ‘covered’ is the right word for insurers to use here.

Let me put this in another context.

Say you and your mate are ordering at the bar, and you go to pay for your schnitty and beer and your mate says “Don’t worry mate, I’ll cover you.”

You’d think, “Damn, what a good mate. I’m so lucky we’re mates, mate. Let’s be mates forever.”

Now imagine that, as you’re leaving the pub, your mate says “By the way you still need to pay the bartender.”

“What?” you say, “Didn’t you say you’d cover me?”

“Yeah.”

“So why do I have to pay the bartender?”

“Well, I covered you $3. You still have to pay $22.”

That’s not really ‘covering’ someone — you feel me?

And if your health cover is covering you like that, I don’t think they should be allowed to use the word, ‘cover’.

Maybe they could say ‘half-covering’, or ‘partially-covering’, or ‘5%-covering’ — but definitely not ‘covering covering covering, I’m covering you with your health cover so much, you covered little cover. You’re so covered I can’t even see you, where’d you go!? There you are! Buried under all my coverage.’

I also don’t think you get the right to plaster little umbrella icons all throughout your iPhone app. Unless of course those umbrellas are 1:1 actual size, which would then be a fairly accurate representation of the coverage you provide.

But even then, if I’m out in the pouring rain, and you’re there with one of those little paper umbrellas you find on the rim of a fruity cocktail, I’d say, for all intents and purposes, I’m uncovered. Like, if your umbrella isn’t physically covering at least 50% of my body — sorry, but you don’t get to claim you’re covering me.

That’s about as much of a misuse of the word ‘cover’ as an ‘undercover’ cop rocking up to a druglord’s den wearing a big blue policeman’s hat. Or as a ‘bed cover’ which is actually the size of a sanitary pad.

It makes me wonder about the vulnerability of people with longer term medical costs, or stickier conditions like mental ill health — of which the uncertainty regarding insurance payouts may fuel the anxiety treatments are attempting to lessen.

I know what you’re thinking — “You didn’t read the fine print.”

And yes. You’re right.

I mean, I did read it. But I didn’t really absorb it. It was as dense as a fruit cake in a dying star.

So because they’d said “You’re covered”, I just thought, “Well, all this mumbo jumbo must be a weirdly roundabout way of saying I’m covered.”

This skirts a bigger question — how meaningful is the word ‘cover’ in the context of ‘health cover’ if you can asterisk it and disclaimer it and dump a cubic fuck-tonne of Legalese beneath it, to the point that it doesn’t mean what you and I would mean when we say the word, ‘cover’? In that case, you may as well say ‘complete cover’ as long as you caveat it to high heaven.

What do words even mean at that point? Call it ‘health zebra’ or ‘health bananas’. It’s about as arbitrary as ‘health cover’. (Just make sure when you asterisk it that the asterisk is actually 100% of an asterisk, not 5% of one.)

I’m getting too semantic here — so let’s return to that mental image from before: You’ve left the pub, $22 down. You’re standing in the rain. Your ‘mate’ is covering you with a teeny-tiny-tiki-sized umbrella. You can feel the water in your socks, and now you have a cold coming on.

Is that covered?

It’s 3AM and I’m a miniature cow made of exposed bloody muscles, trying to evade an evil alien space god.

I’ve rolled in lawn clippings that have clung to my sticky red musculature to form a grassy layer of camouflage. I’ve also befriended a Swiss-Family-Robinson-eque family who are trying to smuggle me up a mountain. At the top of the mountain is a Stargate-like portal, through which I can jump to escape the space god’s juju mind magic — but he keeps seeing us and zapping us back to the base of the mountain, over and over again.

It’s getting nowhere. Bloody clumps of lawn drop off and I roll in the itchy grass to try stay disguised. Climb. Climb. Climb. Zap! Zap! Zap!

I stir.

I wake.

And I think…

“What the fuck was that?”

I’ve long held the belief that most dream analysis is woo. How can there be a single universal meaning to entirely subjective images and sensations flitting by your mind’s eye in a state of semiconsciousness?

Flying is meant to mean happiness. Teeth falling out is supposedly about a sense of loss. According to Google, being naked in public is about vulnerability and change.

But what if you’re a nudist?

Often these interpretations are caveated to high heaven, saying that they’re loose ideas only and that your personal context really matters and that dreams are very individualistic.

Case in point: Vampires. On this Tumblr, dreaming of a vampire is confidently broken down into ‘If a vampire is following you…’, ‘If you’re the vampire…’, ‘If you’re being bitten…’, ‘If it’s a traditional vampire…’, ‘If it’s a sexy vampire…’ — but how can any outsider say what a vampire means to you? Maybe you had a weird childhood fascination with the Count from Sesame Street. All these spin-off interpretations feel more like they’re covering their bases than emanating any confident psychic truth.

Which begs the question, how useful or applicable are these broad interpretations anyway? It feels a bit like tealeaves, in which you do the heavy lifting to make the readings resonate. They’re more like conversation starters or thought framers than anything else. Some people might need that to help guide their thinking — but I second-guess the need to outsource it to a third party. Chances are they’ll give you a bum steer.

I’m also dubious about dreams being capable of predicting the future. Like, how would that even work? Propose me the mechanism. Does your mind, which seems inextricably linked to the wrinkly grey organ floating in your head (if lobotomy-recipients are anything to go by), float off somehow and travel through wormholes to different multiverses to observe alternate timelines, but also somehow in a bodied way with ‘eyes’ and ‘ears’ that can surveil those scenarios? I want to believe it, but it seems farfetched.

What seems easier to believe is that, whenever someone ‘predicts’ something via a dream, it’s only ever in retrospect, when something happens in the real world and they go “Oh! I had a dream about that last Wednesday!”. No, I’m pretty sure you just got a rush of dopamine because something happened that suddenly triggered a memory of last Wednesday’s dream. You know, like how 99.9999% of most memory works.

The best scientific theories about what dreams are is that they’re mental car washes — rinse cycles that process the preceding day’s events.

I think I’m coming across as some hardcore hard-nosed skeptic right now.

I’m not.

I’m actually a very spiritually and psychologically inquisitive person. I’m drawn to the idea of emergent consciousness, the prospect of human consciousness as a hyperobject, of God and the figurative realness of Yeats’ Spiritus Mundi — a sort of “world soul” or cosmic vat of humanity’s memory, out of which symbols rise and return. I’m intrigued by the archetypal stories explored by Jung and their relation to our Id, Ego, and Superego. I’m curious about Schema Therapy and the inner child — and I’ve even written about how we’re each a pastiche of these overlapping psychological forms.

I really do believe that dreams are beautiful and bizarre and compelling and meaningful, and often inspire great creative works. And while I doubt they’re magical or supernatural, I do think they’re self-revealing and oftentimes instructive. Because, through my own exploration, I think I’ve landed on what I find to be the most fruitful method of analysis for understanding my dreams. And it’s a very simple shift— far simpler than breaking down vampiric specificities.

Instead of thinking, “What did each of those symbols in my dream represent or mean?”, I think, “How did I feel emotionally at each moment in that dream? What was the overarching emotional feeling I had during that dream?”

Often, people think of their dreams like movies.

It might look like a movie. Sound like a movie. Feel like a movie.

But it’s not a movie.

It hasn’t been stitched together consciously enough to deliver a high-level conceptual message. Because that would then mean your dream is an act of language — and have you heard yourself sleep-talk? That shit’s grammarless, let alone meaningful.

But what dreams do seem to convey is a more basic form of psychological expression. One that’s wordless. Formless. It’s emotional information. Dreams seem to evoke feelings and sensations arising within you that exist before language and symbolism and representation — feelings and sensations that you mightn’t be fully aware of in conscious daylight, but that at night appear like nocturnal truthbombs.

If we’re to use the movie analogy, it’s sorta like recalling a movie you watched a few years ago.

You probably don’t remember every line of dialogue, or every shot. But you probably do remember, (or ‘re-feel’), the emotions that movie made you experience.

My idea of dream analysis is about taking a similar step back, disregarding the exactitude of what you saw or heard, and instead reflecting on the general emotional impression you were left with throughout it.

Were you confused? Overwhelmed? Disappointed? Anxious? Frustrated? Did you feel a sense of shame, mischief, or boredom? Guilt, or pure child-like joy?

If you dream of having sex with a tiger and you’re really enjoying it, it probably doesn’t mean you’re into bestiality. Perhaps you’re just feeling happy and playful in life right now. And low-key horny.

Likewise, dreaming of stabbing someone angrily with a knife mightn’t mean you’re a soon-to-be serial killer, but it might mean that on some level you feel angry. Really, really, existentially angry.

From there, perhaps you can think about why you might be feeling that way. What’s happening in your waking life (or your past) that might’ve triggered those feelings in your sleep?

Don’t read the content. Read the feelings.

When I awoke from being a bloody cow evading an alien space god, I thought about how I had felt during that dream.

On one level, I was amused and entertained by the weirdness of what was happening. On another level, I was really frustrated and annoyed. I felt a sense of not getting anywhere, of being constantly set back.

And I thought — this is how I feel at work right now. Stimulated and excited, but also stressed and emotionally itchy.

During the day, the former dwarfed the latter. But at night, that mental itchiness came out in the very literal form of a hyperallergenic nightmare — grass clippings clung to raw red muscles.

I often think of stress as a gas stove silently filling an apartment. It can be hard to feel it building up. Perhaps dreams are one way it’s made visible before it becomes a fireball.

After my weird cow dream, I prioritised stress relief. Good sleep. Treating my mind with gentleness and kindness. Genuinely switching off from work when the workday was done. And I found my mood shifting, lightening. An anxiety I hadn’t fully been aware of, lifted. My mind got clearer. I actually did my work better. And my dreams made me feel happier too.

In a strange way, I made it to the Stargate at the top of the mountain.

No thanks to Swiss Family Robinson, though.

If you enjoyed this story, you may also enjoy ‘Insomniac’ — my ongoing series about sleep, sleeplessness, and anxiety, written from an ex-insomniac. You can read the rest of ‘Insomniac’ here:

Insomniac

“Goddamnit,” I curse as the bus drives off with my umbrella still a passenger.

It was a good umbrella too. Navy blue. Japanese design. A canopy separate from the shaft that spun with the breeze. Invertible ribs for an easy reset in case the wind did get in. Reasonably priced too.

This was A+ stuff. And now it’s destined for Mt. Umbrellimanjaro at some distant bus depot.

I mean, I know I could just ring the depot or go there — but, although great, this umbrella is worth just not enough to warrant the effort.

At least it’s not raining anymore.

Oh wait, now it is.

Maybe I shouldn’t have cursed the Almighty.

Did you know that, according to the robust intel of the London Business School, upwards of 80,000 umbrellas are lost on the London Underground every year? Across the ditch, 2000 lost umbrellas were auctioned off for $900 by the New York City Independent Subway System, alongside hundreds of other articles. One plucky Dutch designer (who has an umbrella start-up, so take this with a pinch of salt) estimates that 1.1 billion umbrellas are thrown out each year, a large chunk due to accidental abandonment.

Why are umbrellas of all things, our saviours on a rainy day, one of the most misplacement-prone objects on planet Earth?

I hypothesise a few reasons.

Firstly, umbrellas are an occasional carry. They’re not welded to our being like our phones or keys and wallet. They’re only with us every now and then, and so we aren’t in the habit of having them nearby.

Secondly, they aren’t pocketable. Most of the time when you lose an umbrella, it’s because you’ve used it and it’s wet and left on the ground, near the base of your barstool or train seat, far below eye-level. No one puts a wet umbrella in their pocket or handbag. I mean, there’s probably one guy who slips it into his ankle-height cargo pant pockets — but except for that guy, no one does. Because intentionally wetting your clothes or handbag defeats the purpose of using an umbrella in the first place.

Thirdly, the need state for an umbrella is variable. By this I mean, it rains on and off. And so you might enter the pub during a downpour, but by the time you’re done, the sun’s back out. You think, “What a beautiful day!”, not “Better get my umbrella!”. The need state that caused you to bring your umbrella there has now evaporated much like the raindrops on the footpath.

Yep, many things dampen our chances of retaining our trusty waterproof steeds. And while it’s easy to become a cynic and feel that, like big pharma, Big Umbrella is conspiring to keep us on the hedonic treadmill consuming and losing umbrella after umbrella, I prefer to treat this as a creative challenge. How can you ensure you never lose an umbrella again?

1. Always hold it

Like Jack and Rose, promise to never let go. Handcuff yourself to that door floating in the middle of the Atlantic, grip your umbrella by the handle and let it drip by your feet. Take it with you to the toilet if need be. People might look at you strangely as you take a tinkle with a tiny umbrella round your wrist. They might scoff at you as you gesture during an anecdote and spray everyone with rainwater. Your knuckles might cower. Your wrist might rash. But know that as soon as that umbrella leaves your grasp, it’s as good as gone. So fuse your hand and your brolly. Be one.

2. Keep the sheath

Maybe constantly holding your umbrella isn’t your cup of tea. Maybe the room you’re in is carpeted, and the room-owners would much rather you use the customary umbrella stand. Maybe you don’t trust the umbrella stand. Fear not. Most umbrellas nowadays come with a handy sheath. Not only does this keep your umbrella neat and compact, it serves as a waterproof layer, overcoming the non-pocketable nature of a wet umbrella. Shaken to remove excess rainwater then stored in its sheath, your umbrella can now be safely stowed in your handbag or pocket (if you have ankle-height cargo pant pockets), without fear of drippage. Perhaps stow it upright though, so that if any drips do occur they drip down into the sheath, rather than out the top.

3. Carry it in a separate bag

It’s an odd parcel of psychology, but you never seem to forget a tote or bag or backpack that you’ve placed near your feet or on the hook beneath the table. Or it’s at least a bit harder to forget. For some reason, it’s far easier to get emotionally attached to a bag over a brolly. So use this kink of your psyche to your advantage, and place your umbrella in a separate carry bag — one that you don’t mind getting wet. This bag should only be used for your umbrella. Unfortunately this technique doesn’t work for bigger golf umbrellas, unless you were to carry it in a rifle-case, though that mightn’t vibe with the bus passengers around you. So perhaps invest in a tripod case. Or keep on theme and put your golf umbrella in a golf club bag.

4. Smart tag it

Ah, technology. In April of 2021 when Tim Cook unveiled the $149 Apple AirTag to intelligently track your valuables, he probably didn’t intend it to be attached to a ratty parasol. But if you’re serious about keeping your umbrella safe, perhaps it’s worth the investment. Not for fear of losing your umbrella, but for fear of losing a $149 Apple AirTag. (Not a sponsor).

5. Invest

On that note, why not purchase the most expensive umbrella money can buy? Alexander McQueen sells a $645 Italian-designed umbrella, made of 100% polyamide and complete with an unforgettable golden skull handle. Or for the less ostentatious among us, Mr Porter retails the ‘Kingsman’ — a handcrafted, pinstripe and chestnut-wood handled umbrella worth a paltry 257 Great British Pounds. You might be questioning the need to enter the upper echelons of umbrella ownership, but perhaps the more your umbrella costs, the less likely you are to absent-mindedly leave it somewhere. Or at the very least, it’s worth the trip to the bus depot. Plus if you never lose it, it may eventually add up to all those cheap brollies you lose over the course of your life.

6. Get Bon Jovi to sign it

I get it, money doesn’t grow on trees, and a $645 umbrella is very hard to justify. So instead, look for ways to add alternative value to your umbrella. Incorporate your umbrella into key life memories, like birthdays or funerals. You could cut your wedding cake with your umbrella, or place it on top of your Christmas tree in lieu of a star. At minimum, you could get your favourite band to autograph its innards, or even your kids to decorate it with a silver marker. The more your umbrella means to you, the more consciously you will carry it.

7. Accept your fate

Take a leaf from the Buddhists and accept that umbrellas, like all things, are transitory. They come and go. One never really owns an umbrella, but leases an umbrella momentarily from the universe, to which it is destined to return. You will lose your umbrella, because you are human. So think of that $10-$20 pop whenever you’re forced to buy a new umbrella as a ‘humanity tax’, and surrender it to the collective unconscious. Your umbrella now serves a higher purpose. Amen.

With climate change inexorably altering the face of global weather patterns, more severe rainstorms, monsoons and wet seasons are upon us. Umbrellas are not going away any time soon — well, except when you lose them. So don’t lose them.

In the words of the great Rihanna, “Umbrella, ella, ella, eh, eh, eh, eh, EH EH!”. Take the proper precautions, think creatively, and you will never get caught in the rain cursing the lord again.

How To Never Lose An Umbrella Again was originally published in Human Parts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There are no people on George Street in Sydney’s CBD. No line for cheesecake at Uncle Tetsu’s, but also no cheesecake. The traffic lights blip out their metallic song to an auditorium of cooly-lit buildings and birds. Even the trams have gone to sleep for the night. At times I wish I was a machine like them, a robot who could power off precisely at 1:56am, then resume services precisely at 5:22.

If only.

Insomnia doesn’t happen overnight. For me, it started with a few bad nights. Soon I was waking, every night at 2am, unable to nod back off.

I’m one of the 14.8% of Australians who, according to the Sleep Health Foundation, have either been diagnosed with or display symptoms of clinical insomnia. A broader 60% report trouble sleeping. Some researchers have noted that, since COVID-19, that number has risen.

Most Australians don’t seek medical help for sleep issues, chalking it up to just being a bad sleeper. When they do, it’s often tacked onto another consult. Commonly prescribed are OTC Melatonin tablets, to mixed results. When I took some, I started with 1 before needing double. By my calculations, I’d have soon needed 32,000 tablets per night.

A 24/7 security car crosses the tram-tracks ahead. It’s a Toyota Yaris. Imagine being a crook and being caught by a Yaris.

There are nangs in the gutters of Martin Place. The council’s flowerbeds shake beneath the streetlights. Purple and white. Orange. Green. Flags advertising festivals flap in the wind corridor formed between the Big 4 banks as though blown by an ancient hairdryer.

I pass a homeless man in a blue sleeping bag on a bus stop bench. I wonder which of us is having the better sleep tonight. Would he get more out of my bed than me? Probably.

The causes of insomnia are various — irregular sleep patterns, substances, certain medications. Most causes however, are mental.

“Insomnia is one of the core symptoms of many psychological disorders, including the two most common ones, depression and anxiety,” says Dr Tim Sharp, Founder and Chief Happiness Officer at the Happiness Institute in Sydney. “But in turn, insomnia can cause or exacerbate mental ill-health.”

“People with long-term sleeping difficulties often fall into a cycle of anxiety and worry,” says Lisa Stedman, principal psychologist at Mind Journey Psychology, and whom I started seeing for my issues. “The worry about not being able to sleep keeps you from sleeping, which reinforces the worry.”

This I can vouch for. As my eyes popped reliably open at 2am, I felt painfully awake — heart and mind racing, feet writhing against the bedsheets, wishing and wishing to sleep.

Perhaps the hardest thing about insomnia is how isolating it is, how quiet you have to be. The taste of your morning breath forming.

Office after office is for lease. The EzyMart at Circular Quay is closed. But in the window I see American breakfast cereals, coloured and hopeful, lit by white fluorescent tubes. Reese’s Puffs. Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Lucky Charms. On the other side of the world children would be eating this right now. The cartoon leprechaun printed on the box smiles widely — I wonder how many cavities are in his grin.

With no people around, the Sydney Opera House looks like a spaceship on a launchpad. Hundreds of seagulls circle above its brightly lit sails, thinking it’s daytime. I watch them swirl and swirl, and never once crash into each other.

My darkest night was here in 2018. My partner and I had tickets to see Kevin McCloud of ‘Grand Designs’ fame, and trying to will a good night’s sleep for it, I got zero sleep instead. Loud and paralysing anxiety that I would never sleep again, and die delirious, drowned out all of Kevin’s charming British voice.

I saw a psychiatrist after a second sleepless night in a row, locked in a spell of fear — what’s clinically called a mixed affective state, an acute state where symptoms of depression and mania coexist. He had patients’ paintings on the walls and golf trophies on his windowsill. A single white hair sprouted between his eyebrows like a sunflower. Finger by finger he listened and typed notes, his calming demeanour assuring me there was no emergency here.

I was prescribed anti-depressants and mood-stabilisers, and slept well.

“There’s no doubt medications can help some people,” says Tim. “But the question should always be ‘do the pros outweigh the cons?’”

“Sleeping pills occasionally can get you a good night’s sleep,” says Lisa, but notes these can be “habit-forming” and difficult to stop taking. She encourages behavioural strategies that address underlying anxiety and worry.

Medicine did help me. But during the first COVID-19 outbreak, my insomnia returned — and now even meds did nothing. I needed to address the deeper issue.

The seagulls outside St Mary’s Cathedral are sleeping with their red legs up. Their heads are swivelled backwards and buried in their plumage. It looks uncomfortable, but 33,000,000 years of evolution can’t be wrong.

The Coca Cola sign at King’s Cross flashes for no one but a few cabbies drinking Macca’s coffee, not Coke.

As I pass St Vincent’s Hospital I see people social distancing outside the ER. A man walks a woman with a zimmer-frame to a black Jeep with its hazards on. The sky is now the ever slightest shade of blue.

I took time off work. A concerned colleague (another of the lucky 14.8%) recommended an online program based on cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBT-I), developed by THIS WAY UP, part of the Clinical Research Unit for Anxiety & Depression at St Vincent’s.

“People with insomnia often spend excessive time in bed in an effort to catch up on sleep or give themselves more opportunity to sleep,” explains Dr Elizabeth Mason, senior clinical and research psychologist at THIS WAY UP. “The problem is that more time in bed doesn’t actually lead to more sleep. It leads to frustration.”

She adds, “A major aim of CBT-I is to help the patient retrain your brain and body so that the bed once again becomes associated with calmness and sleep.” This is done in part by restricting time awake in bed — gruelling but corrective.

Through the course and Lisa’s therapy, I gained a healthier grip on my insomnia. I learnt that stirring in your sleep is nothing to pathologise. To worry long before bedtime. To get up after 20 minutes of not sleeping, do something non-stimulating in the other room, then try again.

Moreover, I learnt that insomnia is like a very shit bedtime story. You tell it to yourself every night, that tonight will be terrible, and it is. But by slowly rewriting it, night by night, the story changes.

“Speaking from both professional and personal experience, there is hope,” says Tim. “CBT is very effective.”

“Sleep deprivation may cause irritability, reduced concentration and motivation,” says Lisa. “However you cannot die from lack of sleep.”

There are some nights I just don’t sleep. And that’s okay. I no longer read them as a catastrophe. Instead, I go to the other room, or out, for a walk.

I silently thank the clinic as I pass by. The pink patina of dawn drapes itself over the Sydney skyline. The first few birds — currawongs and lapwings — call out from still dark trees, “I am here! Here I am!”

An Ausgrid sub-station hums. Its electricity makes a smoothie inside a terrace house. A cop sits in the passenger seat of a parked police car, his face lit up by Candy Crush.

There’s no emergency here. No emergency here.

This story was originally written for The Guardian Australia (read here) and forms part of my ongoing series on sleep, anxiety, and finding calm called ‘Insomniac’. You can find the rest of ‘Insomniac’ here:

Insomniac

When I Can’t Sleep, I Walk was originally published in Invisible Illness on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The way to feel better is to not

Eat a whole Sara Lee cheesecake in a single sitting. Get fired. Get hired. Put too much pressure on yourself. Or not enough. Be diagnosed with a terrible lung disease. Drink excessively to mask a mortal fear, then go out the next night and drink even more. Long for something far beyond your control. Commute three hours a day for three years. Be in a relationship. Be single. Be married. Have someone close to you die. Feel no love for your newborn. Wrestle with your faith at 2 a.m. on the toilet. Spend six hours in darkness YouTubing and Redditing and Twittering. Sleep too much. Sleep not enough. Ruminate for fun. Watch the news. Miss a coffee. Move country. Queue up at the bank. Do your taxes. Get a bill. Visit Sea World. Eat a whole Sara Lee cheesecake again.

Many things can make you feel shit.

But what should you do when you feel shit?

The common, knee-jerk reaction is to push that shit down, deep so you don’t feel it. You either ignore it, soldier on and suck it up, or bombard yourself with sunshine and puppies and positive affirmations.

“Cheer up!”, “Don’t worry!”, “Be happy!” — we seem to have a tacit discomfort in our society with discomfortable emotions. So much emphasis is placed on the pursuit of happiness, the lionizing of positive emotion, that it sidelines a full two-thirds of the six basic emotions we can feel — those being sadness, anger, disgust, and fear. As a result, when we feel the so-called “negative” emotions, we often don’t know how to feel about them, or what to do when we encounter them in others.

In other words, we’re shit at feeling shit.

Since 2020, I’ve been running a small project called “Thoughts For The Dark” that collects the hard-won thoughts that’ve helped people through, well, shit times. This will come as no surprise, but phrases like “Don’t worry!” or “Be happy!” or “Cheer up!” have not yet appeared in anyone’s submission. That’s because blind positivity can’t contend with the 24/7/365 shit-stream that is life. When facing a firehose of mental effluent, you need something else — iron-wrought and galvanised and real.

One submitter (who we’ll call May) was about to turn 21 when her father died. She felt consumed with grief and loss — the unshakable feeling that her father never got to celebrate the adult woman she had become or see and experience the adult woman she would continue to be. She didn’t know what to do with herself. Where others offered kind words and well wishes and positive thinking, like bandaids, it was one of May’s “most down-to-earth friends” who offered the opposite — reality.

“It’s shit now,” May’s friend said. “And it’s probably going to be shit for a while.”

There was a pause. “But I can promise that it will be less shit, one day.”

This stark and stoic acknowledgment of the shit-ness of the situation helped May immeasurably. “Sometimes just acknowledging the pain and darkness for what it is can be enough to set you free,” says May. “And is often a lot easier than the effort required to dismiss or change the way you feel.”

And one day, true to her friend’s word, it was less shit.

Ally Poole was 37 with two young kids, when she was diagnosed with stage 3 Hodgkin Lymphoma. It was the second cancer she’d been diagnosed with in her life.

Being young, she was treated with very strong chemo that knocked her around quite badly. Some days, she couldn’t reach out for her anti-nausea medication because of how nauseous she felt just by reaching for it.

Ally shared her story on Instagram and would get comments like “Chin up!”, “You’re doing great!”, “Look on the good side!” and, to her, worst of all, “You’re my hero.”

What would Ally have rather someone said?

Speaking on a recent television program, Ally said “When you’re going through something like that, sometimes you just need someone to say ‘This is really awful.’”

She says that all those “Keep positive!” comments made her feel the opposite — they made her feel guilty. “I had survivor’s guilt,” she says. “That I should be positive because someone else has it so much worse.”

Asked what words she would’ve wanted to hear, she has three:

“This is shit.”

The instinct to pretend you don’t feel shit, ignore the shit, need to feel immediately better when you feel shit, or make other people feel immediately better when they feel shit, is perhaps misguided and more harmful than intended.

Perhaps the wiser advice is to sit with the shit.

Why?

It might be helpful to think of shitty feelings as though they’re actual shit.

If you try to hold in weapons-grade diarrhea, if you don’t let it pass through your stomach and intestines and bum parts, you’ll end up rupturing a bowel or getting constipated and developing hemorrhoids.

In the same way, shit feelings have to work their way through your mental system, so that they may pass. You need to trust in the process that makes them decompose. You need to let them flush through you.

If you try to clench your mind’s asscheeks, by soldiering on or trying to “stop” feeling shit or actively pushing those uncomfortable feelings down, paradoxically, you’ll end up making yourself feel shitter.

Feeling shit feels shitty. There’s no way around it. But anecdotes like Ally’s and May’s seem to suggest that acknowledging the shit, accepting it, sitting with it, might just be the best thing to do.

There’s no right way or wrong way to feel shit. You can mope, eat cheesecake, curl up, cancel plans, listen to Radiohead and cry and cry and cry. You don’t have to feel any other way. The only important thing is that you actually feel it — because only then, one day, can you move on. 💩

How to Feel Shit was originally published in Human Parts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.