This blog began when I trekked Nepal with my then partner. Then was reinvented while living in China. It was very intellectual. Very stupid. Yes, I’m calling my own blog stupid.
Why? Cause it was like a beta-blocker to my better writing. It represented me churning out analysis.
It was a status quo device for my life as a frustrated author and artist. However that is rapidly changing…I’m doing more writing that is creative than ever before and more singing and more comedy writing than ever before…
I’m filling up my FOF again. Fuck off Fund. Cause in about 12 months I am planning to be gone again. Not sure where. After a trip to Cambodia in March I will decide where.
I won’t apologise for the word fuck. It’s going to be more prevalent in my posts. I was informed by an offenderati that it’s highly offensive recently. I nodded politely and removed it from my vocab in their presence. Out of genuine respect for them but also because I couldn’t bare the fucking tut tutting.
What I really wanted to say was “fucking world hunger, poverty, despair, war, rape, violence offend me yet the word fuck bothers you that deeply? Okay! Alrighty then!”
There are few posts I need to do about the Chinese experience and I think I will invest some time in them soon. Mainly because I want to talk about the propaganda of life and I learned a lot through that experience.
I became interested in all things propaganda at university. Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Churchill, Queen Victoria. Yep, throwing the east and wests together.
But it’s because I have been trying to understand my own very odd life. What was the propaganda I bought into? Why?
The various forms of bullshit we feed ourselves to conform or not conform or conform to non-conformity.
I’ve been a few places since I last blogged. A few bush locations in the NT. I had returned to Australia after a great experience in Guiyang, via a fling with my “editor” in Sydney and the seaside town of Kiama – which I did enjoy but how fucking stupid was that effort? Cause now I need a new editor. Bummer.
I was drawn back by the complicated game that has become my family of origin.
When I came back to Australia it was largely in response to the guilt I felt at not being “settled”. I realise this comes from the many years of matriarchal disapproval I experience every time I do anything other than marrying and being a model 1950’s housewife.
Whilst in China I was clearly enjoying myself. Instead of being miserable and matronly as I am supposed to be (according to the female narratives of my family). When it occurred to the FOO – I got the heart rending phone calls. How terrible it all was. A call that reduced me to a blithering mess on Mothers day was the pinnacle of this very typical manipulation. While I was working, no less. In a Chinese school were displays of emotion are not welcome. I got the usual line about how she had forgotten what days I worked. Never forgets unless it serves a purpose of belittling me and my efforts. Yes! she had a cancer. Was it EVER life threatening? NO! But this was not the picture painted.
Did I hope for the calm conversation with a calm parent, that says “hey I’m not well, but it’s this (described) and I will be okay”. No, I go no clear information but just swamped with guilt trips and push-pull bullshit. And a long laundry list of everything that was wrong in her life including the fact that the dog had a rash. Oh, how I lived for conversations where problems were solved and strategies made. But no.
By the time I made the decision to come home and had already booked – it was revealed that it was highly treatable cancer. Ironically this information was revealed to me because I wanted to ring the doctor and find out how I could support. But by the time I was told it was not life threatening, it was all too late. I had secured a job and was due to go back to Australia.
*cue that sound effect like when you got an answer wrong on a quiz show*
It probably would have been better if I stayed. But, as per usual, I bought into a drama created to keep me in check. Drama created to keep my love, but only gaining my bitterness and resentment. We are what is taught to us, unless we choose to shatter the patterns. My mother has never shattered a pattern and she is locked in a world where women are martyrs and manipulators. It’s terribly sad to watch.
I thought I had stopped playing that game a long time ago, and since this – it seems the people still playing this game might have finally realised that.
Because I didn’t go back to where they would have liked me to. I sound harsh? Yes! Because I could give you 50 more examples like this one. Each time more dramatic when I am not “home”. I’ve been a total slave to it until two years ago. Never do I get a straight answer or simple request. Everything is sheathed in some indirect, passive aggressive attack.
It’s haunted my relationships with the men I choose too – this fucked up gas-lighting. No more.
I realised, too late, the decision was wrong, but I was committed. So I worked on being excited at the prospect of a new job in a place like Darwin. But after 6 months I just feel like I have “settled” again and that has not been my plan for a very long time.
That fucking honeymoon period thing maybe? No, it’s more than that. I’m bored, I’m restless and I’m unsatisfied. Not just lack of sex either. That is also something I need to remedy. That’s the FMF, a bit different to the FOF. You work out that acronym.
I was committed to travelling through the rest of my life. No more “home” of which to speak, just “places I have lived”. But I have normalised myself again. Brought back to the fold of normal by an ancient banshee foretelling my doom. Apparently this doom I am destined to if I stay out doing anything different in the world other than wear an apron. Fuck the 1950’s apron.
I am sick of the internalised misogyny of my family and I will ferret out every last shred of it from my body until my dying day.
Burn the fucker down. Stab it with the knife of modern matriarchy, replace it with the kind of freedom that lets us run with the wolves (again!).
Bring on the FOF and the FMF.
Jacci Pillar 