Read Emails from the Edge Online
Authors: Ken Haley
Emails from the Edge (15 page)
Despite what many will see as a clear-cut case of depression (though to this day I think the term itself simplistic, disguising more than it explains), I did put up a fight for my sanity. I forget how, but I managed to get a ticket to the football Grand Final which, being Australian Rules in Melbourne, was akin to unearthing the Holy Grail. Because of a draw during the finals, that year's match was being played a week later than usualâon the first Saturday in Octoberâand offered Collingwood their best chance to break a 32-year hoodoo. That they did so, turning the tables on Essendon in a memorable display of power and grit, enabled me to participate vicariously in scenes of jubilation and excitement. It was an important attempt to reconnect with the society from which I had cut myself adrift.
That September and first half of October in Melbourne I spent meeting family and friends I hadn't seen for years. From what I can recollect, they seemed to marvel at the adventures I'd undergone which, since I scrupulously avoided concentrating on the recent collapse of hope, I was happy to let them do. I regaled them with dramatic tales from other years of my time awayâclose scrapes and bureaucratic battles in my African, Russian and Chinese travels. For many of those friends with whom I'd kept in contact only by the occasional letter, those experiences were as fresh as if they had occurred a week, rather than years, ago.
On the whole, and with such meetings to look forward to, my mental terrain began to develop recognisable contours. In the mornings I would meander through the valley of purposelessness. The afternoon would be marked by something to âmake the day', be it a meal or a reunion with someone from my old life. The evening might reconnect me with the news (that unfolding televisual horrorworld from which I couldn't find the will to escape); and then the long, unsleeping night would set in.
Dwelling on thoughts that revolve around the same mental track, of course, offers no release. You cannot escape from your thoughts, as the saying goes. My metabolism was a broken-down system feeding off itself: no refreshing nutrients were in prospect. The greatest achievement in the world is to be able to sit still, but the person to whom I had been reduced simply couldn't. The world had turned on me; now I was destroying the world, mistrusting all that was good, exaggerating all that was bad.
As masters of terror tactics from the KGB to the US military at Guantanamo have known, sleep deprivation is the royal road to madness. If you're not already unbalanced at the outset, you will be headed that way before 48 sleepless hours have passed.
My insomnia-induced stupor translated into an inability to carry even the simplest plan into being. Vacillating, increasingly in two minds, I found myself ringing at the last minute to announce I wouldn't be able to keep an appointment noted down in the diary days before. Often, as the weeks wore on, my legs felt like dead weights, and my formerly obedient body grew lethargic, as if magically transferred to a planet with three times Earth's gravitational pull.
The growing gulf between what I would do and did do further reduced my already battered self-image. Unwilling to impose too much of myself on people ranging from old workmates to casual acquaintances, I decided to travel interstate, seeking fresh vistas and the odd reunion with old friends there, too. So I headed north by train, to Sydney, staying with a good friend, a journalist with whom I'd worked closely in years gone by. He lived in the inner suburb of Glebe, in bachelor digs, but was a captive of romance and in fact not far off getting married.
Most of the time there, I was too scared of my own mental disarray to speak of what had happened. We went to the local pub, we watched TV, I heard him sayâwith the forced casualness of a mateâthat it had finally struck him, this was the love of his life. But I held back, a tightly coiled spring, from revealing any of my own, quite different, disturbances. The imbalance between confidences shared and confidences withheld created a strain between us, at least from my perspective. This was the first time a thought occurred to me that would recur with increasing intensity over the next few months:
Whatever I say, no one can ever know what's happened to me, and even someone who did understand it all couldn't repair whatever has broken down within
.
After a couple of days in Sydney I resumed my northward journey. Having been away from home so long, and finding no calm there now (though there was no calm within me wherever I went), I remembered a couple met years before, with whom I had kept up intermittent contact during my time abroad.
Despair was edging closer to me and, the more desperate I became about my own future, the more âconfessional' I grew in my exchanges, feeling that the more of my sorry self I talked about, the more people who knew me might hit upon a solution to my inner woe. And those good friends in northern New South Wales were especially creative in helping me battle my demons.
His name was Tâ, hers Dâ, and they lived in Mullumbimby, near the heartland of the counter-culture, Nimbin. Although not dedicated followers of that or any other fashion, they were open to various ways of combating the one thing that was driving me mad (or, should I say, keeping me mad): the inability to get any sleep.
Dâ knew something about aromatherapy, and introduced me to a variety of fragrances that certainly packed a power of soothing. One Saturday we three went to a local agricultural show, and had a fine time sniffing the flowers. But, come the night, I still couldn't sleep. They both suggested warm milk before bed, which is a very pleasant drink. But not a wink.
Tâ introduced me to his parents and siblings, who made me feel as if I were an integral part of the family. For hours of an afternoon I soaked up the sunshine, reclining on a deckchair until the plastic straps left red marks on my bare back, reading most of the time, willing myself to feel better. Evening came on. The sun disappeared. It was back to Tâ and Dâ's. We talked until 10: I retired to the front room they had generously let me use. And there I lay awake, staring at the ceiling, until at long last the sun returned.
Dâ was equally indefatigable in seeking out treatments. One I recollect was a greenish jelly known as Japanese magma. The effect, if I have this right, was supposed to be invigoration of the spirits. And I must have felt better for a time. But when that old lassitude returned, as it inevitably did, my fears would resurface and I would try to tackle them one by one.
A new terror sprang up in me:
Why am I not well? What can be done about it?
No one had the answer. No matter how outgoing and understanding anyone was, I felt the need to stop burdening them by my useless and downcast presence. Shortly afterwards, I moved for a few days to a rambling rural house, not far from Mullumbimby, owned by one of their relatives.
Those few days reminded me that even those families that appear the best adjusted have their own dramas. In my frenzied imagination, every little disagreement I overheard (and there weren't all that many, but spend a few hours around anyone's hearth and the family dynamics will reverberate clearly enough) was magnified into a divisive force that would set everyone against each other in the end. On the fourth day I made my excuses, returned to my good friends Tâand Dâ, announced it was time I headed back to Melbourne, and consulted the departure times for buses heading south.
Now came November. I tried to fill up the pointless hours by seeing my hometown as if for the first time or, it would sometimes strike me, for the last. Voraciously I kept injecting the latest news of peril far away into my system direct via newspapers, radio and TV. The inability I felt to relate the enormity of what had happened to me in that frightening place was making me extremely tense and snappy. The need to avoid company was heightening my madness, yet I became acutely aware that understanding my predicament would not necessarily mean I, or anyone, could resolve it.
About this time came the first media reports of people returning from the Middle East with what was being diagnosed as post-traumatic stress syndrome.
That's me, I thought. That's exactly the label the psychiatric nurse in Bahrain gave me
. But again the afterthought:
They can name it but they cannot cure it
.
In East Melbourne, having found a nice anonymous psychiatric practice listed in the
Yellow Pages
, I made an appointment. The stakes couldn't have been higher: my sanity was on the line.
The appointment was for half an hour, maybe an hour, but in my compulsion to blurt out everything that had happened in the previous few months the awareness dawned that the sympathetic face of this health-care professional concealed an absolute inability to plumb the depths of my condition. Furthermore, if I told him everything with the full force of feeling welling up within me, it would sound like a tale told by a madman. I couldn't stand the thought of being committed to a clinic for the mentally ill where everyone who mattered to me would be visiting, or having my stress factored into the complex equations of their own lives. So I pulled my punches, kept my information general without being bland, and spared this busy professional the impression that the person sitting in front of him was desperately deranged.
Anti-depressants were prescribed. Another appointment was booked. I threw away the scriptâwhich makes more sense when you've already lost the plotâand never went back.
If I did energise myself with long walks, soon enoughâand especially lying down at nightâI would feel a tingling sensation in my extremities, way beyond numbness, that would remind me to breathe slowly. I believed that if I could control my breathing with deliberation my general anxiety level would drop. I also told myself that hyperventilation and tension in my limbsâsometimes my hands would become âlocked' like an arthritis sufferer'sâcould be precursors of a heart attack. Some nights I heard my heart skip a beat, and always felt a mild surprise when it kicked back into its normal rhythm.
Fright by night, skulking about the city like a cockroach by day: this was no way to live. I had plenty of time but was running out of meaningful things to fill it with. As November drew to a close, I recalled that the last time I had been happy was a year before, in England. Working in London as tumultuous events unfolded had been one of the most productive times of my life.
From old associates in Melbourne I knew that newspaper journalists were going through hard times. But in London not only were there several Fleet Street papers where I had contacts and was well regarded, I also knew the head of Reuters news agency's European division, Graham Stewart. No doubt it was optimistic to believe that a change of scene was all I required, but at home, where Treasurer Paul Keating had just announced the ârecession Australia had to have', all was gloom and doom. Going back to where I was before everything went sour seemed the best thing to do, and gave me the one thing I most needed. Hope.
That winter in London was as unlike the previous year's as anything I could imagine. On the Strand, where in 1989 a few beggars were to be seen, old tramps had been joined by young drug addicts, all with makeshift shelters constructed from cardboard boxes, huddling in doorways for shelter from the cold. Across the Thames, in front of Waterloo Station, the same phenomenon was writ so large the space had been christened Cardboard City.
Saddam's onslaught had triggered a global downturn that mirrored my personal downturnâtwo dark parallel lines without any foreseeable end. On the opposite side of the world, far from escaping gloom, I was surrounded by it, engulfed.
In England as in Australia, I sought out some friendsâone among my closestâbut avoided others. My internal battery was running down, and the energy I needed for seeking employmentâanything to occupy my mind and drive out this endless nightmareâcould not be entirely absorbed in gloomy reflection. I knocked on the doors of those newspapers for which I had worked twelve months previously, but they were no longer ajar. The recession had cut the hiring of casual sub-editors to the bone, and on some journals permanent staff were being laid off.
I remember spending the evening of 16 January in my room, by the open fire but draped in a jacket and shrouded in all-pervasive gloom. The light was off; I wanted no false hope. Early in the morning, it must have been, I turned the radio on and caught a news flash. âOperation Desert Storm has begun. Coalition troops have begun the battle to oust Iraqi forces from Kuwait.' Everything that happened was sucked into my own personal tragedy. I wasn't far out of danger now.
At the end of January 1991, I could see no future for myself in England. Good friends had done their best, there was no work or prospect of it, and my finances were beginning to mirror my inner resources (flickering). Having learnt the hard way that uncertainty was the only certainty, I had bought a round-the-world ticket in Melbourne, so that if I ended up staying in Britain the rest of the ticket could be used any time within a year of the first flight to London. This type of ticket is valid for two stopovers, so long as they are in the same directionâwest to east, or east to west. London was the first, so I had one up my sleeve. A glance at the map, and a desire to use up all the time I could in finding a new life to replace my old broken one, suggested a halt in North America.
I had kept two friends from my days working on a newspaper in Athens: one an American, the other a Canadian. I have sometimes wondered since those days what would have happened if I had chosen to stop over in Los Angeles instead of Vancouver. But all such speculation is as idle as it is enticing: the probable answer is that, all things being equally dismal, I would have spun out of control in some other place.
Perhaps it was better this way. The Californian journalist was a close friend, whereas the Canadian journalist had remade her life in the Philippines. Neither could know what I had gone through or help me, of that I was convinced. But now, with Despair closing in, I felt that to fetch up almost unannounced on the doorstep of a friend with whom I'd kept in touch down the years by letter might be a bit overpowering for both of us, given my vulnerable state. It would be better to go the indirect route, as it were. I remembered that Penny had a brother, Greg, in Vancouver, and a phone call confirmed he still lived there and would be happy to put me up for a while.
That September and first half of October in Melbourne I spent meeting family and friends I hadn't seen for years. From what I can recollect, they seemed to marvel at the adventures I'd undergone which, since I scrupulously avoided concentrating on the recent collapse of hope, I was happy to let them do. I regaled them with dramatic tales from other years of my time awayâclose scrapes and bureaucratic battles in my African, Russian and Chinese travels. For many of those friends with whom I'd kept in contact only by the occasional letter, those experiences were as fresh as if they had occurred a week, rather than years, ago.
On the whole, and with such meetings to look forward to, my mental terrain began to develop recognisable contours. In the mornings I would meander through the valley of purposelessness. The afternoon would be marked by something to âmake the day', be it a meal or a reunion with someone from my old life. The evening might reconnect me with the news (that unfolding televisual horrorworld from which I couldn't find the will to escape); and then the long, unsleeping night would set in.
Dwelling on thoughts that revolve around the same mental track, of course, offers no release. You cannot escape from your thoughts, as the saying goes. My metabolism was a broken-down system feeding off itself: no refreshing nutrients were in prospect. The greatest achievement in the world is to be able to sit still, but the person to whom I had been reduced simply couldn't. The world had turned on me; now I was destroying the world, mistrusting all that was good, exaggerating all that was bad.
As masters of terror tactics from the KGB to the US military at Guantanamo have known, sleep deprivation is the royal road to madness. If you're not already unbalanced at the outset, you will be headed that way before 48 sleepless hours have passed.
My insomnia-induced stupor translated into an inability to carry even the simplest plan into being. Vacillating, increasingly in two minds, I found myself ringing at the last minute to announce I wouldn't be able to keep an appointment noted down in the diary days before. Often, as the weeks wore on, my legs felt like dead weights, and my formerly obedient body grew lethargic, as if magically transferred to a planet with three times Earth's gravitational pull.
The growing gulf between what I would do and did do further reduced my already battered self-image. Unwilling to impose too much of myself on people ranging from old workmates to casual acquaintances, I decided to travel interstate, seeking fresh vistas and the odd reunion with old friends there, too. So I headed north by train, to Sydney, staying with a good friend, a journalist with whom I'd worked closely in years gone by. He lived in the inner suburb of Glebe, in bachelor digs, but was a captive of romance and in fact not far off getting married.
Most of the time there, I was too scared of my own mental disarray to speak of what had happened. We went to the local pub, we watched TV, I heard him sayâwith the forced casualness of a mateâthat it had finally struck him, this was the love of his life. But I held back, a tightly coiled spring, from revealing any of my own, quite different, disturbances. The imbalance between confidences shared and confidences withheld created a strain between us, at least from my perspective. This was the first time a thought occurred to me that would recur with increasing intensity over the next few months:
Whatever I say, no one can ever know what's happened to me, and even someone who did understand it all couldn't repair whatever has broken down within
.
After a couple of days in Sydney I resumed my northward journey. Having been away from home so long, and finding no calm there now (though there was no calm within me wherever I went), I remembered a couple met years before, with whom I had kept up intermittent contact during my time abroad.
Despair was edging closer to me and, the more desperate I became about my own future, the more âconfessional' I grew in my exchanges, feeling that the more of my sorry self I talked about, the more people who knew me might hit upon a solution to my inner woe. And those good friends in northern New South Wales were especially creative in helping me battle my demons.
His name was Tâ, hers Dâ, and they lived in Mullumbimby, near the heartland of the counter-culture, Nimbin. Although not dedicated followers of that or any other fashion, they were open to various ways of combating the one thing that was driving me mad (or, should I say, keeping me mad): the inability to get any sleep.
Dâ knew something about aromatherapy, and introduced me to a variety of fragrances that certainly packed a power of soothing. One Saturday we three went to a local agricultural show, and had a fine time sniffing the flowers. But, come the night, I still couldn't sleep. They both suggested warm milk before bed, which is a very pleasant drink. But not a wink.
Tâ introduced me to his parents and siblings, who made me feel as if I were an integral part of the family. For hours of an afternoon I soaked up the sunshine, reclining on a deckchair until the plastic straps left red marks on my bare back, reading most of the time, willing myself to feel better. Evening came on. The sun disappeared. It was back to Tâ and Dâ's. We talked until 10: I retired to the front room they had generously let me use. And there I lay awake, staring at the ceiling, until at long last the sun returned.
Dâ was equally indefatigable in seeking out treatments. One I recollect was a greenish jelly known as Japanese magma. The effect, if I have this right, was supposed to be invigoration of the spirits. And I must have felt better for a time. But when that old lassitude returned, as it inevitably did, my fears would resurface and I would try to tackle them one by one.
A new terror sprang up in me:
Why am I not well? What can be done about it?
No one had the answer. No matter how outgoing and understanding anyone was, I felt the need to stop burdening them by my useless and downcast presence. Shortly afterwards, I moved for a few days to a rambling rural house, not far from Mullumbimby, owned by one of their relatives.
Those few days reminded me that even those families that appear the best adjusted have their own dramas. In my frenzied imagination, every little disagreement I overheard (and there weren't all that many, but spend a few hours around anyone's hearth and the family dynamics will reverberate clearly enough) was magnified into a divisive force that would set everyone against each other in the end. On the fourth day I made my excuses, returned to my good friends Tâand Dâ, announced it was time I headed back to Melbourne, and consulted the departure times for buses heading south.
Now came November. I tried to fill up the pointless hours by seeing my hometown as if for the first time or, it would sometimes strike me, for the last. Voraciously I kept injecting the latest news of peril far away into my system direct via newspapers, radio and TV. The inability I felt to relate the enormity of what had happened to me in that frightening place was making me extremely tense and snappy. The need to avoid company was heightening my madness, yet I became acutely aware that understanding my predicament would not necessarily mean I, or anyone, could resolve it.
About this time came the first media reports of people returning from the Middle East with what was being diagnosed as post-traumatic stress syndrome.
That's me, I thought. That's exactly the label the psychiatric nurse in Bahrain gave me
. But again the afterthought:
They can name it but they cannot cure it
.
In East Melbourne, having found a nice anonymous psychiatric practice listed in the
Yellow Pages
, I made an appointment. The stakes couldn't have been higher: my sanity was on the line.
The appointment was for half an hour, maybe an hour, but in my compulsion to blurt out everything that had happened in the previous few months the awareness dawned that the sympathetic face of this health-care professional concealed an absolute inability to plumb the depths of my condition. Furthermore, if I told him everything with the full force of feeling welling up within me, it would sound like a tale told by a madman. I couldn't stand the thought of being committed to a clinic for the mentally ill where everyone who mattered to me would be visiting, or having my stress factored into the complex equations of their own lives. So I pulled my punches, kept my information general without being bland, and spared this busy professional the impression that the person sitting in front of him was desperately deranged.
Anti-depressants were prescribed. Another appointment was booked. I threw away the scriptâwhich makes more sense when you've already lost the plotâand never went back.
If I did energise myself with long walks, soon enoughâand especially lying down at nightâI would feel a tingling sensation in my extremities, way beyond numbness, that would remind me to breathe slowly. I believed that if I could control my breathing with deliberation my general anxiety level would drop. I also told myself that hyperventilation and tension in my limbsâsometimes my hands would become âlocked' like an arthritis sufferer'sâcould be precursors of a heart attack. Some nights I heard my heart skip a beat, and always felt a mild surprise when it kicked back into its normal rhythm.
Fright by night, skulking about the city like a cockroach by day: this was no way to live. I had plenty of time but was running out of meaningful things to fill it with. As November drew to a close, I recalled that the last time I had been happy was a year before, in England. Working in London as tumultuous events unfolded had been one of the most productive times of my life.
From old associates in Melbourne I knew that newspaper journalists were going through hard times. But in London not only were there several Fleet Street papers where I had contacts and was well regarded, I also knew the head of Reuters news agency's European division, Graham Stewart. No doubt it was optimistic to believe that a change of scene was all I required, but at home, where Treasurer Paul Keating had just announced the ârecession Australia had to have', all was gloom and doom. Going back to where I was before everything went sour seemed the best thing to do, and gave me the one thing I most needed. Hope.
That winter in London was as unlike the previous year's as anything I could imagine. On the Strand, where in 1989 a few beggars were to be seen, old tramps had been joined by young drug addicts, all with makeshift shelters constructed from cardboard boxes, huddling in doorways for shelter from the cold. Across the Thames, in front of Waterloo Station, the same phenomenon was writ so large the space had been christened Cardboard City.
Saddam's onslaught had triggered a global downturn that mirrored my personal downturnâtwo dark parallel lines without any foreseeable end. On the opposite side of the world, far from escaping gloom, I was surrounded by it, engulfed.
In England as in Australia, I sought out some friendsâone among my closestâbut avoided others. My internal battery was running down, and the energy I needed for seeking employmentâanything to occupy my mind and drive out this endless nightmareâcould not be entirely absorbed in gloomy reflection. I knocked on the doors of those newspapers for which I had worked twelve months previously, but they were no longer ajar. The recession had cut the hiring of casual sub-editors to the bone, and on some journals permanent staff were being laid off.
I remember spending the evening of 16 January in my room, by the open fire but draped in a jacket and shrouded in all-pervasive gloom. The light was off; I wanted no false hope. Early in the morning, it must have been, I turned the radio on and caught a news flash. âOperation Desert Storm has begun. Coalition troops have begun the battle to oust Iraqi forces from Kuwait.' Everything that happened was sucked into my own personal tragedy. I wasn't far out of danger now.
At the end of January 1991, I could see no future for myself in England. Good friends had done their best, there was no work or prospect of it, and my finances were beginning to mirror my inner resources (flickering). Having learnt the hard way that uncertainty was the only certainty, I had bought a round-the-world ticket in Melbourne, so that if I ended up staying in Britain the rest of the ticket could be used any time within a year of the first flight to London. This type of ticket is valid for two stopovers, so long as they are in the same directionâwest to east, or east to west. London was the first, so I had one up my sleeve. A glance at the map, and a desire to use up all the time I could in finding a new life to replace my old broken one, suggested a halt in North America.
I had kept two friends from my days working on a newspaper in Athens: one an American, the other a Canadian. I have sometimes wondered since those days what would have happened if I had chosen to stop over in Los Angeles instead of Vancouver. But all such speculation is as idle as it is enticing: the probable answer is that, all things being equally dismal, I would have spun out of control in some other place.
Perhaps it was better this way. The Californian journalist was a close friend, whereas the Canadian journalist had remade her life in the Philippines. Neither could know what I had gone through or help me, of that I was convinced. But now, with Despair closing in, I felt that to fetch up almost unannounced on the doorstep of a friend with whom I'd kept in touch down the years by letter might be a bit overpowering for both of us, given my vulnerable state. It would be better to go the indirect route, as it were. I remembered that Penny had a brother, Greg, in Vancouver, and a phone call confirmed he still lived there and would be happy to put me up for a while.
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