Bogan Reporter

On Sunday I found myself, wide eyed and bewildered, on the first of what I hope will be many fine journalistic deployments for a Melbourne magazine.  It was a hoot, but prepared, I was not.

You see, I’d spent the better part of the morning loitering aimlessly around Footscray, occasionally peering listlessly into some shop or another, wondering if I should go in.  My back had been giving me such hell that I’d thrown the towel in and elected to take a valium, despite it being the middle of the day.  The directionless meandering appeared to be some sort of side effect, and so, at the moment the phone buzzed me back to consciousness, I was pressed awkwardly against a glass window separating me from a delicious looking fruit flan.

It was the magazine.  Life is cruel.

The editor needed someone urgently to cover a film fest in the city.  By the time I noticed the alert, there was precisely one hour to go till lift off.

I couldn’t think.  I tried desperately to gather a list of pros and cons for analysis, but all I could come up with was this:  Do I have time to have a shower!?  I’ve never really been honest with myself about how long I spend in the shower, so I don’t know!!  I just don’t know!!

These thoughts were not helping.  Time was running thin.  And so, lacking the mental faculties required to make an informed choice, I figured my only option was to go.  I couldn’t risk living with regrets.

I ran home.  My legs felt heavy and like they were not made for running.  Inside, I accosted Tom with my armpit. 

‘DO I SMELL?’

Tom flinched.  ‘Um, maybe a little.’ 

‘FUCK IT!  Quick!  Lay out some edgy looking clothes for me!  I’m going to cover a festival!’

Tom looked very confused but elected not to question me.  I got in the shower and tried hard to hold my face directly under the flow the entire time, in an effort to blast away the latent effects of the pill.  Once out, I asked Tom if he thought it was a good idea to rush into the city and meet my new editor for the first time unprepared and on valium.  He said yes so we jumped in the car.

At the venue, I ran into my editor.  As in, we physically collided, apologised to eachother, then in a moment of recognition/horror, realised who one-another were.  As we said hello, it suddenly occurred to me that this was a terrible idea, that my editor had obviously intended for an experienced journalist to answer the call-out, and not some doped-up-too-keen-wannabe who clearly lacked the analytical skill to have garnered that fact in the first place.

Too late.  He was lovely and gracious and explained that ‘I don’t really know anything about this thing either,’ and in we went. 

The auditorium was big and shiny and buzzing with young arty types.  I began a process of looking at something, then quickly swinging my vision around to focus on something else, in an effort to discern if the valium was still affecting me.  A girl with orange hair looked at me as if I was mad.  This caused me to realise that my repeated head swinging was probably too obvious a test.  I desisted. 

The first video was in an Eastern European language and it was at this point that it occurred to me that I had been too busy drug-testing to think about what I should be doing.  The video was passing my by!  Should I be taking notes?  I decided yes.  But on what?  The general ambiance or the content of the film?  I wanted to pose all these questions to my editor, who was sitting and laughing at the appropriate times and looking decidedly not-confused.  But I wasn’t sure if any of them were professional enough.  So I scrawled random notes and chortled as convincingly as possible at the Romanian guy.

After what felt like 5 minutes but was actually an hour, my editor explained that he had to go and he would speak to me tomorrow.  And with that, I was on my own.  Just as I was beginning to relax, someone tapped me on the shoulder. 

‘Yes?’  I said to the neatly dressed girl with a clipboard.  I half expected to be kicked out.

‘Hi.’  She sounded very astute.  ‘Katie, right?’

Eeek.  ‘Yep.’

‘I’m Sarah.  Just confirming that you’re planning to stay and cover the awards at 7?’

I had no idea what she was talking about.  ‘Of course!’  I beamed, and she seemed satisfied with this response.

And so the end came and I was turfed out, with hours to go till the fabled awards and only a notebook full of frantic scrawl for company.  I figured I had a choice.  I could begin the process of stressing needlessly over what to record/ what direction the article should take/ whether I was even good enough to write it, or I could go to the restaurant and get a little bit drunk.  I elected to do the later.

By the time I returned for the awards, I was full of merriment and anticipation and cheered along with best of them as the hosts warbled out their show tunes.  I clapped, I laughed, I note-took.  I felt very reporter-like.  During an intermission Sarah approached once more, dropped off her email and bade me farewell.  But the paranoid part of me couldn’t help but notice her reserve.  Had I done something wrong?  I racked my brains, and was just about to dismiss the thought as ridiculous when my hand happened to brush against my head wear.  My beany!  I had left my bloody Collingwood beany on!  As the gravity of my faux pas set in, I wondered if Sarah would report back to the mag.  ‘That newbie reporter you sent,’ she would say in the smuggest of smuggery, ‘wore a novelty beany to the awards show!  Hardly the sort of person you want representing your fine publication!’  And they would laugh and laugh and I would be fired and cast from the industry like the dirty bogan Collingwood supporter I truly am.                       

I took the hat off.  I had hat head.  Then the night was over.

I’m yet to find out if Sarah chose to reveal my true identity to the magazine.  I can only hope she’s not a Carlton supporter.    

On Mental Illness

 

I met up with a friend the other day that I hadn’t seen in a very long time.  We were mates in primary school, and since then she’s gone on to get a well paying office job and a lovely, professional boyfriend.  From what I could ascertain from my brief troll of her Facebook, she was living an awesome, successful life.  So I was pretty apprehensive in the lead up to our lunch- what would she think of my career choice?  Would she look down on me for having spent so much of the last five years bumming around and trying to figure out what to do with myself?  Should I embellish a bit to make myself sound more… like her?

In the end I decided against it.  I’m a shithouse liar and would probably have ended up tying myself in knots, anxiety niggling at me as I analysed the convincingness of my creative additions.  I told her the truth, as we sipped our lattes, and of course, she was encouraging and gracious as ever.  As she marvelled at how generous our country is to support its young creatives through grants, I must admit a hint of jealousy crept into my thoughts.  This woman was not only successful, she was unfailingly put-together.  To me, she had the perfect life.

So when eventually she confided that she’d experienced difficulties with her mental health, I was thrown.  I suppose I’d already put her up on a pedestal.  Finally, I’d been thinking, I’ve found someone who hasn’t struggled through their 20’s!

Is it possible that every single one of us has at some point experienced a mental health disorder?  Whether it’s anxiety, depression, or bipolar, I don’t know a single person who has been let off scott free.  Life is tough.  It gets too much sometimes.  And yet, apart from the odd intimate conversation, we don’t talk about it.  Of course we’ve come a long way, but the accepted wisdom still seems to be that mental illness is a relatively uncommon problem. 

I know so many people who have struggled for years before finally realising that they have a clinical illness; that they need to be treated.  For the most part, once they have sought help, their lives have significantly improved.  I am one of these people.  I denied the gravity of my ‘stress’ for years, labouring under the weight of anxiety day after day until I cracked.  If we talked about it more, if we acknowledged that this is something that happens to nearly everyone at some point, we would be in a better position to recognise it when it happens to us, rather than explaining it away until we’re almost at breaking point. 

In theory, we don’t stigmatise mental illness like they did in the old days.  We have awareness campaigns, education in schools, and famous role models.  This is all fantastic.  But day to day, at work, at uni, we are still under an enormous amount of pressure to be ‘happy’.  It’s not really the done thing to admit in everyday chit chat that we cried into our pillows last night, unable to let go of the sadness we’ve held onto since our grandmother died a year ago.  We don’t tell each other that we’re not just ‘stressed’ over study, we’re tied up in knots of worry so pervasive and complex they are consuming our every thought.  The implicit message, for better or worse, is that there’s something slightly wrong with you if you’re not sparkly and content.  Even if we’re not saying it out loud, the daily pressure to be happy means that there is still a degree of shame surrounding mental illness.  My attitude toward my friend, that she was not the ‘success’ I’d assumed her to be due to her experience with mental ill- health, was simply reproducing the incorrect notion that to have a mental illness is somehow to ‘fail’.

It’s not exactly an environment conducive to recognizing mental illness.  We spend so much time faking it that often we fail to understand or accept that we need help.  In my case, I held the misguided belief that there would be a really obvious ‘episode’ or warning sign, that someone would hold a big ugly placard in front of my head blaring ‘YOU HAVE AN ANXIETY DISORDER’.  For most of us, it creeps up slowly, and our misconceptions on the issue mean we’re not adequately prepared to respond to the signs.  Then, when we finally do accept that we have an illness, we cover it up and discuss it only in the most intimate of circumstances.  We participate in the culture of shame. 

But it’s not shameful to have a mental illness, and it’s not at all uncommon.  We can claim to understand this all we like, but the only way we are really going to believe it is if we lift the lid and start talking.  To talk about it would be to normalise it – to break down the ridiculous expectation that we should always be content.       

Next time I meet up with an old friend, I am not going to omit the fact that I suffer from anxiety.  I am going to challenge the voice in my own mind that tells me I am less of a success because of it.  Wouldn’t it be great if we thought of mental illness in the same way we do physical- we all expect to fall ill from time to time, but we also expect to be able to talk about it, to treat it, and to receive unconditional understanding from everyone around us, not just our closest confidants.