A Note on Forgetting

Sometimes, I forget things. I’ll wake up of a morning, have breakfast and think, “Oh, I should take the rubbish out on my way downstairs,” and then forget. So I come home and continue to forget and go about the next few days remembering and then forgetting. At some point, I’ll open the door, step into the apartment and be welcomed by a distinctly unpleasant smell. Within moments, the rubbish will be sitting in the bin outside, and the windows in the apartment will be thrown open, and I hope that next time, I won’t forget.

There was something of an Incident in early November on facebook. Very few people probably noticed or heard about it, but it shook me. A cousin of mine had posted an innocuous question about a club, which I took upon myself to answer, having previously frequented said club. Another cousin (I have a lot of them) began to poke fun at the first, asking if she or her boyfriend were bi, or gay and did she know it was a gay club she was asking about? These jibes rubbed me the wrong way and I commented on them, stating the underlying feeling made me uncomfortable. The thread quickly turned heated. The second cousin leapt on the attack, questioning my understanding of the situation and chastising me for casting ‘judgement’. The first cousin’s boyfriend chimed in his support, and later threw his own harsh words my way, eventually revealing his disturbingly bigoted perspective. Within a day of the last comment, my cousin had deleted her first status, thereby extinguishing the entire thread.

As much as I would dearly love to tear down every word hurled at me over those few hours that is not the point of this post (the beauty of the internet means I can do that tomorrow!). This post is about forgetting, and my cousin’s actions are merely illustrative. Her deletion of the thread speaks to a desire to forget. More than that, it speaks to a desire to quash further argument from any of the commenters.

So now that we’ve apparently forgotten, what happens? Surely everything will go back to the way it was? Everyone has forgotten about it, so there won’t be any lasting effects. Right?

I cannot speak for anyone else involved, but I know that it hasn’t been quite so easy for me. My trust in several people has been severely diminished, I’ve lost a facebook friend (whether or not this is a bad thing remains to be seen), I am severely dispirited to be shown, once again, that I am related to bigots, and I am left with the feeling that, should I ever indulge in my ‘reasonable skeptic’ side in front of my cousins, I will be put-down and ridiculed until I stop talking (the last lesson, admittedly, has already been ingrained from twenty-three years’ worth of stomping on my voice; I’ve only very recently begun to get it back). Beyond the immediate, I will continue to feel this for a very long time. How am I to act when I next see these cousins? Do we acknowledge what happened, or will we casually avoid the topic? What happens if gay rights come up in conversation when we’re in the same room? Will I ever be able to trust them?

Like the forgotten rubbish sitting in my kitchen, this situation will start to smell. The question becomes: how long will we let it sit there? At what point does the smell become too great for us to bear? There are three choices now: sit and let the fetid stench grow, forever unacknowledged; get as far away as possible, so as to avoid having to deal with the smell; fucking deal with it.

In a dream world, I could sit down and have a calm, rational discussion about the Incident, with everyone present really paying attention to what others say, with minds and hearts open. Sadly, I doubt this will happen. I will be told to ignore it, to get over it, to stop complaining, they didn’t really mean it and come on, they’re your cousins can’t you just forgive them and move on? Well, no, I can’t. I won’t. If we all forgive and forget and move on without any resolution, how will we ever grow? If we never take out the rubbish and throw open the windows, how will we smell fresh air again? And once we remember what fresh air smells like, will we let the rubbish pile up again? Or will we learn?

I know what the fresh air is like, and I will do everything I can to stop the rubbish from piling up in my life.

Honours - an experience to last a lifetime?

Because the best way to introduce yourself to the internet is with an intense overshare. This year I had the joy of completing honours as a part of my bachelor of science degree, and it appears I have been gifted with this continuing, but maybe fading (we’ll see), anxiety as a result. For those not versed in academic lingo, honours is like a testing ground to see if you should go onto further research. In my case it consisted of a year long project with a thesis produced by the end of it. I’ve heard it compared to something like doing a PhD, but worse. Honours is roundly acknowledged as being difficult, tiring and stressful.

However, all of this assumes that, at the very least, your supervisors will be there to support you. Allow me to tell you that when the best thing you can say about your primary supervisor is that they happened to find you a fantastic secondary supervisor that it was an incredibly tough year. There were changes to my project, caused by my main supervisor, that made no sense, dodgy scientific and ethical practice and an unwillingness to actually give a damn. A particular highlight was my main supervisor’s attempt to bail on my entire project about a month before my thesis was due through a two line email sent only to my second and third supervisors.

Still, I managed to drag myself over the line, encouraged by my other two supervisors, with the expectation that the fear and anxiety would go away. That afterwards I would be able to forget about all the rotten things that had happened and move on to doing better things. Gaming, cooking, bludging in general. But the relief never really came. The lasting waves of anxiety that have dogged me since I gave in my thesis were totally unexpected. It’s been over a month since I submitted my thesis and I still find myself spontaneously bursting into tears for no known reason. Literally yesterday I felt panic shoot through me at the thought of doing the dishes, the fucking dishes. I need to do a last bit of Christmas shopping and the thought of all the things I need to do to get to the city and back has thus far been overwhelming me.

A large part of me is so fucking angry that my main supervisor managed to get at me so severely. Given that we’re not even on speaking terms and I could probably never talk to them ever again for fear that I would say something that I would regret later (though I’m beginning to think that there are no words strong enough), they can’t actually know that they’ve screwed me over this badly. Ultimately, after all the additional anguish, my mark was fine, and I could do a PhD if I wanted to, so this isn’t some attempt at a strike back for a bad mark.

All of this adds together to make me realise how much of a prick I’ve probably been in the past. Having had no experience with anything remotely bordering on mental illness I’ve typically shut down when exposed to it. Why exactly? I don’t know, most likely out of fear, why is a jerk a jerk to anyone? But even now as I sit here and type this, I can feel tension rolling through me for no reason. I’m safe, I’m loved, nothing that I need to do in the near future is what I would previously have described as stressful or difficult, and yet everything feels slightly shifted. It’s as if someone moved the furniture in my absence but I can’t quite figure out how or as soon as I pin down what the difference is, I lose it again. About the only time I don’t ever feel it is when I’m sucked into playing Skyrim or the like.

I’m not claiming to have any great knowledge of mental illnesses or what they’re genuinely like. But I do know that after a month of completely unexpected anxiety that I really wish would just go away, that they are clearly more complex than I imagined. I’m trying to suck it up and move on, but it’s just not working.

Gleecap: I Kissed A Girl (and had feelings)

I have always been an avid fan of Glee. During the first airing of season one, I waited with bated breath each week for the Australian airing. At times, it was not enough to just sit and watch; I would spoil myself by consulting that ever-flowing font of knowledge, Wikipedia. My need became even greater in season two, and I took to watching each episode almost as soon as it aired in the US. This trend continues into season three, though now I have someone to turn my confused, disbelieving stare upon and see it reflected back at me. For while I have remained steadfast in my commitment, Glee has not. Initially charmed though I was by the bright, hopeful smiles of the characters, the possibility of novel arrangements of all sorts of songs, and Lea Michele’s legs, I quickly began to spy cracks. I was not disheartened, Glee was supposed to be an attempt at a new way of telling a story on television; new things always take time to settle in. The creators were feeling their way into the genre, they would get the hang of it soon enough.