Journal

There comes a time in every girl's life: you're maturing, and you need to turn to your mother for answers to awkward questions.

Like where on earth does one go to buy handkerchiefs?

All I've got at the moment is about ten fraying mens hankies, which I think are the same ones my mum bought for me when I was a teenager.

Mum laughed and explained that everybody uses tissues these days, which is why hankies are so hard to find.

It's not that I'm a tissue sceptic. I'm quite persuaded that tissues are superior from a public health perspective, provided you bin them immediately after use, and don't just shove them back in your pocket/handbag/whatever. It's just that I find tissues will more effectively remove makeup, whether you want them to or not. The daintiest dab with a tissue risks exposing the full horror of my big red Karl Malden boozer's nose, which I'd rather avoid.

It's a potent memory: being a child and wobbling about on your first bicycle, focusing so hard on coordinating all the actions required to keep it upright — and failing — until you stop fixating on each individual movement and suddenly "Oh my god! I'm doing it! I'm doing it!"

And then you become self-conscious again and promptly topple over. But that momentary success renders what had seemed a futile pursuit potentially fruitful.

I raise this as a metaphor because when you're a child who is trans and/or neurodivergent, and has no way of knowing that these are perfectly commonplace ways of being, you will find yourself confronted — typically within a year or two of school — with the apparent reality that there is a fixed and very limited number of legitimate kinds of human being, and that you aren't one of them.

I'm absolutely furious.

…is the sort of thing I'm likely to say any day of the week. About a week ago it was particularly appropriate, and occasioned by the start of term at uni and receipt of the timetable for my subject. The timetable is quite sparse, consisting of a single tutorial a week and the due dates for assignments. Ordinarily it causes no distress until I approach one of those deadlines.

Took a promethazine early last night, as I was too exhausted to do anything useful with my evening, and it was upsetting feeling so useless. As usual, this led to being out like a light for ten hours and at least one weird dream.

So I was on a coach trip; some sort of school excursion deal, and in the seat next to me was Peter Davison.

We had a long conversation about acting and television production. And it turns out that he is every bit as lovely as you would expect.

Anyway, as you do on long coach trips, we got a bit tired, and as we'd become firm chums by then we had a bit of a snuggle. Nothing inappropriate; just a perfectly innocent, congenial, arm-in-arm, head-on-shoulder snuggle. That's a thing isn't it?

It turned out we were going to some workshop, and I ended up on a table full of strangers where we did the usual icebreaker thing. I couldn't see any reason not to say that I was currently living in Havana.

A couple of weeks ago I was cleaning the flat and unpacked some of my boxes of books and things. Not to finally properly move in after two and a half years, just to douse the boxes with cockroach spray and repack them again. It's a glamorous life.

In amongst the things I've not been able to throw out, there's a high school report from July 1987. I've no idea why this is in my possession in the first place; I assume my mother has the rest of them, along with other cherished reminders of my childhood triumphs.

I think I must have seen it at Mum's place decades ago and pinched it for it's entertainment value. According to Wikipedia, ADHD (then called ADD) was known about in the 1980s, but clearly the Australian education system wasn't equipped to identify it. Here's a selection of insights into my temperament as a callow youth:

… poor attitude has been detrimental. - Year master

… lacks the competitive spirit… - English

I haven't had a good month. I have to decide where to focus my energies when I don't really have any energies, and nobody's much interested in me anyway.

I was feeling pretty low last night, had drunk as much wine as I could usefully drink, and had taken a promethazine in the hope that I'd be zonked out for 12 hours, and might resurface with a more positive attitude.

Then I got an email from Darrell, the convener of my local #U3A philosophy group. I'd left it too long to enrol for the new year, so I missed out on a place in the class and was on a waitlist.

He invited me to come along anyway as an "Illegal", in the expectation that people will drop out, so I might as well be there from week one.

It was such a kind and thoughtful offer that I burst into tears.

Of all the things I've done in the last couple of years, talking about caustically controversial stuff with other dotty old people once a week has without question been the most fun.

It was the first time I'd been back to the house in which I was raised since The Before Times. Being back there always gives me the willies to some degree, but I wasn't overly worried about it. However my mother had led me to believe that my three siblings and their families were all keen to see me, which was a bit daunting (not to mention implausible).

I'd vague intentions of visiting Sydney for some time, with a view to spending a couple of days with family, and then a couple more staying in the city and catching up with one or two old friends as a feeble gesture toward making amends for years of neglect. But chronic spoon depletion led me to scale it back to a couple of nights at my Mum's house.

I don't know how it's possible for life to keep getting both harder and better, I just know that it is possible.

I don't mind, particularly. I'm a stubborn old bird, and as long as the quantity of the better keeps rising in proportion to the harder, I can maintain my equilibrium. 2024 was a bit over the top on this score, though.

For the prior few years I had been cocooning. It's a luxury I had available to me by virtue of the fact that I had already sleepwalked into a situation where I was living in near-total social isolation. So when I packed up and moved a thousand kilometres to a city where I knew nobody, with no particularly well-developed plan for what I was going to do with my life, I can't imagine anybody thought it odd. Well, no more odd than anything else about me.