Author: Have You Met Kim?

I bake and I lift weights. I have aspirations to be a writer and this is my practice ground.

On a Rant.

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I had to check what day it was. My memory has been shot, lately. I don’t know why, all I can do is list concurrent factors: my flat was renovated and my boyfriend moved in; nothing is in the same place as it was; there’s empty spaces where we’re still saving to put something there; many things are still awaiting their place; the things that do have a place may yet be moved around to a better one; I don’t feel settled.

Quality sleep has escaped my nights as he tosses violently in his sleep. At least, it feels violent; it isn’t. Its 95 kilos of a six foot man rolling over and I’m jolted from my sweet slumber. I groan inwardly and go back to sleep, but the damage to my unbroken reverie has been done.

My symptoms have expanded, I’m anxious now and becoming irritable. My recollections are swiss cheese and I’m constantly unfocused. I worry I’ve lost my grasp of living in the moment and being present for the people I care about. I yawn frequently and seek to lay blame. I change my diet to fast until lunchtime, perhaps the effort of digesting the morning meal taxes my body’s ability to focus before midday.

I reflect on this recent upheaval and am confident my pointed finger will find its mark. My certainty wanes and it dawns on me this past few months is not finite. Recent chronology stretches back and back and I realize change has been the real constant for a time longer than I want to admit. I am tired.

I mope inwardly and seek comfort in old habits: salty carbs and weekday wines. The ingrained habits of my New Life™ habits seem to be limited to Good Vibes Only. I’ve been asymptomatic of the depression that controlled my youth now for 18 months, the same period of time for my greatest successes in career, finances, health and relationships.

I’ve worked hard to get myself from minus one to zero and having steered my life out of the disaster it fell into, the water has never been so calm. I feel like I’ve exceeded my own modest expectations having achieved going from zero to one and yet I am bewildered as infinity stretches out, invitingly, toward me. I’ve never stood here before and it’s beautiful.

I’m at a loss to explain what’s happening to me now. Everything is completely new, the frames of reference I know no longer apply. My ship, in a new ocean, still needs to be steered by me. Writing is my map, it always has been. Despite my neglect at this deeply important skill, writing somehow shows me where True North is. Its up to me to keep looking at the map to keep me on my right journey.

On Telling My Parents Their Divorce Didn’t Cause My Depression

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“Hey Siri.” Ding. “Dial Mum Mobile.”

I was in the car when I called Mum, a few days after reaching enlightenment. I had been sitting on the couch in the living room of my Life Coach when the wormhole he guided me down dawned into a rushing realisation.

“Hey Mum”

“Oh, hi darling”

Mum has a way of lengthening the vowel in “Oh” which sounds at first as though she could be doing anything more constructive than answering the phone, yet at the same time like she’s been awaiting the certain inevitability of this very call.

I wasn’t sure where to start so I did what I always do: bore my audience with background information in an amateur effect to build context.

I cut to the chase. “Mum I saw my Life Coach,” I braced for an audible eye roll. There wasn’t one. “I think I figured out where my Bipolar Disorder came from.”

I recounted a memory. It wasn’t a special memory; it hadn’t been repressed to come back in a brace of cold sweats. It was myself and my 2 years younger sister, Lisa, playing in the dirt in the back yard. We’re dressed the same in turquoise tracksuit pants and matching tops, matching navy and white-velcro shoes. Mine were on the wrong feet, having dressed my three-year-old self as I usually did back then. We were two cherubs with stamped foreheads and sticks in the mud, Lisa’s chin and ruddy cheeks suspiciously brown with dirt. There’s a dusty photo of this scene somewhere, both of us giggling uproariously.

In the guided meditation this memory bounced onto another one, perhaps 12 months later. The sodden green grass and rich dark earth gave way to freshly laid brick pavers, its summertime in this scene and Lisa and I are playing in a makeshift sandpit. It was actually the bucket or two remainder of the sand underlay that had been dumped onto the hard ground, we pair grabbing our beach pails and little fistfuls of sand. We lived nearly 100km from the nearest beach and laughing, we smiled for a photo. I don’t recall how long we played like this but my next memory was of looking around for more sand. My imagination was whirring and I had endless ideas I wanted to create with my hands in front of me, with my best imagination partner right there, reliably willing and able to help me create whole new imaginary worlds and hours and hours of completely absorbing play.

I knew immediately that there was no more sand. This was all we had and this wasn’t enough for me. My ballooning imagination that had been rushing to fantastical heights slammed shut. In that moment, I realised that my world wasn’t big enough for me and I was bound in. My little body felt a visceral stress response of that sensory depravation.

I realised that the physical panic of that moment had been with me ever since. The understanding of that moment hit me all at once like a tonne of bricks. I opened my eyes. I was crying.

My tone was conciliatory. “So you see Mum, it wasn’t your divorce that caused my depression,” Mum paused before responding.

“Well,” she said carefully, “it didn’t help.”

On The Topic of Dull Methodologies

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I’ve come a long way since I realised I had a problem. Its taken me a while but the pointy end has been more recent so those who may not have known me for that long can’t see the evolution over time. Standing atop that mountain and looking over the spectacular view ahead of me, I reflect on the journey I took to get as far ahead as I have. Much like building tremendous strength in lifting, I maintain that only with putting one foot in front of the other and trudging up the trail can you ever get anywhere. The road to something amazing is spectacularly dull, as it were.

I was a shy kid who grew into a socially awkward adult that couldn’t read faces and had trouble understanding other people’s emotions because I didn’t know how to have feelings. I felt disconnected all the time. I’d look up at the sky and know that the world was beautiful but couldn’t actually feel it. I’d say it to myself over again that something was pretty and significant but nothing truly captured my heart. My high school sweetheart, an artist, was a hopeless romantic and always creating something or doing small kindnesses but they were all lost on me as I just accepted everything at face value and couldn’t see the emotion and feeling behind any of it. He stopped doing those things eventually.

I didn’t know why I was that way, but I knew I had to stop doing it.

At the time I was in university studying applied science and without deliberately designing it that way, I started experimenting with myself. I’d have my control group (I’m a scientist, not an engineer after all) which was my baseline feeling. I’d monitor what was happening and then reflect on that to find a variable or a group of related variables such as my behaviour or thought patterns and change them. I’d then experiment with those changes and see how I felt before reverting to the original baseline or keeping them. I didn’t apply this methodology to lifestyle habits until more recently. Those things are bastards to change.

What then happened is that I started to notice things. Back in my early twenties I used to hang out with a very broad crew of so-called ‘outcasts’ – metal heads, goths, gravers – who all prided their selves on how damaged they were. For the most part, a lot of them did have legitimate mental health issues and thus with all these broken people I felt at home. However very few of them were doing much more than taking anti-depressants, if anything prescribed at all. None were in therapy. Almost all were living for the weekend (regardless of what day of the week it was) and for many, spending it dropping eight-balls with ice chasers wasn’t uncommon.

I realised that I was getting better and they weren’t. I had found an objective measure of success.

Looking back this seems like easy pickings: don’t use drugs to mask your demons. Easier said than done when you look at all the ‘normal’ regular people who mask their demons with a myriad of other things: work, reality TV, sex, having more babies, home renovations. Harder still is when that’s all you have by way of influences. I’ve experimented with drugs to see if it was for me and to attempt to fit in with anything at all, but ultimately I felt that when you’re losing your mind the last thing I want is to lose what tenuous grip I have on it. So, I don’t do drugs and try to avoid getting out of control drunk.

I guess what I learned from this is that without someone holding my hand and without having relatable role models there was still space to carve my own path. It took a committment to what I knew deep down was right for me, and then the courage to do it. I still follow that rule, even though now I have built so many good relationships with people I admire and I expose myself constantly to more inspiring humans than I ever thought possible.

But sometimes I’ll still find myself in that little space where I feel disconnected from everyone, unable to figure out why the sky is beautiful. Except now I have built an out.

On The Topic of Fear

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I feel scared. I feel scared a lot, actually. When I am scared I give it a moment to wash over me and feel the feeling. Then I hold it in my hands and turn it over like some million-squares rubix cube, trying to figure out what it is doing there in the first place.

I feel alone a lot, too. I grew up pretty isolated, physically as well as emotionally. The hallmark of my adult life has been to hold tight to my independence with both hands and not let go. I think the reason for that has been because I don’t like rules. The other day I articulated myself poorly in saying that I don’t like to be told what to do. That’s not true, I love being told what to do because I don’t like having to organise myself. What I wanted to describe is that I don’t like rules. When other people’s rules are forced on to me I stop and I get off the bus.

Many of my childhood memories are stained with the word NO. No, you can’t do that or no, we are not doing this. I am a normal adult but I developed quickly as a kid and the other side effect of having been neglected is that I was constantly under-stimulated. I felt trapped all the time like I was in solitary confinement and the warden was drunk and terrifying. I remember being so hungry but so scared of leaving my room because I didn’t know what I would find on the other side of the door of our tiny, suffocating little house. There would be no escape for a few years yet. The boredom still lurks around sometimes.

My only escape was to shut it all off. A short time later I had my first breakdown, at 15. It was brief but returned a year later. Again brief but this time I was really present with it and I was scared. Everything went cold and under me was a dark pool of terror.

I stopped feeling anything all together for the next eight years. The only thing I could feel in that time was rage or nothing.

I smiled, I laughed, I looked for love and lived my life but it was hollow.

It scares me looking back at those words and realising the gravity of it all. When you’re young none of this stuff matters because kids bounce and you still think you’re immortal and all you know is that nothing is certain and nothing is forever. You just went along with it.

But as time goes on you realise that even with all the work you’re putting into getting better and with all the work you’re putting into trying to live your life despite it all, some things you can’t fix in time before they become rusted on.

This is where I am now. I’ve fixed pretty much everything else but this fear of being trappend and under-stimulated remains. Until this point I’ve been trying to solve this rubix cube on my own. After that meeting I had the other day, I realised the missing piece was that I can’t. I need someone to hold my hand. I don’t want to face that on my own.

Now, I’m ready to start.

On The Topic of Inspiration and Self-Doubt

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I have been on an overseas holiday the last little while. I would call it “traveling” but I think there’s a few more people out there who lend more legitimacy to that descriptor than I do. I was humbled to be a special guest at a very special event and from there I continued on my own driving around a foreign land. I’m staying in hostels for the most part and I have mixed feelings about the experience. Its been five years since I last traveled alone in a foreign place. I won’t say it is harder than it used to be, it isn’t, but I have to admit that I like it less than I used to. A lot less. I still find the value of travel in confronting my known assumptions but then again, I put myself into those situations at home and challenge what I thought I knew as a matter of course. That part of the trip has been my favourite. Well, in some ways yes and in some ways no.

My absolute favourite thing about the trip has been meeting a group of new people who inspired the hell out of me. This isn’t a common phenomenon but it is one of the few that I am already to identify and savour. I was lucky enough to meet a handful of hands-down excellent people at this event and its had two really opposite effects. All of my memories are that of being immediately accepted into a close-knit group of people. Being accepted like that and how special that made me feel will sit in my heart forever. The other effect as I got to know this group and some individuals in particular, was I realised that they weren’t average people. The innate intelligence, care and kindness that permeated this group was a breeding ground for a kind of wealth and success that I’ve only seen come similarly out of nowhere in circles where being an arsehole opportunist was the predominant trait. This didn’t make sense to me at all. In the days that followed as I reflected on what I had experienced my wide-eyed inspiration had given way to a sinking feeling.

A sinking feeling that I am not smart enough, not well-connected enough, not good enough to realise my impossible dreams.

I know you aren’t supposed to compare yourself to others as you’re trying to carve your own path, but you have to take inspiration from somewhere, right? So what do you do if that glimmering sword of inspiration blackens into a dagger of self-doubt? I’ve come a long way and it’s hard to hear others tell me I’ve reached the zenith in life and in work yet where I want to be is still only on the horizon.

Without being too self-referential, I’m trying to provide solutions rather than give unanswered problems with this blog-form writing exercise, but some shit I just don’t know about. I’m trying to figure it out, though.

 

On The Topic of Building Capital

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Let the record show that I have been on over one hundred Tinder dates. The vast majority of them happened within one year.

They say that love finds you when you’re least looking for it. I say that love, like death, runs by its own clock. There’s nothing neither you nor I can do to stave or hasten either of them. The best we can hope for is that one doesn’t follow the other without at least a few good innings in between.

When you date by numbers you learn a few things. You learn that as a girl, being ernest for a boy is a cardinal sin. You’re ’emotionally too available’. You stand out by standing down. The oldies, aghast, look at the world of online dating and wonder aloud what happened to the old fashioned dumb-struck refrain: “I like you, wanna go out with me?”

Dumb-struck, I shrug back in response.

Online dating, otherwise known as the sushi train of who’s going to buy Tuesday’s beer, is like buying a first home in this million-dollar property market. After spending all these years building capital to be interesting enough to date, you go to inspection after inspection before one of two things happen: you are priced out of the market you want because you’re not good enough, or you are blindsided by a bid you didn’t see coming before the last gavel sounds and the show is over.

So with other options dried up you keep playing the numbers anyway, lowering your expectations and your standards just to get into the market. You take the stream of advice given to you and you drift further and further from the person you thought you were. Further from the person you wanted to be. You hear the occasional story of people who meet online and sometimes an invitation to their wedding is even on your fridge. Sometimes you hear of people who meet online and buy their first home instead. You went to their housewarming. All the while you find yourself in places you don’t like and in places where you don’t want to be.

I took a break from the numbers game after twice being heartbroken, which followed two more before that. This period was concurrent with coming out of a long term relationship and a career change which failed. I went on the dole. I had suffered a breakdown a year earlier and the subsequent depression was still eighteen months away from lifting. Seeing my GP for pain that I couldn’t afford to treat, she stepped me on the scales. I was clinically obese.

I was interviewing all over the city. My flatmate moved out. It was three weeks to Christmas. I deleted Tinder.

On all fronts I found rejection was of a specific kind “we absolutely loved you but there’s someone better qualified”.

The irony wasn’t lost on me. As my money ran out, I was forced to choose how I wanted to live my life. I saw the three pools of life, love and health and had to decide – keep doing the same thing and admit that theres something so wrong with me that I can’t fix my situation or push through. It was a bit hard thinking how to work upwards from rock bottom when depression is trying to suck you under the water. It takes all your energy to keep your chin up just so that you can breathe. To get back to dry land, or rather, to touch my feet on the dry land of stability for the first time, I needed to cash in my capital.

With the help of my support network, I employed my resourcefulness and my resilience in exchange for courage. I thought I was brave before, leaving my stable six-figure dead-end government job for risky company to get my foot in the door.

I was naive. But that didn’t hold a candle to what I had to do next.

 

A year on from that period I am no longer depressed. I am no longer obese. I found a dream job leaving my last salary in the dust. I decided that this will be the last company I work for.

I’ve been told my whole life to play the game, but I don’t like its rules. They don’t work for me. So I’m changing them. You learn that when a game is played by the numbers you become a statistic. Thing is, so does everything that you are looking at too. The best thing I ever did was spend my capital on fucking it back.

Just start.

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Brahm has asked me to spend some time writing about my story. I never really thought of my life as a story, just a series of events and their consequences. I don’t really know where to start. I can start from the beginning but that idea bores me. I’d much rather recount snippets of conversation that have given me pause for thought. Whether those pauses are positive or encouraging or not is another matter. I think it will be easier to get things down on paper if I just stick with annotating conversations, because thats really what excites me. Meeting people is my favourite thing in the world and it the thing that terrifies me most. I can’t adequately quantify this dichotomy. It would make my life easier if I could.

Right now I feel very satisfied with my career. I have settled into my new job in electrophysiology and as the road widens I have more mental capacity to lay down the bricks to realise my plans as an entrepreneur. I’ve been collecting experiences and the people who come with those experiences for a number of years now, and I feel the time is imminent to cash in that capital and start building the juggernaut. My challenge is to make myself ready for that timing. I have hopes that the final pieces are going to begin falling into place when I get in contact with this new NLP practitioner who will show me how to discover what I need to do and then hold me accountable to it.

On the other end of the spectrum, I’m terribly lonely. I’m trying to find a way to stop caring so much about it but, well, I’m human. Online dating is slowly killing my self-confidence as I face rejection after rejection. My friends and colleagues are astonished when they find I’m single, and have been for such a long time. I’m so far along in terms of personal development they just assume I have a stable and loving relationship when that could not be further from the truth. I don’t know what I’m doing that isn’t just wrong, but SO wrong, to explain the complete and abject failure in this part of my life. This topic is too depressing to continue on with.

I don’t really know what to write, or have anything springing to mind that I really want to write anyway. I suppose I can write about recent experiences on one of my many stupid dates. Or I could just go and do what I just did which was send a text to the guy I met this weekend from a sex website to come over so I get the fucking over and done with. He’s not hot and he’s not ugly but he has a big dick and a lot of energy. Above all, he’s genuine and has not stood me up or just sat around being pen pals, playing texting games the whole time.

I realise how much I need to talk to someone about all this and get it off my chest. I’m just so beyond over it.

Online dating takes up so much of my time in terms of endless texting. It takes up so much time in swiping left and swiping right. It takes up so much time in waiting the requisite amount of time before sending a reply. It takes up so much time not waiting the requisite amount of time and getting radio silence in return. Online dating is a burden on my life and I need an out but don’t know how to get myself out of this addiction. Like any addiction, it is rooted in fear. I am afraid that I won’t meet anyone who will see me for who I really am and love me for it. I deserve better than this and online dating has shown me that I’m not going get it.

I’ve been on over a hundred tinder dates and had my heart broken by Tristan, Brenton, Bruiser, the Ranga, the Giant… and beyond them all Mike, but in the interest of not giving found puppies names lest you become attached, I would refer to him as The Barrel-Chested Heartbreaker. He’s the one I just fell for completely only two short months after that chance meeting in a bar with John who changed my life as quickly as he left it. Mike was the one who looked me dead in the eye and said that because I’m a fixed person, broken people like him can’t be with me.

I was devastated. I still am.

I am a fixed person. I was a broken person and now I am a fixed person. I am single because I am looking to be with another fixed person. I have met many broken people but I have not met one fixed person yet, let alone a local single, male fixed person whom I am interested in…. and who actually likes me back. The closest approximation I was the one I met last week, who in under a year has gone from so broken to on the road to being fixed. He is accomplished, intimidatingly so. He is resilient, strong and determined. He challenges his own thinking more than most people on this planet and as much as I do, and continuously. He is also leaving in two days. Like all online dates he’s gone with the wind but there is a small doors for potential contact in the future. However, experience shines a cold, hard light on reality – you can’t escape the inevitability of radio silence in love and lust. It all ends in the same place.