Tired.

The great writer Isabel Allende famously starts each new novel on the 8^th of January. It was the 8^th of January in 1981 when she wrote a letter to her dying grandfather that later became her first novel, The House of the Spirits. Since then she has committed to many new works, always on the 8th, all of them enticingly chunky reads for the long, languorous days of summer. Especially the long, languorous days of a summer when it seems the pandemic will never end and we desperately need to escape somewhere, anywhere we can that's not here. 

But I confess, dear Reader, that I am too tired to read Allende. I am too tired for her exquisite multi-layered plots sprawled across faraway lands, that encompass generations of characters and all their lives, loves and losses. I am too tired, full-stop. I am exhausted by the interminable, unrelenting, repeating sameness of this pandemic, which has stretched beyond the unthinkable. I am fatigued beyond bearing by the distance and complexity that stands between me and the people I love, and the places I want to be. I am weighted down by the dual understandings of the safety that we were granted in Australia, and the heavy costs that so many of us bore, personally, financially, socially and emotionally to achieve that safety, tenuous as it may seem. Now, fully vaccinated, I tentatively hope for a better year in 2022, but it seems we must first step cautiously into the unknown. That, too, is tiring.

I am burdened also by a recent injury, as yet incompletely healed, and by the bureaucratic struggles that it has wrought, uninvited, upon my life. I am burdened by the untended paperwork of too many days, which has accumulated in drifts around me. For while I have not been writing here, I have not been writing anywhere. My willful silence has crystallised into a barricade of sharp-edged wood-pulp, salty with all of the thousands of unexpressed words that have leaked out in other ways. This is not a palace of tears, but a crudely assembled fortification borne out of necessity and lack of other options. And yet my silence lives and breathes, and takes expression, and finds a way. Maybe one day it will morph into a conscious form that will grace the pages of something I write, or maybe it will remain close and lumber ahead of me on the path I take into new, more benevolent landscapes. 

 

I am wearied too by unresolved grief for my mother, who died an eternity ago at an impossible time and distance away from me, and where she was survived, in the end, by a circle of people whose cruelty was as casual as it was premeditated. This, despite all my life’s experience, is not the ending that I imagined, because my endings always contain hope, belief, survival, fairness, compassion, healing, transformation, celebration, connection, and even in sadness, redemption. This, perhaps more than anything, has shattered my sense of the way of things: the way things should be based on what I have always known about basic human decency and how it swings into action even in the most difficult times. Now betrayal is no longer an abstract concept to me. Instead it slinks away from me as I climb out and away from this extended valley in my life. I have seen its face, and I know its name, I have tracked it to its favourite haunts, and I have a sense of the company it keeps. I must carry these hard won insights with me as I go forward wearily on my way. 

And finally, I am encumbered most heavily, as I have been for decades, by the aftermath of physical and psychological abuse that I was subjected to as a child. Despite my every effort to heal these ancient injuries, they have been summonsed again by more recent acts of cruelty engendered, even after all this time, by the original abuser. Dear Reader, if you have not known this place, you cannot imagine the endless darkness therein. One might wade into it and never return, consumed by what dwells there. Instead, I do the agonising and exhausting work of caretaking its hazardous boundaries, of looking into the pain, remembering what needs to be remembered, and then letting it be. 

One day, perhaps, I will write a fuller account of that abuse. But for now at least, the perpetrator of the abuse should know that I have broken my silence, and when I did, I was believed. The marks of that abuse have been patterned all over my life as they are on my body, more visible to observers than I ever realised. I have struggled for years to find and break the lock on the mental shackles of secrets that never should have been mine to keep. But in the very act of writing and speaking about it, as I tell the truth of my experience of being abused, those shackles are broken and I throw them off. And yet I am still left with a lifetime of tear-soaked weariness and the shards of so much that was broken. 

Yes. I am tired. I am too tired to read Allende. For now, anyway. It is a new year, and it is a year that holds enormous promise. I have guarded my silence when I needed to, and I have harnessed its exquisite eloquence, and now I have claimed it to keep or to break as I choose. My words will not be beholden to secrets, lies or manipulation. I write and speak for myself, and in this bright new year, that is exactly what I intend to do.