Making God laugh
I told the universe I was ready to let life get easier. It didn't go to plan.
Dear Fools and Queens,
So much has happened since I last wrote that I don’t know where to begin – and I can’t even be bothered re-writing that cliched sentence.
I have been to the darkest places a mother can go. (Another cliche.) We are all going to be okay (I hope) but I’ve been broken apart, a veil ripped between life as I knew it and what it might be now, now that I know in my bones what I always tried to remember : that anything that can happen to a person can happen to me. Or to my child. With no warning.
My young adult son’s medical information is his, but I can say there have been emergencies, hospital, a diagnosis. Life right now is full of driving to appointments, cooking tempting food and giving the kinds of pep talks that make me drag my soul for every last scrap of wisdom or positivity. Often these have to happen late at night.
My tears are close to the surface. I tend to well up and leak at inconvenient moments but I’m trying to stay calm because my own extreme emotions aren’t useful. My maternal intuition has been reinforced yet again, and the message I’m getting is clear. Don’t take your eyes off the road yet. Parenting young people into their twenties is a whole other game nobody’s talking enough about. (Or are they? Tell me!)
Perhaps I’ll write more about this later, when I have permission and when it’s a scar not a wound. In recent years I’ve been vocal about how I’m looking forward to the next phase, of being an artist and moving away from the intense work of mothering. That horizon has receded and I’m struggling with acceptance. How to stay attached while letting go. It’s a tricky thing. The advice of people who aren’t parents, or who are parents at earlier stages, is often simplistic. They just don’t get it.
I do have gratitude for survival, and for the intense intimacy and brutal honesty this crisis has brought into family life. For the friends who have showed up, and for the flawed but free emergency medical system we have experienced. (Finding a psychiatrist on the other side is a whole other matter and I’m frankly shocked at the difficulty and expense. No wonder we have a growing homelesness crisis.)
During this time, my own mental health emergencies across the last 30 years have been brought back into focus. I’m reminded of my postnatal shock. My post divorce breakdown. My insomnia and not sleeping more than four hours a night. My vulnerability. I remember the times I nearly sank. The things that helped. The way I know how to keep the boat afloat now: meds, sunshine, booking things to look forward to, reaching outwards socially instead of going inwards to isolation, which is always the temptation.
I’m looking into family history too, reading my late Aunty Coral’s unpublished memoir pieces, picking apart the stories of ‘nervous breakdowns’ throughout the ages. I’m seeing the patterns of creativity and ‘giftedness’, mania and depression. The way '‘going to bed in the afternoon’ is a common way of surviving overwhelm, and the ways careers tended to shut down earlier than most people’s should.
I’m trying to meditate more too, and when I do, I’m steadier. I’d started a semi-regular meditation practice a while back, becoming a member of Club Med, taught by an old friend and colleague turned meditation coach, Ghita Loebenstein, who Substacks at Supermuse. (I highly recommend her blend of ‘secular, spiritual and functional ways into creative intelligence as a daily practice, without dogma or noise’. Why don’t you join us?)
Speaking of mental illness, my last newsletter praised the Instagram confidence and grandiosity of writer Lisa Taddeo. I won’t diagnose a public person (particularly one who viciously attacks even kindly suggestions of needing help) but given I sent you there for inspiration, I just need to say that it’s all turned chaotic. I hope she’s okay and that whatever’s going on doesn’t discredit the work she’s been promising –exposing powerful pedophiles among the elite. [Edit: at the time of publishing her account has been shut down.]
Page of Cups, the too-sensitive child
Thinking of mental fragility, the tarot’s Page of Cups comes up. A young person, emotional and creatively gifted, connected to the sea, emerges from the depths with… a fish in his cup? As Rachel Pollack notes in Tarot Wisdom, ‘this is the only cup in the deck where something comes forth besides water’ … ‘the true products of the imagination’.
The treasure here, the unexpected and slightly off-putting element, must be handled carefully, like those strong emotions with adult consequences that so often wreak havoc when we first experience them. I see this Page and I wish for them to be taught how to use their exquisite sensitivity instead of being destroyed by it. As my wise friend and motherhood mentor, Phoebe, wrote to me this week, sometimes ‘the best people feel the world the hardest.’
It gets to be so easy!
So here’s what I started writing five weeks ago – before my crisis. Reading this now I smile at my innocence, how I could be seen to be tempting the Fates.
Okay, I’m going to tell you a secret.
But I want you to set the intention that you are ready to receive what it is I’m about to share. And I want you to imagine that I’m your higher self, delivering a message that you, in this moment, are perfectly prepped to receive. Here we go. Are you ready?…
It gets to be so easy. You have reached a level of your remembering where it gets to be so easy!
– Nikki Meyers on TikTok (and Instagram)
I’m not very hungry but I’m watching my partner, Markus, crunch into fat spring rolls in Mai Jia, a Thai restaurant across the road from the Como Cinema in South Yarra. We’re filling in time until the Australian movie, a musical – The Deb – is finished, when I'll step in to host the post-film Q&A with a talented young actor-singer, Stevie Jean.
I already watched the film on screener link over Easter. I’ve done these kinds of events a thousand times but not for a while, and there’s always a bit of adrenaline going on when you’re about to ad lib in front of an audience. And tonight, I’m not meant to mention the film’s director, Rebel Wilson, or the high profile court cases around it. Not to mention the CEO of the organisation who has been ‘made redundant’ against his will with talks of litigation.
There won’t be any audience questions.
“Are you nervous?” asks Markus, starting in on his curry.
“No, because I’ve had a revelation. A spiritual awakening. That life doesn’t have to be a constant struggle. I’m letting it be easy!”
“And how did this grand insight arrive?” Markus smiles indulgently. He’s used to my claims of reinvention, my spiritual excitements and experiments. He’s even bought himself a couple of tarot decks, despite being scientific and sceptical.
“I’m a bit embarrassed to admit it,” I say. “I got it from TikTok the other day. From some random influencer. Her message just hit me, right here.” I thump my heart.
‘Don’t be embarrassed,’ Markus says. ‘In Back to the Future Doc Brown gets the idea for the flux capacitor when he hits his head on the toilet. Good ideas can come from anywhere.”
And that’s why I love him.
TikTok is a toilet, but it’s also a goldmine, with a particular raw, wild-west algorithm that’s completely unlike my other curated platforms. I love the fact that I’m anonymous there, not performing as an author or booktokker, just consuming. Letting the feed deliver stuff completely outside my usual reference points.
So when Random Nikki with the friendly face and inoffensive nose-ring looks into my eyes and tells me she has the secret just for me, I am intrigued enough to watch through to the end.
I want to believe her. I want to be told that I’m allowed to find life easy now.
‘You have reached a level of your remembering where it gets to be so easy,’ she repeats. ‘Here’s the thing, it already is right now but what’s happening is that you are now ready to fully receive what is in front of you.’
I was ready Nikki. But wow that got hard fast.
The ‘remembering’ of which you speak is perhaps just the knowledge that we got through the last time, so we’ll get through now, with resources and tools to stay present and ward off panic. Look Nikki, I’m trying to make your theory work.
Like The Magician.
Being okay with not being okay
I’m not okay. Far from it. But I’ve been listening to audiobooks by Buddhist nun and spiritual teacher Pema Chödrön, the author of the bestselling When Things Fall Apart and here is a section from her latest book, Another Kind of Freedom, that speaks in another way about the lifetime process of moving towards equanimity:
Over the years, my close students have written to tell me about their practice and their lives. A typical scenario goes like this: At first there’s nothing but pain. They’re distraught because they’re going through a messy divorce. I feel for them, but I know how impermanent our life situations are. A year and a half later, they found a new partner and they’re on top of the world. Now life is as it should be. Everything – relationships, children, job, health – is going smoothly. I’m happy for them, but I also know that no circumstances are final. Then their health deteriorates and one of the children starts acting up. Up and down it goes until at some point, because of their practice, the student begins to have more equilibrium. Pain and pleasure continue to alternate, but the student doesn’t go up and down with the outer circumstances in the way they used to. They move closer to “being OK with not being OK” as Tsoknyi Rinpoche puts it.”
On the whiteboard on my toilet wall I have written the phrase ‘No feeling is final’. We’re holding on to that.
Sending you love from the trenches,
Rochelle x
Hi, if you’ve read this far please consider hitting the heart/like button or dropping me a comment. I love knowing that these words have found you!
Watching
DTF St Louis (HBO). A strange, tender and blackly funny series about male friendship, midlife sexuality and suburbia – all wrapped up in a non-linear murder mystery. Starring Jason Bateman, David Harbour and Linda Cardinelli, DTF St Louis was created by Steven Conrad (The Weather Man). I loved the odd couple detectives on the case (Richard Jenkins and Joy Sunday) – and the way ‘deviant’ sexuality is treated with such generosity. It’s an education. This show was personally recommended to me by Adrian Martin recommends – which you should subscribe to if you haven’t – so thank you Adrian, you guessed my taste (and David’s!) perfectly.
Rooster (HBO). Sweet and easy, sometimes cheesy. This comedy series starring Steve Carrell is set on a college campus as a visiting author-academic rebuilds his complicated relationship with his adult daughter, also a professor in the midst of her own marriage breakdown. Created by Bill Lawrence (Scrubs, Spin City, Ted Lasso), there’s a great ensemble cast here, rounded out by Phil Dunster, Lauren Tsai and John C. McGinley.
Kath and Kim (Netflix). My kid and I are rediscovering this nostalgic comedy gold. I’ve gotta say I did not love this show when it first aired (2002-2007) – found the comedy too broad and crude, cruel even. But now that it’s a cultural relic of a past time, and so much has entered into our Aussie lexicon, I’m finding it hilarious and often sharp. Trude and Prue. The malapropisms! The discussion of mahogany for a new kitchen:
‘I want monogamy,’ Kim says.
‘Oh, no, Kim, that’s old-fashioned,’ replies her mother. ‘You just want a veneer of monogamy.’
Ha!
Reading
The Watchtower by Elizabeth Harrower. A rediscovered Australian classic. First published in 1966 and set in leafy 1940s Sydney, this devastating portrait of domestic tyranny as two very young women find themselves at the mercy of the horrible Felix, who promises to look after them, is not yet finished because it’s a bit intense for my current state. Thus my next choice:
I’d Rather Not by Robert Skinner. Genuinely delightful and hilarious memoir - down and out in literary Melbourne. Here’s the blurb:
Robert Skinner arrives in the city, searching for a richer life. Things begin badly and then, surprisingly, get slightly worse. Pretty soon he’s sleeping rough and trying to run a literary magazine out of a dog park. His quest for meaning keeps being thwarted, by endless jobs, beagles, house parties, ill-advised love affairs, camel trips and bureaucratic entanglements.
Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash. So much fun. So much family dysfunction. This bestseller made me laugh during some very dark days.
You are a queen, Rochelle! Love you, and this Substack. You are so generous with us, your readers. And you’re doing so well at sitting with the impossibly hard and intense. xo
Rochelle, I’m so sorry to hear about this difficult, shocking time you’re in. Much love to you and your family xx