Selma In The City

Writer. Teacher, Misfit. Sydney, Australia

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Still imagining other lives, still turning the worlds in my head into stories, still trying to pronounce incontrovertible. Holding on to hard won hopefulness.

    • That Old Celestial Force

      * For my dearest friend, Ms Karen, the most integral part of the Writers’ Collective –

      When I look back on my life I know I have made mistakes, everyone has. Sometimes those mistakes pertained to  my perception of my life or of myself. I often carried myself with a lament sounding in my head, struggling to refer to my life as being a glass half full, seeing that glass sitting on the kitchen table covered in fingerprints so thick they became interlayered, backpainted etchings, the hopes I held for the hours, the days, the weeks, the years of my life flying up, out and  into the ether. Until the glass was half empty.

      I tried to change my outlook a lot. Focusing on what I could do, instead of what I couldn’t. Staring up at the skies at night till the veins in my neck were straining, hoping for some kind of response from a celestial force. But there was nothing.

      Or so I thought. There was a celestial force at work and it was slowly changing my view of my life, of myself. That force gathered as many positively charged ions and free electrons, bits of stardust, as it could so it could send me what I needed. The people, the writers, the creatives, the kindred spirits, the ones who became friends, to show me, encourage me, pointing like signposts, that the path I had found myself on was the right one. They were the golden years where we engaged so vigorously in our writing and creative pursuits we formed an unspoken writers’ collective. It was a family, we knew each other’s ins and outs, there was a comfort and ease to it as familiar as the way the sunset casts a golden glow on water , so enveloping we knew it would always be there. We hoped it would be.

      Time can pass in the cruellest of ways, throwing boulders in your path that impede your progress, making you lose sight of the horizon. When the boulders are there they trap you in a mundane world – eat, sleep, work; eat, sleep, work – it’s all you know how to do when you’re trying to survive. And before you  can remember how long it has been, ten years have passed, fifteen. All you can see in the midst of this passage of time are the shadows cast by the boulders, the golden years, the golden light, the golden times are so distant it’s like they happened to someone else.

      One thing I have learned in my time on this planet is that you should never underestimate that celestial force. It is tenacious and persistent, always waiting for the path to clear. And it has to clear, right? It can’t be blocked forever. It’s like one of Newton’s  Laws of Motion ‘ “For every blocked path that is intraversable, there is an equally traversable unblocked path.”

      I got tired of the path being blocked. I was really over it, so I cleared it physically and emotionally. And not long after I noticed the golden hues of the sunsets.  I could see the horizon and the people, the writers, the creatives, the kindred spirits, the friends, waving at me. They hadn’t left. The golden years hadn’t happened to someone else, they had happened to me. The people who get you, get you no matter how long it’s been. As if time hasn’t passed at all.

       

       

    • Keep On Moving On

      My neighbour, Lila, moved out last weekend. We had bonded over shared experiences, the greatest of which was a terrible split from our exes. I didn’t know she was moving until a few days before the truck came. She didn’t want to tell me, “I feel like I’m a failure,” she said. Her reason for moving however, was not an admission of failure but a display of strength.

      Lila had been in deep, financial stress for the past 6 months, unable to pay her energy bills, her daughter’s school fees and her rent. Her ex hadn’t been keeping his side of the Parental Agreement decided upon in Court and she was struggling to make ends meet. Part of the agreement was regular payments for her half of the business they’d started together which he still ran to his financial benefit. He claimed he couldn’t pay that half upfront so the Court agreed to instalments.  In addition, he was breaking the agreement in other ways, constantly asking that their daughter spend extra days with him or turning up at Lila’s place without notice. He claimed to love their daughter ‘more than anything’ yet refused to pay for the very things he had agreed to in Court like new school shoes or swimming lessons.

      Even though Lila worked full-time she was struggling to pay her bills. She’d lost many clients when she’d been forced to leave the business. When her daughter stayed with her father she took shifts with Uber Eats, delivering food.  “I never thought my life would end up like this,” she said, her eyes wounded, even though her tone of voice was light. “What do you do when someone tells you they love you more than anything on this earth, that they will love you forever, but they don’t? What do you do when you find out that your life with the man you loved wasn’t real, that your life is so full of lies and betrayal that when you lie alone in bed at night the pain is so great it feels like a knife in your heart?”

      In spite of her wounds Lila mustered the strength to move on, finding a cheaper place to rent and getting a better paying job. She moved far away to do it. She wanted to. It served two purposes – really allowing her to start again and making it more difficult for her ex to turn up unannounced and uninvited. He now has a 90 minute drive instead of a 5 minute drive to her house.

      I will miss Lila’s sweet, friendly nature and her calming presence. I liked hearing the sound of her daughter playing in the garden. It was next door family energy.

      I won’t forget the wounded eyes. I can’t. Those eyes were caused by the thing we don’t always talk about when we talk about abuse in a marriage or relationship – financial abuse. That hold abusers like to have over their partners, the control of the money. That’s why so many women have trouble leaving toxic relationships. They have no money. Naysayers will say “Just go anyway” but it’s not that easy. Without money how do you pay for accommodation? Food for the kids? Petrol for the car? To make matters worse, any kind of assistance programs available are jam-packed full of women in similar situations and you may not meet the criteria for most dire of circumstances.

      I remember when I split with my ex I was completely panicked. I thought it was because of a romantic sensibility where I was mourning the death of love but it was really because splitting from him meant leaving the business we ran together, effectively leaving me without an income. The last thing you want to do when you are in a overwrought state like that is to pull yourself together and go to job interviews. You just want to lie in bed and cry. But you can’t. And I didn’t.

      The thing I have noticed over time, especially now that I have given myself some space to breathe, is that you remain affected by the financial abuse for a long time. It affects the way you view money. It affects the way you view work. It affects the way you view yourself. Over time the verbal abuse means less. The betrayal, infidelities and lying means less. The physical abuse doesn’t mean less but you can compartmentalise it, lock it in a box, so it can’t hurt you as much. The one I’ve struggled with the most is the financial abuse. For years I endured it. For years after we split I was still paying off old debts, his debts. I still have a fraught relationship with money. I still view myself as being in a position of lack, of deficit. But perhaps the wish to survive, the need, the implementation of that wish and need, is worth much more than money.