In considering the question, I had to catch myself. It was easy to plough the same ruts that took me straight back to my breakdown. They’re well-worn and I’m mindful of not banging on about it, but it WAS my first proper rebellion. At 31, I had never before had to fight for anything as tenuous or as important, as my life and sanity. It seemed like after a life of ‘exceeding expectations’, that was the moment to start disappointing folks in order to protect myself. That was when I really heard myself say NO, get fucked, fuck off – for the first time.

In explaining my breakdown as the catalyst for my rebellion, I began by blaming my ex-husband. The timing was right – our looming separation preceded my first pyschosis. He was cold. The love between us had faded and resentment took its place. All those things were true but as that resentment festered, other people also calculated their way between us. I won’t shrewdly frame judgement around physical or emotional infidelity, only to say that I understand when people are desperate for affection, or release - they will go to great lengths.

That judgement would hang me.

I went onto blaming my parents. Their own marriage was not a façade but a fury that’s lasted most of their lives, despite their best efforts. Clearly it was their fault I had stuck out my loveless marriage till I broke! They’d set such a sterling example!

Then came church and school and finally we got to the crux of the matter. As kids they lay heavy burdens on us, on our parents. Compliance above all, was revered. Don’t make a mess, don’t make a noise, don’t question, never say no to your masters…and your masters are many. They gave you community. You owe them servility.

In this system that we were all doomed to fail, some of us were made more ‘fragile’. My poor brain was the perfect example, susceptible to stress, shame and guilt. I was born a girl so psychologically I was malleable to both carrots and sticks. By immediate history, I was a migrant child who needed to fit in. Queue the patriarchy.

As girls, we were never taught the need to rebel. It wasn’t expected of us the way it’s expected of boys. It certainly wasn’t acceptable. Until 31, I’d gladly pandered to every mediocre gender expectation that was launched my way. These things were gospel; that we should be cute, respectful, considerate and kind. They rewarded it with every gold star, every benediction, every time we squashed ourselves into palatable boxes for teachers, priests, bosses and boyfriends, they’d tell us: good girl. Compliant is one word for it. We were told that if we did what was expected, we would get what “we wanted” in life. We were told what that was; the perfect nuclear suburban household. Queue the carrots.

If we rebelled, we were shunned. Queue punishment.

I did everything right. Jumped through all the hoops. Colour me surprised then, when the world did not deliver on its part of the deal. There I was, surrounded by the debris of my first love, the dissolution of my marriage, my career and business in tatters. Even the so-called lovers fled. It was then that I realised how little serving other people’s expectations had served me. I had shrunk myself to fit and all I got was this lousy diagnosis? A psychotic breakdown?

Finding myself ‘mad’ one morning was a helluva way to break free of pleasing people. I rebelled in the most important way – by becoming myself. But at first, I had to be stripped of everything. My ego and socially acceptable persona. My dignity was not stripped but I questioned what that word meant after pissing myself naked on a freezing cold beach.

Those most basic moments continue to put things into perspective – about what’s really important. The drop off was sharp and devastating, electrifying and still shakes me to this day when I ask myself what is really important? Today? In this moment? To stay silent? To toe the line? To follow the crowd and to please people?

I remember myself on that beach. A washed up individual, begging two young kids for any clothes they could spare so I could cover myself, a bite of their sandwich. When I remember that young woman, when I remember the infinite and infinitesimal decisions that lead to my breakdown – my constant subjugation – I remember my soul again. And my soul glories in rebellion.

NO way. Get Fucked. Fuck off.

Are you raw dogging this timeline with me? Are you CAPITAL: FEELING ALL THE FEELZ? Deep in your goiters? The wild impulse to cry raw and lash out daily at the hateful and the ignoramuses? How are you getting through your news feed?

There is no judgement, only the understanding that like now, we have always been on the precipice. This one is just ours to endure, to own and to overcome. Or to fall into. Through our fear and malaise, through our most hopeless moments. And the dull ones where we keep treading water and plundering this capitalist moonscape, shackled, to keep putting bread on our tables.

I have been climbing back into bed and stifling screams. I am waking in the wee hours and training myself to keep my phone terror device out of reach. Between scenes of new massacres and news of dwindling emperor penguin populations, I am flip flopping in sweats about bills while still trying to maintain a vestige of ‘self care’. Whatever flagellating gasp that is. A home pedicure. A box of hair dye and tweezers by lamplight and my aging reflection.

Are you waking in the wee hours and lapsing into Valium comas? Are you medicating some numbness with weed, cigarettes, other drugs or booze to take the edge off these beggaring days? You’re allowed to. You can. Sometimes we should. I have done these things and learnt not to regret my moment of communion with vices. They remind me I am mortal.

Of course, it is privilege to enjoy anything – ever. The precipice has always been there and the hoi-polloi have always been made to feel guilty for dancing, screwing or laughing back in the face of authority. Come at me and call me a privileged white woman. I am. I know, and I laugh in the face of those who try to convert me, diminish me, subject me to their petty judgements and dim me. You dreadfully miserable. Never again. This week I’ve found joy in a sugar bun, in a creamy latte, in the hug of a friend who hugs me back with the same back clenching vigour, in a tart margarita, in an everlasting lego rose posy and in holding the hand of my friend and her children as we clamber up and down slippery rocks and mud to get to a waterfall … before the hordes of blinged up g-banger instagrammers descend.

I don’t show you my pain because my pain is trifling. I show you my smiling face and I laugh and I dance and I drink and I smoke because this is also, how I resist the darkness of nothing.

This is how we sustain ourselves. Some days, it is the only way to rebel.

The week has not been all doom and gloom. Through a sea of rejections and the horrifying news of expanding war crimes in the Middle East and more targeted lethal attacks on journalists, I have read eagerly about the arrest of BRS for alleged war crimes. I have read about the dismissal of Bruce L’s defamation case in the High Court against Channel 10. I have read my rejections and found a wonderful silver lining – highly commended for my poetry collection project at Varuna House, Blue Mountains. Truly – bad news, be damned.

Doris Lessing: “Whatever you’re meant to do, do it now, the conditions are always impossible.”

It was the 7-year anniversary of my first spoken word performance recently. I cherish the memory when after spending a long ‘Winter’ cooling my heels, I came back from some loose mania to re-emerge as a poet and writer. They are creative vocations which I recommend to anybody looking to heal from their own dark times.

Poetry has been medicine for me. Not for the satisfaction that an artful rhyme brings. Not for the audience’s applause, although that is addictive and can make up for the poor pay, and occasional scorn that comes with writing poetry. What I didn’t expect from writing, was the catharsis that comes from telling my story. It has been the most valuable gift from my ongoing practice.

Catharsis. What a great word! I think whenever one hears it, they intuitively feel it’s meaning. Merriam-Webster defines catharsis as: ‘the purification or purgation of the emotions such as pity and fear ... that brings about spiritual renewal or release from tension’. Catharsis through poetry, has helped me understand the breakdown that floored me 14 years ago. A psychotic episode that at 31, was an unexpected crack in my convenient reality.

I was on the way up when it happened. I had friends and parties, a house, a husband and a small but promising business. I had ticked so many boxes that kept me distracted from the wheels that had started spinning a little too quickly. Perhaps it shouldn’t have been a surprise when they fell off? I hadn’t slept properly for a year. Ice had built in my marriage and old friends became confused with my late nights and rambling posts. So, waking up psychotic should not have been the devastating surprise that it was. But it was.

I ran away that morning and was found, days later, walking along the Great Ocean Road. A police man drove alongside me and gently suggested that I go to hospital. He had a kind face and softly he said he would take me there if I wanted. I wonder now, how many times he’s had to help women like me in such states of despair – leaving hard places. A short stay at Barwon Hospital followed. Then a tentative diagnosis. Bipolar.

I’ve played with that word for so long. As I spent years retreating into the comforting folds of my parents’ old couch, unable to work and with a divorce looming. As I toyed with different Psychiatrists and medications. Lithium. Latuda. Lamotrigine. It took two years of rest before the intensity of my mood swings eased and gave me breath between peaks. It has taken 14 years to decide I won’t be shamed by my illness. Of course, it has given me pain but the experience has also given me authenticity, creativity, truth, beauty, depth and compassion. I am more than just a diagnosis. I have also become more because of it.

I didn’t come here to write this though. I came here to tell you that I have turned these past ‘hurts’ into fodder. Into poems like the very first one I wrote seven years ago. As I pressed that old pen into paper and made those crucial indentations with ink, I had no set intentions other than to noodle some brain farts down. But the pen flew and before I knew it, I’d written a poem called “Trophy Wife”. A rhyming ditty where I imagined myself locked up and trapped – like a cat, in a cold house, pacing, itching to escape my loveless marriage. It was the first poem I’d written since high school and the first one I’d ever written of my own free will. For no other reason than to relieve the pressure that had built in my body and in my brain since my divorce and breakdown. It felt good to write.

I read it back and I was satisfied that it captured that old life accurately. I sent it to close friends and they agreed it needed to be heard. I didn’t even know then that ‘spoken word’ was a thing but I googled ‘poetry event’ in a sweaty lather of excitement and as if by magic, that same evening, a bar in Brunswick was holding a poetry night. Fuelled with recklessness, I went and before I knew it, I’d put my hand up to read.

When my name was called, my feet turned to jelly and my hands trembled. I’d read in front of audiences before but never like this. Never my own deep and personal words. At first, my voice was unsteady but I started. Then the chatter and idle clinking of glasses fell away and I knew they were all listening. I steadied. I started stretching out pauses, increasing the tension intuitively. Some words I whispered into the mic and some rattled like machine gun staccato. For five minutes, I held the room. At times they gasped and at the end there was silence before the applause came. I felt seen. I felt validated and heard and I felt incredibly brave – not just for reading my words out but for having written them in the first place.

What was more incredible though, was the way that my story resonated with so many people. People with their own tales of love lost, grief and despair came up to me that night and told me how certain lines hit them. How they were reminded of their own journeys out of personal hells. It was incredibly powerful to find, in a room full of poets and people, that we were not alone in our trauma or our recovery.

It is for these reasons that I have continued to develop my poetry and writing practice to this day. Some days I write little or nothing. Some days I sit down at the computer or an old pen and notepad and lose hours before realising that night has sunk and it’s time to return to the real world. In a similar fashion to my first poem, I have delved into my first psychotic break and found comfort to have restored myself to a place where I could write about it artfully at arm’s length. That piece was published in print in a great literary journal and it made my father so proud, he almost forgot the tears he’d shed when he had to pick me up from the hospital that first day. My exploration and interrogation of life and all it’s dark and quirky corridors has helped me understand myself better and I am better for it. Truly, art and poetry are powerful medicines

This is Me - Bipolar and Fabulous.

“I’m sorry Maja. Bipolar is a serious illness and I’m just not ready to have it in my life.”

So, she said to me. My best friend. My matron of honour. A woman I’d become closer to than my own sister in the ten years I’d known her. I wish I’d had the option of checking out of bipolar disorder too but but it was my diagnosis to bear. Oh well. As they say in the classics, “Sometimes them’s the breaks kid”. I still occasionally dream about her and when I do, I wake with a hot pang of anxiety and regret. Could I have done anything differently? Maybe on reflection, our friendship wasn’t a great loss but it was painful in a year of great losses. My mental health being one. Could a diagnosis be any less convenient?

At this point, I should say – Hi. My name is Maja and one of the extraordinary gifts I’ve been granted is that I live with bipolar. Indeed, it’s serious mental illness that has taken me on many journeys, most of which I am proud to be grateful for. If you have time, I’d love to explore some of those stories here with you now and going into the future. This medium offers us a little more room to explore without the distraction of condensed captions or the short attention spans that come with Instagram posts. Without the restriction of hard narratives or fixed timelines or diary entries that pick up slowly through the minutes of days, weeks and months. Through prose that suits lived experience and all its opinions. Through verse that flows freely when a manic episode is approaching. And (of course) through poetry, because it truly is the vital language of the blessed creatives.

And if the singular plot line of Icarus interests you then I have many strings to add to that bow. Many manic fantasy flights that have brought me close to the sun. Often too close for comfort, but the stories, while my skin still resonates with those glorious refractions, tell themselves. About God’s and demi-gods who have held doors open, held my hand through psychosis and guided me gently back down to the ground. About nurses and doctors in all their evil and wicked permutations also. About plummeting suddenly into abysses so dark they absorb all matter and life and hope too. I survived all of them and in the fourteen years since my diagnosis, I have learned to be grateful for balance, stability and moderation. But that’s not why you’re here. We’re here for the joy, the depths, the multi-focal lenses that see forward in time and backward into dark histories. The creative edges that line the edges of so many people with mental illness. And we’re here to talk frankly about the difficulties of stigma that dog us fabulous people.

It is my hope, that eventually, I can tie some of these loose ends together here and create something wholesome, lush, beautiful and concrete. Maybe for the stage. Maybe for the screen. Wholly truthful (except when it’s fantastical). Mostly respectable (except when lewdness is called for). Kind and respectful – balanced and nuanced – and if it makes you laugh inappropriately – we’re all learning.

Welcome to ‘Diary of a Diagnosis’.