Month: February 2018

The year is 2018. People around you are getting married, having babies, starting businesses and you just ate pasta with margarine for dinner for the third night in a row. Life is confusing.

No but I’m serious, does anyone actually have their shit together? Like, really?

I’m scrolling through my Instagram feed, and three girls I was friends with in school are getting hitched. Like, committing. To one dude. For the rest of their lives.

Some are announcing engagements. Some are about ready to pop with babies. Some are launching really rad business plans, collaborations, graduating and starting some really fucking cool careers. Some are travelling to the places you’ve always wanted to go.

And I’m drinking coffee for breakfast because I only had enough money to either have coffee or food, and, logic, I chose coffee.

And why the fuck am I levelling myself with these people?

Because I know, from afar, there’d be people who look at me and go, fuck yeah, she really has her shit together. I mean, I did publish a poetry ebook last week (buy it here lol). People are legitimately buying my words and some of the reviews I’ve gotten so far have made me cry all the tears (happy tears, for a nice change). I’m part of the thought catalog community as a writer. I’ve got multiple projects on the go; personalised wedding readings, custom print-making, making this poetry collection into a book you can actually hold in your hand. Trace your hands over the words my lil heart conjured up. I’ve travelled to some of the places these people are and have my own cool travel photos (my hand hovering over the like button, almost not liking it in jealous spite, but giving in because it’s a cool photo and I’m not petty.)

I run my own small print-making business. Like, dude? How much do you want at 23?

But I don’t feel like I’ve made it. I don’t know if this is because I know I have so much further I want to go; I’m yet to publish a real life novel, I’m yet to get my writing further than Queanbeyan/Canberra/Sydney (the occasional readers from overseas, which is some radical shit). Or do you never actually have that I made it moment?

It just begs the question. Do any of us really, ever have our shit together? Or are we just assuming, pretending and allowing others to think things for you are just that little bit better.

inner workings is my first (of hopefully many) poetry collections in the form of an ebook. figurative blood and sweat, and many, many literal tears went into the writing of these pieces.

“inner workings” is for the workings of my mind and soul, the make up of me written into 102 poems.

it scares the living shit out of me to publish these works – some coming from a mere 17 year old self who believed she knew heart-ache, to the very woman sitting here today.

my heart on pages. I truly hope you love my work as much as I love writing.

get your copy for $7.99 here.

much love,

ya gal rackers x

As someone who is a mahoosive advocate for mental health awareness, and more than eager to share my own journey along with ma lil rack babies, I’ve noticed in both my very public and very private journals, I hardly document when I am feeling happy. Instagram is usually inundated with selfies and (more selfies) happy times, but I don’t often write the words about happiness, because I’m too busy feeling it.

Here I am. Documenting it.
Today, Wednesday the 7th of February 2018, I feel as happy as the happiest I have felt before.

Life feels exciting. My future feels even more exciting. I know what I want with a career, I know who my people are; the same people who have been there throughout it all. Throughout the other happy moments, and quietly been waiting for me when I attempt to push everyone away and crawl into myself. They are the ones who tell me in their own way that they are there for me whenever I am ready to need them; through a text, just to say hey I’m here; with a snapchat of their dogs, because they know that I’d love their dogs almost more than them; with a coffee catch up where we talk about nothing and everything, overanalyzing the exact same situations we’ve been overanalyzing for years.

And I am here. My constant. I can laugh and I can cry, and the tears I allow myself to cry (almost daily) is my body shedding the sadness that my skin is coated with. Because while I feel like my body drags with sadness, my heart soars with love, and care, and empathy, and happiness.

I used to hate how much I cared. I used to hate that words would cut me deep, and I used to hate that those words often came from my own head. But I’ve come to accept it. And work on it. Allowing myself to feel everything that comes my way allows me to embrace happiness even harder.

I am happy.

I am so, fucking exhaustingly, disgustingly, annoyingly happy.

I don’t know how long this will last. It’s a feeling, after all. Feelings are fleeting.
But it’s the best feeling in the world. Better than lego.

If you are currently in your own pit, I send you all my love, and all my hope. Hope that you can find the strength (that is, and always has been, right inside yourself), to climb atop and scream to the world that you are better than your sadness.

I love you all.

I love my goddamn life.

“You just need to stop overthinking.”
Oh? Wow, thank you so much, I had no idea, my entire mental state just shifted and I have you to thank for it. Had never thought of that before. Just stop overthinking. Shit.

I’m crying, tears are running down my face and to anyone on the outside they would assume that, while my face is buried in a book, I’m crying over a character’s fate. They do not see into my mind and the fact that literally all of a sudden, out of the blue, unbidden thoughts run through my head; I was enjoying being in my fantasy fiction land within the confines of pages, but thoughts I don’t want to think jump at me, cloud over my eyes so I can’t go back to focusing on the words on the page, and I’m crying because of these ideas occurring in my mind. These unwelcome, fucking hurtful thoughts.

I lay down to rest, and my heartbeat feels stronger, and against my throat it feels like it’s going to pulsate out of me. My body and my heart are doing their best to yell at me; to say, hey, look at us! We’re alive! And my brain is thinking hurtful thoughts again, but my brain is counteracting those thoughts, and there is a battle in my mind of which is right and which is not.

And it feels like my brain and my heart are at odds with each other, they want to be on the same side, but my heart is going no feel this, we are hurt, we are so hurt, feel it; and my brain is saying, I know you’re hurt, but we’re not going to get better if we keep letting you bring us down; think logically, move forward, the reason we are using to be hurt is not a valid reason to be hurt.

And I wanted to tell him that even though I’d never been in love, I knew what it was like to be in a feeling, to be not just surrounded by it but also permeated by it, the way my grandmother talked about God being everywhere. When my thoughts spiraled, I was in the spiral, and of it. — John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

It’s being told to “live in the moment,” by people who wait all week for the weekends. Who count down their work day and shut off their thoughts by alcohol consumption and situationships.

It’s remembering moments you had thought you’d forgotten, times you had pushed so far back into your head you figured the memories untouchable. They pop back in as if you invited them around for a cup of tea, and you’re mulling over moments from long ago. With the help of these unwarranted thoughts, these unwanted friends, they dig you further into a pit of self-destruction until you can no longer see light.

You know the help is there. The ladder is right behind you. But sometimes it takes all human strength, strength you’ve convinced yourself you don’t have, to turn your body around and climb.

And it’s as simple as this: I cannot change my overthinking as much as you cannot. I can do everything in my power to work at a better me, to hope for a better day, and to know that life is a gift.

But it is not as simple as, “you need to stop overthinking.”

And all I want to do when my mind is wandering off, off into ‘fairy land’ as you used to call it, I imagine and wish and want to hold you in my arms; daughter to mother, I want to hold you and reassure it will all be okay, everything will be okay, just like you had with me on so many different occasions throughout so many of the years you were here. And now I don’t know if the person I envisage is you or if it is the part of me I lost when you were gone, I don’t know if all I’m imagining is cuddling the child within myself ensuring her that we will be okay; that mum gave the little girl enough strength to see the adult through the years.

The grief hits at the most inconsequential times. It makes sense when life hurts a little harder and the pain of not having you feels a little stronger when I’m hurt by someone or things are a little more stressful, or big, exciting things are happening and you’re not here at home to share them with at the end of a long day.

But then there’s the moments out of the blue, when I’m driving home from the shops and my mind has been everywhere else or I’m happily singing along to my favourite song of the moment, and I catch a glimpse of the moon and I think of you, because I always think of you when I look at the night sky, and I’m crying, I’m blubbering and I’m a mess and I can hardly breathe.

Or I’ve been on holiday, and I’m feeling on top of the world and all of a sudden I’m under it, and I can’t breathe as I watch the waves crash into the shore and I wonder where in the fuck you are and why I feel so alone.

Or, like this morning, when I’m sitting on the fucking toilet, and all of a sudden I get this rush of emotions and I’m crying and I’m rocking back and forth. While I’m on the goddamned toilet. So I’m simultaneously laughing and crying because I miss my fucking mother but, well, I’m on the fucking toilet.

When I’m disappointed by people in life, when people do things to hurt me or I feel as if no one is there, and it only intensifies the loss of you.

When it’s been close to five years and you can barely yell in someone’s face that the reason you feel so out of it is simply because you miss your mother. I just want my mum.

I don’t even like my tea the way you used to make it for me, and sometimes that alone makes me hurt. But there are days where I will make it exactly how we used to drink it, and I could swear that as I sit down with my cup of tea and the latest book I’m reading, I can taste your laughter and I can hear your happiness. Wherever you are.

I have lost what I considered my entire universe, but in a heartbreakingly satisfying way, even that is wrong. You were not my entire universe, because I am, and I know that you would be glad to finally hear me say that.

And while you are, singlehandedly, one half of the reasons I am here, almost solely the reason I am who I am, and the strength that is pushing me ahead; I am learning, every day, that I am. I am. I am.

Because of you, but mostly, because of me.

I miss you, ma. And I wish, more than anything, I was taking you out for breakfast for crepes with lemon and sugar and a pot of English breakfast tea, and we were laughing together and I was telling you about the things I find hard but in comparison aren’t that hard at all; because that’s a wonderland, that’s in a different world that unfortunately you and I will never know. In this world, you’re permanently frozen in time at 50 and you are memories, you are photographs and funny stories and a hot milo with six marshmallows, you are the perfume that I still search every store for to keep your smell. You were here, but you are not, and there is evidence of your life everywhere, everything shows you lived and loved but there are moments I can’t remember your laugh or hearing you say ‘I love you, kiddo.’

Because in this world, we don’t get to sit together on your 55th birthday and toast to another 40 years of life together.

Instead, I retreat to my room, and I retreat to my words, and I attempt to put my entire heart on this empty page to give other people even a glimpse of what I am feeling. To hopefully give the people fighting similar battles the realisation that they are not alone, as much as I am not alone.

I miss you, and I thank you, for the years I had with you, for the years I have ahead of me, and most importantly, for leaving me with the most amazing family, as fucked up as we all are.

Here’s to the first of February, the day the most wonderful woman in my world was born. Happy birthday, Mumma Rozza. I toast my tea to you.