OR

That’s where I’m at right now. I am leaning towards letting my ‘heart’ win, but you know, these things are scary and take time. I’ll know more after ‘the talk’ tonight. And I’ll let you know what the outcome is.

It’s funny how history repeats. Years ago I was part of a group of queer students who received a City of Melbourne Young Artists Grant to produce a publication called Chaology. It was the year after I’d been one of the organisers for Queer Collaborations (QC), the annual queer students’ conference, and only six or so months after I got together with my husband (then boyfriend).

Our group was mixed bunch: three visual artists, a composer and me, the writer. We decided to produce a CD and booklet that would contain music, spoken word, art, stories and everything in between. I wrote a couple of stories that were printed in the booklet, but I also decided to make a three-part spoken word piece which was about coming out again, only this time as straight.

At the time I was hurt and confused by the reactions around me. There was my friend T, who, as I said in a previous post, told me I just wasn’t the same person to her anymore now that I had a boyfriend (despite her being utterly straight herself). And there was my mother, who had never accepted me being gay and could not contain her excitement at the fact that I had a boyfriend.

This time around there are no friends to disappoint (all my current friends are awsm and love me for me) but there’s still my mother, and of course, my husband. It’s sad that even as a 30-year-old woman, I still can’t please my mother. She refuses to accept me for who I am and I have, until now, done everything I could to try and make her happy (see: white fluffy dress).

It’s taken me a long time to get to a place where I’m okay with me. Self-acceptance is a hard thing, and it never helps when those who are supposed to love you can only see your flaws.

I’m happy to say that finally I feel ready to stand up and say ‘this is me, and if you don’t like it that’s your problem’. Those spoken word pieces I did remind me that even when I am making someone else happy, I’m making myself miserable. I can’t change who I am, not for a mother who wants a good little daughter, or a husband who I dearly want to protect but just can no longer play wife for.

So, I’m going to share the spoken word pieces with you – embarrassing as they are, the sentiment is what’s important. Together the three pieces are less than two minutes long, so have a listen and know that laughter is entirely permitted.

Parents | Friends | Urinary Tract Infection

I also have 10 or so spare copies of Chaology floating around, so if you want one (they’re pretty funny and dated – oh, and free!) send me an email on kelly (at) kellyblainey (dot) com or leave a comment.

Love Kelly x

What a hen looks like after two years in a battery cage

A couple of weeks ago I helped a fabulous group, NSW Hen Rescue, ‘rescue’ over 200 hens from a battery farm. I use quote marks because it was a legal rescue – unlike what a lot of animal activists do – with the full knowledge and blessing of the farmer. That didn’t make the day any less traumatic (for the birds or us) though.

These hens had reached the peak of their ‘productivity’ (it always upsets me to see sentient beings described as though they were widgets in a factory, although I guess that’s what they are when they are part of the industrialised food production process). They were due to be slaughtered because they were no longer as profitable as they once were. This is at age two, mind you – in nature hens live upwards of 10 years!

Luckily for these girls, NSW Hen Rescue had arranged with the farmer to take them from his farm and re-home them, instead of them being sent to slaughter and turned into pet food. And so it was that I came to be standing in my gumboots on a sunny Saturday afternoon taking birds out of cages in the foulest-smelling place I have ever been in my life.

Damaged hen

What a hen looks like after two years in a battery cage

Caged hens

Life of confinement for these hens

Cage upon cage

Cages of birds piled up on top of each other

No room

Cages were so crowded parts of the hens were poking out

Shit

Metre-high piles of excrement under the hens' cages

Another damaged girl

Damaged bird after years of wings rubbing against wire cage

Happy hen

Happy rescued hen playing in the sawdust

Dust bath

Hen's first dust bath!

We discovered quickly, due to the size of the cage door and how distressed the hens were, that the easiest way to get them out of the cages was by their legs, despite our initial protests and attempts to pick up each bird around her middle and coos of ‘it’s okay little girl’. We knew this would be the last time in their lives the birds would be handled in this way, and that they were going to a better place, so we did it.

The factory itself was horrendous. After seeing, smelling and touching it, I cannot believe that this is the accepted way that food is produced in this country (or others). It was worse than hell – metre-high piles of shit under each row of cages (why didn’t the farmer ever clear out the shit?), vermin and bugs all over the piles, and birds crammed three, four or five each into a cage about the size of an A3 piece of paper.

Legally birds are supposed to have space the equivalent of an A4 piece of paper each, and clearly these cages were under regulation size. The only redeeming quality here was that as soon as we took the birds, the cages were going and the farmer was going free-range with his new flock.

The cages were stacked on top of each other, so whenever a bird on the top level went to the toilet, it just dropped down onto the birds below. The hens live perpetually standing on the cages’ wire floors, with no room to walk around or spread their legs.

When we got the hens to the land that NSW Hen Rescue had rented, though, what a difference! I had the privilege of witnessing these girls take their first-ever dust bathes, something that is a natural behaviour that they had, until then,  been unable to do. They burrowed in the dirt and the straw, flicking it up across their backs and clucking away.

We put out food and water for them and watched in delight as they ate for the first time without having to strain their necks through wire bars on the cage. Tears of joy replaced the tears of disbelief, horror and sorrow that had been with us earlier in the day.

Throughout the day I used my phone to post photos and status updates on twitter, and I was amazed at how many retweets and discussion ensued. It is clear that a lot of people out there feel equally as horrified as I do about hens in battery cages. It’s not just the cages that are horrifying, but the whole regime of artificial light and forced starvation that is used to induce more egg laying than is natural. For more information about the life of a battery hen, please see the Animal Liberation website.

The good news is there are ways you can help! The first is obviously don’t buy caged eggs, ever. But you can also get involved via NSW Hen Rescue and help by:

• adopting some ex-battery hens and giving them a loving forever home
• making a donation
• helping out with future hen rescues

At the moment I’m building a chicken coop in my backyard, and I hope to pick up my ex-battery hens, the ones I  helped rescue, next weekend. I’m so happy to know that with me and with all the adoptive homes the rescued hens have gone to, they will have the chance to live out the rest of their lives the way nature intended them to – dust bathing, digging for worms, nesting when and where they choose, and having the space and freedom to just be themselves.

Image: little balls by rgvmonster

As some of you may know my husband and I separated five months ago, after being together for seven years. Before I met him I had only ever had girlfriends, not boyfriends. I strongly identified as a lesbian (I was even Queer Officer of my student association at uni) and I never thought that would change. Of course it did change, in that big kind of way that leads to beaming mothers and a fluffy white wedding dress.

But now the marriage looks like it’s over and everyone is asking me the big question: am I gay or straight? My friends and family are demanding to know how I now identify. Those closest to me actually have an expectation that I’m going to rush out and get a girlfriend – in their eyes, me being ‘straight’ never quite fit.

I have to say, though, that it’s not that easy.  Not only is sexuality, in my view, a fluid thing on a kind of continuum, but I honestly don’t know who I am or what I want. I never liked the word ‘bisexual’ – not least because there are more than two genders – and it is, to me, a concept that is overly simplistic and misunderstood. But mostly I don’t want to attach a label to myself. I’m not only one thing – I’ve never been a dogmatic person, but someone who is always open to new ideas and opportunities and experiences. I’m not someone who would be happy staying in the same box for my whole life.

Since leaving my husband I have seen a few men casually. I haven’t seen any women yet, although I do have a dinner thing tomorrow night with a woman I met online, one of those ‘get to know each other and see where it leads’ kind of things. I’m really looking forward to it, but again, I don’t want it to define me.

Why do we have to be defined, anyway? I remember when my husband and I first got together all those years ago – it was like coming out all over again, only I was going back in. Friends reacted weirdly – my best friend at the time actually said ‘but you’re not my Kel anymore’ when I told her. I had to learn ‘straight’ social etiquette and get a host of new topics to talk about at dinner parties. I drifted away from my queer friends, something that I’m still annoyed with myself about (though thankfully I’ve reconnected with some of them since then). I let my new ‘identity’ define me – I was a wife! I had a husband who was going to save me, like in all those fairytales, and I didn’t need anyone except my white knight.

Now I feel like I’m on the verge of coming out all over again – third time lucky, perhaps. I would be happy to just let it be, but it doesn’t necessarily work that way for the rest of the world. For example, when I spoke to my dad yesterday, and told him about this dinner tomorrow night, he sounded pretty excited. To him, I’m gay – always have been, always will be, and the marriage (and subsequent flings) were just me getting off track. None of that is to put down my husband, who is a wonderful man who I still care about deeply. But I guess to dad, and to a large extent to me, there was always this part of me that couldn’t be squashed, no matter how hard I tried (and I certainly did try).

Then there’s my colleagues. They know about the separation, and about one of the flings, but that’s it. Could I really have that ‘I’m gay’ conversation all over again? Do they already know? Do they even care? It’s been 10 or 11 years since my first ‘coming out’ conversation, and I don’t know if could be bothered to go through all that again.

And what if I’m not gay, anyway? I came across a great word the other day, which, if I’m forced to define myself, I will probably use: homoflexible. It means someone who prefers the same sex, but can on occasion be attracted to the opposite sex. Am I homoflexible, then?

This post might seem hypocritical – I mean if I don’t want to be defined, then why am I bothering to write about it? Well, I might not want a label, but I do want to belong somewhere. I do want to know where I stand, even just with myself. Maybe it’s more about sorting stuff out in my own head, than it is about defining myself for anyone else.

I certainly enjoyed being part of a ‘community’ when I identified as lesbian all those years ago. I may never call myself a lesbian again, but that doesn’t mean there’s not some other kind of community out there that I could belong to. I now think it’s unlikely I’ll ever have a relationship with a man again, although that doesn’t rule out non-relationship kind of things. I probably will get a girlfriend some time this year. Right now though, I’m just trying to find a place where I feel comfortable and am being honest with myself. I’m half in and half out of that damned closet. I don’t know how many times I have to keep stepping through that door until I find my place in the world, but I’ll let you know as soon as I do.

Image: Algarrobo Beach by Pepo

So, when I said in my previous update post that I’d kicked my depression, I wasn’t exactly lying, but there’s more to the story than that. It’s more like the depression is mostly under control but I am prone to occasional spikes, such as the one I’ve been having for the last couple of days.

On these occasions I wonder if I’ve made the right choices: moving two hours out of the city to a town where I don’t know anyone, committing to a new mortgage, living by myself (no partner, flatmates or parents for the first time in my life) without even a TV for company. On the one hand, I am living exactly as I’ve always dreamed: fresh country air, veggie gardens, simple, quiet, reflective. On the other hand, though, I sometimes feel very alone and unsure of myself.

I did a tarot reading the other day for the first time in months, with my favourite deck, Osho Zen Tarot. I was first introduced to this deck at the National Queer Spirituality Conference in 2003, and I have been in love ever since. Anyway, one of the wise messages I took from the reading was that aloneness in the presence of oneself, which is (or should be, if you’re a stable, self-loving individual) a positive thing.

Often I am said stable, self-loving person, but this is not always the case. When I am feeling good I adore my own company. I cherish the insight I get from sitting in quiet reflection, and the peace and relaxation I feel when I spend my country evenings surrounded by crystals, candles, incense and music while I work blissfully on my tapestry or read a book. I like not having to be ‘on’ all the time, rushing around and being bombarded with messages from a million different sources.

But when I feel a bit blue, like I do right now, I hate my own company. I hate my thoughts, my restlessness, the self-loathing and doubt that permeates my environment. How can you enjoy your oneness when it’s the one thing you hate?

Getting comfortable with yourself and your own company takes a lot of work, especially when you have a history of depression. Sitting with yourself may just be one of the hardest things there is. But once you can do it – oh wow. Ideas, connections and insight open up. You feel at peace, floating on a blissful cloud where the opinions, criticisms and actions of others can’t touch you. You operate on instinct, knowing that you are, perhaps for the first time, being true to and with yourself. You are in the zone.

I have chosen a life where I have given myself the greatest opportunity to get in the zone. I live alone, many hours from friends and family. I only work in the office back in the city two days per week, and the rest I work from home. It is quiet here. Sometimes it is too quiet and I start doubting my choices. When this happens, I deal with it by getting back to my original intention: why did I choose to live alone all the way up the mountains?

It was to counter everything that my life had been up until now – busy, chaotic, and often unfaithful to myself. It was to get to a point where I operate from that place of instinct and authenticity all the time. It was to be present with myself. Despite depression spikes that come and go, and the bitter feelings of loneliness that come with it, deep down I know that this was the right move for me. Right now in my life I need aloneness. I need to be honest about what I want and who I am, in order to get past this depression and live a life of authenticity.

Of course you don’t need to move to the country to get in touch with yourself – I moved to the country because this is where I feel most at home. You don’t even need to live alone. But you do need to make time for yourself, without distraction, and get to know and enjoy your own company. I think we all need to stop thinking of ‘being alone’ as a bad thing, and instead celebrate the opportunity it gives us for growth and truth. And if worst comes to worst, I can always go get a TV…

Left my husband, sold my inner city apartment, bought a shack in the mountains, kicked my depression and gotten back to my happy hippie self.

Now that we’re all up to date, let me tell you about my fabulous country life. It begins with no TV – what a joy. Of course I have my laptop for the ever-important Doctor Who, but beyond that I keep things quiet and simple. Lots of tapestry and classical music; I’m building a chicken coop for the rescued battery hens I’m adopting next month; and I have two naughty puppehs to keep me entertained. I’m working two days per week in the office in the city, and two days per week from home. The commute (5 hour round-trip) isn’t too bad, actually, because it gives me bonus reading and writing time.

Ah yes, my writing. I knew there was a reason I had this blog. Lately I’ve just been journaling in private – no-one really wants to see me process my separation in public, do they? (I’m sure my husband doesn’t.) I really have been writing every day, but instead of putting it out there, I’ve been keeping it for myself. Depression-wise I seem to have things well under control, which I think comes from letting go of a major stress in my life, and moving out here to the mountains where I have slowed down my pace of life and gotten back to simple pleasures.

Of course I still have bad days (who doesn’t?) but I’ve learnt to deal with them in much more productive ways. Yesterday, for example, I was a bit blue, but instead of moping I took teh puppehs out for a long walk in the fresh country air, which perked me right up. When I get stroppy I calm myself down with some tapestry or meditation, instead of going on a rant. And I’ve been spoiling myself a bit since I left D – new shoes, lingerie, that kind of thing, which helps with a little confidence boost.

Oh, I nearly forgot! Since I last wrote anything here, I shaved my head! It looks fabulous – feels so authentically me. I have been getting back to authenticity lately. It’s so important for me to be myself, after so many years of trying to be someone I’m not (and for the wrong reasons). I’m working hard on letting go of what others think of me, and instead just doing what makes me happy. I’ve realised (finally!) that I can’t live my life for other people – this includes my husband, my mother and anyone else whose opinions I took on board way too often.

So that’s it for me and my quick update. I will be back soon with actual blog posts about real stuff.

Love Kelly x

I could picture myself having a house with a little consulting room in the front, where I would work one-on-one with clients.  Next door would be my study where I would write my books and articles, and life would be complete. Two passions, two purposes, and lots of good vibes to go around. The income from my clinical work would supplement my writing income, and I would be helping people and being true to myself.

This week though, two different people made me re-think this plan. I have been contemplating the state of my marriage and my future, wondering what my next step will be (you can read more about it on my other blog).  My good friend Eve said to me that my purpose in life is to reach people through my writing, and that if I stay in the miserable situation I am in I will be depriving the world of that. And when I told my dad about an aromatherapy course I was interested in, and he said that that was not my path; that I was here to heal people through my writing.

Two people who have never met each other said the same thing in the same week. My path is clear to them both. I should say that they are both intuitive healers themselves, although neither would describe themselves that way. I can’t tell you how powerful their words were, and how much I needed to hear their clear, outside perspectives.

I know I have things to say and give through my writing. And I also know that I cannot write what I want to write in the state I am in. My writing has been treading water, as have I. My memoir sits unfinished; my research project into the spiritual underpinnings of binging and other self harm is not yet started. The novel I started, not to mention all my other novel ideas, is untouched. I blog every now and then, and I write for work, but my soul’s true work is nowhere to be seen.

The changes I am about to make in my life are about getting back in touch with myself. Finding my lost spirit and creativity. Getting out in nature. Living the life I always dreamed of living – in the country, as a writer, surrounded by trees and mountains and my very own vegetable garden. These changes are happening. It is time to move on and to get back to me. For too long I have been trying to make myself fit into a box that I thought would make me happy, when in fact what will make me happy is just being myself.

If I can help people through my writing, that is fantastic. Right now, I know that I will at least be helping myself, which is more than enough of a reason to do it.

First, an opinion piece I wrote for work (Voiceless, the animal protection institute) which has been published by the Green Times: A Whale of Inconsistency, about the moral inconsistency of public opposition to whaling while the majority ignore the suffering of millions of kangaroos and factory farmed animals in Australia.

Second, another opinion-slash-essay about the medicalisation of binge eating disorder and obesity, published by The Scavenger. You can also read my first Scavenger piece, the ethics of binge eating.

It looks like I will be writing fortnightly for the Green Times, on behalf of Voiceless. Those pieces will all be about animal protection issues. And I will be writing monthly for The Scavenger on a range of health issues, so stay tuned!

I may not have written on this blog for a week, but I’ve written on my other blog. I’ve written in my journal, too. I’ve even been to a creative workshop and had a play with words and painting there. And I have done this writing despite being in the middle of a nasty, tear-inducing depression, which, if you want to know more about, you can read it over here.

It was quite interesting, actually, going to that workshop while being depressed. If it weren’t for the fact I booked it months ago, I wouldn’t have gone – there is no way I would have booked into it while in this state. The workshop was Wish Flags, which is similar in intention to the Treasure Maps one I did a while back, only it involved more play with fabrics, paint and embellishments and less with writing and collage.

I worked very differently at this workshop to the way I normally work. With my Treasure Map there was a lot of planning, and a lot of attention paid to the aesthetics. With my Wish Flag, I literally banged something out in paint in 10 minutes, and then I was done. No planning, no revisions, no caring about what it looked like. I had a vision, a symbol that I wanted to get out onto the canvas, but I didn’t fuss over it. There was glitter and beads and all kinds of shiny things that I could have used, but I ignored them all and just did my simple little thing. I guess the depression altered my attention span and my care factor.

I felt a bit weird about how little effort I had expended on my flag, until I realised that I had done all I could. I simply wasn’t in a frame of mind that could have fussed and primped over my painting. I couldn’t have sewn sequins or woven ribbons. I could only paint and do a bit of drawing with pastels. When I realised that, I realised that it was okay to have produced what I had. It was right for me then and there, and it was a success.

Along the same lines, my writing has also been a success. I have done a lot more writing since starting this experiment three weeks ago than I had done in the two months before that. I’ve given myself a little injection of writing mojo and it feels great. I haven’t done a post a day – but I haven’t needed to. I have done what I have been capable of, inside this depression, and I know that what I have done has been exactly what has been right for me.

You may have noticed that I haven’t posted for a couple of days, despite launching the grand writing experiment where I said I would post every day for a month. The two missing days even fell on a weekend, when you would think it should be easier to blog, as you have more time. But alas, I spent a great deal of my weekend sleeping. Crazy tiredness, lack of energy and de-motivation are symptoms of the depression, and this weekend all three of those things kept me from this keyboard.

One of the funny things is that writing is a part of the healing. I don’t mean healing in the ‘cathartic’ way people often talk about, where they deal with their issues by expelling them onto the page. In my situation, the process of sitting down to write is important because it is action (doing something instead of sleeping) and it is an action that usually gives me pleasure. Completing a blog post goes a little way to helping lift my self-esteem, and if I can write more than a blog post I feel even better still. Usually the momentum of writing something will have a flow-on effect, and I’ll find I have enough energy to do something else if I first am able to turn out some words on the page.

Of course when I feel like I currently do, it is incredibly difficult to do the writing, no matter how small. My body feels like lead and my brain has trouble focusing. Plus, there’s the tears that I have to see through to make sure I’m not typing xadlfjasl;kjwoeij. I generally have to give myself a big pep-talk, which involves telling myself repeatedly how much better I will feel after I do some writing (which is true). I have to use the promise of the reward to make myself sit at my desk, turn on my laptop and start doing this thing. The reward is worth it – even half an hour of not feeling like shit is wonderful. And, with a bit of luck and effort, I can propel that half an hour into a longer session of non-shittiness by feeding on the momentum of having taken the first positive steps.

There is the romanticised idea of writers needing their depression to fuel their writing. The melancholy apparently gives them something to write about.  I used to buy into that idea, and indeed, my early writing was full of the horror of humanity, found in my depressed, twisted perceptions of the world. Now, however, I know that it is extremely difficult to write when depressed. I would generally not recommend it, and don’t subscribe to the theory that all writers, artists and their ilk, need mental illness to inspire their work. It’s near impossible to be inspired from within a black rain cloud. You have to wait until the cloud has passed, and you can see the sun again, before looking back and writing about what it was like inside the cloud. There are also many writers who don’t have depression, don’t write about depression, and if they do, approach it they do any other topic – via research. Depression is certainly not a prerequisite.

As I bring this all to a close, I want to share what’s happened to me over the last forty minutes since I’ve been writing this: My body still feels heavy, and would prefer to be lying down. My eyes are droopy, and would struggle if I now began to read a book. But my mood has lifted. I’m that little bit happier for having forced myself to sit and write this. It is evidence that I don’t have to stay locked inside my depression – that if I try really hard, I can get on with stuff. My writing may not need my depression, but my depression most definitely needs my writing.