A few months ago when I was looking for comfort and company in books about motherhood, I read the story of a woman who went to her doctor to ask why she felt totally exhausted. The answer seemed obvious: she was mother to a young baby and had been deprived of sleep, almost nightly, for more than a year. But when you are in the middle of it, the answer doesn’t seem so obvious. It’s easy to get used to a way of living, even one that you’re not necessarily happy with. A relatively new mother myself, I’d come to regard being woken at 6am as a sleep-in (my son having taken to rising at 5am for several months) and getting close to six hours uninterrupted sleep a “good night”; not to mention doing a demanding, semi-paid job in theatre, as well as a demanding unpaid job as a mother, as working “part-time”. And then my doctor diagnosed me with exhaustion and recommended complete rest, plus vitamin B12 injections and no alcohol. I have a history of depression and lately it’s been coming on quite strongly. The word “depression” suggests to me a slump, a soft blackness, a state of slow, quiet hopelessness. When I am really “down”, I am much more liable to have a pounding heartbeat, racing thoughts, manic movement and violent, self-directed urges. There is a feature film called Little Bits of Light that captures this side of the condition with painful honesty. Anyhow, the idea of being able to take my doctor’s advice to take complete rest was a little unrealistic with an “active” 18 month old to supervise, but I did take another course: I went to see a psychiatrist for a full diagnosis. After a two-hour long discussion, which was lucid, erudite and engaging, my doctor (who I think a truly excellent human being) was forced, by the limitations of his diagnostic guidebook the DSMIV, to give me the informative diagnosis of “mood disorder not otherwise specified”. Whilst this did not provide me with any new information – although it did give me a laugh – there was an upside. After years of denial and attempts to side step, I agreed to go onto a therapeutic dose of anti-depressants. And it was like waking up a whole old person – an earlier version of myself. No less exhausted physically, but a whole lot more alive mentally.

Inspired by the Giant Sparrow and his fervent belief in the existence of “places where anything is possible”, I have recently completed work on the performance art installation Sleep/Wake. To find out more, join the Sleep/Wake Group on Facebook or check out the reviews on, and linked from, the fabulous Theatreview website.

One of the tasks I’m engaged in at the moment is writing a funding application to Creative New Zealand for the literary magazine JAAM. If you’d like to know more about the magazine – perhaps subscribe, or send in a poem, essay or story – check out the JAAM MySpace or Facebook pages.

Alternative Title: “Me, Me, Me!”

I went to see Malia’s Johnstone’s Dark Tourists on Saturday night. It is a complex, stimulating, funny, dark, beautiful show, and if you get the chance to see it I highly recommend that you do. One idea it raises is that we all take our individuality, our uniqueness and our selves, a little bit too seriously and that we focus on these things too much – at the expense of other people, social harmony and the environment, among other things. This idea has been popping back into my mind over and over since I saw the show and especially just now when I was hunting for a friend on Facebook. Trawling through the many, many profiles of people who have the same name as my friend, I found myself thinking that we all do place ourselves at the centre of our own special universes these days and that technology like Facebook encourages us to do so.

I do realise the irony of raising this issue in my very own weblog!

Also catalysed by my experience of watching Dark Tourists, I have lately been questioning one of my basic assumptions in life, that is, that I am able to be self-sufficient if I choose to be. I don’t mean self-sufficiency in the material sense so much as in an emotional and spiritual sense. For a long time I have operated with the basic assumption that, if it came down to it, I could take care of my own emotional and spiritual needs, thank you very much. I guess this is a sort of ‘back up plan’ in case everyone I love suddenly abandons me – more on the origins of that paranoid delusion in a future post perhaps! Now, you know how you sometimes know that something isn’t true, but you believe in it anyway? Well, I think that this particular untrue belief of mine is starting to change. I will record the consequences, as and when they emerge…

“You see,” said Sparrow as Whisper emerged from the sea and stepped, dry and scoured, onto a small, sandy beach. “We can disappear and disappear – thought by thought and feeling by feeling – but although it may seem to us that we have vanished from the world, we are still here.”

The bird was perched on a rock at the tide line, its feathers dry and smooth, its bright black eyes thoughtful.

“But how…?” Whisper began.

Sparrow lifted one wing.

“There is no how,” it said, “or what or when. But there is who.”

“And where?” Whisper ventured.

Sparrow fixed him in its gaze.

“There are,” it replied, stepping carefully down from its perch, “places where anything is possible.”