hsphaven

My Grade 1 teacher was the only adult who was nice to me at St Thomas Mores, my second primary school which I spent half of prep and half of grade 1 at. Her name was Mrs Warner. I was always late as my family only had one car which my dad took to work so my mum would have to walk me and the pram containing my baby sister up the hill to school each morning. It was a real struggle but Mrs Warner was always glad to see us and told the school that I was a good kid when they were all demonising me as a child of Satan. After I left St Thomas Mores I wrote Mrs Warner letters but that eventually fizzled out. I wish I could talk to her again. Tell her how my life has turned out and perhaps connect the dots of my past. I know 6-year-old me still lives on inside me, would like to see her again and continues to search for a kind figure like her amidst all the abuse, scapegoating, social exile and hate. She doesn’t know it is 2024 now and that the world has moved on.

I moved to Tecoma Primary School half way way through Grade 1. I spent three years there, the longest I’ve ever spent at one school. If I could just freeze those years and never live the rest of my life I would. I had many friends there and people liked me. I still have the book of all the lovely things people wrote about me.

Monique was like my girlfriend. We did things together children shouldn’t know anything about. Her house had a bad vibe to it. She was probably sexually abused.

I left this school in Grade 4. I was going to go to Belgrave South Primary School but Tamsyn, my friend from St Thomas Mores who accused me of sexually assaulting her, had moved there. Her mum threatened the principle that if he accepted my enrollment then she would take him to court. So I moved to Selby, a school nestled in the bush next to the Puffing Billy railway. At Selby I was bullied by the same two girls every single day for the two and a bit years I was there. I look at photos of myself from that time and I see a part of me had died. I always wonder how my life would have turned out if I had of stayed at Tecoma. A lot of damage had already been done. I remember dissociating at the age of 7 even at Tecoma, going into another state of consciousness where I would ask myself over and over “am I really here, am I really here?”, as Radiohead sings in “How To Disappear Completely“. A part of me had departed, or never really integrated. I couldn’t take that back. I had nightmares. I wet the bed. I couldn’t run from my past completely, but I still did a pretty good job at blocking it out and putting on a new uniform. I had friends and I made people laugh.

I’m shattered what has become of my life.

“Some catastrophic moments invite clarity, explode in split moments: You smash your hand through a windowpane and then there is blood and shattered glass stained with red all over the place; you fall out a window and break some bones and scrape some skin. Stitches and casts and bandages and antiseptic solve and salve the wounds. But depression is not a sudden disaster. It is more like a cancer: At first its tumorous mass is not even noticeable to the careful eye, and then one day — wham! — there is a huge, deadly seven-pound lump lodged in your brain or your stomach or your shoulder blade, and this thing that your own body has produced is actually trying to kill you. Depression is a lot like that: Slowly, over the years, the data will accumulate in your heart and mind, a computer program for total negativity will build into your system, making life feel more and more unbearable. But you won’t even notice it coming on, thinking that it is somehow normal, something about getting older, about turning eight or turning twelve or turning fifteen, and then one day you realize that your entire life is just awful, not worth living, a horror and a black blot on the white terrain of human existence. One morning you wake up afraid you are going to live.” Elizabeth Wurtzel, ‘Prozac Nation’