Chance Delays

  Let’s just put it out there: it’s not a good look to heap crap on RUOK day.  It’s nice. It was started by nice people, people who lost a beloved friend, people who wondered if they could have saved him. It’s a genuinely beautiful act from friends in terrible grief. Many of us have lost someone to suicide, and if you can’t bring them back, then maybe the next best thing is to do something meaningful to prevent another one. I get it.  RUOK day's origins are genuinely beautiful, admirable, and understandable. And I really, really don’t want to say “but”. . . . . BUT… ***** RUOK day is a classic of its genre. It’s a day for people who don’t suffer to try to fix people who do. It’s a day to try to “spark conversations”. It’s a day for “champions of change”. See also: White Ribbon Day, the establishment of Beyond Blue. What it isn’t, is a day that was asked for by those of us who suffer, often threaded through our entire lives, from mental illness, trauma, and persist...

  Dear Hawthorn, If what is alleged is true,  I no longer want you in my life. I’m not sure you think I even exist. But that’s not the problem, is it? The problem is that I’m not sure you think anyone other than blokes like you exist. Or matter. But we do. And you mattered to us. And you have trashed everything that meant for our family. There aren’t that many properly working class families who love Hawthorn as passionately as catholics love Collingwood or Mancunians love United. But my family is one of them.   Dear Hawthorn, When I grew up, my mum and siblings and I would join my cousins and aunties and uncles and grandparents, and we’d drive out to VFL park with our little plush hawks dolls, with the number of our favourite player drawn on the back. We’d eat pies at half time, and bang the advertising boards when you got a goal. My brother had a poster of Peter Knights on his wall. After family lunches at Pa’s place, all seven grandkids would climb the fence ...

 28th March, 2020. Fucking gratitude. For a long time I have thought the gratitude idea is naff. Normally naff things aren’t too bad – they can usually be ignored, or enjoyed. But this gratitude thing just came too close. Everyone was talking about it. Research has shown. Research has shown. What did it show? Gratitude is the key to happiness. That is what it showed. Be grateful. Make lists. It will fix everything. Through pain – be grateful. Try. Try harder. Be grateful. Why do I hate this? Because it's naff. And, like any lifehack for human suffering, it's not meaningless. It's dangerous. ***** Many of us from the leafier suburbs of the world know exactly what it's like to have our expressions of suffering repurposed as ingratitude.  I was fed messages, which I dutifully swallowed, about how much money and time was invested in my upbringing. On how much was spent on our house, on our various sailboats, on our holidays, on our schooling, on our exchange trips, on our u...