Hi all.
This is a podcast episode that you can listen to above, or with these links to Apple or Spotify. Or you can read this episode as a piece of writing below.
Apple Podcasts here, Spotify here
Shedding Skin - Confessions of an Itchoholic
Episode 2 (out of 10) - Nurture
Subheadings with durations (in mins)
1. Brisbane (3.50)
2. Primary School (6.00)
3. Satisfy the Itch (2.27)
4. Delayed Gratification (3.46)
5. More Itch (1.39)
6. Heat Map / Insomnia (4.23)
7 - Chronic (5.25)
8 - My Family (2.36)
9 - Parenting (7.37)
Shedding Skin - Confessions of an Itchoholic is my memoir of growing up with a body that was not east to inhabit. It will be released an episode each week for a few months. Citing neuroscientists, philosophers and modern-day poets (rockstars) and exploring the 90s popular culture that shaped me (its music, movies and video games), Shedding Skin is a rollicking, humorous ride of self-analysis about the confusion and alienation of growing up with chronic health battles, the disorientating effects of coping mechanisms (like alcohol and drug dependencies), and my eventual flailing attempts to understand how to live a deep life whilst struggling with new parenthood.
.
Shedding Skin was long listed for the Richell Prize for emerging writers in 2023.
Chapter 2 – Nurture
No change, I can change
I can change, I can change
But I'm here in my mould
I am here in my mould
But I'm a million different people
From one day to the next
I can't change my mould
No, no, no, no, noRichard Ashcroft, The Verve
Bitter Sweet Symphony (1997)
We moved to Brisbane when I was 10. My parents came to my sister and me and asked how we felt about moving to another house, in another city, in another state. Sally was not keen – she had just started high school, which was a less than smooth transition, and she was not the sort of person who embraced change because it stirred her anxiety.
When they asked me, I instantly said,
“Yes. Let’s go.”
This occurred without even thinking about it. There wasn’t a sniff of a pause for reflection. I was in.
“But you’ll have to leave behind all your friends and start at a new school.” My Mum cautioned.
“I don’t care.”
This inexplicable part of me that was drawn to the unknown may seem brave, but I think that ‘call to adventure’ was more of a reaction to regularity, a fear of normalcy, an apprehension of similarity. Even as a 10-year-old I was seeking something different to what was, wary of sameness, willing to bid adieu to all my friends at the mere chance of something bigger and better, something different, despite not knowing what that was. I didn’t really know myself, but I knew I was ready for a new me, to break the mould I was in.
1. Brisbane
Everything in Brisbane felt more powerful, more profound, more intense.
The oppressive humidity. The swarming insects. The intensity of the sun. The winding roads and hills. This weird, violent sporting spectacle called State of Origin. And the glorious thunderstorms that would sweep in most summer afternoons and dump rain and lightning down onto our tin-rooved cream-latticed Queenslander home through the concentrated, humid air.
Thunderstorms became an immediate obsession of mine. I relished the build-up of the dark clouds each afternoon, scanning the horizon in anticipation of the atmospheric pressure surge. The growing tension was electrifying, then finally the unleashing of the Earth’s energy, the ferocious winds and the cracks of the thunder and the pelting hail and rain. We would run around the house, slamming doors and louvres shut whilst our 2-year-old Doberman Monty (Lady had died a few years earlier and was unceremoniously buried in the hard dirt in our backyard back in Adelaide) lost his mind, whimpering in the stairwell as if the world was ending. He was taking advice from that most Australian of songs, Down Under:
“Can't you hear, can't you hear the thunder? You better run, you better take cover" (Men at Work 1981)
I wanted to get lost in that frenetic energy, to lose my sense of self to that power. It was intoxicating, to break with the sense of normalcy, as if the energy helped me unleash myself from the confines of a restricting body.
Once the storms had passed, I’d walk along our road, Harte Street, the mist, and moisture streaming off the still hot tarmac, poking the squashed cane toads run over by people rushing home in the dimming light of the storm-filled afternoon.
The undulating hills of Brisbane may as well have been the mountainous ranges of the Himalayas compared to Adelaide in my mind – some roads were so steep you dared not ride you bike down them for fear of brake failure.
“Didn’t you hear that a girl died riding down here once?” new friends would whisper.
Flying foxes soared through the air each night and squabbled loudly as they fought over food in the tropical fruit trees. Possums thumped across the tin rooves and did battle with domestic cats in fierce showdowns, their high-pitched shrieking piercing the hot night air.
We had cast off the button-down scene from Adelaide with its Sunday school and its sandwiches with the crusts neatly cut off and its twee social expectations. In Brisbane we could swear, be sweaty, even be a bit bogan - everything felt just a little bit more dangerous, more raw, and this suited the Gilpin family to a tee.
2 Primary School
Much like the weather compared to Adelaide, primary school in Brisbane took things up a few notches. I fit in reasonably quickly and made some good friends, but my newfound love of the violence of the natural world in that subtropical atmosphere was not translated to a love of the increase in violence I found in the human world.
There was a boy at my new school called David and he also had eczema, but his showed up as very dry and flaky skin on his face, especially around his eyes. No one in the school had more sympathy for David than I did – the skin on my arms, legs and neck was red and torn, but I didn’t have much eczema on my face at this time and this was a reprieve that I clung to. He used to get mercilessly teased and bullied and my heart would break for him. I was occasionally teased but again managed to mostly fly under the radar, hiding my skin under oversized school shirts and long pants even whilst baking in the never-ending Queensland summer.
I could never even dream of teasing anyone – too sensitive, too aware of what it felt like to receive - let alone getting into a fight. Therefore, it was with the utmost surprise that I did end up in a fight, the one and only tussle I’ve ever had in my entire 4 decades of life. And by tussle, I mean, I got kneed in the stomach by a boy named Martin.
That was the whole fight.
We both went for a ball on the tennis court, a brief interlocking of our hands and arms ensued, before he swiftly despatched me with a brutal knee directly into my soft midsection. I keeled over, sucking carbon dioxide, incapable of comprehending how such malice could exist in the world. Oh, the humanity! The next part was even worse – we were both marched to the principal’s office, a place I had never been before (it was reserved for naughty kids in my mind) to ‘explain our actions’. I sat there sobbing, wailing, and choking on my lack of O2, my guts still hollowed out and aching, whilst cucumber-boy Martin chilled in his chair with a blank look and the tiniest of smirking grins on his face, a waft of satisfaction permeating his aura.
He had been in this situation before. He was a veteran. I was weak, naïve, ‘sensitive’ and being dealt a lesson in Machiavellianism. He was unafraid, even enjoying himself, drunk on his knee-to-the-stomach power.
From that point on simply surviving the ‘Darwinian fitness landscape’ of the brutal savanna that was the school ground was the primary objective for a kid like me.
I watched on a few months later when a good friend of mine, Ben; a tall, broad-shouldered lad, who was the fastest bowler on our cricket team, provoked and goaded Martin behind the music hall one lunch time. Ben was making a loud chicken noise that Martin was taking offence to - mainly because Ben was making said chicken noise right in Martin’s face. I have no idea if Ben knew that Martin had taken me down earlier that year, nor if his goading was in some way recompense for Martin’s previous misdeeds in relation to me. I suspect it was more that boys like Martin were magnets for violence, and this one day the polar attraction was strong.
Martin pushed Ben away, but Ben continued, until finally Martin lost it and pushed even harder into Ben’s face. This gave Ben the permission to do what he was hoping for all along - standing tall and straight, he extended his right arm at the speed of light, fist clenched, with the form of a welterweight pro, clocking Martin directly in the head. Martin’s body was immediately pulled down by an immense gravitational force, the strength of his vascular system evaporating as he crumpled into a heap on the ground, screaming.
Did I revel, however guiltily, in the feeling of schadenfreude that so completely enveloped me on that balmy summer’s afternoon after witnessing such an event? How could I not.
Those two never fought again, but there were two boys, another Ben and a friend of mine Matthew, that were always ‘at’ each other. ‘Big Ben’ (as he was named in my head) was a giant, he would have weighed two and a half times my weight and twice Matthews, was tall and broad and reminded me of a Zangief from the Street Fighter 2 video game. Matthew was short, scrappy and quite small but was one of those kids who was a ‘bruiser’ – he was never dissuaded by the fear of getting hurt, was always looking for trouble, and always seemed to find it. All this felt counterproductive to an innocent like me, but there was no keeping Matthew down, his attraction to violence seemed an inevitability.
One morning Ben punched Mathew right across the face as we waited in line for assembly to start. All the people around Matthew, myself included, stopped and stared, waiting for the crying or the collapse or the running to the teacher. Mathew just stood there, intense face staring out. The pain (and redness) gradually spread over his skin as his face soaked up the hit (that would have flattened any of the rest of us) like a shock absorber. I’d never seen anything like it.
Another time Matthew and I were standing next to each other as the end-of-lunch bell rang. Most kids had made their way to class, but Big Ben was nearby – the polar attractions being strong once again. They got into a disagreement, and like clockwork, Ben punched Matthew directly in the face. So far nothing out of the ordinary. This punch must have hurt more than normal, as Mathew swung his head down to the ground in pain, wailing with his tongue out. In doing so, he smashed his chin on his knee. Then, screaming like a banshee, his face exploded in agony, and we realised he had just bitten clean through his own tongue. I had never seen someone in so much pain, his contorted, bloodied face attempting but failing to express the full force of the excruciation. I felt so nauseous I had to go to the sick bay after witnessing ‘the great tongue bite of 1992’.
Not long after, Matthew and his family moved away, and I never saw him again.
There was increasing violence happening in my body during these years too. Despite promises that the humid air of Brisbane would be better than the dry air of Adelaide for tortured and cracking skin (and the oft repeated but never eventuating prediction that I would simply ‘grow out of’ having eczema), the reality was the hotter Qld sun and the profusive sweating it created wiped out any gains that may have occurred. I was, of course, allergic to my own sweat.
So, my skin started playing even more of a prominent role in my moment-to-moment experience of the world.
3 Satisfy the Itch
Skin itching is a sensory mechanism to signal that there is something wrong such as a harmful agent or inflammation, usually when the skin is dry or broken. The fibres in the nerve cells that create the itch sensation are related to fibres that signal pain, and when these cells are disrupted by scratching this stimulates touch and pain receptors around the area which offers a sensation of relief.
Oh, the sweet relief of scratching an itch! The agonising release! The unbearable ecstasy!
The sensation is very short lived however, and the friction and heat and disruption from the scratching contributes to further irritation especially of skin that was incredibly sensitive and easy to tear. In my case, once I had started scratching an area of skin on my arm for example, the itch would move out from the original scratched location so that I effectively ‘followed’ it (or is that ‘pushed’ it?) as it spread. Oftentimes a single scratching episode would be 20 or more minutes of shredding an area and then moving on as the triggering of the receptors fanned out across my body, always just out of reach, never satisfied. The scratching hand was fully magnetised to the itchy skin, possessed and frenetic, you’d look down in horror at what was playing out whilst having zero agency over it. Eventually you would slow down, the entire area had been ‘tackled’ and you could finally stop and survey the damage.
Modern psychology posits that each person is psychologically made up a set of sub-personalities, traits or drives that in some ways compete for dominance over the person as they negotiate certain psychosocial situations. For example, have you ever stopped yourself from eating a cookie? There’s the part of you that wants to eat the cookie (or have another glass of wine, or scroll Twitter for a few more minutes), and there’s the part of you that doesn’t (because all of these things in excess are bad for you). In effect, you’re trying to restrain yourself, from yourself. (A great metaphor for the paradox of adult life in general.)
When it comes to the extreme itching caused by eczema, this interplay with restraint doesn't really apply.
You just scratch the itch.
Restraint is mostly futile. You simply give in. Fold. Cave. Surrender at the earliest opportunity. The itch is agony, like a type of pain that demands a response. It is exquisitely excruciating to resist, and a brief form of heaven on Earth to give in to and scratch.
The itch. And the scratch. The cause. And the effect.
4. Delayed Gratification
The ability to delay gratification is one of the most relevant indicators of long term success for a human.
There is a classic psychological experiment that illuminates this correlation – the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment. Children were given the option of a treat now (like a marshmallow), or double the treat if they could wait 15 minutes before getting anything, and the researchers were able to show with much follow up for many years that the children that could delay the gratification tended to have better life outcomes across a range of metrics like school grades and body mass index amongst others.
What happens to a person whose life is constantly interrupted by a process that they cannot control, cannot stop themselves from doing, and that process requires a part of themselves to give in and collapse their willpower in the search of instant gratification? Well then, dear reader, in that case you get me, a creature with a much-depleted long-term orientation ‘gimme the single marshmallow now’ world view.
Chronic itching makes you tear your body apart which causes pain and continues the cycle of chronic itching. In order to make some sense of this, you mind attempts to create mechanisms of control in order to cope. These mechanisms can end up running your mental programming and in turn controlling you in as many ways as the original thing you were trying to control for, and this all starts because you are stuck responding to something that is constantly disrupting your reality.
The ‘mechanisms of control’, largely futile as they are, then often become obsessive.
This inability to delay gratification that led to my obsessive and compulsive habits created a bunch of externalised harms such as a deep social anxiety, harmful coping mechanisms such as addiction, which in turn created paranoia, and ultimately the creation of a toxic self-image and a broken relationship with my own body that would set the stage for the first 3 decades of my life, but we’ll get to all that fun later. More importantly as a 10-year-old, it simply meant I spent much time and energy obsessing over my skin. Picking at it, scratching it, being aware of it, thinking about it. I couldn’t stop. It was the only mental mechanism my mind could conjure.
The itch. The scratch. The cause. The effect. The obsession. And the compulsion. The compulsive behaviour - to look at my skin, to pick at it, to touch it, to scratch it – was inexorably linked to the ‘cause’, forever tethered to it as a reaction looking for control but becoming a slave to itself.
In his book Conspiracy, Michael Shermer outlines the concept of negativity bias, which is our tenancy to disproportionately focus on negative things. For example, my kids (understandably) have negativity bias when I ask them to tidy up their toys – they cannot see the positive of the future clean room, only the negative of the task of cleaning it. Shermer goes on to explain a subset of negativity bias is disgust.
"An evolutionary component of negativity bias may be seen in the emotion of disgust, which evolved to drive organisms away from noxious stimuli because noxiousness is an informational que that such stimuli could kill you through poison or disease." (20)
This is why, over time, I developed trypophobia, which is a fear/disgust reaction to clusters of holes or openings.
Shermer again: "In a complex body, all the parts must work to keep the thing going. But if one part fails it can be catastrophic to all the rest. This can spell the end of the body. Stability of the overall body must be maintained requiring the brain which runs the body to devote the most attention to threats that could terminate the organism."
My growing obsession with my skin had evolutionary roots, the need to constantly monitor disease to maintain future survival. And my disgust at the fact that my skin is really just a bunch of holes, it breathes, I am semi-permeable, was triggered by my own disrupted skin reminding me that infections were getting inside, that I was meeting the external world with a less than protective outer casing. This reaffirmed a social feeling that I was ‘diseased’ and felt 'infectious' to others. Eczema is not contagious but concerning myself that others thought it might be was as troubling as if it was.
Crawling in my skin
These wounds, they will not heal
It's haunting
How I can't seem
To find myself again
Crawling by Linkin Park, sun by Chester Bennington (2000)
5. More Itch
When the itching was so bad at night we tried putting mittens on my hands. It’s the fingernails that do the damage to the skin when you scratch it, so the thinking was that if the mittens were on, I couldn’t scratch the skin as easily.
The first problem with this is when you scratch your skin with the mittens on, the scratching doesn’t satisfy the itch, like blowing softly to extinguish a roaring fire. The second problem is the mittens come off, and them staying on relies on the exact same restraint mechanism that is useless at preventing you from scratching in the first place. So, mittens come off. Itch is scratched. Regular dates with nail clippers were the best option.
I would often keep my family members awake on our camping trips as we lay on our hot inflatable rubber mattresses inside our stuffy tent and I scratched the days sun exposure off my skin. To which they would take turns shouting, “Stop scratching!”. It’s almost like asking someone not to breath – it’s an automatic response to a physical need.
Back at home each night before bed I would sweep my sheets to clear out the dry skin that was amassing up on my bed, piles and piles of my own dead and separated body floating around my room and gathering in heaps on the floor. I was constantly shedding.
Also, moisturising. Always moisturising. This might sound like a pleasant thing, to relieve the dryness and assist the skin to stretch and breathe more, helping it become more supple. It’s more like this: you are forced you to run your hands all over your bumpy, torn, angry skin, multiple times a day. Not only did this aggravate it immensely, it meant the physical contact that I was making with myself was defined by pain, and the disgust that my body was open and broken, a weeping mass of uncomfortable flesh, was constantly reaffirmed.
6. Heat Map / Insomnia
When skin like mine is so sensitive to anything it touches, this disorder can be referred to as ‘contact’ dermatitis/eczema. This means that anything your skin comes into contact with is a potential trigger for a reaction, such as obvious things like pet hair, grass, water, even dry air, but also simpler things such as clothing, seats, bedding etc. The main thing, surprisingly, was other skin.
Yes, my own skin touching other parts of my skin was one of the biggest triggers for irritation and overheating.
If you draw your attention to your own body briefly as you read this, see if you can discern if any parts of your skin are touching one another. If so, picture the temperature of those areas rising inexorably until a brutal itch breaks out. With eczema you would be forced to move so the skin wasn’t touching to attempt to cool it down, most likely creating a different area where new skin is overlapping, and so the dance would continue.
There is something strange that happens to everyone each evening the world over. They become physically paralysed, all their senses switch off, and their mind goes through a sort of remapping and purging. Once this process is over, they awaken a ‘new’ person. This is called sleeping. This odd, daily event, whilst considered to be socially acceptable, is truly a bizarre set of circumstances, the peculiarity of which is most notable when it comes to young children going to sleep.
As a parent, you’ll find in the evening before bed your young children become possessed (even more than normal) by manic energy and delirious behaviour as if some mischievous spirit inhabits them. It will take all your stamina and patience to calm down these inexhaustible bundles of expression and untrammelled emotion and corral them through bath time and teeth brushing as they chatter and laugh and squeal and squeak their way to lights out. But then, moments later, the animating force that possessed them seeps away and they become comatose semi-corpses lying with drooling mouths ajar drooling. You look at them and think ‘this cannot be the same creature that 5 minutes ago was spitting toothpaste all over his brother laughing like a maniacal supervillain’. It is the same creature, one who has crossed a Rubicon into unconsciousness for another 8 hrs (and thank God for that).
Back to a young me - searching for the conditions that would elicit such a joyful conking out as my current children seem to enjoy, each night I would lay in bed attempting to find the elusive body position that would:
a) Not have any part of my body touching another part, and
b) Be comfortable enough to drift off blissfully to the land of nod on a fluffy white dream cloud like a care bear
I have concluded that such a body position does not exist and never will. You can lay there stretched out like a decommissioned robot with no skin touching, but this is not comfortable enough to fall asleep. Once you find a comfortable sleep position however, skin overlap comes back into play. Leaving my skin touching any part of the bed for too long would also overheat it, so I’d be forced to revolve myself like a rotisserie chicken, searching for cool, breathable air.
Even back then in primary school, I began to start dreading going to bed. Hating it even. Bedtime should have been a respite from the hecticness of the day, a place to recharge, rebuild and heal, but it was turning into the battleground of a protracted war of attrition where I was both protagonist and antagonist. I became a night owl in a futile attempt to avoid the inevitable each evening.
This lack of quality sleep would follow me into adulthood. No matter what I tried, I would wake up exhausted, dehydrated and like I'd been stomped on by an elephant. There is much wisdom that ‘sleep expert’ friends and family seem willing to impart when they see dark circles under your eyes:
"You should try magnesium before bed.". It upsets my stomach.
"Get some essential oils." I’m allergic to multi-level marketing.
"Slow release melatonin worked for me!" Zonks me out, my body ‘forgets’ to roll over and I wake swimming in sweat having baked my insides.
“Have you tried Ambien?”. Yes, yes I have lost my mind (but found little sleep) on Ambien (more on that in later episodes).
"If you can't sleep, don't try, just get up and do something until you're tired.” Kindly get fucked.
When your health is disrupting your sleep, this can create a confusing, spiralling paradoxical vortex - a perfect catch-22 (where the only solution to a problem is denied by an inherent condition of the problem), because nothing is worse for your health than a bad sleep.
7 - Chronic
“Time heals all wounds” said some Greek poet who didn’t have chronic health issues.
There is a special term reserved for illnesses, ailments and diseases that occur (or recur) over a long period or that are persistent. This term is Chronic. The word chronic derives from another Greek word Kronos which means time.
Our bodies exist in 3-dimensional space and interact with their 3-dimensional environment, but there is another, not so obvious dimension that requires factoring in – we are actually 4-dimensional entities that exist across time! Who knew?
What a world - space and time are intermingled!
(which in the case of a chronic sufferer includes allergens that trigger immune responses that make them feel like a bag of aardvark faeces),
The word chronic and its implication of time are important to understanding how the impact of these disorders can frame an experience of the world. Effectively, it is hard to separate ‘you’ (whoever that may be) from your ailments. They follow you forward in time and try as you may, they cling to you like a Ridley Scott face hugger. You leave a trail of ill-health receding behind you in the past, and you have much itchiness and suffering to ‘look forward to’ in the ever-arriving, exhausting future.
Socially this seems to be a difficult concept for many healthy people to comprehend, the normal process of things being:
· Someone gets sick with an illness
· The person has a brief period of incapacitation
· This is followed by a brief period of healing to recover
· The person returns to ‘normal’ and is well again
· Everyone says ‘glad to have you back, you look well’ to much nodding, smiles, and appreciation
· Normalcy is happily ushered back in and the show rolls on
It’s completely understandable that, ahem, ‘normal’ people would use this frame to comprehend illness for the chronic sufferer, however, the frame is incomplete. A chronic suffer dreams of such simplicity, but instead gets something like this:
· Body living in an inflamed or weakened state, often with multiple interacting ailments and medications/interventions
· Get sick (with virus for example)
· Get disproportionally sick in comparison to ‘normal’ person
· Cascade of health difficulties occurs (for e.g. disrupted sleep inflames auto immune issues whilst body still fighting virus. When auto immune issues surge, this causes more inflammation, which intensifies the number and severity of related symptoms)
· Take disproportionately longer period to overpower simple virus
· All other health metrics get worse during this time, often cascading together
· Kronos (God of time) does immense battle with chronic sufferer’s mind causing mental strain as days of ill-health turn to weeks or longer
· Confusion reigns over which medications to take and if they are ‘working’ or not, or if their side effects are contributing to general feeling of shittiness (they probably are)
· Body eventually fights off virus – incredible!
· Weeks required to return to pre virus homeo-stasis with second order effects trailing long into future (Kronos being an ass again)
· Increased risk of further/new infections or illness during extended recovery period when immunity is low, continuing the cycle
· Often never a return to anything resembling ‘normal’, just a continuation of complexity
I have simplified the ‘normal’ response to illness and expanded on the ‘chronic’ response, but the point is to illustrate the vastly increased complexity of a chronic illness sufferer getting a run of the mill virus like a cold, and how that disruption can cause a symptom cascade that lasts disproportionately longer than a regular, non-chronic person.
The worst thing about all of this – compared to a ‘normal’ person, a chronic sufferer is much more likely to catch the virus or cold in the first place.
Healing is your body repairing itself. It reacts, often makes you feel terrible, pours inflammation into areas where it is needed, but is purging disease and cleaning up the system as it seeks hypothetical balance. When the event that causes the problem continues on and on, the ‘healing’, the reaction of the body’s immune system itself, continues and escalates to the point where your own immune system can attack your body. These diseases are called auto-immune diseases and eczema is one of them.
So your own your body trying to heal itself is part of the problem! It’s overreacting, being ‘over-sensitive’, to perceived or actual threats, constantly using energy and fighting the world, always in a war stance, ever battling.
There were long periods as a 10- and 11-year-old where the skin under my knees and inside my elbows was so torn and in a constant state of ‘healing’ that I couldn’t straighten my arms or legs. The skin simply could not stretch enough to allow my limbs to extend as normal. I would get out of bed and be forced to push my knees down into the straight position over a 15-minute period, each time trying to stretch the stubborn, cracking skin a little further without it tearing or aggravating the sore bits underneath so I could walk properly.
These cycles of ill health and their undulating patterns were starting to impact deeply in my sense of reality, intertwined in the fibre of my being like quantum entanglement, no way to separate ‘me’ from my ongoing maladies. With my skin being so open to infection and my immunocompromised body working overtime to manage the chronic inflammation and the lack of quality sleep, my body often felt like a giant star, burning up more and more energy just to keep from collapsing under its own weight, desperately avoiding going supernova.
I'm never alone, I'm alone all the time
Are you at one, or do you lie
We live in a wheel, where everyone steals
But when we rise, it's like strawberry fields
Don't let the days go by
Could have been easier on you
I couldn't change though I wanted to
Should have been easier by three
Our old friend fear and you and me
Glycerine (1994) by Bush, sung by Gavin Rossdale
8 - My Family
By the early 90’s, ‘The Gilpin’s of Brisbane’ seemed to become firmly entrenched in the rising middle class. My Dad’s sales job salary was enough for us to afford a house with a pool in a nice neighbourhood. My sister started high school at the private co-ed school St Peter’s Lutheran College.
On weekends if we were not off camping somewhere (remember, always camping, nary a tin roof or a spring mattress or a hot shower in sight – only tents, bush, mosquitos and dirt), we would be gathered around the TV to watch Hey Hey It’s Saturday, a very Australian 90s variety show on Saturday nights, and The World Around Us, a nature documentary series on Sunday nights. Weeknights it was the news, a current affairs program, and Sale of The Century, a popular trivia game show.
One time we even went so far as to send a picture my Dad found in a magazine into Hey Hey It’s Saturday in the hope of getting it featured on the ‘Funny Photos’ segment. It was a photo of a man attending in some veterinarian fashion to a fully-grown emu, with the unfortunate camera angle making it appear like he was mounting the bird from behind. Each Saturday we would watch and wait for the funny photos segment to appear, only to be disappointed that our photo wasn’t shown. It never crossed our minds that despite being the sort of humour the show regularly employed; the show runners were perhaps wisely reluctant to present a picture of a man fucking a bird on a family TV show.
We didn’t go to sports events. We never saw live music. Mum read us lots of books when we were younger, but parent to child book reading begins falling off the radar when kids hit double digits. Besides, I could read my own books by now, and became obsessed with the weird and whacky worlds of Paul Jennings and Morris Gleitzman.
My sister and I, much to our delight, did have unfettered access to our local video store - called Video 2000. It’s towering shelves of VCR rentals stretching as far as the eye could see, offered us endless possibilities of worlds to vanish into.
When I wasn’t pretending to be Atreyu from The Never-ending Story, or being disturbed by Davie Bowie’s crotch in Labyrinth, I was misunderstanding the sexual innuendo in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, or wishing I could be made miniature like in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. It was heaven.
Above all else, I wanted to be Marty McFly. The sunglasses. The skateboarding. The guitar playing. The time travelling! The constant facing of his fears (“What’s the matter McFly - are you chicken?”). That guy was my hero.
9 - Parenting
My sister and I were kept in line with a sort of serious sternness when it came to our behaviour, and the set of reasonably strict rules that came with that. If gravy was to be served with dinner, it was never put on the vegetables. Only the meat! Apparently, we dragged our free settler birth-right dinner-time manners and rules from the silver spoon scene from Adelaide (that my Dad despised) up into Queensland. We certainly didn’t complain about our food or enter fussy debates about what was for dinner (unlike my own children regularly do). You ate what was served to you and if you didn’t, there was absolutely no fruit and vanilla ice-cream for dessert - an unbearable loss that often necessitated the forced swallowing of brussel sprout foulness.
We weren’t allowed to ‘talk back’ – once some rule or boundary was communicated, that was it. It was not a discussion.
The discipline of my parents never turned physical – just threats of actions were enough. Thede included the ‘wooden spoon’, which lived on top of the fridge and would be dramatically ‘reached for’ when our behaviour turned bad. Then there was the threat of ‘washing your mouth out with soap’ if we said swear words. It never occurred to me at the time, only decades later, that the threatened soap washing was the cleaning of the ‘dirty’ words that we were forbidden to say – there was no connection in my mind to the purifying nature of this action, it was simply something that we did not want to happen as a swearing preventative.
There was a sense that our actions as children were noticed and attended to primarily by way of strictness, rules and sometimes frustration, but our feelings were not a big factor in how we were ‘governed’. And governed feels like an apt word. The prevailing idea was that children should be seen but not heard (something that I have confirmed with my Mum that this was a reasonably true parenting philosophy of the time). That if, as children, we had a negative reaction to something, the reaction was to be minimised and the generalised philosophy of 'what doesn't kill you makes you stronger' would be applied. 'Toughness' was the primary method of coping with the world, and it should be promoted as strength of character even as it was deployed as a way of disregarding the truth of how things felt (sometimes bad) and the depth of the challenges being navigated (often hard).
If you felt bad, or if something went wrong, that was making you stronger. There wasn't much more to it than that. Life can be hard. Get on with it.
The other side of this ‘parenting style’ coin would be to be over cautious in your approach to how your children interact with the world, sheltering them too much, evoking helicopter parenting and creating un-resilient kids who are upset and triggered by the smallest of events, cannot look after themselves and will ultimately find the world and their life difficult to navigate due to their lack of hardiness. Promoting resilience in children is one of the biggest challenges of parenting. We cannot protect them from having hard experiences, and we shouldn’t want to, but there must be some middle ground.
The 'toughness' and 'getting on with it' and 'stop complaining' as a life/parenting philosophy of the 80s and 90s required a fair amount of denial. There seemed to be a preference of denying the truth of what was happening internally (ie how something feels) to fit some external way of acting or ‘being seen’ by others. This denial is easily lodged into the developing mind as a mechanism to make sense of the world, but it can drive important and complex things such as emotions, reactions, truth even, away in preference for simpler expressions of how to behave and what to strive for.
My poor Mum, desperately searching for something empowering to say to her red skinned and itchy offspring, regularly offered in response to my condition “There are children out there without arms and legs. Imagine that.” I comprehend the Nietzschean idea of ‘What does not kill me makes me stronger’ (23) as a framing of the value of resilience, however it strikes me as generally dismissive of the real and affecting pain that can be difficult to carry. The proffered solution of ‘things could be worse’ is not very comforting to a child, it’s more terrifying – “how much worse could they actually be??” No doubt she was as distressed as I was to see me in pain, and no doubt at as much of a loss as what to do or what words to say to ease those burdens.
It quickly became obvious to me as I parented my two boys that any feeling they were experiencing (as separate to any action they chose) were valid and true and not to be framed as ‘wrong’. My impulse for them not to have a specific feeling - say, they dropped their ice-cream, and they became increasingly upset that it was ruined and there were no more ice-creams to replace it - was to protect myself from their emotions. This can erroneously paint their reaction as 'wrong' or 'too much' or an 'over' reaction.
Life is hard, ice-creams get dropped, emotions need to be felt, not corrected.
There will be many dropped ice-creams in my children’s future, and they need to be able to go on the ‘dropped ice-cream upset roller coaster’ with honesty and fullness, not suppress it and hide how they really feel. As the parent, it's my (often impossible) job to ‘hold’ and accept my kid’s emotions, because they are learning how to do this for themselves by watching how I do it. The immense challenge as the adult is this: you have your own emotions going on, and it can be hard to separate and hold them both.
But, that's the job.
Back to the 90s - I never saw any weakness in my parents during this time. My Dad was an unstoppable physical force who rarely spoke about how he felt – he broke his collar bone one time after being run off the road riding his bike across the Walter Taylor bridge and I watched as he calmly got undressed, had a shower, then got into his car and drove himself one handed to the doctors without even a hint of pain or emotion. Everything in its place and simply a matter to be sorted out. My Mum was a quiet person, and it could often be hard to know what she was thinking or feeling. She was somewhat emotionally guarded and would regularly process her feelings away from my sister and I. Grief, and other related upset states, were managed privately, not collectively.
Anna Spargo-Ryan, in her visceral memoir Some Kind of Magic about growing up with chronic mental health conditions, frames these adult concerns and their attending concealment as the air being “charged with an unspoken future concern” (24) (emphasis on unspoken.). The way my parents separated the challenges they were feeling as they navigated the world by containing their expressions of those challenges (ie not talking about them) left a big gap between what I saw was happening, and how I should learn to understand it.
This fashioned in me a sensation that weakness was wrong, some sort of failure by choice, because I never saw it expressed in my parents or any other adult. Hard feelings were shuttered away in private rooms, unexplored, unexplained.
I got the sense that if only I could be stronger, my life would be better, and I would be able to connect more easily. The problem? I felt like weakness incarnate, at least physically.
Internally, I began mirroring the emotional containment that was being modelled for me.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I was about to hit some real growing pains, morphing from a kid to a teen, a period where I would grapple with my culture, it’s wisdom and the way it was telling me how I should live.
.
.
Thanks for reading episode 2 / 10.
If you would like to support my work which is free to access, you can donate here at Buy Me a Coffee
Find me at sheddingskin.substack.com and on Twitter/X @nick_gilpin_
.
.
References and Vid Links
Verve, The. Urban Hymns. Bittersweet Symphony. s.l. : Hut Recordings, 1997.
Work, Men At. Down Under. Business As Usual. s.l. : CBS, 1981.
Shermer, Michael. Conspiracy. s.l. : John Hopkins University Press, 2022.
Park, Linkin. Crawling. Hybrid Theory. s.l. : Warner Records, 2000.
MC Hammer, Can’t Touch This, 1990, Link
Bush. Glycerine. [perf.] Gavin Rossdale. 16 Stone. s.l. : Trauma: Interscope, 1994.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols. s.l. : Penguin Classics, 1888.
Spargo-Ryan, Anna. A Kind of Magic. s.l. : Ultimo Press, 2022.
Kindergarten Cop It’s Not a Tumor
Hey Hey It’s Saturday Intro (1993)
Frank Warrick’s The World Around Us Intro - Late 80s
National 9 News Intro 90s
Sale of the Century Intro 90s
Round The Twist (1989) Theme
Never Ending Story (1984) Trailer
Labyrinth (1986) Davie Bowie You Remind Me of the Babe
Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) Trailer
Honey I Shrunk The Kids (1989) Trailer
Back To The Future (1985) Trailer
Back to the Future – Chicken
Lord of the Rings - The Two Towers - Gullum I’m Not Listening
Simpsons Wonder Years parody
The Fugitive (1993) - Dr Richard Kimble
S1 Ep02 - Confessions of an Itchoholic