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.
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Apple Podcasts here, Spotify here
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Shedding Skin - Confessions of an Itchoholic is my memoir of growing up with a body that was not easy 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.
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Shedding Skin was long listed for the Richell Prize for emerging writers in 2023.
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Shedding Skin - Confessions of an Itchoholic, Episode 1 (out of 10) - Nature
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Subheadings with durations
0 Prologue (5.21)
1 The Soul Needs a Body (3.14)
2 My Baby Body (1.20)
3 Walter (3.21)
4 Me Again (2.25)
5 Adelaide and Mum (4.08)
6 Lying (1.11)
7 Motion Sickness (1.36)
8 Camping (1.43)
9 Sensitive (3.35)
10 Dad (5.25)
11 Video Games (1.00)
12 Salt Water (1.14)
13 Medicine (2.00)
14 Stobie Pole (2.30)
15 Simon (2,55)
16 Groin (1,45)
17 Peter (3.22)
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In this episode - I am born! It’s the 80’s! There are no words to describe babies, or life. My forehead is rubber stamped ‘Faulty Life Capsule’! I am allergic to what the world is made of, especially when we go camping. My Vietnam veteran father is certain, competent, manly. I am sensitive, unsure, weak. Life is a video game full of medicine powerups and allergy death traps. I am embarrassed and wish to hide. I have surgery on my balls. My primary school friends are better than me.
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Prologue
I never opened myself this way
Life is ours, we live it our way
All these words, I don't just say
And nothing else matters.
James Hetfield, Metallica
Nothing Else Matters (1991)
Sapiens are biological matryoshka dolls.
Lurking inside us all are more humans waiting to materialise, a never ceasing line of renewal and propagation readying themselves to ‘pop’ out, our bodies creating more bodies. That more humans grow and emerge from inside the female of our species is equal parts mesmerising, earth shattering and terrifying for everyone involved in this enterprise of human perpetuation.
Well, at least it was for me.
If you’ve ever heard the sloshing of the unborn as they spin-kick around in their watery cocoon, tethered to life by an umbilical cord like a spacewalking astronaut, then you may agree, this is a peculiar undertaking.
So it was on the first day of Spring back in 2014 I sat in a bustling, fluorescent lit hall in the maternity ward of our local hospital, having just used a shiny pair of stainless-steel scissors to snip one of those cords. Soon after I held in my quivering and malnourished arms a mini human, my firstborn son, a creature who was made of my wife, Cate, and me. A specimen whose physical presence was as miraculous as his survival of his own birth. Which, had it occurred a few decades earlier, would have ended in disaster for both him and Cate (as covered in Ch 8). Thanks modern medicine with your sterilised scalpels and your sleepy drugs.
What had we done?
Apparently, a very natural, normal human thing – we had procreated. We had done something, however, that words struggle to capture, something astonishing. Something phenomenal. Something, dare I say it, spiritual (an odd word for an atheist, but its root in Latin is spiritualis which means ‘pertaining to breath’, as in respiration).
There should be poets stationed at maternity wards across the globe ready to assist the shocked and awed new parents to find the words, any words, to describe what has just transpired and the wonder of who has just arrived.
For me, it was something so impactful that demolition charges were laid that exploded down through my sense of self like the controlled implosion of a derelict high-rise, detonating each weakly gathered story I had told myself over decades about who I was, what human life is about, and how to be in the world carrying my specific (but also universal) burdens, lest they destroy me.
It’s hard not to get all existential when you have living, breathing, farting existence wrapped in a hospital sheet on your lap.
I was gripped by the paradoxical terror of having created something so exquisite, yet something so delicate and impermanent. Awe, wonder and the horror of mortality swirled through my oxytocin pickled brain. My (already low) testosterone levels plummeted, and I made many promises to my son about how I would ‘fix myself’. Promises that I broke within weeks of his arrival. Promises that would take half a decade of torturous reflection to re-establish.
It turns out I didn’t really know who I was, and I didn’t really like myself that much (those 2 things being related), but I was finally on a path to reconcile those things by creating an external version of myself, an ‘outer’ child to my ‘inner’ child if you will, my wife and I shedding from our bodies our own little matryoshka to experience the world through and to mirror back to us our own existence. My (already high) need to self-reflect was suddenly red-lined. And what is the purpose of self-reflection if not to become better, the best person I could be?
How could I strive for anything less for this miracle boy I now held?
One problem: this elusive ‘better-ness’, my potential to grow as a human, was constrained, as it always is, by what I didn’t yet understand about myself and the world. Often the moments we’re forced to realise our deepest truths arrive though hardship, suffering and collapse, and within a few years of our son being born I nearly died multiple times, had 4 emergency hospital visits, fell more than ever into substance abuse, and was to have all of the structures of my identity – that self-image I held in my mind, my ego and the well-worn neurological patterns that controlled my daily actions, compulsions and addictions - challenged and exposed and crushed.
Parenting, it becomes swiftly apparent, is akin to running a marathon by doing a series of back-to-back sprints, for 20 or more years. If a more thorough and exhausting multi-decade ultra-marathon stress test for the human animal exists than raising children, I have yet to hear of it (except for the sheer lunacy of real ultra-marathon runners). Yet plenty of normal people seem to manage to shoulder this burden, do this task, and even do it well. Don’t they?
The problem for me was I wasn’t a normal person because I had (and perhaps still have) an abnormal relationship to my chronically inflamed, calamitously ill body. In her 1978 book Illness as Metaphor (2) Susan Sontag says
“Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.”
My passport, unfortunately, was full of stamps to ‘that other place’, and I was often denied entry to the ‘kingdom of the well’, the border guards there reticent to allow free passage to the inflamed sack of proteins that constituted my body. To push Susan’s metaphor as far as it will go; I was only ever on a tourist visa to this mythical kingdom of wellness - permanent residency never granted.
I would soon become a snake struggling to wriggle free from its old skin, a man grappling to shed the toxic patterns of my past, the mental legacy of my ever-present, ever-disruptive, and ever-exhausting chronic health ailments. Seeking to cast those patterns off so I could best carry forth the immense (yet uplifting) burden of parenting, the exquisitely relentless sufferings of my chronic health problems, and the all-round general challenge of a human life deeply lived, spurred on by the teeny, blonde-haired, blue-eyed human mini-me I held in my arms.
My only option was to begin shedding.
Episode 1 - Nature
The north is to south what the clock is to time
There's east and there's west and there's everywhere life
I know I was born, and I know that I'll die
The in-between is mine
I am mine
Eddie Vedder, Pearl Jam
I Am Mine (2002)
1. The Soul Needs a Body
When a baby is born, the most incredible thing happens that almost no one notices.
The mother has toiled in body and mind to achieve an impossible physical and emotional feat, the often-useless husband has eaten his fingernails off, shitting himself in fear for the safety of mother and child, and the doctors and nurses have made quick decisions and gone beyond the call of duty in assistance during the intense and often violent process of childbirth.
So, the baby has landed, is now swaddled up with Mum and the intensity is subsiding, replaced with a bubble of warm love, sunlight radiating forth from their collective souls. The cooing, newly crowned parents decide to communicate to the outside world, their patiently waiting loved ones and friends, the news of the safe arrival.
And here’s the incredible part – they have no words. To describe what has happened, they rely mainly on limited scientific data to express the emergence of this whole new person:
The sex of the baby
The date (and sometimes exact time) of the arrival
The weight and length of the baby
Sometimes (but not always) a name
The very future of humanity has arrived, the archetypical representation and rebirth of our species, a completely innocent and divine presence imbued with the potential to save us all, a product of millions of years of evolution and the successful reproduction of his or her entire familial lineage, a dogma-free, culture-less, unindoctrinated cosmic soul-consciousness wrapped in an impossibly delicate biological casing! And they -
“Weigh 3.87 kgs”. And are a “girl”, who arrived at “10:57pm”.
Also, “Mum and bub are doing well.” (hopefully)
The soul needs a body, and the body is measurable, quantifiable, limited and rooted in the physical therefore it is more easily articulated. While the soul, the carnate essence, the conscious life-force, the ineffable and indescribable and transcendent alive-ness, is not.
So, the parents find words for the body as if describing an inanimate object via raw facts, but any words for whatever else magical is going on with this baby largely escape them. And there is something magical going on with this baby, and every baby, I defy you to hold a newborn and not feel this. You could of course be an empathy free psychopathic Terminator robot who feels “narr-tting”, but for the rest of us, we intuit something remarkable transpiring when a baby is born - the indescribable animate, the animal, the alive essence - some sort of miraculous and inevitable perpetuation has occurred.
The Greeks, somewhat ironically, have a word for this inability to describe using words – alexithymia, which translates to not having the words to express emotions or feelings.
If someone did post a baby announcement to Instagram like this:
The embodiment of the divinity of the human cycle of renewal has manifest itself in baby form! It’s here in my arms, a sentient biological system arrived to enact the archetype of reincarnation and the heroes’ journey, to transcend the physical plane! To transmute to the higher levels of existence! To convert its cosmic dharma and save our species through genetic dissemination and the incarnation of love!
They would not be suffering from alexithymia but would perhaps be a little too high on oxytocin. At least they tried.
Colonel Frank Bormam, who took some of the first photos of the Earth from outer space, somewhat ineloquently said about his experience:
“What they should have sent was poets.” (9)
The awe and wonder of a new person, like the Earth hanging in the vastness of space before us, exposes our paper-thin explanations of these things, because mere words can never sufficiently express what we are feeling inside.
This incapability doesn’t stop with describing babies. Our alexithymia, this inability to find words to explain what is happening to us, to express our internal experience, follows us throughout our lives.
It certainly followed me.
2. My Baby Body
Here is a snippet of the ‘raw scientific data’ that heralded my arrival back in the early 1980s in Adelaide Women’s Hospital down in South Australia:
6 weeks premature
Boy
2.2 kgs
Small. Concern for lungs
Crooked. Scrunched up on one side – torticollis, scoliosis, wonky hips, tweaked neck
“Baby not fully cooked, recommend incubator crib (baby oven) for 4 weeks to ‘finish’ the job” (arguably it didn’t work)
Feeding tube for 4 weeks
Diagnosed with Eczema (Atopic Dermatitis)
Big rubber stamp on forehead – Faulty Life Capsule
Pumped with steroids to ensure survival – don’t ‘say no to drugs’ kids!
The forementioned and imaginary poet, should they have been present, may have proclaimed with Shakespearean flair:
“Here lies a wretched corpse, of wretched soul bereft” with nurses fainting at the sight of me, this crumpled, lopsided cosmic meat burrito. Or as Elaine from Seinfeld famously quipped:
“Some ugly baby, huh?”
Further pertinent information:
Mother – doing well all things considered. She nearly died having my sister 3 years earlier, and no doubt had the shit (and baby me) scared out of her when I ‘decided’ to evacuate ship so early
Father – away for work in Alice Springs 1500 kms away thinking he had plenty of time to get back before this naughty little boy decided to sneak into the outside world early.
3. Walter
In 2019 my wife Cate gave birth to our second son, Walter.
At our doctor’s request, Cate was scheduled for a C-section because she had previously had an emergency C-section with our first born - the strawberry-blonde haired angel creature who exploded my sense of self (we’ll get back to him later).
As our surgeon dutifully cut along the same incision on my wife’s protruding belly, she proclaimed in anticipation “get ready with the camera” and proceeded to drop ‘the curtain’. I crouched with my zoom lens, coiled like a wildlife photographer ready to document this unmissable moment. Only, the surgeon miscalculated the size of Walt’s huge noggin and she couldn’t get him out, so I have a series of gory photos of this accomplished professional struggling to extract our newly arrived son through the gaping incision on the front of my poor wife.
They slapped Walt down on the resus table, I snipped his cord, and the nurses poked at him, waiting for his lungs to fill with air and our little lad to cry out for the first time.
Silence in the room.
Walt was asleep.
He was having none of this.
He did not want to breathe, he did not want to be out of the comfort of the womb and in this bright, cold room full of weirdos jabbing him with fingers. Who could blame him? No wonder alien abduction stories are so common, Walt was having his first one right here on the resus table at the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital.
“Is everything ok?” my wife’s increasingly concerned words were voiced. She couldn’t see him from her position on the op table so was relying on my confused translation of the scene. They really need a live camera feed of the resus table so the person who just had another person pulled out of them can stay up to date with happenings.
“I think so. I think he’s just being lazy.”
More poking, a few light jiggles and even a soft slap here or there. He was barely interested; and his oxygen levels were dropping. Tyler Durdan from Fight Club flashed into my mind’s eye - “This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.“ (12)
He eventually did breathe, made a half-hearted cry, but it was with far less vigorousness that we all expected of him. Our children are bound to disappoint our highest hopes for them eventually, and Walt was starting early. The nurses were making the best of it, but their increasing franticness betrayed their concerns.
I was sweating. This creating new people thing was full on. And I didn’t even have to grow him for 9 months, let alone be sliced open to extract him. Men – to say we get the easier path with this whole populating the planet thing is the understatement of the Anthropocene.
So, they whipped Walt away down a corridor on the mobile resus table, tears welling in his parents’ eyes, so he could spend a few days in the Neonatal Intensive Care to deal with the pesky fluid not clearing from his lungs. When I visited him only minutes later, I realised he was a relative giant of a creature, a big-domed bruiser compared to the teeny lifeforms that inhabited the other incubation cribs. Coming in at a hefty 4.3 kilos and all puffed up like a 12 round Mike Tyson, our big rig looked even more gargantuan lying next to his fellow NICU newborns, some of whom arrived 12 weeks or more prior to their scheduled delivery dates. Gazing at these miraculous crumpled balls in their heat beds connected to artificial feeding tubes and monitoring sensors, their vulnerability overwhelmed me, their impossibly delicate physical forms engaged in a titanic biological battle for survival – genetically encoded to cling to life and reach for the future with all the energy they could muster.
When you were here before
Couldn't look you in the eye
You're just like an angel
Your skin makes me cry
You float like a feather
In a beautiful world
I wish I was special
You're so fuckin' special
But I'm a creep
I'm a weirdo
What the hell am I doing here?
I don’t belong here
Thom Yorke, Radiohead (3)
Creep (1992)
4. Me Again
Back to mini-me in the time of big hair and bigger shoulder pads - I was one of those babies. Teeny, tiny, early, crumpled and needing an incubator crib. Something was happening back in that biological womb-oven that required me to urgently evacuate ship, and it may have been my Mum’s love of roasted peanuts. Swapping her analogue pouch for the digital spaceship technology of the incubator womb is a great metaphor for our modern, tech-guided life. We’ve swapped the cave for the city. The soft grass for the innerspring mattress. The tree-picked berry for the hydrolysed vegetable protein of our cheese and bacon Cheetos.
There are many human-made technologies that have ensured my contented survival over the years – drugs, surgery, headphones with noise cancelling and really good bass. I was mere minutes old before getting my first sample of sweet, synthetic steroids (molecules that would become a deeply embedded part of my life years later) to suppress my flailing immune system and keep me ‘reaching for the future’.
I got out of there eventually (the spaceship womb, and the hospital), but I was wonky and crooked and small. Queue many doctors’ frowns and worries and concerns about my ‘development’. I didn't take my first quivering steps until I was over two years old. There was concern my brain wouldn’t function normally. I had very small lungs and was diagnosed with asthma immediately.
It was a reasonably inauspicious beginning, but I can’t be too morbid about it. I had made it to planet Earth. What a place! Thanks for the body, and the steroids to use it!
It was my skin that immediately emerged as my main medical antagonist. I was wrapped in an epidermis layer that simply didn't do the job it was designed to do. Eczema, Psoriasis, Dermatitis: these are different names for slightly different afflictions, but all relate to inflamed, irritated and overreactive skin.
In her 2022 book Skin Deep – the inside story of our outer selves, Phillipa McGuinness helpfully lays out the following facts about eczema, which we shall swiftly get out of the way:
“Eczema comes from the Greek word meaning ‘to boil over’. Clinical name – atopic dermatitis. One in three babies develop the condition between 2 and 6 months of age. 80% of people grow out of it by the time they are adults” (I lucked into the remaining 20% of course). “Once you’ve had eczema your skin will always be dry and sensitive. Eczema is often linked with asthma and hay fever.”
Also, that eczema is “treatable but not fixable”.
In my case, my skin didn't stretch, it didn't breathe, it didn't stay supple but most importantly, it didn't keep out agents of infection. What it did do was get inflamed and angry and explode into rashes and sores and itchiness whenever it interacted with allergens, which appeared to be what the world was made of.
5. Adelaide and Mum
I was born, and spent the 1st decade of my life, in Adelaide, also known as Radelaide, the capitol of South Australia. Living in the ‘city of Churches’, Australia’s most British of state capitals, you could almost pretend you were back in ye oldy England (minus the drizzly weather and the piss warm beer), sitting in regal parklands eating a Cornish pastie, your pinkie finger rising up off your teacup whilst gleefully saying the word ant which would be referring to a small insect and not your Uncle’s sister, that would be your Aunt, and if you moved your limbs around to the beat of some music that would be called dancing, not dancing
We lived in a small, classic sandstone house in a neighbourhood of classic sandstone houses, each one neatly aligned on their block with fresh lawns surrounded by brushwood fences. The street’s mature white cedar trees towered over the road casting tunnels of shade, their roots pushing up the wide bitumen footpaths creating lumps perfect for growing kids to jump bikes over.
Our little house had a grape vine growing off the beams above the car port, large walk-in bird aviaries that my dad build in the backyard to breed finches, and resplendent off-brown carpet squares in the living room. These came in handy when I was a few years old and my parents, not believing me when I expressed that I was allergic to nuts, fed me half a peanut as a test and I promptly threw my guts up all over a square or two. Convenient enough to peel them up and take them outside for a good clean!
We were a typical, white, emerging middle-class family with 2.3 kids (2 kids and a dog - a Doberman called ‘Lady’). Neither of my parents, both born in the post WW2 baby boom, completed high school. My Dad worked in sales and was away quite a lot for work in the early years whilst my Mum kept house, did part time work and managed us kids – a ceaseless (and thankless) task that she relished and approached with confidence, grace and gusto.
My Mum is a short, slight lady, and back then was always moving, always cleaning, always cooking, and always doing aerobic stretches by her bed each morning. Mum was (and still is) indefatigable. She says that raising children was exhausting, but that very early on she ‘decided’ to not be tired and to simply get on with it, channelling the influence of mind over matter with the power of positive thinking. (I’ve since tried this for myself, and it doesn’t work so she must have made the whole thing up).
Courtesy of the hair curlers lined up in our bathroom, Mum looked like Sigourney Weaver from Ghostbusters would if you shrunk her down but kept her 80s hair the same size. If you’d met Mum in the 70s when her dark straight hair was neatly combed down to her shoulders, you’d have been greeted by a classically beautiful 20-something hippie who wouldn’t have looked out of place fronting Jefferson’s Airplane as Grace Slick. Mum’s other rock and roll claim to fame, other than being present when the Beatles arrived in Adelaide in the 60s like every other teenage girl at the time, was when she was spied by Meatloaf at one of his concerts and he ignominiously proclaimed that he would ‘do her’.
My sister Sally, 3 years my senior, was my hero and my best friend. Tall, skinny with lots of long, very curly, almost frizzy hair, she had boundless energy and a fantastic imagination. We loved each other dearly, and would get lost in play for hours, animating our toys and creating fantasy worlds and adventures of intrigue in our big backyard.
My health was trouble from the start for the entirety of my little family, not just for me. When I had my own children, I realised that in the early years you are raising little bodies and little immune systems as much (or more) than you’re raising their attached identities. It’s a very physical enterprise. Food and milk goes in, wee and poo and spew comes out. They sleep (not enough) and wake anew each day, ready for the exhausting cycle to continue.
My compromised immune system immediately meant a lot less time for my sister with my Mum, who was primarily in charge of caring for me. All those Doctor’s visits, filling prescriptions for potions and lotions, sick days off from kindy and eventually primary school, and helping me with the endless parade of asthma puffers and creams and medications took the most monumental amount of time and energy for my Mum.
35 years later when Cate and I would welcome Walt, our second, into our family, I would much more fully comprehend the phrase and appreciate the technique of ‘divide and concur’ as a parenting stratagem. It is usually deployed out of necessity, and that was certainly the case with the Gilpin’s of Adelaide in the 80s.
6. Lying
One of my earliest memories is of standing in our yard at night and telling a lie.
There we were, the 4 of us, The Gilpin’s of Kyre Avenue, Kingswood, on the grass in our backyard looking up at the night sky in search of Haley's comet. It was 1986, and we were gazing upwards like many other families all around Australia, necks craning towards the heavens, searching intently for that small cluster of passing cosmic space dust that was having a cultural moment here on Earth.
My parents found it easily and pointed it out to Sally and I, straining and gesturing, saying
“See. See! There it is. Look!”
I couldn't see Haley's Comet.
I tried to find it; I really did. My little eyes couldn’t latch on to this genuinely small and over hyped interstellar event. I think I thought it would be bigger – didn’t everyone?
Eventually I lied and said that I could see it.
Such a small, innocent lie. A little boy not wanting to miss out. It marked the beginning of a process I began, as we all do, of moulding myself socially and culturally to fit, to be accepted, to not stick out, in defiance of the actual truth. This process, like many paradoxical features of the human world, has the exact opposite effect than is intended – dishonouring yourself out of a desire to fit in pushes you further away from the connection and inclusion you seek.
7. Motion Sickness
Another feature of the generally flat Adelaide is the winding, nausea inducing roads up into the Adelaide Hills. There I was one bright, sunny afternoon sitting in the back of a car on one of my first outings with a primary school friend and his family, noticing each sweeping corner leaving a little bit more of my stomach behind, creating a nauseating out of body experience where my being was less and less anchored to my sense of physicality in space/time.
I wouldn’t wish the intolerability of nausea on my worst enemies (if I had any).
I would fight the feeling, as if by concentrating hard on the problem I could un-discombobulate my nervous system. This never worked. Too embarrassed to pluck up the courage to say to my friend I wasn't feeling well, I hoped beyond hope that it would pass, and I could avoid drawing attention to myself and my nausea. Maybe they’ll stop soon and I can get out? As others chatted in the car, my dizziness got worse. Like Patrick Swayze in Ghost, my soul had slid out of my body - only he had to die to fully vaporise, I just needed to sit in the back of a Holden Commodore.
The cool sweat would emerge on the back of my neck and then the final tell, the watering of the mouth – the body’s way of protecting your teeth from the inevitable corrosiveness of its own, rising stomach acid. Still, I couldn't speak, my desire to hide my health calamities from the world was taking hold. Besides, you always think you have more time, right up until you’re spewing all over yourself and the back seat of your friends’ families’ car.
There was a metaphorical battle (as much as a physical one) brewing inside me, to hide this dysfunction of my young body (however mild or common or banal it may be to get motion sickness) that I wished beyond hope that could be kept private, but that in the end the truth of which always ‘came out’ – much like my projectile streamed partly digested ice-cream and stomach acid.
Scar tissue that I wish you saw
Sarcastic mister know-it-all
Close your eyes and I'll kiss you, 'cause
With the birds I'll share
With the birds I'll share this lonely viewin
With the birds I'll share this lonely view
Red Hot Chili Peppers
Scar Tissue (1999)
8. Camping
Our family were campers. We never stayed in hotels or motels or villas or anywhere with a normal mattress, aircon or a TV during holidays - it was always tents, blow up mattresses, damper in the campfire and washing ourselves from a bucket hanging in a tree.
My parents, sister and I would frequent a sleepy fishing town called Coffin Bay to camp and go adventuring in our little dinghy. Unfortunately, our camp site was a 7-hour drive from our house. Each Christmas and Easter Dad would pack up the Ford Falcon station wagon with military precision in time to leave by 430am, and we'd load in, our pet dog Lady the Doberman curled up in the front footwell at my Mum's feet. Back before touch screens and sat nav, the old Falcon cassette player volume could be adjusted by twisting a large circular knob - imagine! - and Lady's black and tan snout would rest just below it. Every hr or so she would readjust her position and treat us to an extra loud burst of Paul Simon’s “Graceland” or Midnight Oil’s “Beds are Burning”.
The first hour of the trip was always fine, the excitement of heading off on an adventure buzzing through my sister and my bodies, our favourite toys lined up together on top of the Engel camping fridge, the fresh sights out the window enrapturing us as the urban spread turned to highways and the houses thinned out as we entered rural farmland. I’d follow the power lines along with my eyes as they jumped up and down and weaved in and out around the power poles like waves cresting and falling.
Eventually, my old friend motion sickness would slowly creep in, enveloping me with its sickly embrace like Gollum reaching to strangle Frodo.
"Look out the window!" my dad would exclaim as if that somehow solved the queasiness building in my stomach.
“Get the bucket ready!”
I could sometimes hold it off for even an hr with intense concentration, the grasp of the spectre of nausea ever tightening around me until the cool sweat and the watery mouth would betray the inevitable once again. Quickly pulling over on the side of the highway, I would buckle over and heave away, the gaze (imagined or real) from the people in the cars whizzing by burning into the back of my head as much as the hot flush from the nausea.
9. Sensitive
I was a ‘sensitive’ little fellow from the outset, in more ways than one. Doctors used to say “you have sensitive skin” or that I was ‘sensitive’ to allergens like dust and pet hair and grass clippings or that my digestive system was ‘sensitive’ to certain foods. I was extra sensitive to nuts - peanut paste is the nastiest devil smear imaginable. I loved hugs, I wasn’t demanding or fast moving as a child as many can be - I was slow, deliberate, docile even. My lack of action was most likely a side effect of the energy my body was rerouting to battle constant inflammation, or a defective sympathetic nervous system, meaning I couldn’t easily be jolted into fight or flight.
In his 2014 book The Body Keeps The Score, Bessel Van Der Kolk speaks of the sympathetic nervous system as our body’s ‘accelerator’, releasing adrenaline and cortisol to pump us up ready for action, and the parasympathetic nervous system as the ‘brake’, calming us and returning us to ‘business as usual’. (15) Little sick Nick, quietly sitting still, lop-sided, red skinned, looking out at the world, didn’t seem to have an accelerator, his master brake cylinder seized up, jamming his brakes perpetually on.
The word sensitive derives from the Latin sensus meaning to feel. Another description is ‘easily effected’. When you’re easily affected by things – the world, other people, the air you breath, the grass in your backyard, your pet dog - what can you do about it, especially as a young child? You can’t really do anything except continue forth being easily affected by things. I imagine there are people that can move through the world and not be easily affected by what they encounter, their hardy dispositions a foil to the impacts of the natural environment or cultural/social forces – but I was never one of those people. We might now call this sensory diversity? It’s not easy to imagine what that would be like if that’s never been your experience, your body/mind/nervous system simply feels the imprint or forces of the world in a deeper, perhaps more intrusive way, and you are stuck trying to process them none the wiser that there is any less-sensitive way of being because it is not available to you.
It’s not clear to me when being ‘sensitive’ crosses the bridge to being ‘over-sensitive’, but I probably walked that bridge (then sensitively set fire to it behind me) a long time ago. Labelling someone over-sensitive is often used as a weapon to describe something that they shouldn’t be, as if they have any option to change this by choice.
One term used to express the opposite of being sensitive is to be called ‘thick skinned’ - this would point to a virtuous trait of someone’s that they are tough, that they don’t sweat the small stuff and are not easily rattled by life.
In both ways, physically and emotionally, I was not thick skinned. Over my formative years I would erroneously correlate being ‘over-sensitive’ with being ‘weak’.
Could being super sensitive create in me a supersized set of values that would have positive ramifications – such as empathy, or compassion, or patience? Could being super sensitive be like some sort of superpower? Maybe like Santa, who ‘knows when you’ve been sleeping, and knows when you’re awake’ (which is kind of creepy really), perhaps ‘Sensitive Man’ has the superpower of empathy and he ‘knows when you’re upset, uncomfortable or in pain’ because he can relate.
There must have been some evolutionary advantages to being over-sensitive and I just needed to figure them out! All this was far too much for my little mind to grasp at such a young age of course, but in time I would recognise that like all superpowers, an inability to understand, hold and wield ‘sensitivity’ with wisdom and virtue and softness could, and did, lead to disaster and the desire to ‘numb’, ‘suppress’ and ‘avoid’.
10. Dad
My Dad is the middle brother of 3, born in the post-war baby boom to parents of the ‘Greatest Generation’, the cohort that were the primary participants in WW2. His father, my grandfather, was a prisoner of war for 3 years at the hands of the Japanese in Java before surviving and returning to Australia to have a family.
Dad was conscripted to the war in Vietnam in 1970 when he was 20 years old, his fate left to the rolling of numbered balls to determine if those born on any particular day of the month would be drafted or not. After spending time training in Townsville, he landed in Niu Dat, the Australian base in Southern Vietnam, on his 21st birthday, before the Australian contingent was extracted 3 months later as the war gradually came to an end.
During my childhood my dad’s connection to the natural world was stronger than his connection to the cultural or human one. This was a man most at peace soothing his nervous system in the arms of Mother Nature - spotting finches and wrens in a rainforest, fishing for yabbies by a creek or out past the river mouth on the open sea in our dinghy catching whiting.
Raising children did not look easy for my dad. He was quite strict with discipline and rules and often lectured my sister and I about the many dangers we needed to account for as we grew. His own mother was tyrannical and would be quick to shout at the 3 brothers, especially when she had been drinking. My Dad’s orations on the dangers of the world and how best to avoid them were part of this his way of protecting us even as he took us on oftentimes daring adventures through the natural world – learning to fire rifles on outback farms, overnight hikes through natural amphitheatres to isolated bush huts, building campfires under the stars in dry creek beds, taking our tinnie out through river mouths and into the open ocean. A certain amount of fear to mitigate the dangers of these activities was surely warranted – the natural world is mysterious and full of potential menace - but when back to mundane life in the suburbs, he found it difficult to let go and allow the chaotic world of child rearing happen around him. I can sympathise.
His nervous system seemed slightly over-tuned; his ‘accelerator’ being easily pushed. He could hear and sense things, and therefore be bothered by things, that the rest of us didn’t perceive. Decades later my dad would seek help for his inability to get a good night’s sleep, which was related to the stresses he and his fellow conscripts experienced during their time in the war.
His particular set of sensitive neurons and alert sympathetic nervous system made him especially good at being a bird watcher – with eyes as sharp as an eagle and the hearing of a fox, every bush walk we went on as a family he would not so subtly let us noisily trudge up ahead so he could hang back and listen for the squeaks and warbles that would reveal the feathered critters he was seeking. We could set our watch to his favourite line on our family bush trips –
“If you stop making so much noise, be still and actually listen, you might hear something!”. He wasn’t wrong. But we couldn’t be still. His ability to stand motionless in the bush for minutes at a time simply listening amazed me – his body working overtime to activate a parasympathetic state that was not easy to attain in other situations. The outdoors was his temple, and stillness his mode of worship.
His bloodhound sense of smell would eventually work against me in my teenage years when he could effortlessly heat seek out the pot I poorly hid in my room.
Camping one night back at (the aptly named) Coffin Bay, my sister and I were half asleep in our tent when Dad’s finely tuned nerves kicked into gear and started communicating with the tree towering over our campsite.
With sudden shouting:
“Kids, get out of the tent!!”,
we startled and both stumbled out right before a large tree branch crashed down where we were laying moments prior, flattening the camp.
It didn’t come naturally for my dad to show his emotion, his own nervous system’s ‘sensitivity’ did not translate to emotional sensitivity like it did for me, but instead to ‘toughness’. My Dad had the thickest metaphorical skin you could imagine.
He was a physical presence, always tying ropes, reversing boats, filleting fish, and building decks. I was in awe of but also intimidated by his masculine energy, his physical competence, his booming voice, and his larger-than-life presence with its supersized sense of humour. If he said something, it was probably a lark because he was always taking the piss and playing the larrikin. My Dad made social connections easily and was always willing to help people in physical trouble – he was the guy that would stop and help you tow your car out of the mud, flag you down if you trailer wasn’t connected properly, alert a random driver that their taillight was broken or assist to start your flooded outboard motor.
I was discouraged by his frustration at others lack of physical competence, including my own. There was a singularly right way to hammer the tent peg into the ground, but I could rarely find that way and the result was often a feeling of uselessness. Every child wants their dad to be proud of them, but in my dad’s world of building things and fixing things and pitching tents and packing trailers it felt like I had to work extra hard to seem modestly capable with my flailing biological systems. His was a firm grip, not a light touch.
Was it via genetics, or by mimetics, or by chance that I inherited my dad’s overstimulated nervous system? If the universe knows the answer, the universe keeps its secret. I would wager there is only one person in my entire suburb that knows the exact engine note of the enlarged exhaust pipe of the Nissan Silvia driven by the pizza delivery man in our local area, and that unfortunate person is me (if there are more of you out there, search for my Facebook support group “People of The Gap Brisbane Unite Against Ungodly Night-time Vehicular Vibrations”).
My sympathy for my dad’s (or anyone’s) inability to get a good night’s sleep knows no bounds. When a moth lands on the wall 3 rooms over, I am torn out of my slumber for the next 2 hours.
11. Video Games
Years later when I hit early primary school, I discovered the joys of video games, and I used them as a framework to explain the first decade or so of my life navigating the world as a super sensitive and allergic person.
I’d picture my life as a classic 8-bit game called ‘Allergy Boy’.
It was a side-scrolling platformer and Allergy Boy would run the gauntlet of the cruel world out to snuff him by leaping over chlorine filled pools and ducking under bottle brush trees bursting with pollen, picking up asthma puffer power-ups and avoiding lawn mowers spewing out grass clippings along the way. Allergy Boy would be forced to battle Cat Hair Girl and Mouldzilla, and navigate puzzle sections where he would have to eat pieces of cake to traverse a maze, but some of them are made from deadly almond meal and you have to figure out which ones to survive (hint, there is no way to tell the difference until you eat them and your throat starts closing over). The grand finale would take place in a dust riddled warehouse where the victor of the battle with your arch nemesis Peanut Man would be determined by how quick you could dodge his fiery balls of kryptonite - peanut MnMs.
12. Salt Water
Real life ‘Allergy boy’ had an actual nemesis.
Salt water.
Our camping trips were always near the beach, and we regularly swam in the shallow waves together especially when my sister and I were quite young. I was drawn to the power of the surging water, how it lifted my frail body up and down, losing myself in weightlessness, absorbed in the theme park ride of Mother Earth. I could never resist getting in the water even though I knew these blissful sensations would last mere minutes before the salt in the water made its way into my broken skin. Then, a swarm of wasps would descend on me and attack my body, the burning and stinging sensation like a thousand stabbing needles overriding all other thoughts and feelings. There is nothing that can be done once this begins except to get out of the water and stand with arms and knees bent like a wounded robot, contorted face, hopping from one foot to the other squealing as the pain cascades over your body. It’s not clear if screwing up your face helps, but it’s a universal response to such stinging so it must always be deployed.
“The saltwater is good for your skin!” I would hear.
“It helps it heal!” They would supportively say.
After 20 or 30 minutes the sharp stabbing stings would subside, replaced by a comparatively soothing burn, the heat radiating from my limbs counterbalanced by the cool ocean wind providing a momentary, calming equilibrium after the intensity of the swarm assault.
13. Medicine
When you’re unwell, if you’re like the Adelaide Gilpin’s of the 80’s, you go and see the doctor. The doctor looks at you and prescribes some sort of medicine that will help whatever ails you. This sounds like a great system, and for many, it is. My body’s particular and protracted immune system ailments required a never-ending stream of doctors’ visits and medicines in the ever-elusive search for wellness - devices, prescriptions, remedies, and gizmos that the Western Medical Industrial Complex was only too willing to continually provide – at a cost of course! You’ve got your vaporisers, nebulisers, and dehumidifiers. You’ve got your pain medication, water filtration and pills for anti-inflammation. Don’t forget your creams and lotions and potions, and your puffers and inhalers and relievers and preventers.
If all the pharmacopoeia that I have consumed and breathed in and rubbed all over my body over my entire life was laid out in a room, you wouldn't think that amount of substance could actually fit on and through a person.
But it can. And it did.
You also may be tempted to think that consuming that much medication probably isn’t particularly good for a person. You may be correct, yet this was the imperfect system we had – the factual presentation of symptoms to the well-studied physician, the diagnosis of the cause of the ailment by said Doctors, and the treatments offered and paid for and implemented by the patient and his parents. The endless search for relief. For ‘ease’. For wellness.
Existing in the medical borderlands as a chronic health sufferer meant it was rarely possible for someone like me to get the best out of such a system. Western medicine is very good at treating acute situations – broken your arm? No worries. Suffering from ongoing, chronic, overlapping, and confusing disorders with multiple symptoms that defy ease of diagnosis? Not so much.
I had schedules listed out, times of day to take pills and instructions for what to rub on my skin and when.
Please use only as prescribed by your doctor. This medicine must be taken with food. Keep out of reach of children. Avoid contact with eyes. For external use only, do not consume. This medication may cause drowsiness, if affected do not operate heavy machinery.
If symptoms persist, please see your doctor.
And they did. So, we did. And the cycle continued.
Sometimes
I feel the fear of
Uncertainty stinging clear
And I, can't help but ask myself how much I'll let the fear
Take the wheel and steer
Incubus, Drive (1999) sung by Brandon Boyd
14. Stobie Pole
I was a skinny, pale-faced, red-skinned Charlie from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory look-a-like (the classic 1971 movie version, not the awful Johnny Depp remake) by the time I hit primary school. Here, my life swung wildly between opposites: the feeling of complete freedom of carefree childhood abandon, creative play, and naïve pottering - mainly had with my sister – offset by moments of sudden fear, jolted nerves, discomfort and the terror-filled pang of embarrassment or shame.
For example, in my year 3 classroom one morning I made the gargantuan mistake of exclaiming out loud that I didn’t know what a Stobie Pole was.
My ignorance to this fact was met with the utmost incredulity by my teacher at the time, who hoisted me out of class and lead me down a long corridor past all the other classes, loudly exclaiming to other teachers, the admin staff at the front desk and anyone who we happened to meet that I had “never seen a stobie pole”. This teacher took on the honourable task of illuminating my immense daftness with gusto!
We finally arrived outside, my face cherry red, intimidation cascading through me.
“See, there’s a Stobie pole.” she gleamed.
I looked but got confused. Where was it?
“SEE” she pointed.
“Oh”, I thought, going even redder than before. It’s a power pole. Like, a pole that has power lines on it.
Of course, I had seen power poles every single day of my entire life. I knew what they were. I knew what they were for, and hurray I wasn’t a complete moron (despite feeling like one). I had just never heard of them referred to as ‘Stobie’ poles before, so the entire hullabaloo was a simple matter of labelling. Stobie poles, you’ll be fascinated to learn, are made of two steel joists connected by a slab of concrete, and were invented by an Adelaide man, James Stobie, due to a lack of long, straight timber in South Australia. So, they are a particular Adelaidean phenomenon. May you go forth, dear reader, armed with these crucial facts, never to be embarrassed by your lack of Stobie-related knowledge again!
I didn’t even have the energy to explain to the teacher that of course I knew what they were, I simply walked back to class with her as she continued exclaiming to anyone who would listen that I was a complete idiot.
If I could time travel back to that corridor and quickly catch the ear of that skinny, confused ‘sensitive’ little boy, I might whisper to him:
“Don’t be embarrassed, this is about the teacher wanting to be a hero, not you being dumb. Ask questions, be curious, be inquisitive, listen to that intuition inside you. Also, this might be hard to understand, but no experience, either good nor bad nor any feeling in-between is ever wasted - you’ll use this ridiculous stobie pole story in the book you’re going to write when you ‘grow up’ and it will be funny as all hell.”
At the time the lesson was “conspicuousness bad”, “keeping quiet, good”.
15. Simon
My best friend in early primary school in Adelaide was a lad called Simon. Simon was some kind of boy genius who would often get 100% marks on his schoolwork, was physically competent beyond belief at sports, skateboarding and that other late 80s pastime, rollerblading, was an absolute gun on video games and could endlessly produce amazing creative works when doing art and drawing at school. Was I, a weaker person, attaching myself to a much more competent person subconsciously in the hope that his brilliance would rub off on me? Of course!
An interesting thing about Simon was he looked exactly like his Mum, whilst his older brother Jonathan looked exactly like his dad. Other than his all-round virtuoso competency, his most defining feature was he suffered from a severe and often debilitating stutter. Sometimes he could talk for 20 or 30 minutes or more without a single word stumble, but if he got excited, or annoyed, or passionate about what he was saying, his ability to enunciate would become paralysed and he would trip over his words like an injured hurdler.
Jonathan used to mercilessly tease Simon about his stutter, especially when I was staying over. He would attack him and mock him and embarrass him in front of me until Simon grew angry and red in the face (making his stutter all the worse) and they would often end up in blows on the ground – not something that Simon entered lightly because Jonathan was bigger and stronger than him. Perhaps older brothers partially exist to make a fool of their younger siblings in front of their friends, like some sort of ‘evolutionary character development tool’.
Watching the teasing I recall the welling up inside of me of that sick feeling one gets when they are witnessing injustice or cruelty, my over-sympathetic nervous system seemingly extending the tendrils of empathy outwards towards my friend so I could feel all his frustration and rage as if it was my own. Allergy Boy’s kryptonite was other people’s suffering.
Simon was of course a chess genius to go with his other types of genius. Some afternoons when I was hanging with his family after school pick up, I would accompany him to his chess practise which took place in a large hall with tables laid out with chess sets with those little chess timers deployed next to each one.
Every time I entered that hall, a feeling of deficiency would wash over me. I didn’t really know how to play chess. I knew the rules but wasn’t very good at playing, as Simon had proven many times over our friendship by handing my chess ass to me each time we did battle. Why did I feel so inferior in this chess crowd? It wasn’t as if I was supposed to be good at chess, I wasn’t even really playing. There was a growing sense each time I went there that I was on the outside looking in, that I wasn’t competent enough or clear enough in my passions to know what would make me feel good and engaged and alive. I mean, I was only 8 years old (!), but there was an emerging sense of my washed-out self, reinforced by the clarity that others seemed to hold – their skills and their passions and their abilities a mirror to my sense of lacking.
One thing about this period; I always felt like I didn’t have enough clothes on, like my body was exposed, like that sense of being seen was something to hide from. It was as if I was arriving at school, or the aforementioned chess hall, only in my underwear - like so many bad dreams we all have.
16. Groin
When I was 9 I required surgery on my groin because my left teste would ‘disappear’ up into my abdomen and get stuck there. If I pushed gently in the correct spot near my navel, I could ‘pop’ Lefty out again and he (it seems natural to personify a teste with a male gender) would settle back to his regular place, dangling next to his old friend Righty.
I kind of enjoyed this game because it was my body and if I wanted to pop my nut in and out of my stomach, I should be allowed to. After a few months of popping, ol’ Lefty began to grow shy and developed a hesitance to return ‘back to his sack’. The jig was up, and after much poking and prodding from more doctors, a day surgery was executed. I remember the deep colour of the tar of the surgery antiseptic that was painted across my lower abdomen and groin post-surgery, and the unfathomable ache that permeated my entire nether regions, the memory of which would make my future vasectomy feel like a light tickle from a soft onshore breeze.
I was recovering from surgery when my school had its sports carnival. I used to love sports day so my Mum took me along even though I was very tender and limping along hence couldn’t participate. My keenness to be there and see my friends was quickly overshadowed with the intense hot flush of embarrassment when my friends started asking why I had been away and what was wrong with me. Using all my finely-honed quick-witted skills to instinctively summons an impenetrable wall of a story to hide from them the truth of my predicament, I mumbled
“I had an operation on my stomach”.
Absolute genius I thought as my broiling mortification began to fade. Speaking of my genitals and the surgery they needed to be ‘normal’ was not in the realm of comprehension to my little mind, only shielding myself from the shame of my shy ball mattered - that social reflex to hide the truth carving deeper and more regular channels in my mind.
Don't speak, I know just what you're sayin'
So please stop explainin'
Don't tell me 'cause it hurts
Don't Speak (1995) by No Doubt sung by Gwen Stefani
17. Peter
My other best bud in primary school was a boy called Peter. We spent multiple afternoons playing at each other’s houses, went on holidays together and loved playing sport and racing matchbox cars across his trampoline for hours whilst his pet Jack Russel terrier Emma created a racetrack groove doing laps around his house.
Peter was a very fast runner. I was quite fast too – mainly because of my hollow bones and light weight - but I can comfortably say that he was faster than me, even though I would never admit this to him (or myself) at the time.
These are the sorts of things that are of vital importance to primary school boys. The imagined hierarchy of the playground is organised by critical issues like who’s the best at handball, or the fastest in races, who has the most He-man stickers on his school bag or the best transformers collection.
With Peter and I so close and spending so much time with each other’s families, I noticed one day that he had orthotic inserts in his shoes. Back in the late 80s these were the red acrylic kind that had been moulded specifically to his feet. Peter was instantly ashamed that I had seen them and made me promise, absolutely swear on my life, not to tell anyone about them. I didn’t really understand why it was such an issue but obviously I’d been exposed to his vulnerability, and he was very keen to protect it.
“I won’t tell anyone”.
It felt special to be trusted with such a secret, even one revealed in error, as if our bond could be measured in the things that we knew about one other that we would protect out of honour to our mate. It was obvious that Peter knew about my skin problems, but we never really talked about it, he didn’t even seem to notice. I felt more powerful and protected when I was around him at school, secure in our bond and the depth of our friendship forged over so much carefree time spent together. It was interesting to feel the force of his (seemingly outsize) shame about his orthotics whilst I sat there with warts all over my knuckles and broken, red flaky skin peeling off all around my knees and elbows.
After school one day, Peter was playing handball with a couple of older kids I was unfamiliar with, one of whom turned to me and asked
“What’s all that on your arms and legs?”
This was ‘the question’ I had to field often. The one that triggered that unbearable jolt of electrical conspicuousness. A pump on the nervous system accelerator, surging the desire to hide. Before I could answer, Peter scowled
“It’s because he’s diseased and his skin is all disgusting” as he turned away from me, repulsed.
More so than any direct teasing I suffered at the hands of kids who didn’t know me or were looking for a cheap thrill (there were plenty), these words confused me deeply. The broken skin and red rash covering my arms and legs couldn’t be slipped away into my shoes, hidden from judging eyes. My shame was on the outside, warts and all.
It wasn’t as if Peter was wrong, however. What he said was true! And that was the most devastating thing about it, the truth revealed by a close friend in a way that showed the full extent of his own disgust which simply mirrored my own.
In that moment it flashed into my mind to lash out and expose Peter’s orthotics secret, defending my honour with the only tool I had - weaponizing my knowledge of his secret into an attack. I would expose his fast running as a fraud! I would betray him in the same way he betrayed me! I would mock and laugh at his weaknesses so I could climb back into a position of power and away from my own exposed frailties as all kids look to as they battle for school yard supremacy!
Of course, I didn’t do this. Instead, I sunk into myself, shuffling away with a stone in my throat.
I never mentioned anything about how I felt to Peter – my alexithymia rising. We were still friends and still played together in that odd way that young boys do – you can fight one another or treat each other like shit, then turn around and be all “do you want to come over and play video games?”
Soon after we moved away to Queensland, and I didn’t speak to my one-time best bud again.
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Thanks for reading episode 1 / 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_
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References and Links
Men In Black (1997) – The Best of the Best of the Best
The Lord of the Rings - The Fellowship of the Ring – You Shall Not Pass
Seinfeld – Some Ugly Baby
Jefferson Airplane – White Rabbit (1967)
Unchained Melody from the movie Ghost – The Righteous Brothers (1965)
Beds are Burning – Midnight Oil (1987)
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1971) - Music
Stutter Rap (No Sleep Time Bedtime) – Morris Minor and the Majors (1988)
Simpsons – Just Picture Them In Their Underwear
Metallica. Nothing Else Matters. Metallica. s.l. : Elektra Records, 1991.
Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. s.l. : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978.
Radiohead. Creep. Pablo Honey. 1993.
Jam, Pearl. I Am Mine. Riot Act. 2002.
Borman, Colonel Frank, [perf.]. Apollo 8 Astronauts First See Earth From Space. [Youtube]. The Atlantic; 2019
Shakespeare, William. Timon of Athens.
Louis-Dreyfus, Julia, [perf.]. Seinfeld. [Television]. NBC, 1994.
Fincher, David. Fight Club. [Film]. [writ.] Chuck Palahnuik. [perf.] Edward Norton. Fox 2000 Pictures, 1999.
Mcguinness, Philipa. Skin Deep. s.l. : Penguin Random House, 2022.
Peppers, Red Hot Chili. Scar Tissue. Californication. 1999.
Kolk, Bessel Van Der. The Body Keeps The Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. 2014.
Incubus. Drive. Make Yourself. s.l. : Immortal Records, 1999.
Doubt, No. Don't Speak. [perf.] Gwen Stefani. Tragic Kingdom. 1995.
S1 Ep01 - Confessions of an Itchoholic