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FALLING APART

It was a chat with a philosopher that finally tipped me over the edge. He was sharing his wisdom on the power of solitude. ‘It’s the capacity to confront and accept your own existence without needing others around to entertain or distract you,’ he said cheerfully, as I gripped the phone, my knuckles whitening.

Suddenly, that familiar sense of dread engulfed me. He was still talking, but I was no longer listening. The only sound I could hear was the thundering of blood rushing to my head. My heart hammered. I was trapped on this phone call with a modern-day Socrates, schooling me on ‘human complication’ and the calm that comes from truly knowing yourself, and I was being buried by an avalanche of panic. My mind raced in time with the pulsing in my chest as I applied his words to my life. I’m not calm. I don’t know myself at all. What the fuck is wrong with me?

The anxiety only intensified with every catastrophic thought. It was a death roll, and I felt powerless to stop it.

My brain tried to save me by faking a coughing fit. I hung up the phone mid-sentence. And then I was on the newsroom floor, gasping for breath like a freshly caught fish flip-flopping on the deck of a boat.

My friend and colleague Chris stood up from the desk opposite mine. ‘Jesus, Starkers, you alright?’

‘I can’t breathe.’

Dying felt like a certainty. In these moments it often feels as if that would be a better option than living through another minute. It’s like a scene from a horror movie where the petrified girl is running down a darkened corridor in her nightgown. Except the predator is my own mind. I tried to breathe deeply, in and out, in and out. Science tells us that it’s impossible to panic if you practise diaphragmatic breathing: the body and mind are so interconnected that breathing deeply has an automatic calming effect. But that’s not always easy to believe when it feels like insanity or cardiac arrest are real possibilities. Electric shocks surged from the tips of my toes to the crown of my skull. I was petrified. I wanted to slam my head against the wall just to make it stop.

It was Saturday, the quietest day of the week. My bosses at the news desk couldn’t see my meltdown from where they sat. Only Chris bore witness. He’d never seen this side of me. I didn’t dare look at him for fear of what I would see written on his face. Anxiety had been with me since I was child, but few people knew the extent of my history. It had been years since I’d experienced anything like this. And never at work.

I lay on the floor in child’s pose, face down, knees tucked beneath my chest, arms by my sides, willing myself to keep breathing. I couldn’t stay here. I stood up, my hands trembling as I inhaled and exhaled. Slow, deep breaths. I picked up the phone and redialled the philosopher’s number. ‘Hi, Damon. Sorry about that. I’ve got a really bad cough at the moment. Just had to get some water.’

I finished the interview. The piece I wrote about the lost art of solitude ended up as a front-page story the following Sunday. The headline read ‘Why Being Alone Means Keeping Good Company’. The image underneath was of a pigtailed girl in a flannel shirt, jeans, and hiking boots sitting cross-legged on a rock in a darkened forest, her face illuminated by the tablet in her hands. Take away the digital device and she looked like a 15-year-old me.

This story would be the last one I wrote for almost five months. It was October 2014, and I had reached my life’s peak. But I had fallen apart.

In February the previous year, my first book, High Sobriety — a memoir about my tumultuous twelve months off the booze, set against a backdrop of Australia’s binge-drinking culture — had been published. It soon became a bestseller and was even shortlisted for literary awards.

It came at a time when my career was flying. I was working in my dream job as a senior writer at The Sunday Age, writing long-form features and opinion pieces on issues that fired my passion for social justice. I was living the life I’d always imagined.

Publishing a book was all I’d wanted to do since I was a nerdy wee girl growing up in Scotland. And it was everything I’d hoped it would be. During a blissful few months that felt like it would never end, I had to pinch myself as I was thrust headlong into a whirlwind Festival of Me. Mum flew in from Edinburgh and joined me on a national tour, where I jetted around the country doing bookshop signings, TV appearances, and radio interviews with some of my journalistic idols. I gasped as I saw my memoir in an airport bookshop on the biography shelf right next to Bruce Springsteen’s, his head tilted quizzically to one side, those dreamy bedroom eyes gazing at the letters of my name, which had been fashioned into the shape of a beer bottle. My emotions pinballed back and forth between rapture and delirium. My face ached from all the smiling.

It went on long after the book was launched. One day, a young man tapped me on the shoulder on the tram home from work and asked if I was Jill Stark. ‘Oh my God,’ he said. ‘Your book is changing my life.’

I was giddy. At one point during those heady months — I think it was after a phone interview in my bikini on the beach in Noosa — I may even have gazed skywards like a character in an old black-and-white movie, drawing in a breath as I uttered the words, ‘This is living.’ It was a hedonistic hurricane of writers’ festivals, launch parties, and awards ceremonies, where I sipped champagne and exchanged edgy banter with highbrow literary types I’d previously known only from the covers of books. I was in fantasy land, experiencing spikes of joy that felt intense enough to knock me over.

The buoyancy of success also invigorated my romantic life, and as the year progressed I fell into a series of hot-and-heavy flings with attractive young men who made me feel like a lovesick teenager. At the business end of the footy season I began dating an AFL player. Young and not much of a conversationalist, he liked to hunt wild animals in his spare time. He giggled as he made me watch YouTube montages of people falling off ladders and being hit in the face with basketballs. But I pretended not to notice any of this because he was kind and sweet, and his chiselled body was such a perfectly formed piece of art it would have been more at home in a modern sculpture gallery than in my bed.

On one particularly surreal evening, I found myself on assignment, six floors up, in the Grand Hyatt’s diplomatic suite, waiting to interview Captain Kirk himself, Hollywood legend William Shatner. As the city lights cast an otherworldly glow on the Yarra below, I heard the world’s most famous intergalactic traveller pad down the hallway. At that moment, my phone beeped. It was an explicit text message from my AFL player asking when he could next see his ‘Scottish cougar’. A rush of euphoria washed over me. I rested my head against the notepad on my knees and grinned. This was surely the most ridiculous year of my life. I had reached it: the happy-ever-after.

But something wasn’t quite right. In truth, my joy was a free-falling, anchorless kind of happy that at times bordered on mania. The more praise I got, the more I craved. I was like a crack addict chasing my next fix. And there was never enough. When people were emailing and tweeting and stopping me on the street to tell me they admired my work, it felt amazing. But once the euphoria wore off, something malignant began to grow. Just as I had once used the manufactured high of alcohol to fill the gap, praise had become my new drug. And just like drinking, those first few drinks were always the best. Then I’d try to recapture that buzz again and again, with ever-diminishing returns. I’d find myself refreshing Twitter and Facebook, replaying interviews, and looking up old reviews online as I scrabbled around for more adulation. There was never enough. My self-worth had been pinned to an external vision of my life that was so distorted it was like looking at my reflection in a carnival hall of mirrors.

As the months went on, friends and colleagues remarked on how awesome it must feel to have your dreams come true. I would proffer that ear-to-ear grin that people have come to expect of those who have reached the top of their game. Then I would nod, telling them that yes, it really was amazing and I’d never been happier. Privately, I was falling down the rabbit hole. I felt lost and alone.

I couldn’t understand it. I should have been at peace with myself. The self-doubt that had been my companion for as long as I could remember should have been replaced by full-to-the-brim happiness. Instead, I was empty. This wasn’t just the absence of something; it was a ravenous hunger — an emptiness so absolute I felt starved deep in my bones.

But I was faking it like a champion. On stage at Melbourne’s Wheeler Centre, delivering a lunchtime lecture on the lessons I’d learned during my year off the booze, I had a full-blown panic attack in front of 100 people.

I watch the video on their website occasionally to remind myself of how so many of our struggles are hidden. At the eight-minute mark I pause, clear my throat, and reach for a glass of water. I am smiling, but inside, this is the exact moment where I felt like my heart might stop beating. The room swayed. My knees shook beneath the podium. Sweat trickled down my arms. But I kept going. I later asked a friend in the audience if she’d noticed my distress. Did she see my hands quivering as the voice in my head screamed RUN! RUN NOW!? She hadn’t noticed a thing. Few people knew the truth.

Later that year I went to the United Kingdom, launching the book in Edinburgh, my home town, in front of old friends, colleagues, family, and my high-school English teacher. I spent most of my trip home accepting congratulations through gritted teeth, ravaged by anxiety. During a studio interview with BBC Five Live, the panic hit so hard my hands bunched into claws, gripping the edge of the desk in a bid to stop myself toppling off my chair.

I kept going until I couldn’t anymore. A year and a half after the realisation of a series of dreams that I thought would be my happy-ever-after, I was plunged into the darkest period of my life. I couldn’t work, I couldn’t eat, I barely left the house. After months of panic, a deep depression descended and things became desperate. Close friends kept vigil as I clung on to a life I wasn’t sure I wanted. They were seeing a part of me I had guarded so closely.

My internal crisis — unfurling in my mind like a bad stage play in which the protagonist has forgotten all their lines — had broken the fourth wall. The effort it took to keep smiling through the terror had pushed me to a breakdown. Here was incontrovertible proof of what I had long believed: I was bat-shit crazy.

For all my reporting on mental illness and the importance of breaking down stigma, I was terrified of what people would think. Outwardly, I was the outspoken firebrand — a journalist who started Twitter wars with homophobes and was as comfortable holding court in the pub as delivering a public lecture. The world hadn’t seen the me that couldn’t catch a tram for more than two stops without hyperventilating. Or the me that was googling ‘how to kill yourself without hurting the people you love’ in the middle of the night.

But there was no more hiding. I was a shell. A hollowed-out version of the three-dimensional person my friends had once known. The days dragged on at a glacial pace. Each morning, the weight of what lay ahead pinned me to the bed. It felt like a barbell crushing my chest. Sleep was fleeting; I snatched an hour or two at a time. The brief respite it provided seemed to fuel my anxiety — all that dormant time without a voice. Upon waking, it screamed at me everything that had been left unsaid while I slept. A pent-up jumble of my worst fears and insecurities spewed forth at warp speed, like the mutterings of a born-again Evangelical speaking in tongues.

As the months off work continued, my absence from the newsroom became more conspicuous. I considered concocting an elaborate backstory: a rich elderly relative had left me a generous inheritance and I’d gone home to Scotland to claim my castle in the Highlands. Or I was a contestant on The Bachelor and had been secretly filming hot-air balloon dates with a wooden-jawed Ken doll and 21 random girlfriends. The truth seemed an easier sell. I started to open up to colleagues, contacts, friends, and even strangers. Almost every person I confided in had their own stories to tell. Depression was common, anxiety even more so. One work friend told me how she’d taken months off work when her anxiety got so bad she was throwing up in the staff toilets every morning. I’d just presumed she was on holiday. Another said the panic attacks he’d suffered since his teens were still a constant feature. He seemed such a confident, laidback bloke. A friend shared the details of a breakdown that had forced her to move to the other side of the country rather than face the people who’d seen her fall apart. She was one of the fiercest women I knew. So many people were medicated: antidepressants, sleeping pills, relaxants. They all secretly worried they were not normal.

As I tried to rebuild myself, I started to see that there were struggles all around me. And it wasn’t only those who were living with clinical depression or anxiety. When I scratched the surface I found a recurring theme: people were worn out. They spoke of unmanageable stress and an overwhelming sense of being ‘always on’. The pace of modern life was exhausting. There was a listlessness — a collective sense of ennui — with the constant striving for success and satisfaction. It was the search for something that seemed tantalisingly close but remained forever out of reach, a frantic and often fruitless pursuit of happiness in an age of anxiety. Something about twenty-first-century living was making it harder than ever to stay calm.

People were wired, their brains like overheated laptops struggling to run dozens of open windows at once. Everything was just too damn fast and impossibly loud. The phones we clutched in our hands had become extensions of ourselves. We’d forgotten where the online version of ourselves stopped and the real selves started. Those I spoke to felt trapped in a constant feedback loop of digital distraction and white noise. It was almost impossible to switch off.

I could relate to all this. In the modern age, there is little downtime and always more to do. I reach for my phone to find escape only to face a barrage of atrocities and doomsday predictions every time I refresh the screen. How do you stay positive when an insatiable twenty-four-hour news cycle reminds you in graphic detail that we live in bitterly divided, post-truth times defined by global terrorism, catastrophic climate change, and the mass displacement of our planet’s most vulnerable people?

On Instagram, a deluge of ‘inspirational’ memes jostle for space with images of shiny-faced fitspo bloggers #feelingblessed who offer hackneyed answers as they sit cross-legged against sunsets filtered to storybook perfection. On Facebook, achievements are curated into greatest-hits packages, bolstering the narrative that happiness comes from the key pillars of success — finding a partner, making babies, climbing the career ladder, and owning more stuff. Life’s failures and disappointments are airbrushed out of the picture. So often it has left me feeling that I must do better. I must be better. And when I shared my worries with people around me, I found that so many of them felt the same. There was a sense of not being enough. A feeling that we are all failing in a world with impossible standards.

If the pursuit of happiness and perfection has become a competitive sport, I had played the game like a pro. I had bought the home, landed the dream job, written the book, dated gorgeous men, and generally lived the dream, documenting every step online because what’s the point of success if you can’t make people on the internet jealous? But all the achievements I thought would make me whole turned out to be red herrings. I could have had a Pulitzer Prize under one arm and Ryan Gosling under the other and it still wouldn’t have been enough. My happy-ever-after had been built on quicksand.

When the wheels fell off, I had no idea what to do next. I was living in a world that promised me I could have it all, and here I was at the pinnacle, utterly bereft. But if I was broken, the culture that formed a backdrop to my disintegration had surely played a part in that fracturing. It’s a culture that views sadness as abnormal, particularly when you’ve ‘made it’; a culture so afraid of feelings that we think we can spend, drink, or click our way out of the blues. It’s a culture frenzied by the constant need for online connection and external validation, with no room for solitude, silence, or switching off; an environment in which millions of us feel like we’re drowning in an ocean of toxic stress but feel shamed for not being as happy as we should be by the very forces fuelling the problem. Could it be that the pursuit of happiness is making us miserable?

It can’t be a coincidence that the worst period of my life followed one that was supposed to be the best. This book is an attempt to find out why. It is an examination of the enormous psychological challenges we all face in the modern era, but also an attempt to uncover what lies beneath so much of our discontent.

As I tried to put myself back together, I discovered that while my happiness fairytale had been a fantasy, and twenty-first-century living might be adding to my sense of feeling overwhelmed, these things weren’t the sole cause of my anxiety. I looked into my past and found that this mental collapse had deep and complex roots stretching all the way back to childhood. And so I began to untangle the roots, embracing and understanding those messy, painful parts of me I’d long tried to deny. What I found forms the backbone of this story. It has been quite a journey. I continue to walk it daily, one step at a time. Often I stumble. Sometimes I feel like I’m going backwards. I have not been freed from pain or transformed into a barefoot guru, at one with the universe. But I am learning what drives my emotional suffering, tracing its history all the way back to a time before I could give it a name. And I am learning how to live well in our age of anxiety.

The process of unsnarling these roots has been illuminating, bewildering, and at times utterly terrifying. But ultimately, it has been lifesaving. It has taught me that happiness is not what we think it is, and that we all have struggles we worry we can’t survive. Our challenge is to not run from that discomfort, but to make room for it and have the courage to hold it up to the light.