I should mention, my parents were chillin’ in the background this whole time. My brothers were there too, having spent most of the last five years in their bedroom, making their way through video games with religious fervour.
I had gone through my entire life without ever feeling the urge to move house and leave my family. I couldn’t imagine a world without them. But now that I was at uni, I could see the freedom that Amber and others had was within reach. I could have a whole house to myself, or half a house, or a unit. Not just a room, but a whole place.
The idea that I didn’t have my own place was outrageous, and I grew bitter about being trapped at home. I took my frustrations out on my family with my best angry-young-man act.
All the small things about my family that were once mere annoyances grew into thorny resentments. Perhaps this is part of growing up: you suddenly feel entitled to feeling let down, or hurt, by what your family wouldn’t or couldn’t supply to you.
It had happened one other time in my life, when I was just twelve. It was a Saturday afternoon. We’d travelled to the city with a singular purpose: to have our picture taken with the extended family. It was to be a gift for our grandmother.
The twins were just ten. I was also in primary school, not too far away from the moment when Cameron’s hands would reach my neck and drag me across a certain visual arts table. The last time my family had been bundled into a photography studio, it had ended in disaster, with Andy and Chrissy spiralling into anxiety. I was already sceptical that my family could pretend to be normal for the sake of a photograph. Before the camera was even set up, there was trouble.
Chrissy wasn’t happy. It had been a long, uncomfortable drive. He’d been made to wear an ironed shirt with buttons down the front and shoes that weren’t comfortable. Chrissy’s anxiety caused Andy’s to rise in turn.
‘Just shut up!’ Andy told Chrissy repeatedly.
And so Chrissy squashed his anxiety further inside. He turned his attention to the hot red eczema marks that were up and down his arms, and Andy turned to his too. They scratched without thinking, the flaky skin growing redder and angrier with each passing moment.
A stranger touching Chrissy was strictly no-go, so when the young photographer touched him lightly in an attempt to reposition him for the photo, his body immediately tensed up. Andy, seeing this, but not wanting to chastise him in front of the extended family, whispered a harsh warning. Dad asked Andy to calm down. Andy took to his skin like sandpaper. It began to bleed. Chrissy’s innocent eyes filled with tears.
‘Smile!’ said the photographer.
The moment was captured forever and would be hung on our grandmother’s wall like a prize. I remember looking out into the camera and smiling, but aware of my cousins around me: no one else was having anything like a stressful reaction.
Why should they? It was just a photo.
This is the first moment I can remember being properly furious with my family. The boys were exhausted and quiet on the drive back. But now I was the one who wanted to take to the interior of the car and scratch at it red raw.
‘Why couldn’t you be normal?’ I snapped at them.
Dad interrupted before the boys could respond. ‘It’s all right, it’s all over now.’
But it wasn’t over. This was my family for the rest of my life, and the boys couldn’t even take a photo. I wanted to scream at how unfair my life was.
Mum tried to calm me down.
‘I know it’s hard,’ she said. ‘But you’ve just got to accept it. They are the way they are.’
I began an extended campaign to prove them wrong.
While I was trying to survive my personal high-school ordeal, the boys were trying to survive theirs.
Primary school had been tolerable for them for a couple of reasons. One was the tiny size of the country school, where all manner of eccentricities were accepted and embraced. Another was the fact that my father was their teacher for their final years there.
A student’s success at primary school is softly measured. Children are measured against themselves: how far they’ve come from where they were, whether they’re in danger of falling back. Once you hit secondary school, you’re clearly told that the time of being a child is over. Success is now measured by the distance between you and that of an acceptably functioning adult. So, the boys went directly from an environment where their own pace of progress was applauded to one where they were destined to fail.
My brothers attended a large public high school on the other side of town from mine. It was reputed to have the best special-education unit in the state.
It’s difficult to imagine that first day for the twins. I was in year ten at the time, at the zenith of my complications with Mary.
There would have been noise. A lot of it. It would have been amplified in their ears, a constant hum of anxiety. Buildings in all directions, jammed full of teenagers—laughing, pushing and cajoling each other. Andy and Chrissy would have been led by the hand to the special-education unit, a beautifully equipped room, recently refurbished.
Inside, a chaotic mix of strangers awaited them. Students in wheelchairs, their limbs hanging limply and their faces resting on their shoulders, their shirts collecting drool. Another few yelling and swearing at the top of their lungs, trying desperately to overpower the mild-mannered, middle-aged women who were trying to manage them. The silent. The meek. The frustrated. The terminally ill. The boys were brought to this room and told, ‘You belong here’.
Chrissy’s soul would’ve curled up and tucked itself away somewhere inside, hiding in deep fear. Andy would’ve breathed in, puffed his chest outwards. He would make it his personal mission to be normal, even if it killed him.
Chrissy’s time at the high school was brief and rarely pleasant. The wonderfully kind, gently innocent individual we all knew and loved was threatening to disappear forever. Under the strain of adolescence and the cacophony of high school, Chrissy was becoming someone else. He would resort to the only language he knew to explain it: the dialogue of Spider-man’s Venom, or Pokémon’s MewTwo, or a ‘very naughty engine’ from Thomas the Tank Engine. Within a few short months, the Chrissy that would never hurt a fly turned angry and dark. He yelled at teachers, scratched his arms raw, and threw punches at desks and chairs. He had an escape valve: a walk around the oval.
While I’m sitting in a boring lesson, in between trying to figure out if Christine Pennyworth likes me and what I can do to make Mary laugh, my mind turns to imagining what Chrissy’s doing at that precise moment. I see him in the peace of a school oval. The sky is enormous and blue and stretches far above him. He surrenders to it, lost in the endlessness of it. The school, with its noise and nonsense, is miles away, a small collection of buildings in the distance. It can’t bother him out here.
I imagine I’m walking beside him. I’m envious of his escape route. I look up into the sky with him and wonder if he can see more than me. Maybe he sees beyond the blue, into the black, into the stars and planets that circle around him, letting him play with them in a ceaseless cosmic dance that calms him down.
I imagine him feeling the gentle tap on the shoulder from his teacher. It’s time to go back inside. His heart breaks. But, because he doesn’t want to let his family down, he turns around and follows his teacher back inside, back to his own personal hell.
When the time on the oval became greater than the time he spent in the classroom, the futility of the exercise was apparent. Chrissy assumed a part-time enrolment that gradually shrank smaller and smaller. By the end of year nine, he was out of school completely.
Andy lasted longer out of sheer will and determination. He went to normal classes with the assistance of a teacher’s aide, but he often asked to step outside. The sheer volume of noise and the other students’ apparent inability to listen to the teacher and follow very logical instructions completely stressed him out. High school should be a logical place. A teacher tells you something. You do it. Done. Andy couldn’t accept the huge number of variables within this simple equation. Worse, he was told, implicitly, that these students were ‘normal’ and he was the ‘special’ one.
Of course, Andy was an easy target for vicious and unintelligent bullies, who would degrade him with the usual litany of insults that the terminally stupid always seem to reach for: gay, faggot, cock head, etc. He would come home speaking of his ‘nemesis’. Seen through the lens of his pop-culture glasses, high school was a battleground, and he was the hero, striding forth to survive in a world that was up against him.
Andy made it his personal goal to get to the end of year ten. He made it, but the effort left him exhausted. His skin was raw, and he was almost permanently set against the human race.
Mum, Dad and I were proud of him and of Chrissy for how long they’d managed to tough it out. But I was a loud (and probably annoying) voice in my parents’ discussions about the boys. Mum and Dad constantly wrestled with the question: how far do we push them? How much do we let them rest? Usually, Dad would lean towards the gentler option. I would lean to the more aggressive side. Mum would be somewhere in the middle.
Part of my behaviour was motivated by jealousy. In fact, a lot of it was jealousy. I had lost so many hours of my life, strapped to a school desk trying to find a way to tolerate and accept the chaos that was happening around me. I’d never once had the option to escape to the school oval for a breather, or to work with a personal assistant to receive my education at my own pace. Mum and Dad had done all they could. They talked with my teachers about bumping me up to classes that were above my year in order to keep me engaged and challenged. They even offered me the same deal they gave to the boys: get out; be homeschooled.
I didn’t see that as an option; I wanted to be normal more than anything. So I was destined to be unhappy no matter what I did. If I fell out of school, I was a failure, and I resented that I had to figure it out while the boys received a special pass. To be honest, it infuriated me.
This wasn’t to say that I didn’t regard the boys as special cases, or that I dismissed their very real disability. A big part of me wanted to protect them, to go to their school and fix it for them. This is the contradiction in all families, I guess: that thing that will drive you bonkers if you let it. It’s a feat of emotional quantum trickery: you simultaneously feel protective, loving and loyal to your family, as much as you do infuriated, resentful and bitter about them. And that’s not to mention the incessant guilt that you feel for being infuriated, resentful or bitter about them.
Underneath all of this I had a deep concern for my parents. Dad was rapidly running out of energy for his teaching career. Mum was under attack from frequent migraines, lost in her own battles between motherhood and career. Both in difficult places and under a lot of pressure, Mum and Dad saw a number of psychologists and psychiatrists who had prescribed them antidepressants for years. The boys, facing their own anxieties, were also given medication. For all of my adolescence, I was the only family member not on antidepressants. Even our dog, bound in neurosis and skin itches, had a pill hidden in her breakfast each morning.
This point of difference wasn’t for lack of trying on my parents’ part. There were many times when they thought medication would help me, and they held a continual campaign to get me to go and see a psychologist. But I wasn’t concerned about my mental state; I was more worried about them. With my entire family medicated and stressed out, I feared they would detach from the world and lose their way, and perhaps take me with them.
With militant zeal, I took on the task of making sure this didn’t happen. I wanted a family that could take a goddam picture. I wanted a family that didn’t start its day with a conveyor belt of pills. I wanted a family that went on holidays and did things. I wanted a family who didn’t celebrate special occasions by going out to Sizzler. Every. Goddam. Time. (Chrissy is a big fan of the spaghetti. It’s one of the only things he’ll eat out. Sizzler spaghetti.)
It was difficult for Mum and Dad to register this effort of mine as anything other than shame for the way our family operated, and they responded with a complex range of emotions. Part of them wanted me to be afforded the opportunities that many other kids in my position had, so they reacted to things like the Rachel and New Zealand trip with absolute glee, stained with guilt for not being able to provide such an experience themselves.
My frustration with them often surfaced as irritability. I took on the role of cultural snob in many of my interactions with them, to which they responded in kind. Whenever I talked proudly of my drama degree, elements of which they would happily admit they didn’t understand, they would often dismiss my passion with laughter, warning me not to turn into a high-falutin’ arty farter. This game of making all of us feel bad about ourselves created no winners, but it soon became a habit.
Already confused and suffering from anxiety around my sexuality, career and general human worth in the world, I now added an unhealthy mental dialogue about my family, which was no assistance whatsoever.
This tightly wound nest of intense emotions festered over many years. It’s amazing how long negativity can sustain itself. During that difficult time, with schooling, retirement, depression and anxiety all happening concurrently, we all suffered.
Something had to give.
In the second year of uni, I made the seemingly ‘normal’ decision to move out of home. It caused enough of a schism in my family to threaten to tear us apart for good.
On the day after I moved out, my mother was on the phone, angrier than almost any other time I had heard her. Several weeks ago, I had given a copy of a DVD to a uni friend, who was yet to return it. Mum wanted to lend it to one of her friends.
‘This is so like you,’ she said. ‘Selfish. Putting your friends before your family. Your friends before mine. As if your friends are more important.’
We swapped sharp words for many minutes before I finally said: ‘Mum, are you upset about the DVD? Or are you upset that I’ve moved out of home?’
Silence.
‘Well,’ she said eventually, still furious, ‘it’s true, isn’t it? You put your friends before us.’
There was little I could say in response. Yes, right now I was putting my friends before my family. It felt like the right thing to do. I was a nineteen-year-old student.
The conversation fizzled, and I told her I’d get the DVD back to her as soon as I could. I hung up the phone. I had no idea how to have a relationship with my family that didn’t involve me living with them. Maybe I was selfish. Maybe I should have stayed at home for longer. It soon became clear that my choice of roommates was not ideal. I moved into a house with Ravi and Rachel, and the household turned out to be about as functional as you’d expect it to be, with each of us confused about who or what we wanted.
On our first night in our new home, and my first night away from my family, we discovered our landlord had left two cases of pre-mixed vodka in the run-down fridge in the garage. We took to it with gusto. After a lengthy night of drinking, we stumbled to bed. My bedroom was not yet set up, so I climbed into Rachel’s, where I promptly projectile-vomited all over her very expensive mattress and pink-frilled doona. While the translucent poison of the alcohol came bursting from my nose and mouth in great gushing spurts, I had a brief thought: maybe the whole not-living-with-my-family thing won’t work out quite the way I was expecting.
Our house had an enormous yard, and it became the party rendezvous for the entire university arts faculty. After my initial flirtation with parties, they had lost their novelty. They had gone back to causing me anxiety. I felt out of place. I just wanted to watch television quietly and go to bed.
Two nights after I moved in, the house was filled with drunk, noisy theatre students. After several hours of pretending to enjoy myself, I slipped away quietly to my room. It was after midnight; I needed to sleep. When I switched on the light, I found two of my classmates, half-naked and making out, on my bed. I switched off the light and left them to it.
I drove back to my family home. I still had keys. The house was sweetly silent. I curled up on the couch in the living room and fell asleep instantly.
The next morning, I snuck out before anyone saw me.
I moved in with Amber a couple of months later.
The decision to live with Amber turned out to be a stroke of genius. My friendship with Amber was pretty much my first healthy friendship with a female ever. I found in her something I had found nowhere else: laughter, safety and mutual respect. After years of searching, out of nowhere, and without really looking, I had found the positive female friendship that I’d always wanted.
With Amber, I finally started to come home. The person I found when I walked through our front door, in our small (but tidier than average) uni flat, was supportive and welcoming. Beside her, I would find myself to be a generous and likeable young man. I sat with long limbs at odd angles, laughing with her on the couch and sipping a beer, about to enter the fifth consecutive hour of television, relaxed and smiling. I was quietly astounded. It was a version of myself that I had never known. I was a stranger to myself.
I was me. But I was happy.
I hadn’t realised it before, but I had been lonely for most of my life. I had been too wound up in anxiety and negativity to truly connect with anyone. Running away from myself, from friendships, from my family, had left me alone and locked inside my own head for a long time. I thought I had had good friends, but my relationships had been so laden with other circumstances that I had never allowed them to grow into true friendships.
‘I have an exam tomorrow,’ Amber sighs.
‘You deserve a break,’ I say. ‘I’m putting a Friends DVD in.’
‘Good. Right. Where’s the remote?’
‘I’ve got it.’
‘Can you hit “play all”, please, David?’
‘But what about your exam?’
‘Play. All.’
Across town, our fellow students were having a party. We were watching Friends and laughing and asleep by ten. It was perfect.
But my mind wrestled with guilt. Perhaps it was selfish to seek such comfort. It was certainly disrespectful to be openly disdainful of my family. I’m still not sure what a child owes their parents once they grow up, or vice versa. In a period of your life where everything is about choice (your friends, your mode of study, your living arrangements) it’s difficult to give your family the respect they deserve. There’s a lot of other things going on.
I didn’t realise I was hurting people in quite a profound way, purely because I didn’t have the courage to turn around and examine my actions properly.
I had played recklessly with Rachel’s heart.
I had not given my parents the acknowledgment they were due. They had both made every effort to make me happy. This included attempting to combat my depressive nature with numerous doctors’ visits. I hadn’t let them.
Truth was, I didn’t stop to reflect or really talk about my family with anyone, least of all myself. My stance was clear. I was growing up, I was no longer in need of my family, and I was desperately independent. This distance I put between us felt good as I dived head-first into my university years. I drank, smoked pot, and lived a carefree uni-student life. I thought I was unstoppable.
I would come to regret my silence. In the months to come, my inability to face how I was actually feeling would cause me to attempt to end my own life.
I was nowhere near done growing up.