REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST

That sounds familiar, wonder where I saw it. I've been having dreams, a few nightmares and flashbacks into my past. The dreams I can handle, write them down, think about the meanings or not. The nightmares have been a little more frightening because it's unusual for me to have even a bad dream. They've been accompanied by an intense irrrational fear within the sleep state but which disappears when I wake up. A curiosity that intrigues me but doesn't bother me. The flashbacks are something else.

I don't remember very much of the second half of the first decade of my marriage. The second decade was a lot better thanks to a very good therapist who helped me along the road to realising who I was and how I came to be this person. The rest of the road I was supposed to travel alone and make my own discoveries but I'm easily sidetracked and working out a personality that included a backbone was hard work. I discovered an ability to create an object from an idea that was exclusively mine. Now I've sidetracked myself, back to not remembering.

I was watching the news about the 'Palace' in St. Kilda which is now a music venue but way back when, was a convention centre, can't be sure about that. I do know that I suddenly remembered going to a function there for the Blight's work. I wore a long black silk crepe dress with a diamente necklace that hung down to my waist with silver shoes and bag and my hair was just beginning to grow. The shoes should give me a reasonable date because they were my favourite pair, my only pair of evening shoes in the style of Madame Pompadour and the damn dog ate the bow off one. It couldn't have eaten both, no just the one. Sorry sidetracked again. It's just that this whole event became so crystal clear in one moment after living somewhere else in my mind for years. I was nervous and I was ill with the flu, not a cold but the big 'I' and I walked into a room full of cigarette smoke and almost passed out. I said my hello's and walked straight out and got a cab home. End of boring story.

This era of my life was also one filled with panic attacks, nausea and hyperventilating. My constant companion was a paper bag to re-breathe CO2 before I passed out. I was classy even in that, the bag was a green one from Harrods in London. That gives me another reference point, my girlfriend brought it home after her overseas trip. So why should this memory gallop up and bite me in the generous backside? I've been having panic attacks again and it's taken a week or two to recognise them. No Harrods bag this time but two steepled hands across my nose and I'm right even if I'm in the middle of Westfield. A sit-down with a cup of coffee and it's business as usual. The difference between then and now is that I know what is happening to me and I know how to deal with it.

Now to get over the spider phobia, the cockroach phobia, the scales phobia, the fear of flying, fear of John Winston Howard living like Dracula, that is forever, then I might be on that road to mental wellbeing.