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Genetics are a hideous shit-waffle. On my father’s side I inherited my father’s freckles to the excessive degree that I hope soon if I spend enough time in the sun I’ll get enough for them to all merge into a super freckle that resembles a tan; I also got to inherit his near translucent skin to the point of where I will burn under the kitchen light. On mum’s side I got to inherit early onset greying hence I haven’t had a natural hair colour since I was 20… and oh, yeah- the somewhat crippling anxiety and depression that generally makes life that extra bit more difficult to let my feet hit the floor of a morning. So you know, when it comes to hereditary traits everything’s coming up snake eyes.

I remember mum speaking of her dad once, wherein she spoke to me of his deep family loyalty, his kindness, but also his rage. She said that he never laid a hand on her once in all her time growing up, but had a tongue of knives that would cut you to ribbons and then pretend like it never happened while you’re still bleeding on the floor trying to pick up your innards.  I found the anecdote particularly ironic, considering how she was guilty of the same thing. He died the year before I was born so I never got to meet my grandfather, but I had heard enough to surmise that she was definitely daddy’s little girl in every way.

When I was about 4 I heard mum start swearing and yelling in her room suddenly one afternoon, and being the inquisitive little shit that I am I went to investigate because swear words are forbidden and to hear them uttered was delightful. I hadn’t realised that she had accidentally shut the door on her hand and kept asking her if she was alright until she snapped and directed all that profanity at me.

An hour later she was asking me if I wanted to watch a Disney movie and have ice cream and asking for a hug. Some days I’d find her crying at the drop of a hat, or cleaning the house top to bottom, or just not getting out of bed. It was a weird switch that kept me on my toes for most of my younger years.

At some point someone finally diagnosed her with chronic depression and started talking to her about medication. The revulsion was instantaneous. Only crazy people in asylums take medication. I’m just a little sad it’ll clear up in a few days. It’s just pms you know I’ll be fine. She went and tried meditation, saw naturopaths, tried hypnosis, even consulted the New Idea magazine for spells to overcome sadness from the resident witch columnist Deborah Gray. I watched from in between the balusters of the stairs while trying not to laugh my tiny ass off at the insanity of it all, when she just could have taken a pill and saved herself the trouble and the fire hazard.

But all the standing in the loungeroom listening to Enya and trying not to burn the house down while twirling with sage did nothing in the end, and she trudged back to the doctor with all the enthusiasm of a 5yr old being told to eat their damn vegetables. “For the love of… Jenny, you have to take medication to regulate blood pressure, why would it be any different when you have to take medication to regulate your brain’s chemicals??” our family doctor asked her point blank. Mum had no response. She shut up and took the medication. And for the first time, the highs became less manic and the lows became more manageable. We were able to build a solid relationship that resembles the Gilmore Girls rather than two people standing on opposite sides of the Grand Canyon.

I then discovered in my teenage years that instead of all the previously mentioned stress and other trauma-inducing factors that were going on at the time did NOT in fact manifest in amazing mutant super powers, but rather the same symptoms of manic highs and crushing lows. In an attempt to not repeat the mistakes of my predecessors, this is the part where you think I’m going to write that I went straight to the doctors and went on medication.

That assumption would be extremely premature in this narrative. The doctor suggested anti-anxiety medication and I scoffed at him, telling him that was for crazy people and I didn’t need them, I just needed to work through my shit.

I had managed to convince myself that the only reason I felt the way I felt was because of the subsequent trauma, so if I could just deal with that I would be able to kick the depressive episodes and just get on with it. So I did what every young person does when they think they’re invincible despite discovering their psyche is about as fragile as cracked glass – I self-medicated by way of a lot of nights out in Sydney paired with a lot of hangovers the next day. I self-harmed, I didn’t sleep for days on end just to see what would happen to try to “exhaust the crazy”.

When all the destructive ideas wore out and did nothing, I saw naturopaths, chinese herbalists, anything to ensure I didn’t end up following in the family footsteps of having to take a pill every day for the rest of my life to be “normal”.

I decided to take a far more enlightened and awakened path than my mother and her New Idea witch spell columns. I climbed mountains, went bush for days on end, visited temples of varying paths, practiced yoga, travelled, blew my mind out with illicit substances to shortcut Gnostic states and engaged in ritualistic hallucinogens while a shamanistically inclined individual broke my brain apart on a vision quest to recover suppressed horrific memories to face then and defeat them and shut up you act like you’ve never seen a hypocrite before.

None of that worked for me, obviously, so I decided to go back to the drawing board and get therapy. I went through 5 different psychologists before I finally found one that works. But the stigma still was present for me when it came to the topic of medication. I would still feel like I wanted to peel my own face off at the height of a hypermanic episode or call in sick for a week when I couldn’t bring myself to get out of bed and just live under a pile of clothes while the dishes piled up and nothing was accomplished. I naively preferred that to just sucking it up and going on medication.

For some people, twirling around with sage might be all that’s required to make you feel better. I spent nearly a decade looking for a way to function without needing to rely on medication, and I wonder what would have happened and what could have been accomplished over that time if I had have been able to give up the stigma and put a pill into my morning routine that is as normal as my daily coffee. So I finally shut the fuck up and went on medication. Last year.

The evils of Big Pharma may be more perceived in countries that lack universal health care, where there lacks the true support to get help and be well. But here in Australia, all I have to do is spend $22 a month to be able to function in my job, in my relationship, make art, make music and overall get up out of bed in the morning and just experience life. I don’t really think that a pharmaceutical company that makes a pill that allows me to be a human being is as voldemorty as natural news likes to say they are.

Why does the Matrix reference get so often used about taking pills and waking up and experiencing the world for what it is and yet, the thought of having to take pills to manage your mental health is still shameful? Why is the Big Pharma evil the first thing that gets thrown about when it comes to getting well with depression, anxiety and other related disorders?

Without all the stigma I could be sitting here telling a story of how three generations of people didn’t fuck around for all, most and a good chunk of their adult lives respectively and acknowledged their mental health and got something done about it.

People often talk about the evil Big Pharma and their manufacturing of evil drugs filled with evil chemicals… Aside from the rather important fact that chemicals don’t hold a moral or ethical state, the people often decrying the use of medication are those who come from a place of privilege that don’t have to use them. And I think that’s something that should carry its own stigma.

I’ve been thinking about how best to write this for a few days now; previous attempts devolved into incoherent profanity and drawings of phalluses.

But I figured I would start with a story about my growing up, and somehow it will culminate in the feeling of unquenchable rage I feel towards the governments ongoing rampant stupidity.

I was always the weird kid. The first place I remember living when I was 3 was in a housing commission area in Burpengary QLD. The only kids in the near vicinity were from this beautiful family that lived next door, with two boys aged 4 and 5 respectively. I was introduced to GAK, Batman and army men. When I started kindergarten and they put me in the girls group because gender, I immediately contrasted the pink tutus and the barbie dolls with my batman outfit (cape and all) and jeans. I then spent the next many years of my life socialising with boys because it was just easier. Girls were annoying complicated gnats, boys played on bikes and pretended to be transformers and I could rock with that.

By the time I got to primary school the gender socialising was more forced, and so I got awkwardly stuck with a group of girls that tolerated my existence despite wanting to throttle me every time they wanted to play “house” at recess and when picking roles I said I wanted to be the sugar glider and climbed up the nearest tree making wooshing sounds.

Girls were still complicated creatures.

Puberty hit me ridiculously early, and I found myself developing well ahead of my peers. The onslaught of hormones, boobs and FEELINGS was too much for my brain to handle. I went back to hanging with the boys because it was simpler, I wasn’t always being compared to my peers; at that point thankfully they didn’t seem to give a shit about the fact I was suddenly in a training bra and getting lankier by the second.

I remember when I was in grade 5 and I was sitting in the school shed talking to a fellow female classmate about life, the universe and Cheez TV when the grade 7 class came up from the oval after sports class – with one of the popular athlete girls at the lead of the pack jogging ahead of the rest. “She’s really pretty” I caught myself saying out loud, and the classmate said “You’re not supposed to say that, you’re a girl. That’s weird and gross.”

It got around that I wanted to be a boy because I said a girl was pretty. I had my face shoved in the dirt, uniform ripped, beat up because I must like to rough it if I wanted to be a boy. I couldn’t even reconcile my own strange churning in my stomach let alone everyone else jumping to their incredibly misguided conclusions.

One particular girl had it in for me big time, and made it her personal vendetta to make my life hell because I was “the weird boy-girl.” Numerous kicks to the head later I was surprised I was still capable of math. She would wail on me relentlessly whenever she had the chance, and threatened to kill me if I ever went to the principal over it.

I survived primary school by surrounding myself with the guy friends that never saw me as anything other than their mate. Their equal. They kept the bully at bay and kept me safe because they saw me as one of their own despite the knowledge that I wasn’t. Gender didn’t matter to them at that point, just as long as you had a fondness for teenage mutant ninja turtles and didn’t pick the red power ranger we were sweet.

Then came their turn for puberty and you can just forget that.

High school came with its own set of turbulences; with a parental divorce on a nuclear scale that necessitated an interstate move it was enough to cause endless amounts of stress but at that point you reach a sort of comfortable numbness where you just roll with it. Autopilot engaged, you can unfasten your seatbelts and move about the cabin.

I discovered that teenagers are even more a bunch of assholes than kids. Starting a school midway through grade 10 meant that everyone had gotten into their friendship groups, made their cliques, and enter stage left- me. I stayed almost permanently mute for the first 6mths of school, all the while these feelings kept up that there was something wrong with me, that I was broken somehow. I went to the school counsellor (who I would quickly learn was a chaplain) about the feelings and she agreed with me. You are broken. There is something wrong with you. You need Jesus.

A group of boys from a grade below me sensed something was off and automatically assumed I rode the gay-mobile to school. They would shove me into lockers, trip me at every occasion (got me once down a flight of stairs), throw rocks and bottles at my face at speed… surround me in the cafeteria calling me a “dyke” and a “faggot” and a “cunt” and every other name you could conceive, trying to goad me into a fight. The teachers did nothing. They said there was nothing they could do, as I stood there once more covered in dirt, torn uniform and blood.

I self medicated through self-harm, smoking various substances, codeine and insomnia. They eventually left me alone just because they thought if I was crazy enough to cut myself up, they wouldn’t want to be alone in a stairwell with me. Ironically the scars kept me safe from them. But not from my own feelings.

I made a few friends, one of which grew intensely close in a short amount of time. We were both going through hell and found each other to grab onto and keep going through the fire. I liked her. I liked the idea of her. I was never attracted to her in that sense, but the intensity of an intimate platonic friendship was something that caused me to question everyone around me. In a moment of faith I confided in her that I thought something was wrong with me, that I thought I was gay. “preferences”, I called it back then.

“Do you think I’m pretty? Do you find me attractive?” would be the first time a straight woman would attempt to justify her vanity, and certainly not the last. I couldn’t give an answer that would satisfy because there IS NO RIGHT ANSWER TO THAT QUESTION SO STOP ASKING IT, and she let it drop. For the next 6mths she ran between the polar opposites of being ice cold towards me and calling me a weird lesbian freak to playing on my weaknesses from everything she’d learnt about me to flirt, to touch, to tease only to flip back again to ice and rage and leave me in a perpetual state of confusion and fear.

If you’ve ever had a moment where you just feel that cold dread start from your heart and rapidly work its way out to your digits, that was my morning at 5am without fail, every day. The alarm would never go off at 6am, because I would wake from nightmares like clockwork, drenched in cold sweat and fearing the time I had to leave the house and make my way up to the bus stop.

I thought about wandering into the creek by my house numerous times, and just laying there in the water until I stopped breathing. The rumour mill at school started flying around about me and the friend being intimate together, to which I laughed and said no, and then couldn’t figure out if she was more offended by the rumour or the fact that I vehemently rejected it.

I was so lonely, because I felt like nobody understood what it was to have these feelings, and that I must have been the only one in the world that had them, because nobody ever spoke about it. Gay meant AIDS and FAGGOTS and HOMOS and all things derrogatory, perverted and pornographic. They were kiddy fiddlers, depraved hedonistic sluts with diseases, and I didn’t want to be considered amongst them.

I tried taking my life twice before I graduated high school. Never could get close enough to finish the job mind you, each time I’d get to the edge I’d pull myself back, weak and falling all over the place from blood loss. I did my own stitches once and wound up in hospital the other time. It was super convenient to be within walking distance from an emergency department. Swore black and blue it was from a broken window and I knew the nurses didn’t believe a word that came out of my lying little mouth but with nobody for them to contact they just patched me up and let me go.

I think that the fact I made it through high school before the age of social media is a saving grace. I remember the times that this “friend” would call me after school repeatedly and tie up my grandmother’s phone line while she abused me and unearthed every fear she knew I had and used it against me. If I hung up she’d wait a few minutes and call again. And call again. And call again and threaten to tell my grandmother that I had been harming myself. Tell her that I was a faggot and give her another stroke. Told me her death would be my fault because I was gay and it killed her because everything about me was wrong.

I think about how my home wasn’t even safe so I’d never go home, spend hours at the library or the shops or the local music store talking guitars with the owner to find some semblance of peace and for five seconds be somewhere that didn’t judge me for my wayward feelings, didn’t call me a dyke, or a faggot and just let me be human.

With social media today there is never peace. Every notification, every vibration of the phone is an opportunity for madness. I worry about how kids today are constantly connected to their peers, and I can’t safely say I’d still be here if the torture never relented.

I survived because I had a will to fight. Because in the bleakest of moments I reached out and found a handful of people that accepted me for me, allowed me time to find my strength and find my feet. They helped me find my will. And I survived because of it. Others aren’t so lucky. It took me almost an entire decade to feel comfortable in my own skin because of what I endured in high school, and no person should ever have to climb a Mount Everest of internalized trauma at the hands of demonic asshole teenagers because you don’t realise you have a right to be safe and that its ok to have feelings and it’s fine and you’re still a human being.

People have a right to an education and to feel safe while doing so. Without the Safe Schools program, stories like mine will continue to be the norm. Needless deaths will continue to be the norm, LGBTI kids will still commit suicide or leave school with a raft of emotional problems that aren’t dealt with that will turn into explosive issues down track.

How much longer do we have to watch history repeat itself until someone in politics decides to find their feet, stand up to the bully sycophants that would rather kick a gay kid down a flight of stairs than see them get a safe education and flourish in life?

Call the double dissolution already Turncoat, and let’s find out.