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Two months into a 10-month prison sentence, I was placed in solitary confinement after having a nervous breakdown. I’d originally made a fruitless attempt to keep my breakdown to myself, because I’d been told what would happen if Corrective Services found out I was having mental health issues. One of the first friends I made in prison, like many of the inmates, was suicidal. ‘The best advice I can give you if you’re struggling with your mental health’, he told me, ‘is to do everything you can to keep it from the officers.’
History is on my mind at the moment, all because of yet another awful Austen adaptation. The latest cinematic mud-pie thrown at her in the new Persuasion movie may even be the worst one yet, which is something, because there’s a lot of competition. Who can forget Gwyneth Paltrow in the 1995 Emma driving a carriage in a yellow ball gown as though she were doing the time trial in Top Gear?
It’s been growing like a refrain, like a consensus, these past few months. Almost everyone I talk to tells the same story of feeling overwhelmed, of not quite coping – or nowhere near coping. They’re tired, and everything just feels a bit harder than it should, like the treadmill’s accidentally been set to an incline.
I’d been thinking about my own productivity as an employee, as a freelancer, as a parent; about what left me feeling satisfied, worthy, competent or guilty, unproductive, unfulfilled. I’m convinced we should value people for who they are, not what they do, or don’t or cannot do. And yet I catch myself, thinking about, talking about, how much I have or haven’t done on any given day; forgetting to reflect on how I have behaved, on the kind of parent, wife, colleague, friend that I’ve been.
The danger is that unless commissions and inquiries are accompanied by other ways of telling other truths they will inadvertently help to shrink that national story into the story of victims who in fact have never been only victims, and of unmentioned perpetrators who in fact have never been only perpetrators. They risk preaching to a more-or-less converted majority and to an implacably unconverted minority.
Without Christmas, without that beautiful bookend of closure and celebration for another rather depressing year, where would we be? Speaking for me and mine, ensconced in the oft-locked-down leafy suburbs of Melbourne, 2021 promised much and delivered little more than a continuance of stress, bad blood among some of the tribes that comprise Victorian society, and the hope that heightened vaccination rates will translate into the need for no more lockdowns. That’s certainly a present worth unwrapping.
The neighbour says, So sorry. And sir, / you are the last paesano on this street. / Maria you promised me. I could go first. / Ti perdono, I forgive you, amore mio. / I sit in our backyard under lemon shade, amongst / the hens tomato plants and capsicums. I fall into each / wishful memory. We danced, those ad-hoc strolls / and laughter, you hummed our favourite songs.
It’s not hard to understand why so many people are watching Ted Lasso (Apple TV), nor why it was nominated for twenty Emmy Awards and won seven. Believe it or not, it is twenty years since The Office first premiered on the BBC. Not since then has a comedy series cut so close to the bone of our cultural needs and anxieties.
Australian governments and judges have been playing catch up for a long time trying to deal with the backlog of claims for migrant visas. A couple of recent judgments highlight the frustration at work in the system.
But it is possible the members of the Plenary could begin to hear a deeper voice speaking in their hearts. There may arise a new courage to start a process of truth and reconciliation, reporting the process of this journey to the second Plenary Council planned for Sydney, July 2022. We can only begin that journey if members of the Plenary Council come and are open to listening to that deep inner voice.
Reading the paper, Instrumentum Laboris, written in preparation for the coming Plenary Council, I found myself quite disappointed by the lack of depth, awareness and any sense of the need for an apology. Much less an openness to any serious conversion that is needed within the Church.
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