About
Let me set the scene for you… It’s 1981. Wings had just broken up, Malcolm Fraser is Prime Minister and a young married couple in Parkdale, Victoria decide now is a prime time to try adding a baby to the mix. My folks, Mawsy and Damo, weren’t supposed to be able to have kids. Mum had had a metric fuckload of surgery done whilst growing up and the doctors thought she would be infertile. Dad wore jocks that were far too tight and apparently his swimmers were less than stellar. But lo and behold, all those post coital headstands and dads decision to freeball, worked a treat and they conceived.
I came along, a month earlier than expected, in the January of 1982. Let’s assume nothing of interest really happened until 1985 when the folks bought their first house in Keysborough, a neighbourhood in the outer South Eastern suburbs. Growing up in the ethnically diverse working class Keysie, as it is affectionately referred to by those who have residents who have passed through, shaped the kind of person I’ve grown to be- down to earth, low maintenance, egalitarian. I imagine it would have been a very different state of affairs if my folks had bought a house in Mordialloc like they were going to.
In 1986, I acquired one of my most distinguishing physical features…the scar across the middle of my face. I fell over my old mans foot in a rush to answer the phone and went head first into a glass display cabinet. After managing to pry me from the wreckage, the folks were forced to pull a huge shard of glass from my face and rush me to the hospital. A fainting father and 6 stitches later, they sent me home. I still see the scar every time I look in the mirror but most people say they don’t notice it.
I had a mullet when I first started Primary School. It was the first of many terrible hair cuts to come.
I was always that loud mouthed kid at school. I got into trouble for distracting other kids with my class clown routine all the time. All the report cards that I brought home said variations of the same thing “Prue is a bubbly engaging student but she needs to learn that she can not be the center of attention all the time. If she stopped her show ponying and applied herself, she would have limitless potential”
High School was a big shock for me. I went from being super popular within a co-ed Primary School to being a lonely dork at an all girls Secondary School. I spent most of Year 7 and 8 hanging out in the Library at lunch time. Library Monitor was not the kind of position that was held in high regard amongst the social hierarchy. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t a pariah and I always had friends to talk to in class, but when it came to Lunch time, I never had a group to sit with. I just didn’t fit in to any of the cliques that existed in the quadrangle. Thankfully, I wasn’t the only one who didn’t fit in and by Year 10, a group of fellow misfits and I established our own clique. Knowing I had friends to sit with at lunch and people to hang out with on the weekends made life a lot less lonely.
Things were great for a while. Great friends, great results at school, I got a boyfriend. But then something happened. I don’t know what. It was like someone flicked a switch in my brain from the normal setting to ’super depressed’. Maybe it was always there, or perhaps it was a chemical malfunction, but the shit hit the fan and it wasn’t pretty. It was almost like when you’re at a cinema and they begin to dim the lights, waiting for the movie to start. But instead of starting the movie, I just sat there in the dark without even a choc top for consolation.
The worst part was that I couldn’t articulate what was wrong with me. Ten years ago, people didn’t really talk about Depression. I couldn’t explain that I felt trapped by the most overwhelming darkness that followed me everywhere, so I just withdrew. From everything and everyone. I left school, ran away from home and lived with my boyfriend. It was the only escape I had and at the time it seemed like it would make everything better. Of course, it didn’t.
Eight months later, I called and spoke to Mum for the first time since I’d left. I was calling from the Hospital where I’d been admitted after having, what I would later find out to be, the first of many Panic Attacks. I was 18, scared and I wanted help, so I broke up with the boyfriend and mum came and picked me up. I’d never been as happy to see my mum as I was at that moment.
The next few years were what I like to refer to as the Roller Coaster of Mental Illness. I got better, I got worse, I got so bad that I didn’t leave my house for 18 months. I’ve been in and out of therapy, meditated, tried to find religion, taken 6840 tablets and counting.
It hasn’t all been doom and gloom, but I’m trying to give you the abridged version and the stuff you’ve just read is essential to the story. Without reading all of that, it’s hard to get an accurate representation of who I am. Highlights of the awesomeness; I’ve been in love a few times, had people be in love with me, moved houses 7 times, met some amazing people, achieved some huge personal milestones, found my purrfect companion, learned to love who I am and embrace all my imperfections.
Essentially, I’m just a regular kind of bird who enjoys scrabble with friends, loves curling up with my cat, doesn’t drink, is best friends with my mum, laughs at inappropriate things like people hurting themselves, blogs details you probably don’t need to know, takes anti depressants, sometimes prefers not to leave the house, listens to Gold FM, is bisexual and loves tattoos.