Book review: The Barrier by Shankari Chandran

I got around to writing a Goodreads review for Shankari Chandran's new book. I actually really think she's found her groove with this fast paced fun style of writing and I can't wait for the next one. Speaking of writing, I'm going to try and put some thoughts down about what is going on for me at the moment, in terms of parenting, my divorce and also my time on prac (for my nursing studies I'm doing clinical practicum in an emergency department). Until I do though, you should totally read the barrier (Aussies can buy it easily in bookshops - Dymock's stocks it and others will get it in) The Barrier by Shankari Chandran
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Barrier is a far cry from Shankari Chandran's Sri Lankan debut novel Song of the Sun God (a family saga, set in Australia and Sri Lanka over several generations - the kind of book that wins literary awards).

The Barrier is a thriller set in a dystopian post-apocalyptic world, a world looking more and more like the present (I suspect the author wishes she was less prescient!). Travel between East and West is banned (a Muslim travel ban, written pre-Trump) and information and biotechnology are used as weapons. The author has created a future world order that lays bare the present day hypocrisies - the rhetoric of democracy, security, terrorism and the axis of evil have travelled from 9/11, down the decades to this novel's near future (2040) setting.

The Barrier asks big external questions about the world, but also some big internal questions. It explores what happens when there is head with no heart, thinking with no feeling and biotechnology becomes more important than people's souls.

With deadly diseases, warring between east and west, and a hero who has to question everything he thinks he knows, The Barrier is a page turner with brains and heart

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The Barrier by Shankari Chandran

The Barrier by Shankari Chandran


I have read some spoilers for this already and I cannot wait to get my paws on an actual copy! Only another month til it's release! Wheeee!


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Organising ALL THE THINGS

I have been falling down internet rabbit holes on organising recently. I'm reading about Project Organize me Entire Life, reading reviews of ring bound vs disk bound day planners and gazing at endless filing systems on Pinterest. I spent about three hours in Officeworks last week. This obsession is sucking my time and I recognise it as something with more complex motivation than just wanting a new way to get paperwork in order. As I was wandering around the house looking for the plastic-y stand-up sticky notes that I remember seeing somewhere (If you must know I needed a temporary way to label my folders before I commit to catagories using permanent marker) I had a sudden epiphany - there are things in my life that I can't just organise away, much as I wish I could. As Sanjay and I are splitting up, and I'm currently waiting on paperwork from him, I don't know when I am going to move out of this house, I don't know how much money I will have available to rent or buy an apartment, I don't know where the kids will go to high school, I don't know whether I will pass uni (it's likely - I haven't failed a subject yet!) and graduate at the beginning of next year, I don't know if I will get a new grad nursing position, hell, I don't even know if I'll be able to do a new grad program considering I will have 50% custody of my kids.

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.

- Donald Rumsfeld

Writing it down makes it obvious. Organising is channeling the anxiety related to the vast quantity of really major unknowns in my future (including the 'unknown unknowns' - worrying about them came free with my anxiety!). It is also serving to focus me on something I can do, although it distracts me from more useful pursuits (I'm an expert procrastinator but this is ridiculous. I have heaps of uni work!) and it's a weird form of escapism, just like looking at IKEA catalogs where we imagine perfect lives for ourselves filled with light and swept floors.

So now I will try to get some uni work done without being quite as distracted by the various online rabbit holes. I will be a bit kinder to myself, now I know it's not just laziness that is pulling my attention away from what I need to do, acknowledge what the distraction is giving me and make time as I drift off to sleep to imagine a world where paperwork doesn't rule my life.

At least one thing is for sure, I now know I want an A5 sized planner with a whole heap of fancy custom inserts from Etsy.

UPDATE: Tuesday morning

I realised at ten past one this morning that I had just spent 5 hours looking at folders, after countless hours over the weekend. I peeled my eyes away from the computer and went to bed, only to lie there awake and bug-eyed for another hour or so. Either the anxiety is out of control, I have a very special procrastination superpower, it's a weird ADD symptom or I'm having the most boring manic episode in history. Not sure whether to ask for dexies, benzos, mood stabilisers or just give myself a swift smack around the chops for being lazy. I will ask kind Dr S when I see him.

Medication

So many times people ask me if I shouldn't 'have a rest' from my medication. These are often the same people who suggest people with depression should just remember how good they have it compared with people in Syria/current the international hotspot, or suggest that we harden up (We are the toughest people you will ever meet. We do battle with our own minds). The short answer is 'no' but it's slightly more complicated than that.

Imagine I was an asthmatic (I'm not).  Would anyone suggest I needed a rest from my preventer medication? Even if I wasn't getting symptoms or having asthma attacks no one would question the decision to be on medication, made in conjunction with the relevant health professionals. In fact, if I felt all better and started talking about stopping my preventer medication someone would remind me that without it I sometimes get really sick.

Have you ever thought an asthmatic should just toughen up and keep breathing? Have you thought they should just appreciate the oxygen they can get and stop worrying about what they can't have? Have you avoided talking about difficult subjects because you didn't want them upset, thinking it might trigger an attack? If an asthmatic needs to take some time off work or study while they get their symptoms under control how do you view it? What about if they decide they need to use a variety of approaches (medical and lifestyle) to deal with their illness? I have several friends who won't come to BBQs or bonfires on the cooler months because they say they can't breathe. I don't judge them negatively for that.

My illness isn't that different. I use meds, lifestyle and talk therapy to deal with it. When I have a major depressive episode I try to catch it as early as possible and put some things in place to help me manage while things are difficult. I try to remember, when I feel good, that my meds are preventative because when things are good it's easy to forget how bad things can get (what's that saying about forgetting pain?).

All that being said, there are many different ways to manage mental illness, and more and more research is being done on gut-brain interactions, and I am not going to criticize anyone who chooses to deal with their illness in other ways - as long as it is working for them and their loved ones!

Homework

I've had a shitty week. Lots of tears and gritted teeth but a lot better after seeing the compassionate Dr S. He told me I should be writing stuff down more (I think he meant writing good stuff about myself down so I could go back to it in moments of self-loathing) but making notes for myself and diary writing have always had a whiff of make-work about them to me, so I will write here. Also, writing good stuff down about myself makes me nauseous, so I'm going to write other stuff.

Dr S asked me where I thought my crazies came from and I have no doubt that for me there is a genetic and environmental component. I am not a geneticist, psychologist or neurologist. I have not seen inside anyone else's brain and I have not studied theories of the mind. I have a working knowledge of undergrad sciences, a smattering of anatomy and physiology, and I've read some pop-psychology books, including the wonderful 'Brain that Changes Itself' by N. Doidge about brain plasticity. And I know that a cigar is sometimes just a cigar. All that being said I want to explore where my crazy comes from (disclaimers: This is about me, not you. I'm not a doctor. Blah blah blah).

Lets see how far I can stretch my little marble-run analogy. At my conception genes were reconfigured and I got my own set of blueprints, part of this was the plans for an amazing marble run that would become mind. Genetics used the building blocks available, from my mother, to build the marble run. It was so complex that a marble could barely get from top to bottom - too many options, too many connections, inefficient. But genetics had a plan - it knew that after it had built this complex structure, it would start getting used, and as that happened the connections that weren't useful would start getting dismantled, or at least have blockers installed so marbles (thoughts) would take the more efficient way, thus the thing could actually work (so far this is OK, it's just my understanding of basic neuroscience). Unfortunately, in the plan for my mind, my genetics included a bunch of things that are not very helpful. Some were probably included in case they could be helpful and some are probably attached to other things that are helpful in ways that I certainly don't understand. 

For instance worrying is a useful adaptation. It allows us to plan for the future and keep ourselves safe. Anxiety and panic attacks are unhelpfully overdoing worry, and making it difficult to manage normal things, like putting on pants and getting out of the house. I have always thought that anxiety and creativity were also linked - as in, you have to be creative to make up that many scary scenarios in a mundane world - but apparently research backs up my hunch (admittedly, I haven't read the research paper, but that article makes me feel like I have a superpower!).

More unsettling than the anxiety is the depression. Why did the plan include whole sections of the marble run that for some reason colours all marbles blue and slows them right down, takes them in circles and drops the marbles off the edge of the table rather than neatly into the velvet lined box? Why weren't those bits pruned off in the early days? Worse than that, some of those blue sections were somehow encouraged by my early experiences. Some of the splits where a marble can either roll, unimpeded and cheerful, to its destination or head down the blue and tangled depressive path have had the happy option blocked. 

Triggers? For some people, healthy people, who maybe only have one tiny offshoot of 'blue' can weather life's ups and downs. They may get depressed, but there is usually a trigger - major life changes, losses, identity changes, that kind of thing. Once they recover, and they almost always do, their depression is in their past. For me the triggers are often untraceable, some tiny switch that was triggered long ago that means that random marbles will end up in the tangled mire of depression. I have major depressive disorder and my depression is always in my future as well as my past and when it is really bad it is almost impossible to live with (as a friend said to me once, urging me to get some help - you have an illness that is trying to kill you). Sometimes there are triggers for me - lifestyle factors like alcohol (specifically binge drinking), lack of exercise, toxic people, being in situations where I feel my options are curtailed or (more usually) a combination of the above can be problematic. Add normal stressors on top of those things and my thinking can go off the rails.

The next question becomes how to manage things when the marbles are travelling through a blue section, is it possible to avoid the blue sections or can I make the blue sections less blue or even unblock routes so the marbles can exit the rough parts. Sometimes I can avoid triggers (still doing 100 days sober without any problems, still having issues with exercise), often I can use CBT style thinking to interrupt my patterns and divert a marble* sometimes therapy can help divert those marbles. Medication helps massively to keep my brain chemistry in order. Hopefully this combination, including having to mess around to get a good stable medication regime going can help me get back on track and then stay there.

..... and if you made it this far you deserve a punchline - now you know why I smirk whenever I talk about losing my marbles ;-)

Question of the week: is it weird to send your therapist your blog posts?

* Like yesterday when I attempted my clinical skills exam - I did something wrong and need to resit, but managed to halt my catastrophising feelings of 'I swabbed a wound wrong, clearly I'm not cut out for nursing. I can't contribute to society I may as well be dead' and get back to 'drat, I have to re-sit the test on Friday')

Clauunk-schk (that's the sound of gears changing, without the benefit of a clutch-pedal)

Ssoooo, it's been a while....

I'm still wearing my 'office clothes' (although I have swapped my tights for pyjama pants) and I've applied my lipstick because it's nice to look ones best for old friends with whom one has not caught up with in a while. I also have a glass of red wine beside the keyboard, and one in my belly (dutch courage - something I also need when it comes to old colleagues/schoolmates/lovers).

My life is so different now to when I first started this blog that I was considering closing it and starting again, but instead I'll just draw a line under the past and start again anyhow. I don't want to forget how far I've come - although I don't need anyone else to remember.

A (very) brief recap: born, school, depression, uni, depression, work, depression, more work, marriage, work, baby, post-natal depression, part-time work, another baby, life, depression, medication, more part time work and now, a new house with a decrepit garden.

Now I'm working as an educational designer (whatever that is) and moonlighting helping another project with SEO/social media. I spend three days per week in an office huddled around a computer and the other days working in the garden and/or with friends. Since I'm now helping other people write their blog posts I thought it was only fair that I started writing for me, too. Let's see if I can keep to my aim of a weekly post!

Put your money where your mouth is!

...and support the arts. In my letter to Gladys I mentioned my sister's beloved. The lovely and very talented Bridget looks after my kids wonderfully but her real work is in the arts. She has a great project but needs to get funding. Here is her pitch.

She's crowdfunding her first serious short film and I'm proud that we were the first to donate! Add your voice (well, your $$ actually) to a great Australian film project. Ya never know, one day Bridget might be the next Baz Lurhmann/Fred Schepsi/George Miller/Phillip Noyce and you will be able to boast that you donated to her first project.
Support Australian film!
Support women in film!
Contribute to the arts!
Help crowdfund this project!

Five Books That Changed Me

I read Leslie Cannold's recent blog post about books that 'changed her' and thought it was a great meme, so here are my picks. These are not necessarily my favourite books, just some books that were important in shaping the way I think or defined a point in my life.


James Thurber: The 13 Clocks
"The cold duke was six foot four and forty-six and even colder than he thought he was" makes me think that Thurber is the grand-master of the perfectly turned phrase. This book is a favourite of my fathers and a favourite of mine. The book is aimed at children but is so lovely to read out loud that it appeals to adults as well. It is a simple fable about the power of love, but the language is so wonderful that it literally makes me tingle.

Salman Rushdie: Midnight's Children
This book smacked me upside the head with its layered complexity. It also made me crave samosas. It's another beautifully written book and taught me a lot about magical realism as a genre. I read it when I was at Uni, and really trying to understand post-modernism and relativism and I think in this book Rushdie crystallizes some of these ideas into novel form. Having visited India after reading the book I feel that immersing yourself in this novel is good practice for dealing with immersing yourself in India.

Marilyn French: The Women's Room 
This blew my mind at the time I read it (toward the end of high school) and inducted me into the world of the card carrying feminist.

Peter Carey: Bliss
I read this while I was still at school and Carey is a very grow-up author. This story introduced me to a whole level of adult uncertainty and gave me the idea that the adult world is just as messy and difficult as the world of adolescents.

William Gibson: Neuromancer
Introduced me to 'cyberpunk' and Gibson's special form of page-turning prose. It's a dense, cool book and I love it. In some ways it defined my entry into the world of being a professional Internet person.

And number six, the non-fiction book that has changed the way I think the most:
Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn: Half the Sky
This book has completely changed the way that I look at the idea of 'helping those less fortunate' in developing countries. None of the stats or stories were a big surprise to me, having studied similar stuff at uni, but the presentation of the material made me look at aid on a micro rather than macro level. Think of that hippy story about the hundred starfish....



Now, write your own list, like my friend JM has, and leave a link to your blog in the comments (No blog? Then comment with your whole list!).

Load sharing - Paid work, parenting and the 'Mommy Track'

I came home from work today, at about 6:15pm to find all the lights on, mess everywhere and no one home. Normally at that time of day there are kids eating, a father in the kitchen cooking and cleaning and a mother racing around bribing kids to eat another mouthful while tidying up toys and putting a load of laundry on. It was obvious that the house had been abandoned in haste and my mind jumped straight to the worst conclusions. Horrible images of ambulances and glaring hospital lights were immediately running through my head. Of course, it was fine, Sanjay had just dropped the baby-sitter at the train station and no one had tidied up the toys during the day.

But when I’m at work during the day who is responsible for the cleaning and tidying that I do when I’m at home? At our house both adults have reasonably flexible work arrangements, and both contribute to the running of the house and the care of the children. I’ve started working three days a week, sensible hours, for a government department and Sanjay does wine sales for a small company. He works from home (they have no office) and there is heaps of flexibility for him, because it’s all about the sales results. So far this is working really well.

So what happens with the kids now that I’ve started a day job? Asher is in preschool three days per week, 9am til 3pm but because I couldn't get Kiz into any local childcare on such short notice we have a babysitter. She is a family friend who doesn’t have regular work at the moment. She knows the kids and she knows our routines and our arrangement has been working brilliantly so far. She arrives around 10am (I leave the house at 7am but Sanj is around) and hangs around playing with Kiz, doing her own work when he’s asleep and until it's time to pick up Asher then she hangs out with the two of them until we get home. We haven’t noticed any behavioural changes in the kids, and they both seem to really love the babysitter and get a lot out of their time with her. As I think I said before, it's a really good arrangement.

Since I’ve started at this job I’ve again raised the possibility of me being the primary income earner. Despite taking time off during these early years of my children’s lives I would like to remove myself from the ‘mommy track’ and get back into what? A career track? A daddy track? Why is it so hard to have meaningful work with adequate remuneration and some level of flexibility? I want to be able to deal with the dramas that inevitably crop up with young children and aging parents and I want to be able to spend time with my kids but that doesn’t mean I don’t have valuable skills. In my personal experience mothers who are coming back into the workforce and mothers who work part time concentrate more fully on the work they are doing and waste less time while at work. Mothers get very used to being efficient and might be more reluctant to ‘waste time’ changing jobs if they have the option of staying put. Is it up to mothers (and fathers!) to ‘sell’ these advantages to employers? Is it up to savvy employers to work this out? Will we continue to see amazingly innovative small businesses started by parents who want greater flexibility in their work arrangements?

I don't know where I was going with this post anymore - I've been writing it over several days, with work, kids and the usual chaos. Which is kindof an pertinent to the subject of the post, really...

Kiran Update

We went to the Early Childhood Health Centre (ECHC) yesterday (when I started this post the visit was yesterday, now I'd have to say 'Thursday' instead) for Kiran's 8 week check. It was all good and apart from the Whooping Cough he is fine and growing like a weed. In fact it appears that he put on around 500g since last Tuesday's paediatrician visit. That is a lot of breastmilk! When I told Sanjay he suddenly realised why I've been so hungry recently and why I've been a bit tired (I feel like a Cheshire-mother, I might vanish at any moment, leaving just my milky breasts).

As well as getting longer and chubbier he's developing in other ways. He seems to recognise my face from several metres away now, he will lie on the floor and look at his toys or lie on the bed and gaze out the window for ten minutes at a time or more. I don't remember Asher being able to amuse himself for that long with any regularity until he was much older. He's very communicative and loves to gaze into my eyes, smile and then we have 'conversations' where I ask him questions and he vocalises with little 'ahs' back to me.

Kiran is also getting into a really good nighttime routine (will writing about it jinx it?). He goes to bed between 8 and 9:30 then wakes for a feed between11:30 and 1:30. He generally wakes again around 6 or 6:30am and Asher usually wakes and comes in before 7am so we are effectively awake for the day, even if Kiran sometimes goes back to sleep.

The little guy also had his first bottle last night. I went out for dinner with the Mummies and left both boys at home with Sanj. I expressed some milk the other day (almost 100ml) when I was feeling a bit full and so I got another 100ml yesterday which I hoped would be enough. It turns out he was a little reluctant to drink from the bottle at first but once he got the idea had the 100ml and a bit more from me when I got home before he went back to sleep. Dinner out with the mummies was great for me - just the tonic I needed after feeling a bit caged and tense for the last week or two. We were talking about how everyday things slip by so fast, particularly with second children, and how we should all be keeping a diary everyday and I thought about how irregularly I blog and made a pact to write something every day for a week. That seems a bit poor in the light of day, like I should be doing more, but I really want to do it and I hate over-committing. So, stay tuned for a post, however brief, every day for a week!

Blog Anniversary!

Well, the anniversary itself was actually a few days ago, and considering my tardiness generally with this blog, I think that five days late is perfectly acceptable as 'on-time'.

I was lying on the couch a few minutes ago (feeling terrible - I'm coming down with something that feels like the Black Death. I hope Asher doesn't get it from me), and wanting to get up and blog but only having an amorphous swirl of ideas of exactly what I wanted to write about, when I started wondering why I bothered writing here at all. Now, although that sounds like a terribly melodramatic and depressive thing to think it actually wasn't, because I recognise that I get something out of blogging but I'm really not sure what. Anyhow, I thought drag myself from the couch to the computer and check when the anniversary of the blog was so that I could craft an excellent 'what I've learned from blogging' type post, but since I'm already late I'll just cobble something together as usual, and probably go to sleep tonight thinking of ways it could have been a better post.

I guess the first and most wanky benefit of the whole blogging thing for me is that I'm slowly, slowly, finding a voice. Since high school some time I've believed I'm a poor writer and although that hasn't gone away I feel a little more confident about getting my ideas across. I wouldn't have been able to start writing if I didn't have Asher to write about - I didn't start this to muse and ponder, just to record the little guy's developmental milestones and perhaps my state of mind, in lieu of a baby book. A budding confidence in writing is a happy side effect.

Ironically, I also have told barely anyone about the blog. In a burst of enthusiasm I told a few 'internet friends' (and IRL friends who I see more of inside the computer than out these days) and Emma and Brendan, because they were away for an extended period of time and writing their own blog, so I thought I could keep in touch and still maintain my record as worst long-distance friend (which reminds me, I should 'fess up to the Irish Cousin about the blog!) but I haven't told my family or anyone else and I avoid mentioning it in front of people (er, not that there's much to mention!). So for all intents and purposes I have no readers, and I can't work out whether this helps me to feel more freedom when I write, or whether it is the overwhelming contributor to my extreme slackness in posting. Perhaps I should open up a bit now? Perhaps I'm concerned that my lackadaisical attitude to posting will irritate or disappoint? Why should I care?

On a completely different note I've also discovered that having a separate blog for dealing with food, wine and cooking is absolutely pointless, so any further discussion on such matters will be posted here. I'll also try and post Asher development updates more regularly - all about Asher's growing vocabulary coming soon!

Sanjay is in the kitchen. He's bathed Asher, read bedtime stories, and put him to bed and has just cooked me dinner - I'll sign off for now, with a small self-congratulatory grin. I'll eat my dinner, watch some TV and worry about how I'm going to look after Asher tomorrow if my headache, aching muscles and oversensitive skin turn into the flu they are threatening.