I think one of the reasons I have such a bad case of insomnia is because I am scared of the night. Not so much scared of the dark in a juvenile kind of way, but a deep-seated fear of the night, where I think, someone is going to break into our house and then God knows what will happen.
This fear has gotten worse over time, and now it's so bad that I don't sleep at all at night. I am alert to every noise I hear. Sometimes I become paralysed with fear, and sometimes I go around the house trying to find the source of a sound. I am terrified. I am absolutely terrified.
I've been feeling it so badly lately that my nights have become painful, and it's been so overwhelming that I haven't wanted to write about it because I feel like the act of writing it down makes it more real. It's a horrible, horrible feeling and, to put it simply, I am scared.
Something that is making me feel even more frightened is that the house opposite us has recently been knocked down. It's slowly becoming a construction site as more and more workers arrive each day. There is heavy machinery on site and it just seems like the kind of place that would attract trouble at night.
The other thing that has seriously contributed to my fear is that there is only one car in the driveway. We have a skip bin in front of where my car used to be, and I have been extending the hire by months now simply to fill the space. My term deposit matures on 22 June, and I am going to buy a cheap old car just to put in the driveway. I don't know whether potential intruders would see one car and decide to break in, but I think having an extra car there would make me feel better.
This intense, horrible, terrifying fear has gradually become unmanageable for me. It's physical. I feel physically sick when I think about the work site directly across the road. I feel dizzy and light-headed when I hear noises.
I have to fix my sleep. I simply cannot go on like this.
So, slowly, I've been doing things that, more than anything, distract me from that feeling. I keep nearly every light on in the house. I watch television and keep the volume turned up. Most importantly, I keep the heater running, which makes quite a bit of noise. When the heater reaches a certain temperature and switches off, I turn on the cool air instead, which makes just as much noise.
At the moment, it's simply a case of getting through the night. I've checked with Mum and the lights and air conditioner don't bother her. She said she's fine with me having them on if it makes me feel better.
So here I am, on the cusp of my 45th birthday, confessing my inability to feel a sense of security—a sense of safety—in my own home.
I am unwilling to see a psychologist about this issue, although I know I probably should. I have seen sleep specialists who haven't been able to help me, so at nearly 45 I have come to realise that no one is going to magically appear and fix this for me. I have to do it myself.
Something that has been providing me with a little comfort is thinking about the actual risk. I live in a relatively good area, and you never really hear of home invasions around here. I also lived at my parents' house, which was only one street away, for most of my childhood and on and off as an adult. They lived there for 30 years and never had a problem.
So, what I am trying to do is absorb the risk.
If you read my post about trying to manage my new job at the Red Cross Lifeblood call centre, you'll know that my sleep got in the way. I went to work severely sleep deprived and ultimately had to resign because it became too much.
If I could stay up all night and then all day, without the pressure of work, then I know I can make progress with my sleep. If I had a little time to experiment and work on it, with the determination I am feeling at the moment, I genuinely believe I can fix it.
But what I think about is 11:00pm at night: trusting the world enough to allow yourself to fall asleep with no one next to you, no one watching over you. No one would notice if something happened. But I know what I have to do.
The reality is that I have to absorb the risk and accept that, while something could happen, it is very unlikely.
I am behind in life. I am middle-aged and I don't have a husband, partner, children, a degree, a career, a house, or substantial savings.
I figure I've got two options. I can wallow in the fact that I just couldn't make it work, or I can somehow reconfigure my fucked up brain and allow some of these things to fall into place.
I can't have a husband, partner, or children. The days for those things have passed. But that doesn't mean I can't get a degree, build a career, buy a house, and accumulate some meaningful savings.
In August, I am enrolled full-time in a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Adelaide University. It's a three year degree, which means six semesters in total. My biggest barrier to success is my sleep. The only other barrier is that I feel like a complete idiot because, while I've been a mature age student before, I've never been a 45 year old mature-age student, nearly 30 years older than most of my peers. But I just have to get over that.
To be honest, I don't want to do this degree for the degree itself, although I am determined to have one before I turn 50. The main reason I want to do it is for the technical mastery. Ceramics, woodwork, glass, photography, sculpture, and all the other disciplines they offer at the art school.
I don't want to major in any one studio specialisation, although I have to choose one and will probably choose glass. My real goal is to become a jack of all trades.
Someone who has followed this blog for a while would probably think that I really need to get myself together. The truth is that I needed to get myself together 20 years ago. But now that I'm older and, hopefully, wiser, I understand that I need a job and a house simply to get by.
In many ways, I have been living in a fantasy world where I can make a living from conceptual art and perhaps writing a novel about dinosaurs in Cambodia. But there's something in that creativity. I have often said that I don't trust myself in many aspects of life, but I do trust my creative abilities. I don't think I'm excellent, but I do think that if I could harness those abilities properly, I might be able to build a life around them.
So here are my options.
I can keep going as I am, cowering in the living room at night while I watch Piers Morgan and Al Jazeera discuss the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied territories—an issue that is very close to my heart, although I'd much rather be watching those programs during the day.
I could take time in the night to write and become one of those writers who stays up all night and sleeps all day yet somehow manages to make a living. Or I could fix my sleep, go to art school, keep volunteering, and build a life for myself.
It's a humbling experience starting from scratch at my age. Deep down, I don't think I care what the younger students think of me. What I do think is that young people have certain expectations of what a middle-aged woman's life should look like. When they look at me, they might think I haven't lived up to those expectations. But I have to get real. I have to suck it up.
I just mentioned that the time has passed for me to find a husband, partner, or have children. I can't have children due to biology, and it's hard to believe that is no longer an option for me. But I am not particularly hung up on it. I would have loved to have children, but it just didn't happen for me and I am at peace with that now.
The husband or partner part of the equation is a little more complex. I've talked before about how I have a flaw, and that flaw affects a number of aspects of my life. It very much affects my ability to engage in a romantic partnership of any kind. I think there is someone out there for everyone, so I probably could find a man who wouldn't care about it. But I care, and I don't think I would ever feel completely comfortable with someone knowing about it. At the same time, I would want to be honest about who I am, so I would tell them. It turns into a bit of a catch-22.
That said, I still appreciate attractive men. I've actually got a little crush on my mother's hairdresser, John. He is such a genuinely beautiful soul. I've started going to this hairdresser as well. It's just up the road from us. John owns the place and is a friendly Italian man who would be in his fifties. He's good-looking, but more importantly, he is just so nice.
He is lovely with all of his elderly clients and, when my father died, the funeral was on a Monday. They don't normally open on Mondays, but he told Mum that he would come in to do her hair. He did her hair and didn't charge her.
My hairdresser at the salon, Stella, is absolutely hilarious. She only works Thursday nights and Saturday mornings, so I've been going to see her on Thursday nights. Last week Mum gave John her player sponsor tickets for the Crows, so he wasn't working and Stella was in the salon on her own. John asked her whether she would like him to get his father to come and sit in the salon with her so she felt safe. He's lovely.
I don't want a man, but if I did, he would be just like John. Someone unbelievably kind, but also masculine, which he is. He's married and I don't actually have a realistic crush on him, but his son is an apprentice at the salon as well and he is also lovely. You can see the type of people they are.
I look at someone like John and then I look at some of the men I was involved with, mostly in my twenties. I had a few relationships and a lot of fling type situations. My last relationship was with a man named Hamish. He was very good looking, but there was an air of mystery about him and his family. I think there were five or seven brothers and they were all homeschooled, and you could tell. He lacked certain social abilities, but in general he was nice.
We met through the Young Liberals. We were associated with different factions and I was actually part of the conservative faction, which I can hardly believe now. Back then, though, I had no idea what any of it meant. It was quite scandalous when we first got together. I remember being at my friend Georgina's house in Black Forest. She had a two-storey unit and we invited Hamish over, which we thought was hilarious. Hamish and I got talking and eventually Georgina went to bed. We stayed up talking all night. I think we kissed and he left early the next morning. Nothing more happened, but Georgina was convinced we'd slept together and she was furious because she thought it had happened on her couch.
We started seeing each other and snuck around for a while, not wanting anyone to find out about us. At the time it felt thrilling, but looking back on it now, I cringe.
Hamish lived in a massive two-storey house on Lefevre Terrace in North Adelaide with two of his brothers and another Young Liberal. His brothers couldn't stand me, mostly because they didn't like my mother. Hamish's room was on the ground floor and he had an open fireplace in it. I remember cold winter nights with a crackling fire in that beautiful room with its high ceilings. We would fall asleep to the sound of it. That's probably the only genuinely positive thing I remember about the relationship.
We went to the Young Liberal Ball together one year and had a fight. Afterwards, we went our separate ways and on the Monday I found out he had cheated on me. I confronted him and he admitted it, although he insisted they hadn't slept together. I believed him, but I broke up with him anyway. Not long afterwards he turned up at my house with flowers, crying. I felt so bad for him that I got back together with him, but from that point on it was a relationship built largely on me not having the guts to end it. Looking back, I can't believe that. If that happened now, I would simply leave.
I smoked when I was with Hamish. He didn't care, which seems strange to me now. It's an absolutely disgusting habit. I also remember going through a phase where I desperately wanted his brothers to like me. One Sunday I went to the local chicken shop and bought a roast chicken and every salad they had. I brought it all over for lunch, but I don't think it made the slightest difference.
At the time, Hamish worked for a federal minister. I knew another man who worked in the same office and he told me that Hamish was always late and that it was becoming a problem. Hamish had a certain homeschooled arrogance about him and it was difficult to talk to him about things like that. Eventually I suggested that, on the days I wasn't staying at his house, I would come and pick him up and take him to work. When I stayed over, I made sure we were up and moving well before work started. When I was at home, I would get up early and drive over to collect him. But he always seemed to just saunter into work on his own time. We broke up before I ever found out what became of that job.
What bothered me most about Hamish, though, was that I suspect he was interested in my parents and their connections more than he was interested in me. My parents did try to help him with some of his ambitions, probably more than he helped himself. Looking back, that part makes me sad. I almost never introduced men to my parents, but with Hamish they made a real effort. In a strange way, I think that showed how much they loved me. They wanted to see me happy and in love.
I remember when I was much younger, someone told me that women often end up marrying men who are like their fathers. My response to that was, "I'll never find anyone that good."
And I never did.
