Recent writing

Here are some of the things that make me anxious:

• When I have spilled something on my t-shirt then have to talk to a hot person.
• Being away for the weekend with a group of friends.
• Sleeping in a room with other people, whether they’re my friends or not.
• Going to an event or location with someone and being reliant on them for transport, so I can’t leave when I want.
• All-day hen’s parties.
• Hens parties.
• All-day going to the races.
• All-day anything
• Being hungover and having to be around people.
• When I worry someone I love is mad at me.
• When there is tension with another person and I don’t know if it’s because of something I’ve said, done or not done or none of the above.
• When I send a text message to a new friend and I don’t know if she understands my brand of humour.
• When I feel tension between a couple who have come away for the weekend with me.
• When I know I’m going to put my hand up and ask a question at an event.
• When I put your hand up to ask a question at an event but someone else has done so at the same time and you both start talking.
• Waiting for a response to an email or text where there is potential conflict to come.
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• Knowing I am going home with someone to have sex with them.
• When I decide to have sex with someone but you’re not 100% sure you’re attracted to them and are going to ‘wait and see’ as things progress.
• The first 2-5 minutes of having sex in general, whether with a new person or a long-term partner.
• When I’m out in public and your tampon is leaking or you feel like it might be leaking but aren’t sure, especially when there is no bathroom around.
• When I’m hosting a party or event and am waiting for the first people to turn up.
• When I have a scheduled phone call with a good friend.
• Thinking about the bathing costume category of the Waikuku Beach beauty pageant my parents made me walk in when I was four.

But, I’m totally like, not even an anxious person. I’m not!


One last thing for the list, though. When I’m trying to relax but begin to hear the voice of my mother in my head, accusing me of wasting the day. Do we all find it difficult to relax, fully relax, for long periods of time, while doing what we consider as ‘nothing’ (not getting out of pyjamas, watching multiple episodes of TV in a row, scrolling social media, getting lost in a Wikipedia hole, not exercising, reading books, ordering in)? Or could it be possible that my everlasting struggle with the feelings of ‘not doing enough’ and ‘not achieving enough’ are a by-product of growing up in a family where the day had to be made the most of?


My mother would tolerate sleeping-in to a point (9am), but would ultimately find a reason to come in and fling open the curtains.

“It’s a beautiful day,” she would trill.

When it wasn’t a beautiful day: “What are you doing in here? You’re wasting the day.”

This idea of wasting the day was not a concept to me, mostly because when you’re young, the future stretches endlessly in front of you. There would always be another day after this day. There were so many days to come. And how could reading comics, or a Stephen King book, or catching the double-whammy of my favourite cartoons Batman and then X Men on a Sunday morning be a waste? They were SO GOOD.

When I’d moved out of home at 17 but went back to my parent’s house for holidays, afternoon naps were allowed, but after a certain amount of time being blissfully alone in the silence, with the door closed, my mum would come in with some urgent task. She would always show surprise that me – a light sleeper since birth – would wake up to the intrusion.

“Oh, you’re awake. I’m just putting your washing away,” she would say, as she banged the drawers open and shut. The last time I stayed with my parents, I was 36, and can report that it was still happening. The self-replenishing stack of folded undies and ironed t-shirts was a boon though.


I grew up with the great privilege of being in a family who lived by the ocean. I took up surfing when I was 12, starting on my dad’s old board. It was a short board with deep indents moulded in the shape of his knees from years of use. He told me he started kneeboarding because it was the only size board he could fit under his arm on his scooter. But to the other surfers, kneeboarding was considered on par with goat-boating – sit-on-top short kayaks designed for waves – or body boarding, which was always referred to as “boogie boarding” in a derogatory way. My dad was jeered at and teased profusely.

But I was a surfer, a proper one, and that made my dad proud. I spent many afternoons out the back of Scarborough Bay in Christchurch, which was a short walk down the hill from my home. It was the late nineties and being a female surfer was an anomaly. I was often treated with distrust by all the dudes, who seemed to expect me to drop in on their wave or generally get in their way. But eventually I earned respect, and often received a nod from the locals, many of them leathery old dudes who reminded me of sea lions, the way their bristly whiskers stuck out from the wetsuit hoods they wore against the cold South Island waters. Surfing was my greatest joy, after reading and being left alone. But now, I wonder if part of the reason for that is because it got me away from my family. When I was surfing, I could have alone time, and alone time that wouldn’t be interrupted because I wasn’t relaxing in the right way. Surfing was a sanctioned way to make the most of the day.


When I was about 15, my dad purchased his first boat. It was a small orange inflatable, like the ones they use on Piha Rescue but half the size. A few weeks into owning it my sister and I ripped it along the seams by pulling me behind the boat on a body board. We had to swim back to shore, tugging the rapidly deflating boat behind us. We didn’t get in trouble for wrecking the boat, because we’d made the most of things.


We upgraded to a more expensive boat and I would have been most happy to relax on the gorgeous beach we’d boated to with a book while the others did what they wanted. But I was expected to get on a water ski, and whenever I opted out there was immediate tension, and comments made for the rest of the day, because I wasn’t making the most of the opportunity. I also didn’t necessarily want to swim every day at the beach, even though it was right there. Again, not making the most of it. Underneath this the message, I felt, was that I wasn’t grateful. And I do understand that. My parents grew up without much money, and then as adults they became wealthy, and they wanted their children to enjoy everything they never had.


I’ve always liked to have a mission. One summer I’d been reading a book about survival in the New Zealand bush that I’d picked up from a garage sale, or perhaps stolen from the school fair. It included informative nuggets such as: possums are edible but you have to avoid the poisonous gland at the end of their tails. And: you can eat the pith on the inside of cabbage trees. One of my favourite books had always been Hatchet by Gary Paulsen, about a 13 year-old whose plane crashes in the North Canadian wilderness, and he has to survive alone with only – you guessed it – a hatchet. So of course I found this survival book delightful, and loved popping kawakawa leaves in my mouth to get a reaction from people who didn’t know they were a traditional Rongoā Māori treatment for toothache, or pointing at random logs and saying ‘huhu grubs’ like I was a true survivalist.


During this phase I discovered, at the far end of the hill we lived on, a good hectare of low-level tree planting amongst the long grass of the slopes that created the talons of the Banks Peninsula. I deemed it the ideal place to prepare a camp, and coerced my sister and my best friend into dragging felled branches we’d found at the bottom of the hill up the steep track and into a grassy slope amongst the trees that I designated our survival zone. We began constructing bivouacs, following different designs from my survival book, crafted a campfire that I would one day light with my flint and steel, and flattened grass with cardboard boxes to create an epic grass slide. This took us weeks, and at times I found I needed to use all my available skills as a leader to encourage my fellow survivalists to stay dedicated (blackmail with my sister, bribery with my bestie). Then one day we arrived at our base camp to continue work, only to find that it had been discovered and completely destroyed, the trees towed back down to where they had come from. Even I had to admit defeat.

My missions often diverged from what my parents considered a valuable use of the day. The survival camp was deemed passable as it involved physical activity (and probably because it meant both their children were out of their hair for many hours at a time). But frequently, my forms of active relaxation didn’t meet their seemingly arbitrary standards, and thus caused tension. One such activity was my visits to the suburb of Linwood.


Once my survivalist ambitions had been quashed, I found a new weekend activity: riding my bike nearly an hour to Linwood to go to their library, having already worked my way through most of the books at my local one. I would battle headwinds as I followed the long, curving road around the estuary, with kite surfers leaping into the air around me. My favourite part of the mission was to take my new library books across the road to McDonald’s for lunch, and choose the best one to start reading over a Double Cheeseburger combo, using the pickles to wipe the onion out of my burger and adding an extra ketchup sachet. Bliss. Then I would heave my backpack on, packed so chocka full of books that it had begun splitting at the seams, and begin the slog home.

Then one day, my dad asked why I kept going to Linwood, which was “full of losers”. I instinctively knew what he meant, and parsing it now as an adult, it is even more damning: Linwood is a low income area. For me it had nothing to do with the area – it was the adventure. And, again, in retrospect, getting out of the house for my own time. But he didn’t like that I was spending my time on things that he didn’t sanction as worthwhile, and after that, going to Linwood wasn’t as much fun.


Maybe it’s too much to attribute the anxiety I get when I don’t achieve something in a day to my upbringing, as I think it’s a common enough reality: many people simply don’t find relaxing easy. And maybe we’re all influenced by societal messages about what we should find relaxing. Going to a tropical island for a holiday? Sanctioned relaxing time! For me: anxiety inducing. You expect me to do nothing all day, beyond a dip in the pool or drinking cocktails, while being waited on as a white woman by someone who is often a person of colour, and who undoubtedly earns less than me? And what about my need to be ‘busy’, or ‘achieving’! What about my TV shows that I want to watch, but feel I can’t because that’s not what one does on a tropical island! I stayed on a small Fijian island once, on the way home from a working holiday in the States, and I was so bored and anxious that I paid a lot of money for someone to take me out water-skiing.

“Are you sure?” the resort guy at the activities desk had said, frowning and looking out the window at the choppy ocean.

“Yes! Absolutely!” I’d said, practically ripping the water ski out of his hand. Remember I didn’t really like water-skiing that much, but it was an activity that had always gotten the tick of approval from my family.

Anyway the outcome of that story is that I got taken out by a large swell, swallowed a lot of water and had to be rescued. Back to walking circles around the island, I guess. But you know what, I made the most of it!

I reckon a lot of us find things coded as relaxing not relaxing, and vice versa. And when we do things that are supposed to be relaxing, that we personally do not find relaxing, but haven’t parsed as such due to them being widely-accepted as relaxing, there is a cognitive dissonance that expresses itself as anxiety. We want to be relaxed, we should be relaxed, but we cannot be.


I’ve asked two people close to me if they can articulate what the feeling is for them when they are anxiety-free. Their answers were similar: Being free of feeling “wrong” in your existence, and being free of people’s expectations. I no longer have my parents expectations to contend with, so why do I still feel anxiety about blobbing around?


Here’s when I feel most relaxed: when I have just achieved something. It’s on a Saturday morning, when I’ve finished ParkRun so have ticked exercise off the list, and have two days of weekend ahead of me. And it’s when I’m walking back home from being out somewhere writing, a bit tipsy. That is when I'm in the lee of the hill, briefly sheltered from the winds of anxiety that tell me I should be doing something. Also: booze in general. I don’t think I have a dependency, and my favourite level of drunk is always from ¾ of the way into the first drink up to halfway through the second. But I confess, when I feel the pleasant dullness wash over me it’s not so much the feeling itself that signals I can relax, but the idea that ‘I’ve had a couple of drinks now, I couldn’t possibly achieve anything productive’. Lies! Because guess what – I am writing these sentences in JUST that moment of perfect tipsiness.


Here I am, perfectly relaxed. Not anxious. I have made the most of the day now.




Lil’s memoir ‘Not That I’d Kiss A Girl’ can be found at Linwood library, and libraries throughout New Zealand.


 

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