Emma Markezic - Curveballs: How to Keep It Together when Life Tries to Tear You a New One

Contents

To you, for buying this book.

But also Big Z, for being a dude.

This just in: World not oyster after all

What happens when you step on one of the great Lego pieces of life? When you get blind-sided. Sucker-punched. Or just stuck in a big, fat rut. Because you will, eventually. Youll get divorced. Or fired. Or cancer. And, just quietly... thats not what we were promised.

Many of us were told we could be whatever we wanted. Do whatever we wanted. Do whoever we wanted while having whatever nose we wanted. For the first time in human history, we had it all. Chicken nuggets had arrived, Doogie Howser was on TV and life was good.

Yet, despite this utopia, we still need motivational quotes just to get through the day. And I happen to have a pretty colossal problem with motivational quotes. Namely if it fits inside an Instagram square, Im rather dubious about its ability to change your life. Or even your afternoon.

But were liking and were sharing, which means were searching for something something, I suspect, far more than the diarrhoea-like procession of cyber encouragement we get via social media. Something to help us cope with a life those euphoric childhoods of twilight bike rides and Easter egg hunts left us woefully unprepared for. In short, were searching for the ability to deal with a big, fat let-down. When our business fails. When were not married by thirty. When we get sick. When someone dies. When life suddenly isnt the Happy Meal-having, saccharine- sweet ride we were promised. Because at some point, it wont be. Trauma happens every day, to everyone. The only difference between you and the next guy is how you deal with the curveballs that come your way.

This was the conclusion I came to when it happened to me. When I was diagnosed with cancer and had to learn to like it or lump it. Quite literally. What I found, to my surprise, was that I had an innate ability to manage the onslaught better than some people seem to manage a paper cut. I wondered if I was perhaps just mentally stronger the way some people are more physically gifted, like born athletes or natural ballerinas? Im certainly neither of those things, but curveball wrangling turns out to be something I can do with aplomb. And since it seems rather selfish to keep this decidedly mad skill to myself, I wanted to find a way to share how I did it. How I survived. How anyone can be Teflon to trauma, if they have the right tools.

So I spent the last twelve months researching it speaking to experts, listening to stories. Investigating why some people seem to be more psychologically resilient than others and figuring out how we can all train ourselves to be more unfuckwithable, cancer or no cancer. Ive taken all the best bits and condensed them down to eighteen techniques you can do today, tomorrow and every day for the rest of your life. A veritable stock cube for living anxiety- free, if you will. A recipe that you can refer back to again and again, supported by science and designed to help you handle your own curveballs with grace, humour and pluck.

Each of the actions Ive laid out are things I did to get myself through the worst time in my life. Maybe they wont all work for you pick and choose the ones that do, and discard the rest. Theres no right or wrong way out of agony. Its an incredibly personal ride. Its true that what doesnt kill you makes you more interesting at parties but in the meantime, try these. Because theyre the easiest, most effective, most soul-affirming ways to get through this life that I know.

Because it turns out you can learn to keep it together when life tries to tear you a new one. And whats more, you can have a lot of fun while doing it.

But first... a story.

Everything you need to know about happiness, pain, grief, curveballs and a guy named Fats Bam Bam.

Its fair to say a womans rack looks sublime in a push-up bra. Like a Jeff Koons balloon sculpture rendered in flesh. A verse of physical poetry. This story begins with boobs, is what Im saying.

Mine, funnily enough. They were gathered together in one such bra Id purchased just the day before. I was at a wedding in Asheville, North Carolina. A very Southern wedding, if the moonshine and hay bales were anything to go by. All the people saying yall without a crumb of irony was entrancing for a girl from Australia whod never even heard of shrimp and grits before, let alone eaten them for three days straight with a peach cobbler chaser. The bride had shed her heels, the groom had loosened his tie and there was a ten-piece big band playing across the room. There were drums and tubas and a guy hitting a mason jar with a stick. The saxophone player in particular had piqued my interest and I was fixin to make a move.

As it happens, Id been dating a guy at home in Australia for a few months but it was one of those nonsensical non-exclusive arrangements you hear so much about. A millennial special, if you will. For my part, Id never so much as looked at two men at the same time before, so this felt like the ideal time to give it a whirl. There was just something about the curve of the sax players instrument which really buttered my corn.

I pondered which Southern-themed pick-up line would sound best in an Australian accent. You look like youve been ridden hard and put away wet was the one I landed on. He was awfully sweaty after all and it felt right, if a little cheesy. Before making my way over to deliver this linguistic artistry, I attempted to readjust the body parts Id already shoehorned into the Victorias Secret special Id purchased for the occasion.

And thats when it happened. It felt like a frozen pea floating in custard. A notion gross enough on its own, but this was far worse. There was a lump in the middle of my left breast.

You already know that little nugget was cancer. Not least of which because I mentioned it in the intro, but also because we rarely use the word breast unless its medical: breast exam, breast augmentation, breast cancer. In recreational life, were far more attuned to boobs, titties, fun bags.

Still, I didnt know it at the time. And while the discovery of the lump that would be cancer sent a shiver through me that made the sequins on my dress do a sort of quivering conga line, it was easily dismissed. Im sure its nothing, I told myself. Maybe its one of those curious third nipples you always hear about. Or perhaps one of those freaky balled-up twins they sometimes find inside people, made up of teeth and hair.

Yes, its a dark day when a parasitic hair twin is at the top of your wish list.

But the brain is an incredibly manipulative thing. And parasitic twin is what I went with that breezy Saturday afternoon in North Carolina. I danced, I drank, I made out with the saxophone player and I put that lump at the back of my mind for another day.

Its a cavernous place, really the human mind. You can fit in everything from your top ten favourite Simpsons quotes to how to spell handkerchief to a precise recollection of the phone number you had when you were eight years old, all without touching the sides. Its little wonder things get lost in there all the time. Not the Simpsons quotes, of course, but the other stuff. And the discovery of that lump I pushed deep into the cranial cheap seats where it stayed, somehow completely ignored, for days.

It eventually resurfaced a week later on the flight back to Sydney, where I was living at the time. Right there in seat 23B. Probably because scoring a B seat on an economy flight is the very definition of hell above earth. It meant I was helplessly pinned between a sweaty man-spreader and a woman with a Hello Kitty emblazoned phone whose small frame belied her gargantuan snore. Since my body couldnt escape, my brain needed to. And so it rifled around for recent additions with a view to distraction.