Heidi Everett - My Friend Fox

Praise for
My Friend Fox

Blazingly beautiful and devastating. I wept but felt less alone as a human. I want everyone to read this book.

Favel Parrett, author of Past the Shallows and There Was Still Love

My Friend Fox is a beautiful memoir about experiencing diverse mental health. Heidi Everett is generous and gentle in sharing her story in order to demand a better mental health system for all.

Carly Findlay, author of Say Hello and editor of Growing Up Disabled in Australia

With breathtakingly original prose, Heidi Everett gently guides the reader through the complexities of living with mental illness. Humorous, heartfelt and humane, My Friend Fox is a deeply moving and essential read.

Fiona Murphy, author of The Shape of Sound

A raw and harrowing glimpse into life lived on the precipice, My Friend Fox boldly rips the facade from our sanitised perception of mental health treatment. And yet it is also tender and beautiful, with wisps of fable sprouting through the cracks; radiant art hewn from the darkness of the abyss.

Bram Presser, author of The Book of Dirt

If ever there was an authentic voice for survival from mental distress, then this is it. As painful as Heidi Everetts story is, it is told in the most inventive and magical way. Her use of language and imagery is that of a poet who constantly surprises and startles. Creativity and imagination are the soul food that nourish Heidi back to sanity. As does her dog, Tigger, her inseparable companion with whom she shares her life and struggles. This is a most wonderful book from a most wonderful writer.

Sandy Jeffs, author of Flying with Paper Wings

This book is a story of reclamation, resilience and resistance. Heidi reclaims her story from the mental health industry that has defined her based on diagnoses and rewrites it as her own, rich, important experience which holds lessons for us all. My Friend Fox is an evocative and emotive memoir from an outstandingly talented writer. A must read for anyone who has ever felt on the outer.

Jax Jacki Brown, disability activist and writer

I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world...

ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPRY,
THE LITTLE PRINCE

Dear Reader,

This letter is for anyone who comes to My Friend Fox with a story like mine. There are difficult things in these pages that I know many of us share.

I recommend that you only read on if you have the support of a good counsellor, or are at a point in life where you are able to hold others stories safely.

Complex post trauma stress (PTS) is a lifelong reality and it can take many years of trial and error to learn how to live at peace with it; to know its not your fault. It is not a disorder. It is an ongoing story of survival. To all my peers with living experience of diverse mental health, and to those yet to discover they are survivors, I offer my deepest respect.

Psych wards have the responsibility and the privilege to help people with PTS, to provide the tools of healing. Yet those of us who have spent time in these wards agree that healing is a long way off.

I hope My Friend Fox resonates in the psyche of a mental health system in equal need of healing.

Heidi

Lifeline 13 11 14

PHOKOJE GO TSELA O DITHETSENYA! they say in Botswana. Only the muddy fox lives!

The fox in this story isnt a scientifically-engineered, tame silver fox, but a wild, unwanted red fox. Hes a descendant of a family who had no welcome, apart from the unknown bounty placed on their heads once arrived in a strange earth. He knows the crimson air is different to the red in his blood; it tastes drier, bigger, wider than his mother passed on to him. He notates the earth with dancing footprints yet the choreography is in a different key. At night, the stars are upside down and the heat, the heat, when the rain is more like snowbut there is no snow. Where is the snow? It must be hiding in the trees. The trees that smell like hedgehogs but sway like horses tails on long summer evenings.

Fox does not belong; nor does he long to. A solved fox is a disappointment to his creed. He respects that everything around him is a stitch in a tapestry that took many moons to weave and that the moon was in another sky when his soul was being spun. He is fully alive, yet here he is, scrounging around in this field of the universe for five more minutes of heartbeat, 200 more breaths, another cognitive thought process, just like his cousins in the other earth. But Fox knows he is digging in a dirt that his ancestors never wore. He feels the weight of their old eyes, watching and waiting for him to give the clothes back. Put the clothes back, Fox. If he gives the clothes back, what will he wear?

Wherever Fox goes, he faces the dilemma. People despise him for his ways, yet his ways are as deep in spirit and creation as those of the people who shun him. Hes a difficult one. Both predator and prey; a clever hunter who is forever hunted. His compass is true, but his tracks zigzag to confuse. He sits on the outer, waiting for me to discover him, because at the moment, I am on the outer too. He watches me. Can you see him? Hes clever at hiding.

Can they see us? Maybe they deliberately opt to keep company with these strange birds in the psych ward cage.

THE COLD STEEL NEEDLE GOES into my right bum cheek and the yellow oil is pushed in. Metal and veins never mix well. Three nurses hold me down on the bed, my face buried in the mattress. I scream, but the sound is defeated by the noise in the back of my head. I struggle to breathe, but there is no oxygen to be found in the tiny space between my mouth and the plastic sheeting.

Im angry as hell. The marauding invaders have succeeded in their conquest and a great glob of heavyduty anti-psychotic is pulsating in my butt, radiating into the rest of my flimsy human anatomy with the unrelenting shock waves of an atom bomb. Its fractals now: a picture Escher would be proud of. I survive the hour-long seconds until I feel the pressure of a thousand hands swiftly release me. My body springs back up from the bed. No longer part of a mattress, I fill my lungs with brittle, vile air.

I spin over and spit a vomit of abuse at the retreating posse. With their bulging backs they are as ugly as toads as they file out of my room. My deactivated body wont allow me to punctuate the room with a rainbow of action. Theyre now oblivious to my words anyway, a complete reversal of ten minutes ago, when I was scratching at the walls like a crazed cat in a strangers hands. My head hurt. My heart hurt. My soul hurt. And now my body hurts.

Within this chemical straitjacket I am the final tiny babushka. Its keeping me contained in my amygdala, in my head, in my body, in my bed, in my room, in the ward, in the hospital. Im sure Im not the only one here whos dizzy from being confined to a 12 12-metre square common room for weeks, sometimes months on end. Ive been here for six weeks and I still cant make out the horizon.