Kristy Chambers - Its Not You, Geography, Its Me

Kristy Chambers was born in Adelaide, South Australia, in 1975. After graduating from university as a nurse at age thirty, she worked in several hospitals before writing the bestselling memoir Get Well Soon! My (Un)Brilliant Career as a Nurse (UQP, 2012). She currently lives in New York City, where she writes books and scoffs bagels. Check out kristychambers.com.au for more.

For Ciara and Izzy

Contents

Its Not You, Geography, Its Me

Whenever I told people that my second book was going to be about mental illness and travel, the initial response was usually, Oh that sounds interesting, said in such a way that it seemed like the person thought maybe it would be interesting, but it certainly didnt sound very funny, and actually, it probably wouldnt really be that interesting either.

I can understand that. Reading about other peoples travel experiences is only slightly less painful than being forced to sit through a slide show of someone elses holiday snaps, which is sort of like being told about a party you didnt go to.

The travel book is marginally superior to the photographic slide show, though, because at least you can put it down when youre bored without hurting anyones feelings the writer will never know that you couldnt give two shits about the time they went to Romania and milked a goat.

A book about mental illness, however, sounds about as appetising as a bowl of shoe polish and conjures images of dry textbooks or bleeding-heart self-help manuals of the Oh My God, Youre A Mess! Let Me Fix You! variety. A book mixing travel and mental illness sounds like a soup made of yawns and tears. Delicious.

And what do these two topics have to do with each other anyway, I hear nobody ask, and the sound of crickets chirping. Well, for me, travel and mental illness go together like coffee and getting shit done. Also answering to the names of running away and escapism, travel has been my drug of choice, along with prescribed medication, alcohol and movies, for the depression that has been a bug up my ass since I was fifteen. Travel has always given me much more than I expected, even if it was more diarrhoea, anxiety and boredom than I ever thought possible, but it took a while for me to understand that it could never be a cure-all for unhappiness.

For a really long time, I thought that happiness could be found somewhere other than where I was; that it was a place that existed outside my head, like Iceland or Tasmania, and if I just kept looking, Id eventually stumble across my peace of mind in a faraway place. Of the many delusions that I have entertained in my life, such as the idea that there is a weight at which I will be satisfied or a gym membership that Ill use for more than two weeks, the belief that the grass is greener elsewhere has always been the most entrenched (although there is a town called Hell in Norway and I expect that the grass there is probably scorched, if not dead).

One notion I never bought, though, was that our high school years are the best of our lives. Whoever came up with that idea probably also believed that Christmas was the most wonderful time of the year. I beg to differ. I find my birthday, not Christmas, to be the most wonderful time of the year, the day itself and the days after it until all the cake is gone, and quite frankly, my high school years were some of the worst of my life.

Really, how could anyone love high school? Being a teenager is terrible. Imagine knowing everything about everything and having to sit in a classroom for six hours a day listening to some old fart when your primary focus is navigating the existing social hierarchy so that youre situated somewhere closer to the top than the bottom. Homework and parents just get in your way; puppy fat becomes plain old fat and all of this tumultuousness occurs under the monstrous umbrella of puberty, an ugly word for an even uglier time. Im not sure which part of that Im supposed to cherish. And to add insult to injury, I met my nemesis, depression, around the time of my fifteenth birthday.

In March 1990, every blood relation on my mothers side had travelled to Sydney for my grandmother Maries eightieth birthday party , an informal backyard barbecue that also doubled as a family reunion, and the first inkling that something was wrong with me was that I had lost my appetite. I declined the offer of birthday cake, and that never happens. By the time we returned home I was unwell and spiking pizza-oven temperatures. When my eyes and skin began to acquire a faint yellowish hue I was back at the doctors office and what was initially suspected to be a severe bout of flu turned out to be glandular fever, accompanied by an inflamed liver. According to my blood tests I had the liver function of a fifty-year-old alcoholic, without ever having experienced the joy of a weekend bender or being found passed out in a pool of my own urine. I had skipped all that stuff and gone directly to hepatitis. After a few weeks spent resting in bed, I returned to school, still fatigued and feeling fragile but thankfully no longer the colour of butter.

Saying that you were unhappy as a teenager is like pointing out that water is wet, but when I went back to school I felt unhappiness of a new persuasion. Something was off with me, and although I couldnt articulate what it was, I began to feel overwhelmed by things that normally wouldnt bother me. When I failed a test and argued with a friend on the same afternoon a few days later, these laughably trivial upsets resonated like a natural disaster in my teenage world. Im not generally a fan of conflict or failure, least of all those involving me, and while either would have been upsetting in ordinary circumstances, the pain I felt was never so white hot as this. I was all wound up with nowhere to go, like an animal with its leg stuck in a trap.

As my brother, sister and I all waited, as usual, in the shade of the huge peppercorn tree at the front of school for our ride home, out of nowhere my mind produced a shockingly simple remedy for my anguish: You could just kill yourself, you know.

Something clicked in my brain, like a cartoon light bulb switching on above my head, and I felt a flood of relief and euphoria. Suddenly there was a very obvious way out, and it was a way out of everything. I couldnt believe it had taken until now for me to think of it. When I got home, I took a glass of water from the bathroom, a box of pills from the medicine cabinet, then went to my room and swallowed them in handfuls. My happiness disintegrated as I wrote a letter saying sorry and goodbye to my family.

The sensation of freedom was short-lived. As I lay on my bed, crying and waiting for what came next with a stomach full of pills, I got scared. I didnt want to live, but I also didnt want to die; I was in a real pickle.

Soon I was in the emergency department, being stabbed with a cannula by an unskilled intern and throwing up into a hospital sick bowl as my mum rubbed my back. Thankfully, this was before Google, before the information superhighway even existed, and I had just swallowed whatever was at hand and not painstakingly researched a medication that would result in maximum harm. The twenty-two clear capsules filled with tiny coloured balls Id taken were antibiotics, and they might not have done anything more than give me diarrhoea and a nasty stomach-ache, but as they say, its the thought that counts.