Feeling Defeated

I’ve got the sads like my dog Bear does here

Recently I had missed out on taking photos of two bands that I really love, and I think I’m about to miss out on a third this weekend. It hurts a whole lot more because I choose to take photos of the bands I don’t just like or love but obsess over. That’s not a bad thing. You know, I’m just like a teenager who sticks up posters of all their favourite bands and relates some lyrics to their own situation. The music I listen to is more than background music or tunes to just enjoy; they provide themes to my own moods, energy levels and even identity.

From time to time I do miss out on photographing my favourite bands, either from a lack of media access to their shows or being unable to make it to the gig for some reason. The first band I missed out on photographing was The Living End, who I have loved since I was 10. If you think teenage obsessions with bands were big when I was 10 The Living End was my whole life. They were my young autistic special interest who I not just listened to but soaked up any information about. It was really heartbreaking to not get a photo pass to one of their gigs. I even wished I could have loved another band as a child over them; one that wasn’t so hard to get media access to.

The second band was The Ape. My new favourite band and introduction to the music of Tex Perkins. I was also going to travel to Melbourne for the first time if only the tickets to the gig weren’t so expensive because the flight was also going to cost a lot. It was kind of the next big step for me because when my sister was talking about going to the airport I had so much anxiety and felt so overwhelmed by all the information being told to me my head plummeted to the table, and I was shaking until I contacted one of the band members to see if I was allowed to get in to take photos, and get a plus one for my sister because the tickets were really expensive. I’m still not sure if I was allowed to take photos or not, but as the tickets came with meals and drinks and it seemed unlikely I could get on the guest list and eventually I started to become anxious about going, I decided to mope at home and play video games instead.

The next gig I applied for media access to is Rock the Gate, a concert standing against coal seam gas mining. One of the acts playing is Tex Perkins and the Dark Horses. The headliner is Pete Murray and that would probably really help expose my photography to a wider audience, but I haven’t heard back from anyone regarding my application to photograph the gig yet and so I have little hope I’ll hear back before this weekend.

Last night I noticed I didn’t take my missed opportunity to see and photograph The Ape well and by the time I was in bed full blown depression hit with the occasional suicidal ideation. Now I thought my next depressed episode will be over Centrelink post the two interviews I just had, which I planned to post about in ‘My Second Most Recent Breakdown’ but the interview didn’t turn out to be so bad. I sat down for another capacity assessment to see if I was still eligible for the disability support pension and surprisingly the assessor made me feel like I was. One thing I didn’t mention to them however was the fact that I get so down and depressed when things don’t work out for my photography.

That’s how I feel now: I feel like I will never get another opportunity to photograph another show that I need media access to and I even feel like I don’t have the skills to do it should that opportunity arise again. Although, I seem to be doing all right when taking photos of my cats and dog. There was a little black and white photo challenge on Facebook where you had to post one black and white photo a day, and so I decided to take about 200 black and white photos of my pets and now I’m posting one or two each day to my wall.

The skills are still there but my confidence isn’t and since missing out on photographing The Ape for a fourth time I’ve lost interest in going out to gigs. I’ve basically just been playing my Xbox One and getting most of my self-confidence back through playing video games, and I’m pretty good so will stick at it. It’s become my new special interest. It is all I think about, read about, desire and of course, play.

So yes, the next step is learning to take defeat and still staying with my photography. There are so many bands to photograph but like I said I choose to photograph my upmost favourite. The bands I always think about, listen to and buy camera lenses worth +$1000 for just to take photos of individual band members alone. I actually did that, after the last The Ape gig I was at I decided that I needed a wider angle lens, which I did have but left at home. I bought it after I kept cutting off the heads of guitarists with my usual lens.

On the bright side I will still be able to photograph my favourite bands that don’t require media access. I have two opportunities to see River of Snakes next week. The next couple of gigs I need media access to would Gyroscope at Oxford Art Factory and the big one for me will be Datsuns at The Metro. Both gigs are coming up in the next couple of weeks.

I still feel defeated. I’m still depressed of course. It will run its course and I’ll recover soon. I find the best way to deal with it is let the emotions and thoughts come and do their damage and by the end I’ll forget about ever feeling this way. When I first got the idea to go to Melbourne and take photos of The Ape I had that super inhuman level of over confidence which almost led to me spending $170 on tickets alone and thinking it was a sacrifice worth taking. But then I came back down to Earth and thought it would be better to wait for them to come back to Sydney so I can see them for $20-$30 again.

I should probably mention that I may have missed out on photographing two of my favourite bands but I did get to take photos of my mate Davey Lane and after I put the photos online got a post reach just five views short of 4000. That was massive. That’s the highest it’s ever been, and I didn’t even need to pay Facebook money to show my posts to more people.

Maybe it’s a good thing that I don’t get many opportunities to photograph bands this late in the year. It’s heading into the Christmas season and I like to spoil my nephews and nieces.

So, I’ll keep doing my band photography. The harsh reality is you can be doing this for 20 years and sometimes you’ll miss out on gigs that you just assume will be easy to get into, and sometimes you’ll get into huge arena shows…or The Metro in Sydney.

For now I’m just going to continue to feel sorry for myself, because depression.

My Latest Breakdown

Trigger warning: Brief mention of suicidal thoughts. 

A few months ago I got a large letter in the post from Centrelink. For those not in Australia Centrelink is an unemployment service that provides payments to those who are struggling financially to make ends meet. In these last couple of years my psychiatrist had recommended I go on the disability support pension to take the stress off me from applying for jobs. And it was stressful. I would apply for ten jobs a fortnight, hear back from few employers for an interview and then be left waiting in nervous nail-biting anticipation to find out whether I got the job or not. I’d get a call but it was more for being told they went with someone else and that maybe I should try to be less nervous during interviews.

Being on the disability support pension did take the edge off. Unfortunately, I suffered worse mental health issues in that time and now I think I really depend on the pension to be able to live away from home. It’s a pity though because there was a point in my mid-twenties when everything seemed to be working out for me. I was so driven to succeed in any way I could. I was able to learn anything I put my mind to. I was medicated to focus, be motivated to do any dull task without giving it a second thought and I was hell bent on becoming a famous author, or a physicist, or even the first female combat pilot in the Royal Australian Air Force. But then the truth was finally revealed, which I’ve been writing about for a long time – it was just mania and I had developed bipolar disorder.

I’ve been thinking about that for a long time because I’ve still not received proper medical treatment for it which just seems dangerous and counterproductive to my future plans. I also at times struggle to see mania as a bad thing. Why did the great authors, artists and a few composers find success despite their bipolar when all it does to me is destroy my relationships, empty out my bank account and make it impossible for me to commit to an artistic project or anything else I’ve wanted to accomplish. Another obstacle in seeking treatment as it’s made me a much more sociable person. I used to be quiet, withdrawn and low on energy. Now I’m usually sociable, a chatter box really, and have bursts of intense energy for a few hours, sometimes a few days.

But all this combined with severe ADHD and severe anxiety and the eventual depression that always follows mania, has shown me that I’m more unfit for work than ever before. I may feel like I have more energy but I’m too impulsive and distracted to stick with any task. The only work I’ve been successful doing is volunteering for a music website called The Dwarf as a live band photographer. October has been my busiest month and I’ve been shooting bands non-stop and when I haven’t been shooting them I’m editing photos for days on end, to the detriment of my own physical health.

That letter from Centrelink was a review form for my disability pension support payments, and according to my psychiatrist this meant that the Prime Minister just wanted to kick people off the pension and send them to work. My much nicer translation is they were going through the list of people on the pension, under 35, with a fine-tooth comb, seeing who belonged on the pension and who didn’t. I was a red flag for them because I’m only down as has Asperger’s syndrome, and I’ve been getting letters saying that I could still participate in work, even if it’s just volunteering and I could even be trained up. Actually, there are going to be more services to train autistic people to get them into jobs. And all this time I thought the government didn’t care about us? That was sarcasm.

There were a few hiccoughs getting this form filled out. For starters the second part of the form had to be filled out my doctor and at this time I didn’t want to see my psychiatrist. He’s ignored my plea to be assessed for a mood disorder so many times, even when my mood journal was plastered with suicidal thoughts. At this time I was desperate for a diagnosis and medication. I had stopped taking Ritalin full time late last year and my depression and anxiety was very hard to deal with, to not alter my own personality. What I mean by that is I listened to the thoughts and believed them and my mind and lifestyle was changed to accommodate for those thoughts. Since I went on anti-depressant medication it’s been easier to see those thoughts as merely symptoms and they don’t become a part of me. At first the medication completely dulled my mood or rather equalized them which felt like losing my personality, and then I adjusted. Then the mood issues came back.

Previously to finding this form in my mailbox I had successfully been able to keep my suicidal thoughts at bay. But because of the fact that if this form was not handed in I could have lost my pension this played on the most severest of my anxieties – financial instability. It goes like this: if I don’t have enough money to buy food then suddenly I see myself living on the streets and eventually dying. My poor sister has witnessed my many panic attacks over paying rent when I didn’t feel secure enough with the amount of money in my account. This anxiety turns to blaming everyone for causing the anxiety (sorry sis) and feeling like rampaging through the streets because anxiety and anger mixed together gives one a lot of manic energy. You just have to smash, throw, yell it out of you. But all I smash is my possessions, sometimes expensive and rare sci-fi paraphernalia. I throw my possessions too. And I yell at the air.

But then the suicidal thoughts came back, and not just feeling worthless but planning how and when to commit suicide. Then I found another way to want to stay alive. It has to do with not wanting to make a friend hurt over the suicide over a friend all over again. But I still have to deal with very intense suicidal thoughts even if I don’t plan on killing myself, and it’s a horrible thing to go through every couple of days.

So, me and my sister went searching for a new psychiatrist but time was running out to hand these forms in so I had to wait hours in Centrelink waiting to just see someone, because on calling their hotline made me extremely anxious because I didn’t know how to follow the prompts given to me by a robotic voice. In the waiting area at Centrelink I every half hour discretely ate a snack so I didn’t have a hypoglycemic attack. I still did and felt really weak, dizzy and had blurred vision where I’d just stare around like most autistic people do when they’re under stress. My anxiety was intense too and I started to get in my angry ranty mood where my thoughts turned to violence. I was kind of seeing the worst case scenario in my head. I think it ended with me being institutionalized.

I got the extension on the time to hand in the form but it was recommended I see a doctor who knew me well. That meant going back to mood disorder-denying ‘you just have to work and socialse more to overcome your anxiety/depression/mania’ biased as f**k psychiatrist. Fine. So, I called him up. The next appointment fell on the day my form had to be handed in. Now I don’t know why I didn’t ask for another extension after that, even just one more day, but I didn’t. I’m starting to think I make myself paranoid on purpose. Just so I worry about everything falling apart constantly so everything turns out fine in the end. And now I need to find some wood to knock on.

Basically, if one thing went wrong then the end of the world would come. I even started to refer to October 20, the day of the deadline, as the day the world ends. I think this is why I overcommitted to my band photography. On one hand I was glad that I finally could get to shoot the kind of shows I wanted to, on the other I could lose all this if I was to be cut from the pension, have my payments sliced in half and most of my time taken up by applying for jobs or working in a field I was not even remotely passionate about. I even have myself a bit of a fan following. People have told me it’s a waste of my talent to not do band photography. Even my ex was happy to hear I was still doing it. Nah. It’s not like that. We still mates.

For a few weeks I was able to ignore the looming deadline but in that last week my anxiety skyrocketed and I was still shooting shows and editing photos up to the day of my appointment with my psychiatrist and the end of the extension. And then it rained.

The appointment went fine actually. In the waiting room my writer’s block that triggered every time I thought about filling in my part of the form had miraculously disappeared and I scribbled down a bunch of answers. During the appointment I talked non-stop in nervous-manic energy as my psychiatrist filled out his part of the form, replying with the odd ‘mmhmm,’ to show he was listening to my ramble. I kept talking about my mood disorder symptoms of course, including my impulsive spending which he played down by saying I was buying things I needed – sure, I was just spending thousands instead of waiting until I could really afford to spend that much.

Afterwards, I was briskly walking to Wollongong Centrelink in the rain. I had scoped out two Centrelink buildings before my appointment – as I had arrived more than 1 hour early – to put my mind more at ease. The people inside this Centrelink were nice and friendly, compared to the rush-shove too serious service I get from my local one in Leichardt. I was told that I could leave my form there and that everything will be alright.

Finally satisfied that I was given some clarification about my payments continuing I celebrated my buying underwear, socks and a checkered jacket for only $12.50.  I had one of the most scrumptious Mexican lunches at one restaurant too. And as soon as I arrived at the train station there was a train going to the city waiting for me. I even got to catch the bus home, which was free instead of me forking out some $20 for a taxi home. So, things just seemed to fall in place for me that day.

I thought this meant the breakdown was over but I was wrong. That night I was exhausted and being used to this after dealing with stressful situations I just went with it. But the following day’s things didn’t get better. It was hard to adjust to my normal daily life and I fell into a comfort zone where I didn’t try to push myself more. I thought maybe I needed it after going through months of extreme anxiety, but it was hard to break out of. I didn’t even want to go to another show to photograph a band or edit the remaining band photos. I procrastinated writing this blog post for a very long time. I began to watch a lot of TV or spend most of my time on Facebook.

I’m not even sure if things are better now. I’ve decided to plan my days thoroughly so I won’t have large chunks of the day where I’ve got nothing to do so spend them watching TV or saying stupid things on Facebook. I think my afternoon vodka drinking session which of course made me more manic yesterday taught me that I needed to get more control over my life and especially my emotions, which meant fighting against those impulsive desires. I never been good at avoiding impulses because they’re impulses – you act on them before you even know you are – but if I commit to something that needs more focus and thus requires me to take more focus aides (fish oil) then there may be less opportunity for these impulses to surface at all. And I have decided to put all leisurely activities as lesser priorities, which means TV and internet leisure time happens at the end of the day.

So, I’m looking forward to getting more organised and focusing more on my art, which now means Christmas cards or perhaps a nice canvas painting as a gift. I’m not sure. I haven’t done it in ages. It’s my natural talent but I still need to practice it to create some real masterpieces.

I’m also hoping I get to photograph my favourite band from my childhood, The Living End, this Friday and again on the 6^th of November. Then after that I’ve got a few more gigs to shoot and also a visit from my mum. I do like to keep busy. I’ve been walking a lot more too to help with mood and focus. And I have another appointment with Centrelink next month to keep me on my toes, somewhat literally. I’m just going to keep on doing my photography, playing my therapeutic video games, and having Christmas with my family. Next year is about taking my photography professional. I need to learn more about taking promotional band photos though. I think I’d do better with getting a professional photographer friend acting as my mentor rather than studying in a classroom. My untreated moods, ADHD and my more anti-social symptoms would make it an impossible task to accomplish.

revealed, which I’ve been writing about for a long time – it was just mania and I had developed bipolar disorder.