struggle street

blog: the teeth of madness

I have a bad tooth. I used to have more, but over the last decade I’ve worked to have them filled, pulled, etc. and now there’s just one last tooth giving me trouble. It has a cavity that goes almost to the root. I had it filled between jobs in 2019 by a dentist who gave me a choice – fill, root canal, extraction. I was warned then that the filling would be ‘temporary’ and only likely to last 6 months. Well, part of that filling has come out, and the back half of the tooth has cracked and is extremely wobbly, but 6 years later it’s still hanging in there.

If you ask me why I haven’t had it pulled (root canal is just a no bueno in my book), I would cite the reason the dentist gave me… that because this tooth is next to one that was extracted a few years ago, it would leave a two-tooth gap between my back molar and the next tooth, which could affect the structural integrity of that molar (unless I invest in some implants for several thousand a pop). I’ve also justified not having it pulled due to work responsibilities and important events I’m working on; I know from experience extractions put me out of commission for days. Lately the excuse has been that I just don’t have the money.

But the real reason is… I just don’t like change. I hang on to old shit, put up with adverse situations, deal with (read: ignore) ill health conditions and broken teeth, far longer than I need to. Even when I know removing those things from my life or removing myself from those situations would make my life infinitely better, I still hang on.

And if I had to play armchair psychologist, I would say some of this might stem from the fact that my life has always been transient. Even before I was kicked out of home at 17, my family relocated a lot. In the first 13 years of my life I had lived in at least 8 different places across two different countries. And a lot more after I left home; in the last twenty years alone I’ve lived in 20 different places, some for only weeks at a time. I’ve definitely fallen into the “no fixed address” category a few times. And very few of the places felt like ‘home’, felt like places I could set down my load and relax my guard for a bit.

When you don’t have any real sense of permanence in life, especially when that is tied with low income and borderline poverty, you can fall into a line of thinking like “as long as I’m breathing and have a place to lay my head at night, let’s not rock the boat.” When you’re on Struggle Street for any significant length of time (like your whole life), you just try to fly under the radar and get from one day to the next. Any change to your existence – good and bad – threatens that status quo. And you’ve learned that even the good stuff doesn’t last, so you don’t want to risk putting too many eggs in that basket anyway.

To give another example, I am drowning in my current location. I’ve lived here for four years, and while I have a good relationship with my landlord, there are also certain infringements upon my privacy and my property that I’ve had to put up with. I have neighbours that blare their music at nightclub volumes at ALL hours of the day, sometimes up to 3 or 4 am. I have neighbours that get into wild domestics, sometimes involving physical fighting in the street and the cops getting called. On top of that I only have only 2 or 3 friends left in the area that I see on a regular basis, if by regularly you mean once every couple of months.

I’ve kept justifying staying here because the rent is cheap as dirt even for the ghetto area I live in, and the cats have plenty of room to run around. But my mental health is suffering so much because of this isolation and disturbance of privacy and peace of mind. There’s another area of Sydney I am contemplating moving to, where I would have at least a dozen friends I would see regularly. Where I would have access to a few spiritual communities. Where I would be closer to vet care for my animals, closer to the city for commuting and socialising. Yes the rent out there is more expensive – well over double what I pay here. But assuming I could find a housemate, I could make it work. I just need to save for the move.

And yet I hesitate to do this Good Thing for myself. And I don’t know why. It’s as mad as not having my bad tooth pulled. I just need to learn how to prioritise WELLBEING over SURVIVAL, but I don’t know where to begin.

blog: but for the grace of God

My South African friend taught me a word – “omgewings gestremdheid”. Don’t ask me to pronounce it! Translated, it means “environmentally impaired” and means someone who is not just disadvantaged or constrained by their environment, but who is impaired to the point of having little to no hope of breaking free of that environment.

My Afrikaans lesson came about because there is a community on my doorstep you could say is bad even by Western Sydney standards. Housing commission, drug deals, burnt out cars up on blocks, shootings and stabbings, domestic violence and dole cheques, it’s got the lot. But it’s also a community with a big heart, and there are a lot of people with equally big hearts working from within the community to bring about real transformation.

Earlier this year, four boys aged 13 to 16 went to Tasmania for a 10 day wilderness trek up Mt Ossa, and their journey was captured by a 16-year-old film-maker. Tonight there was a screening of the documentary, projected against the wall of the local shopping centre which has been closed for years now. In fact, the only things in the Square now seem to be the tavern/bottle shop, and in strange juxtaposition, the local Uniting church. And as we gathered on the car park of the closed shopping centre to watch the movie, some of the boys from the film were there, and the crowd was a little rough and rowdy, but overall a spirit of laughter, generosity and “keeping it real” prevailed.

But for all the talk about the “heart” and “community spirit” of the area, there’s still the drugs, the shootings, the stabbings, the serial convictions and jail sentences, the ready fist, the too-loud laughter and the occasional “Git FARRRRKED!!”. It’s part of the community’s heritage and its legacy. It’s what keeps this place ‘environmentally impaired’. Change is happening, but who you are inside, where you’re from, that never goes away. It becomes part of what shapes you, what makes you decide to do what you do and think what you think.

And I think that’s okay. Life is not a hallmark greeting card, or a neat story arc in a Hollywood movie. Life is not always pretty. Sometimes, life is pretty damn dark. And some people, when faced with that darkness, crumble – maybe because the gap between their expectations and their reality is too great for them to cope. But others embrace the darkness, see it as a challenge; these are the people who stick out their chin and say to life, “Give us ya best shot!” And sometimes they roll with the punches, and sometimes they don’t… but the important thing is, they got in the arena and gave it a go. That’s what I like to think the people of this community are like – people who know life’s not perfect, but they’ll be damned if they’ll let the rest of society determine their worth for them.

I see a lot of myself in this. I’ve been through a lot in my life. I’ve battled some pretty tough demons, including alcoholism and homelessness. And I thought I had closed the book on that chapter of my life, I came out of it fairly unscathed, I don’t need to be that person any more so time to put it behind me and move on with my life, right? But it never really goes away. It’s part of who I am and always will be. I am struggling lately with things I thought were long buried; I can see it affecting my life, my relationships, and my chance to break free from the emotional environment I’m in. But one thing I’m learning is that it does no good to deny the past. I can’t change my experiences – but I’m coming to realise I CAN change what I learned from them.

I hope that I can learn to have the strength to keep it real, acknowledge my past and my imperfections, and realise that it doesn’t have to stop me from achieving wholeness and completeness in my life. I don’t have to worry about labelling myself a victim OR a survivor, I just need to worry about getting in the arena and seeing how well I can take a punch… it may help to have a few friendly faces ringside though. :)