I was kept safe, I was nourished, Was it the Brady Bunch childhood? Not for me. From 13 to 16 I was quite unhappy. I left home at 16 and never went back. I went to Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. I struggled a lot with what I wanted to do in my life and what my family wanted me to do with my life.
I studied Psychology and I always wanted to be a Therapist. I also wanted to work with children, having read the book ‘Dibs In search of Self’ by Virginia M. Axline. It was about a little boy who lived with autism and worked with play therapy. I remember reading it as a teenager and thinking that’s what I wanted to do.
I made it through Uni and in 1981 I got out and had a career in computers. I was pretty messed up then. By the time I was 21 I had quite severe clinical depression but I was still functioning.. just. I had a job with severely emotionally disturbed adolescents and I couldn’t hack being there when I was not well myself. I had my first round of therapy with a Psychiatrist and the anti depressants at that time were so hard core. I felt unbalanced and foggy and it was so hard to function. I was suicidal and very depressed. I’d had a dysfunctional relationship of sorts and I just wanted to be me in the world. I felt constrained by the expectations others had on me.
A pivotal moment for me was when I flushed those medications down the toilet. I realised I had a whole cabinet of drugs I could OD on that the Psychiatrist had given me. It was a revelation that these people who were supposed to be treating me were just giving me meds so I decided to take up exercise and started at the gym. I’d always been very athletic and I found that exercise for me turned around the depression and that’s when I pursued a career in computers. We were doing pretty sophisticated work in the early days. We’d be on IBM mainframes and we’d be in a room with these huge machines and you would have to compile your programmes and work in what they call machine language. I’m one of the few people around who understands what’s underneath all of this technology.
Eventually I got tired of just using my brain and I wanted to be of service more. I was working for a not for profit housing organisations doing their financial systems and I met a man named Bill who had AIDS. We became good friends and sadly he passed away so I thought that was the work I wanted to do. I left where I was living at that point and went to a town in New Hampshire called Portsmouth where they had an AIDS service organisation and I worked as a volunteer and I got involved in community activism. It turned my life around, I wasn’t working in computers, I was now doing social change work. When I was working there we were losing people like flies, one person after the other was dying and we were the women who stood by and cared. We also worked with sex workers which was an area that wasn’t really being looked at enough.
I then went back to school and got a Masters in Organisation Management because we had some dysfunction in our organisation which got my interest. I wanted to learn about group dynamics and group leadership so I went to Antioch New England and got a degree and worked with the non profit sector. I worked with organisations who were doing really good work.
I was living in Maine by now and these deer started showing up in my backyard which at first I thought was lovely but then I realised that Maine was becoming developed by developers so they were losing their habitat. I was giving money to PETA at the time and I had a lot of earth connections as a kid. I loved climbing trees and was quite a tomboy. When I saw the deer I became more aware about what was happening to our planet. I took a course and more or less just learned about the earth being a finite system and we were imperilling our future in a big way. From that I became introduced to Joanna Macy’s work who is a Deep Ecologist. She has a body of work called ‘The work that Reconnects’. I had a lot of grief and despair particularly over loss of habitat. Where I lived there was nobody fighting for the forests because the land that was being bought up was all privatised, it was kind of taboo to have these feelings whereas here in Australia there was a fight going on to protect State Forests and National Parks.
I quit my jobs, much to my partner at that time’s despair, I just wanted to protect the forests.”
(To be continued).