Sarah Wilson

This week… I am neurotic

Now, you might ask, how can indulging in a private personality schism make life better. I’m kind of asking myself the same, but let’s see how this goes.

For starters, openly acknowledging something in yourself that others have long suspected can make life easier for everyone involved. But let’s take this one step further. Acknowledging and celebrating something that we all have lurking beneath the surface – in one guise or another – but that we rarely talk about, can take life to a whole new level of sweetness. Movies and books about oddball characters do this. I’m thinking Juno and American Beauty. We recognise a part of ourselves in the kooky characters, and it makes us smile in belongingness.  It just does.

I quite love Clare Bowditch.

That’s her up above. The admiration kicked off when she emailed me a while back after reading something I’d written and she suggested we meet for tea when I was in Melbourne next cos we’d have stacks in common. I love contacting people I’d like to meet and suggesting tea. I love people I’d love to meet who do the same.

She’s also very whimsical.

And musical. She’s recording her next album RIGHT NOW. This tune is from it.

She also has issues with her thyroid. I posted my experiences with auto-immune disease a few weeks back. And now I’ve asked Clare to share:

Weirdest symptoms? A swelling in the throat every time I had a sip of coffee or tea or wine.

Best tip to stick to?  I have a very beautiful GP who kept saying to me, “Remember, your body is your best friend. It wants to help you. Listen to it. Slow down. Life is for enjoying!”. This was the best advice I could have had. She also challenged me to find ways of entertaining and being entertained that didn’t involve wheat, recreational sugar, alcohol, or caffeine, which sounds basic, but I found it a real challenge! Excellent quality fish oil and selenium drops were also a part of my healing.

What’s your philosophical stance? Dicky thyroids are a mystery, but mine got my attention and asked me to be a bit gentler with myself.  The only reason I listened is because it didn’t really leave me any other options. I entered 2010 a much happier person than the one who began 2009. I conclude, therefore, that my dicky thyroid was a great lesson in how to be honest with myself.

I love this advice. Yay, to gentle! And I love reading about other people’s symptoms…it’s somehwo comforting to know yours aren’t the weirdest.

If you have auto-immune, what’s your weirdest?

Yumi talks on Ten’s The Circle about who she ran into at Tropfest on Sunday. And there I am.

I kind of like it that I’m in my $40 dress and $3 motorbike boots (I bought them from a homeless man in New York who’d just raided someone’s rubbish) and I hadn’t washed my hair and I’m not wearing makeup and….

Oh, yes. And Elijah Wood bumped in to my left breast minutes after the photo was taken. NOW THERE’S A BRUSH WITH FAME!

I’m a firm believer that the best things happen to you when go lo-fi. You’re being yourself, so good stuff comes to YOU.

In case you missed it, I gave up alcohol for February, as ambassador for Febfast.

The whole concept totally took off, which makes me so happy and impressed with human nature in general. Almost everyone I know took part. Bloody incredible. And the shift in everyone’s behaviour is astonishing. There’s a calmness. An OKness about town.

Gossip terror Ros Reines was inspired to comment in Spectator that the whole of Sydney seems to be on the wagon this month.

A FebFast update: 7200 people took part (I’d double that figure – a lot of people didn’t register) and it’s raised over $500K. Team Sarah Wilson coughed up more than $8K.

Last weekend my dear friend, crime author and highly impressive human being (she knocks my socks off) Tara Moss held a literary salon in her house up in the mountains where most of the room wasn’t drinking. We drank pomegranate juice in big wine balloons instead.

A lot of us have been going to the movies. And doing the Bondi-Bronte walk. And having tea in our gardens.

How’ve you been going? What tricks have worked for you? Below some great feedback from people around Australia. It made me teary….

When I first read about FebFast in Sarah Wilson’s column I giggled with some girlfriends that a whole month without alcohol would ruin me  – well it hasn’t, only two of us signed up but the support and interest from friends has been great. Next year I will really push for their participation and sponsorship, the main benefit for me so far has been such a wonderful improvement in overall health, no headachy mornings, less mood swings, lighter on the scales and better bladder control! Thanks FebFast for giving me a great way to detox after the festive season. I will definetely be participating next year and really monitoring my intake of alcholic beverages from now on. I will also be buying shares in whichever company produces soda, mineral and tonic H2O!

So on Thursday I was stood up by a friend. Her excuse was as flimsy as a philanderer’s promise and it was her third last-minute no-show. Sitting at the restaurant fuming into a ramekin of bar olives I wondered if it wasn’t time to defriend.

It’s a concept many of you relate to. I know this because  “unfriending” has just been deemed Word of the Year by the New Oxford American Dictionary, and presumably because more than just a few of us are talking about dumping redundant friends. (Oxford debated whether to go with “unfriend” or the social media-speak version “defriend”; proper English won out.) But my question, as always, is whether a decluttering of your black book – like you might a drawer of kitchen appliance warranties – makes life better. Come take a walk with me on this one.

• Truth is, I have too many friends. Again, you get what I mean. Our circles have expanded, we’re stupidly bogged down in life admin and many of us have become friend whores, accumulating hundreds (thousands?) of friends on Twitter and Facebook. Exerts call these “weak ties”. We had no idea this would happen when we signed up. But that’s what technology does – it moves faster than us. Now, we’re swamped with weak ties.

For reasons I’m not entirely sure about, I was transfixed by this – a Youtube post of Gwyneth Paltrow’s personal trainer Tracey Anderson demo’ing her arm workout in the mirror.

She made it especially for Gwytneth and on her site Goop GP says she does it when she’s traveling.

It’s one of my favourite things to do: dance on my own at home. I especially love arm dancing – it gets blood to my shoulders and I concentrate on pressing me shoulder blades back together, like I’m squeezing an orange between them. I jump up between writing spurts and fling my limbs (I have this fear I’m starting to hunch from typing too much).

When you get home tonight, perhaps feeling a bit frazzled after talking too robustly at after-work drinks, dance with your arms like no one’s watching.

Enjoy. It’s Friday. Sigh.

Seth Godin, the maestro of idea generation, posted this musing this morning about using cliches to your advantage.

be your own bridge over troubled waters

He starts with the wiki definition:

In printing, a cliché was a printing plate cast from movable type. This is also called a stereotype. When letters were set one at a time, it made sense to cast a phrase used repeatedly as a single slug of metal. “Cliché” came to mean such a ready-made phrase. The French word “cliché” comes from the sound made when the matrix is dropped into molten metal to make a printing plate.

To save time and money, then, printers took common phrases and re-used the type.

Along the way, they trained us to understand the image, the analogy, the story. Hear it often enough and you remember it. That training has a useful purpose….

The effective way to use a cliché is to point to it and then do precisely the opposite.

If you’ve got auto-immune disease, you probably have some bloody annoying issues with inflammation  – swollen feet or hands, skin breakouts, sore joints etc. I do (see the rest of my rundown on my crazy wrestling with Hashimoto’s here). I put up with it for ages. Actually, I whinged about it. But did nothing.

Only recently I’ve realised that I can actually eat my way back from the angry, red, swollen brink. And so it happened – as it does when you start thinking along a certain path – the info I was after jumped out at me. Chelsea Hunter, one of the editors at WellBeing magazine contacted me with the spiel below. She’s kindly let me share her love with all of you.

Chelsea says:

Food is a joy. Food can heal.

I was reminded of this when I read Sarah’s earlier post about how her body often felt inflamed as a result of Hashimoto’s. Only a few weeks earlier I had read an article written by naturopath Saskia Brown about the foods that can help to ease inflammation in the body – a lovely bit of synchronicity I thought. We both wanted to share Saskia’s wisdom with you. Soo…

Anti-inflammatory foods

There are many foods you can include in your diet to help combat inflammation. Including the right types of fats and carbohydrates in your diet is integral to controlling pain and inflammation. Omega-3 essential fatty acids are very powerful anti-inflammatory agents and are found in large amounts in cold-water oily fish, walnuts, flaxseeds, canola oil and pumpkin seeds.

I watched this a while back. But decided to dig it up again because it’s so sweet. 50 People, one question: Where would you like to wake up?

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Fifty People, One Question: Brooklyn from Fifty People, One Question on Vimeo.

Everyone yearns, don’t they.

Although, it’s amazing how many people, when pressed, say they’d wake up where they woke that morning. Being pressed to consider what you’d exchange in your life can see yearning slip away.

Me, today, I’d like to wake up in a sunny loft apartment in New York on white sheets with the scent of a man and coffee lingering. Or maybe I just want to be in an IKEA ad.

“Spontaneity is not made by fastness”

I often get asked how long it takes me to write my weekly Sunday Life column. I know why people ask – because they want to know if what they’re doing is taking too long. I wish I had a watertight answer. But to be honest, some days it flows in an hour or two. Others, well it can take all day. And night. And I still won’t have written the first sentence.

My friends are used to this. I have them on an ad-hoc roster. I ring one when I’m having a stuck day and talk it out, agonise, ask for advice and then get impatient with them, hang up and go sit on my head (I don’t say this flippantly).

What makes these days even more turn-inside-outty:  if I let it enter my head that Other People Do Things Much Faster.

What makes me eventually calm down: is some advice a writing mentor from my early days as a feature writer at Sunday Magazine (the competitor mag) gave me: “The day you stop taking too long to write your first two paragraphs is the day you stop being a good writer”. She then told me about how a VERY senior journo (now editor of a major metro daily) would agonise and have to share his first paras with the office and get lots of egoic stroking before continuing.

What struck a chord this week:  this little snippet about how long it took Bruce Springsteen to record Born to Run:

It took him six months during the spring and summer of 1974 to record the title track….Anytime you spend six months on a song, there’s something not exactly going right. (But) Born To Run marked a change in Springsteen’s writing style. Whereas previously it seemed as if he had a rhyming dictionary open beside him, now his lyrics became simultaneously more compact and explosive. What mattered to him was to sound spontaneous, not to be spontaneous. “Spontaneity,” he said, in 1981, “is not made by fastness. Elvis, I believe, did like 30 takes of ‘Hound Dog,’ and you put that thing on, and it just explodes”.