Day 6: #you

I don’t know how old I am in this photo, I don’t recognise the school uniform, but I think it’s safe to say this was infants’ school era.

I was very blonde and skinny, no doubt still faithfully attached to my teddy bear, Joshua.

It was about this age that I tried to read The Hobbit and the density of it ruined Tolkien for me to this day.

Day 7: #someonethatinspiresyou

Joy was my Honours supervisor and one of those rare people who inspire you every time you see them. She’s incredibly intuitive, and steered me down some paths very gently, which opened up my world immensely and will influence me forever, I think.

I caught up with her last week and despite no longer supervising me in any official capacity, Joy left me bursting with ideas and enthusiasm for projects to undertake. She is my critical friend.

Day 8: #asmellyouadore

I continue to be faithful to L’Occitane, despite the fact that they stopped making the most heavenly vanilla perfume and their intoxicating miel candles.

Day 9: #somethingyoudoeveryday

Read. It’s the most excapist activity for me, it’s like it makes a cocoon of silence around me. I’m trying to read a book a week again this year and most recently I’ve been caught up in Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. I’ve can’t think of any other historical fiction I’ve read, and this was a fantastic place to start. It’s a fantastic way to learn about the Tudor-era in England.

Day 10: #afavouriteword

I’ve always liked my name, it’s always felt comfortable and I can’t imagine being, or wanting to be called anything else.

Somewhere on the Internet, someone mentioned Atmosphere’s then-new album, When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold and I thought to myself, ‘Maybe if I did a little painting of shit gold, I will paint myself out of this rut!’

It was not my first foray into hip-hop, I’d always been a fan, I’d just had a few years dabbling in nothing but the dark arts of PJ Harvey and Tori Amos and Radiohead and ISIS and Neurosis, years where the most upbeat I ever got was enjoying listening to Blood Brothers tear their throats to shreds.

It was with caution that I returned to the beats, tentatively dipping one gold Reebok Pump-encased toe into the water.

One of the first songs I came across was ‘You’ and from there, I fell hard, for the first time since teenage-hood, buying the entire back catalogue of this amazing band that made me feel good, that made me appreciate sunshine, made me stop looking at my feet while I walked and instead at the world around me, had lyrics that made me laugh and made me think.

Of course, after becoming royally obsessed, Atmosphere didn’t tour here for years. Last year I seriously considered travelling to the US to go to the Soundset festival just to see them but couldn’t get the cash together in time; however, on Saturday I am seeing them right here in Sydney and I am stupidly excited about it, excited enough that despite having no sense of rhythm or co-ordination, I might even shake my bizz.

The Jeff, The Silver Fox, The-Pedant-to-End-All-Pedants. In this photograph we were lurking near the carousel in Civic in Canberra. It’s my default meeting place when I visit our nation’s capital, mostly because it would be weird to say ‘Meet me by the sheep statues posed in such a way that less suggests shearing as it does make its audience feel like peeping toms at a live sheep sex show’.

It is close enough to said live sheep sex show that you can take a sneaky peak at it while you wait though. Really, the carousel is the perfect front for perverts.

Looking through the photos on my phone from the last few weeks, it’s really no surprise that many people I know have been having some mental tug-of-wars. The onset of winter and the end of daylight savings is always a bit of a shock to the system, but this year it was like Sydney flicked a switch overnight and then set the winter weather cycle to CRAZY.

Despite the havoc it’s been wreaking with my mood, I am actually a huge winter fan. Winter clothes are so snuggly and cute. About the only characteristic of a heteronormative female I display is the joy I get from a new winter wardrobe and new winter makeup.

This year I’m trying to find a way of wearing M.A.C’s Cyber lipstick without looking like Morticia Addams. Not that I have a problem with Morticia Addams, she is a certified sex bomb but certified sex bomb, I am not.

In order to counter the Tess of the D’Urberville-esque feelings I was having, I took most of last week off work and went to the farm. It was fantastic, I booked a flight, which made it a half hour trip and it was delicious and cold and I spent time reading and cooking and treking the paddocks with Mum, then sitting in the afternoon sun on a rock by their creek, watching fish swimming.

I also went through a bag of my old clothes and pulled out some gems, including a great pair of pants which make me feel like a total dandy and a hat that made me feel like a flapper.

There is no place in the world as relaxing as the farm.

Day 1: #peace

I’ve always been very sensitive to my surroundings. A good indication of my mood at any given moment is the state of my room. I like clean sheets, dried in the sun, a pile of good books beside my bed, for everything to smell fantastic and to be tidy. It relaxes me to give things order.

Day 2: #skyline

Last week I took some time off work and went to visit my parents. I hardly ever go back and I could either lose a day to train travel, or fork out a couple of hundred dollars and drive back, but I decided to treat myself and fly, as the flight to Orange is only half an hour long. One plane and a taxi later and I was building a fire, sitting in silence and feeling more relaxed than I had been in weeks.

Day 3: #somethingyouwore

Jacket: official casual wear from Alcatraz prison, San Francisco.
Lipstick: Cyber by M.A.C.
Chicken: courtesy of Rosings.

Day 4: #fun

Fun is wearing outfits that make you feel like a fascist spy from space future.

Day 5: #bird

This is Crouchy, who my mum wishes I would stop calling Crouchy, because crouching to be picked up is not all Crouchy does. She also makes eggs.

This is the story about how I got fat.

In 2005 I started a new medication and I started to put on weight. Not a little bit here and there, a lot, fast. I’d always been a skinny kid so weight gain was confusing. I remember standing in my bedroom, which I had diligently decorated with Polaroids and plastered with Radiohead and Bikini Kill lyrics, trying to do up a skirt I had worn mere weeks before. This was the first time in my life I’d felt comfortable with the essence of whatever it was that was me. I was having a very self-confident year and I was very satisfied with a lot of aspects of my life. 

What was uncomfortable was the way the skirt suddenly felt like it was sawing me in half. When I couldn’t do it up, I assumed the washing machine had eaten part of it. I let this charade go on long past the point where white goods could be to blame.

I didn’t just gain weight, I became obese. People who’ve known me for years have argued that although I weighed a lot, I couldn’t possibly have been obese, maybe because there was six-foot of me to spread the weight gain across, but there’s no getting around the facts.

This turn of events both upset me greatly and numbed me. While I became obsessively self-conscious to the point of avoiding clothes shopping almost completely, because fitting rooms would make me panic to the point I would break out in a sweat, I somehow felt safer with a label. If I was fat, people could just see me as that, ignore me and move on. I never learnt to ”embrace my curves” perhaps because they weren’t so much curves as odd bulges in hard to hide places. My self-loathing was very insular and I ignored it so diligently that I didn’t even notice the depression creep in, a low buzz that sapped me of so much energy and made me a homebody. I assumed my constant tiredness was a side-effect of the weight, except I wasn’t tired, I barely slept, I was instead exhausted in every way possible.   

I joined gyms, I ate microwaveable “healthy” meals, I bought bigger and bigger clothes and then I finally gave up. The thought of what I used to consider dinner and the portions I ate makes me feel ill now, but at the time I guess I thought that I was fat anyway, junk food made me feel better and what did kilos matter when they were just being added to kilos on kilos?

Nothing could stop me. Family members talking to me about my weight and the consequences didn’t, hating all my clothes and my reflection didn’t, being diagnosed with high blood pressure didn’t.

I was so numb that on the several occasions strangers decided to tell me I was fat, one man going so far as to follow me around the supermarket, I didn’t shed a tear. Whole Lotta Rosie? I was a whole lotta fuck you.

Then in 2010 I started losing weight slowly, living alone meant that the only things in the fridge were things I really wanted there. Bottles of soft drink became a can every now and then, I started cooking at home more, snacking less. It wasn’t a conscious decision at all, but the small results were nice and were enough to get me back to the gym.

Last year I lost more weight and learnt to love the gym, particularly lifting weights. I started to lose fat, and gain muscle, so although the scales weren’t moving much, clothes started to fit differently, I started to sleep better and I stopped hating every photo I saw of myself. I started letting people take photos of me.

This year, I set myself the same resolution I had done for about five years, but I tweaked it slightly. Rather than telling myself I would be skinny and a total heath food nut by year’s end, I told myself I didn’t need to do anything more than reach the weight I was when I first stepped on the scales in 2006 and realised I had a problem and probably needed to do something about it. It was still a huge task, but at least I had a number, and at least I was being realistic.  

On April 8, I stepped on the scales and realised I’d passed my goal with eight months to go, and I cried. I hadn’t realised until that moment how much weight loss actually mattered to me.

I’ve lost about 10kgs this year already and multiple clothing sizes. I fit into clothes I haven’t worn since my early 20s, whereas clothes that I bought as recently as November look ridiculously baggy on me now. I have developed a shopping addiction and had can’t stop clutching my sides and screaming, ‘Hip bones! Hello it’s been so long since I’ve seen you!’

I am nowhere near the point where I want to analyse the whole process or the long-term effects of ignoring that I felt so bad about myself for such a long time, and honestly, I don’t really want to get into the politics of weight in western culture either, so I’m just kind of enjoying it at the moment and trying not to run into things when I look at myself in shop windows, not because I’m arrogant, but because I keep having to check in to make sure it really happened.

And so this is the serious side of the story, a fairly superficial snapshot of one of the biggest struggles I’ve had.

Probably the biggest thing I will take away from the experience is this: I have never met a seriously overweight person who doesn’t have mental health issues, and it’s a chicken or the egg scenario, but I don’t care which came first. It doesn’t matter. I don’t find fat jokes funny, I don’t understand the intolerance people feel for, say, overweight people at the gym, overweight people sitting next to them on the plane, overweight people eating in public. It’s not necessarly gluttony and laziness, sometimes these people are very, very slowly slipping away, self-medicating on food, faced with a huge task to get better. To taunt them, to use them to make yourself feel better, is cruel.  

I was the same person, the whole time.

After forgetting my hair-straightener, deodorant and any form of bra that held my chesticles above my knees, we decamped to a car rental place situated above a garage, heavily populated by idle taxi drivers like flamingos around a watering hole. I’m not sure what I was going for there, mostly just the image of a lot of taxi drivers.

The fake leather couches in the demountable office only solidified the  distinct atmosphere that this was the sort of place where you could probably trade sexual favours for a few more charge-free kilometres per day.

With no sexual favours exchanged, we were on our way.

Jeff has both pros and cons as a travel buddy. Pros include owning TomTom and knowing how to set up blue-tooth to play music from an iPhone over the car’s stereo, actively encouraging snack breaks and being understanding about my inability to park cars very well. Cons include refusing to make out at red lights, mocking my inability to stop at suggested snack break establishments, highlighting my tendency to hang left and insisting that it was unsafe for me to drive with five Cheezels on my left hand.

We stayed at the Mecure, in a two-storied room and I celebrated such a score by purchasing some gin and tonic in can and retiring to the bath, where I caught up on The Wall Street Journal* and The Economist**.

The weather was gloriously cold and I squealed and curled up in my suitcase alongside my thick stockings and jackets and array of very grandma-esque underwear that keeps my kidneys and lady bits warm in the cooler climates. I love winter clothing.

I think this winter’s look is best described as ‘Soviet sex spy’.

Saturday was the Canberra Craft Beer Festival which happened to be held in our very hotel. We met up with some of my favourite buddies from high school – Adam, Marty and Tim – and settled into seven hours of drinking, coupon heists and sausages.  

Photo by Tim.

Photo by Jeff.

Afterwards, Jeff and I went to the Neutrell household and played Fruit Ninja on Kinect. It’s amazing how seven hours of beer can make you unselfconscious about ninja chopping the air and getting overly competetive about who is the greatest food ninja and crying in the corner when it isn’t you. Poor Jeff***.  

The next day we met up with one of my most dearest, darlingest friends, Skye and visited Jeff’s adorbs puppy, Po before beginning our trip back to Syds, during which I was still not allowed to wear Cheezels rings while driving.

I recommend a good roap trip, I think it’s healthy to get a change of scenery. Just remember: forgetting to pack a bra is an expensive, expensive mistake unless you can fashion a weekend replacement with a coathanger and two shower caps.

* By which I mean Who magazine

** And again, still Who.

*** By which I mean me.

Day 1: #yourreflection

Two things happened to me recently. First, my hair grew ridiculously long without me noticing. Like more than halfway down my back long. Everyone else noticed, mostly because I am now prone to leaving giant hairballs wherever I’ve been, which obviously means someone’s probably already cloned me. Maybe this is the clone typing now. The second thing, and this is worth some musing of its own at some point soon, I lost a heap of weight. I’ve been slowly losing weight for a few years now, but in the last few months I’ve been dropping kilos and kilos. This weekend I tried on a skirt I last wore when I was about 24 and it fit. It’s been a really strange process, mentally. Anyway, this photo was really the first time I could see what other people had been telling me: I have long hair and lost a bunch of weight *hacks up a hair-ball*.

Day 2: #colour

April is the month of road trips and road trips mean supplies and supplies mean going to Priceline and buying miniature versions of the makeup goods you use at home and miniature things make me happy. I had this blinding revelation in the middle of the night that I wanted denim coloured nail polish and it was all I could do not to buy all of them. I’ve been liking bright colours lately, because when I’m at yoga I need to have something to focus on while I’m twisted upside down, hating yoga.

Day 3: #mail

I don’t get much mail anymore, but in 2003 I started a subscription to Vanity Fair and while it’s lapsed, I still buy it each month and now have every issue from December 2003 ’til the most recent one. I’m thinking of going the subscription route again, if only to have something to look forward to in the mail.

Day 4: #someonewhomakesyouhappy

The V. My nephew, V is two now and talks a bit and is really funny and gregarious and social. He loves naming animals and swimming and crackers and cookies and planes. He’s also exceptionally fond of Stevie and Stole and Jeffy!

He makes me happy because he really is a bundle of cheer and really sweet.

Day 5: #tiny

I bought these tiny Kewpie dolls at Mao & More years ago and they’ve lived on various desks of mine ever since. Here they are waiting to make a telephone call in a tiny telephone booth. Naturally.

Day 11: #someoneyoutalkedtotoday

This is the back of my friend Lilla. I’ve known Lilla almost the entire time I’ve lived in Sydney. She is a Doctor of Philosophy and exceptionally good company. She is a vegetarian who owns both a cat and a whole cat skeleton. This was taken on our way to a sunny Sunday brunch in Newtown.

Day 12: #fork

A fork in the road, a buzz in the lines. The time just after nightfall is one of my favourite times.

Day 13: #asign

This is many a sign! Bonjour!

Day 14: #clouds

I took this from the top of the stairs at Redfern station, on my way to yoga, one of those rare vantage points in Sydney where you can see how big the sky is.

Day 15: #car

On my street are two really awesome old cars, this one, a metallic blue and another light tan coloured one. Neither of them ever seem to move and I can understand why. If you find a car spot long enough to fit a car this big in it in the Inner West, you never give it up.

Day 16: #sunglasses

Hello, my name is Julia, I am a sunglasses addict. At one point I owned 14 pairs, now I own six or seven. I bought the ones on the lower left in the US and decided I’d never find a more awesome pair. I bought the ones in the top left in Portland at a vintage shop called Magpie about two days later when I realised I could find a more awesome pair.

Day 17: #green

I had planned to somehow convince Jeff to be my subject for ‘green’ being that he has a well-known green addiction. Then I went into my ex-horse stable, now-porn sauna bathroom and saw this.

Day 18: #acornerofyourhome

I spend hours and hours and hours looking at my bookcase, either enjoying the way everything looks together, or plotting the next line of reading I’ll take.

Day 19: #funny

This is funny because as soon as I saw it, plastered on the front of one of my local pizza places, I knew who was responsible.

Day 20: #before/after

This is me aged 3-ish and 26-ish, at a guess.

Day 21: #delicious

Every week after yoga, my cousin and I walk home and stop for a chocolate break. I always get a strawberry Freddo because, um, they’re delicious.

Day 22: #kitchensink

I love the little window in our kitchen and I find washing up relaxing. I am my mother’s daughter, despite the rumours.

Day 23: #moon

Moon is the one movie that’s made me sob in public. That bit where he holds out his hand and says ‘I’m so lonely’? Jesus.

Day 24: #ananimal

I call this The Urban Zebra.

Day 25: #breakfast

NOTHING TO SEE HERE. To be fair, I actually stopped eating breakfast for a huge chunk of time this month, so on a technicality, I completed March photo a Day.

Day 26: #key

This belongs to my soon-to-be-no-longer-a-housemate housemate. I think it’s so amazing.

Day 27: #yourname

Left: my writing, age 7-ish. Right: My writing, age 29.

Day 28: #trash

Garbage is still one of my favourite albums ever. It’s all sex and sadness and rain and too much eye makeup.

Day 29: #feet

These are Steph’s amazing rubber leopard print boots.

Day 30: #toy

This is Joshua. He is 29. He’s a real pal.

Day 31: #whereyourelax

Yin yoga. I almost meditated myself to sleep last time.

Day 6: #5pm

This is where I am at 5pm most days, my work desk. My team are huge on printing out pictures of our latest obsessions and plastering out desks and monitors with them. Here, I am repping insanity and music, by way of Hunter S Thompson and (the) Melvins. The other side of my monitor is all hip-hip, all the time, baby.

Day 7: #somethingyouwore

The 7th of March happened to be a Wednesday and Wednesday happens to be yoga day! I am halfway through a beginners yoga course. It amazes me how much stronger I am than the last time I did yoga. Downward-facing dog into plank? Not a problem. How I can’t do a proper sun salute because of my boobs? Totally different story.

Day 8: #window

This was the last day I had recently where I really didn’t feel like I could get out of bed. I’m not exactly gazelle-like now, but at least I’m not mentally composing poetry about life being a cage.

Day 9: #red

I saw this skirt months ago and talked myself out of buying it because it didn’t fit perfectly. Now I’ve lost a bunch of weight and as chance would have it, the skirt was still there. Now to find me a blazer and complete my plan to look like some kind of Kubrick schoolmarm.

Day 10: #loud

I could have chosen so many things to illustrate loud, but none of them would be as fitting as Jeff. Has he ever told you his Tolkien joke? No? You’ll know when the punchline is coming because I’ll have my hand firmly clamped across his mouth and a tight smile.

Day 1: #up

I remember when I took this photo rain was predicted for Sydney all through March. Today I sat in almost the same spot, baking in the sun.

Day 2: #fruit

I don’t eat much fruit, despite having free fruit boxes delivered to work twice a week (Sorry Mum! Sorry body! Sorry heart in body!) but orange tea counts! This is one of a series of photos I take called Big Food Photos. It’s one of my favourite things in the world, along with large underpants and the concept of adult prams.

Day 3: #yourneighbourhood

I grew up in the country and on long drives I would spend hours watching power poles go by, imagining some really fast and strong person bounding along the top of them, keeping up with the speed of the car. Power lines could be really ugly, but I like the way they dissect the sky.

Day 4: #bedside

I have always loved bedside tables, mostly because I read a lot and like having books close by. Here we have: a skull-shaped shot glass that usually has medication in it; bottles of Omega, vitamin D and melatonin; a talisman monkey that my mum made that looks to be dead, but is really sleeping; a pictorial history of hip-hip; back issues of Vanity Fair; a book about anxiety; a notebook; Polaroids from Steph and Joel’s wedding; a highlighter; a wristband from the Tamworth Country Music Festival; my Kindle; a notebook I keep track of every book I read in, and tissues.

Day 5: #smile

I am the only person who can take posed photos of me that aren’t hideous. This one is ridiculous, but not hideous. This is my fake photo smile. The photo is quite old, I haven’t been blonde in an age.