Where The Wild Things Grow

Mushrooms and mosses and writing. Oh my.

Life pulled me underground, and for a while, I let it—staying quiet, hidden, slowly breaking down. But even in the dark, things grow. Here’s what happened, and what has brought me back to the surface.

Doonan, Queensland

It’s been a while since I wrote a post. Months, in fact. Since then, so much has happened—in the world, and in my own private universe.

I tried to write a list of everything that has happened in those 5 months. (I’ve become a fan of lists lately - Lists of appointments. Lists of support services. Lists of incidents and evidence. Of things I’ll do when things get back to normal.) But when I did, when I saw my personal events -battling a mental health system, starting a degree, dealing with an autoimmune condition that blossomed in the Queensland humidity, a daughter pulling further away, trying to make a living - in the context of the seismic events that have happened in the world: America’s ice-cold plunge into authoritarianism, the genocide in Gaza, the destruction of the global economy, the death of good people, the inexplicable rise of bad people, my issues felt tiny. Not deserving of being at the top of the list. They were insignificant against the backdrop of the shifting tectonic political and economic plates on which our world exists.

And yet… my small events feel just as earth-shaking. Tiny particles, in the grand scheme of things. But with a weight so, so heavy. I remember in physics class we were learning about mass. We held big objects, which felt light. We held small objects that felt heavy. But they were all the same weight. The small ones just felt heavier, the teacher told us, because they were putting pressure on a smaller area. Perhaps my events felt heavier because I was the only one experiencing them.

So I abandoned the list. I will not compare them. I won’t line up my issues, and compare them to world events, like schoolchildren ordered by height. The littlest ones at the end, made to feel unimportant, insignificant. Because they weren’t insignificant, not to me.

Besides, it wasn’t one small thing or one big thing that kept me from posting here.

It was the accumulation. Each worry, each event, global and personal, stacking up on my shoulders, pushing me down. I did my best to resist. To stay positive. But then November came like a boulder. And I sank, willingly. I retreated underground and pulled the dark around me like a moss-heavy blanket. It muffled the noise, but the tremors from above still came. The roots still pushed down. Still whispered, mixing their messages until world events and my personal issues became intertwined. Not enough beds. Another hospital bombed. People stripped of human rights. A mother unable to help her child. An immune system in collapse. A world in collapse.

I surfaced when I had to—made appointments, took calls, argued, cried, tried. But after each time I came up, I needed to retreat deeper. Until coming up became too hard. I found ways to stay down there. I got rid of social media. I stopped communicating with friends. I stayed home more. I read the news less. I stopped posting here. I stayed hidden, me and my words.

Hobart, Tasmania

I didn’t rot. I didn’t disintegrate. That’s not what happens to things underground, where the wild things grow. No. I changed. I composted. I became a different version of me. I realise this now, as I look over my writing from the past few months. My words have changed. The words that I wrote frenetically. At a pace I haven’t done before. Spreading, unseen, unjudged, in the darkness. Mushrooming.

These curious new words were deprived of the stuff that exists at the surface. They reached into different, darker, deeper places. Tendrils reaching out into the murkiness that surrounded me, finding new sources of sustenance, new ways to feed me. I wrote about my fears. My realities. My self. Who I am at the core. And I held it close, not wanting to publish it here, not wanting to share, to give. I was doing enough of that on my journeys to the surface. Giving pieces of me to various therapists, doctors, bureaucrats. My feelings. My thoughts. My tears. My writing. They were the part of me that was still mine. Still hidden. Still me. The darkness was safe for me and my words. We stayed there together. Mulching with each other. Breaking down into something different.

But, the light, eventually, finds a way in, even when we try to shut it out. I’m doing a Master of Creative Writing at Edith Cowan University. Sharing is not optional. It’s essential. It’s how you grow in their environment. The soft light of my tutor found me and guided me up and out. Into a sheltered little clearing, where the only people who would see my words were a small group, who were also exposing their writing to the elements for the first time.

Manly, NSW

So there I was. On the surface, Exposed. I worried that in the light, my words would shrivel and die, like mushroom spores speared by a hot shard of light. But my classmates shielded them. They nurtured my writing, just as I nurtured theirs. And in that little space, just above the surface, my writing grew. Spawning and spindling out in strange and interesting ways. The way wild things should.

And while I was tentatively tiptoeing on the surface, still hiding my writing from the wider wood, someone reached into the little space I had created. Someone I respect. Someone whose beautiful writing reached and warmed me when I was deep underground - Bee Lilyjones. Bee asked me if I wanted to collaborate with her and other women whose writing feels like sunlight - Julia Adzuki, Stacy Boone, Yasmin Chopin, Amanda C Sandos and Julie Snider.

I said yes. And when our first newsletter comes out, you will see why Bee’s offer coaxed me out from under my mossy blanket.

And so, here I am, resisting my instinct to burrow deeper underground with my notebook. Instead, my writing will grow in plain sight. In a way I didn’t anticipate but growing anyway. Stripped of finery and superficiality. No pretty petals or glossy leaves anymore.

Dear reader, I should warn you. My words no longer unfurl like a delicate flower. They sprout like fungi, in unexpected places. You will not be able to clip and arrange them in a vase or put a pretty ribbon around them. They will take on strange shapes. Fed on things I’d rather ignore, but know I need to digest. They will no longer come from a place of curated aesthetics; sentences carefully pruned and trimmed for reposting.

No—they will be true. Untamed.

They will be from the place where the wild things grow.

Maleny, Queensland