Gettin' Good and Mad

Most of my friends know the bones of my life story - sexually assaulted by a Catholic priest and subsequently expelled from my boarding school at 16, raped at age 17, married to an alcoholic batterer who also raped and sodomised me as his "right"... and being bi-polar. Running away with my two kids across three continents finally to arrive in Australia with nothing but each other. Boo-hoo, poor me material.

They also know how I used those experiences and was accepted with open arms by Queensland Dept. of Mental Health; ran myself ragged giving talks while on the Dole and studying; liaised between patients and staff at a local psychiatric ward; ran support groups; did suicide interventions; made docos; communicated with politician Julia Gillard etc. As long as I was a volunteer.



When it came to paid work I wasn't qualified.

I took all that with me when I went to China and found that in a country of huge dichotomies, high suicide rates (never published), depression, high rates of mental illnesses, abysmal education standards, women-as-less-than-other (strongly and officially denied), I was certainly qualified. It all came together.

I've got awards I was given, yellowing on my windowsill in incomprehensible Chinese. But, most importantly, I've got the words of my students: "Cireena, you taught me how to be a woman", "Teacher, you gave me a meaning in my life", "My teacher, You showed me what it meant to be a man", "Until I took your classes I had never realised that I had choices", "You taught me about truth and honesty" , "I learned to love life through you".



I know perfectly well that I'm not alone in getting these kinds of responses:- its what teaching is all about. But to me it proves that what I was doing was working.

Then, once again, I come to Australia and I'm not bloody qualified.



My whole reason for going to University as a "Mature" student was to gain qualifications and credibility that would make my life experiences useful. It was certainly not because of scholastic/corporate/personal ambition. I went to Uni through six of the most difficult years of my personal life because I want to help where I know I can. An ethos that has been devalued by every beauty queen who breathlessly announces she wants to "make a difference" to the poor little kiddies of the world or whatever.

Discovering Seventeenth Century writer Margaret Cavendish was all part of that because it showed me how long women have been living my life and fighting against it. Indeed, how my life, in comparison, looks like a Sunday School picnic. Through Margaret and on behalf of millions of women down through the ages and across the worlds, I hoped to gain a Voice.


But I'm stymied. Time is running on and I'm still just a whisper in the wilderness.



I love knowledge. I submerge myself in learning. So going on to get higher qualifications is not something that daunts me. But knowing that I need those further qualifications before I can even THINK of being taken seriously, however, is starting to get me good and mad. Because the pathway to those qualifications, it appears, takes me directly away from the life experiences that I want to keep building on.



Until I have those magical, door-opening, strings of letters I do not figure in The Great Scheme of Things. To get those strings of letters I have to retire from The Great Scheme of Things.



Each year spent in scrabbling for those letters takes me further and further along my life journey. Women who have turned a certain chronological milestone on that journey are unemployable.



Where the hell is the magical trapdoor that drops me out of this labyrinth of 21st century bureaucratic bull shit and says "You want to do something worthwhile? O.K. Go through door Door Number 2."?



Since the turn of this shiny new century I have returned to University, got myself a couple of degrees, learned new skills, become a teacher, travelled to The Middle Kingdom, gained valuable insights, won awards, turned some peoples lives around, gained insights, had valuable experiences, gathered up knowledge, and considered I was finding myself a place in the world that would make sense of my life.



Instead I have been catapulted me back to where I was 10 years ago: - unemployed, broke and disregarded.



I reckon that's enough to get anyone mad.