Louisa Simmonds

NC and her friends had a sisterhood meeting the other night. She and her tight band of millennial girlfriends, who have recently experienced a spate of more trials than tribulations in their journeys through young adulthood, decided they needed an intervention. After a rough few weeks of new jobs, new-people stresses, cockroach infestations, the cost of avocados and Ubers, men issues…and men issues, they decided to exorcise their demons by sacrificing the drunk backpacker passed out on the floor beneath them and having a big girlie overshare.

Now I know that I do drop the ‘E’ word and ‘A’ words (entitlement and avocado) in connection to my millennial children quite often on this site, but perhaps the world from their perspective doesn’t look quite as rosy as I would like to believe.

Obviously, I have not been made privy to what evolved from the girls’ session, although I remain confident that give my daughter a week, a slap-up meal at our local Japanese and a month’s supply of vegetarian lasagne, her loyalty will crack like a walnut. But what I do know is, each girl wrote down four toxic things that they want to remove from their lives on a piece of paper and then they burnt them ceremoniously in a dish – followed by ten minutes of panic when they remembered about the recent fire ban in NSW.

And what I have been given permission to reveal is that number one on NC’s agenda was PTSD – and no, I haven’t screwed her up as well as my son (not that much, anyway) – where the acronym stands for Pre Traumatic Stress Disorder, and relates to her generation’s fear for Gen Y’s future in terms of how we are killing each other and the planet, climate change, the increasing gap between rich and poor etc. There is no doubt in my mind that relationships, men, and sexism would have also been on her list –  particularly as she was still recovering from her company’s selection of a man to lead their IWD conference that week – which may explain the smoking Ken doll and pins I found in her bag the next morning.

Anyway, our debrief the following morning made me think about two things: what I would have ejected from my life at the age of twenty-three, and what I would lob in the bin right now, at the age of fifty-something.

Personally, I have few memories of my early twenties other than the consumption of vast amounts of alcohol and cigarettes; dependencies that have obviously left their mark in terms of the culling of my brain cells. I didn’t take life too seriously back then, other than donating my time to a few coin collections for the university Rag Society, making tea for the vegan student militants camping outside McDonald’s (because their leader was pretty hot), attending the odd lecture (because the lecturer was pretty hot), and watching various renditions of Welsh poetry (because the poet was pretty hot). In truth, I was pretty shallow and hedonistic back in the day. And in hindsight, perhaps if I’d recognized those unresolved grief issues rooted in my addictions, sober me might have found more time and energy to change the world and bemoan the price of avocados.

And what shit would I let go of, today?

My anxiety, which stops me doing so many things that I know I would enjoy.

My lack of self-belief that is linked to the anxiety that stops me doing those things I know I would enjoy.

Hmmm.

My box of regrets, most of which are so embarrassingly first world and entitled: the if onlys seated in family issues, the houses we lost money on, the careers and businesses that never took off, the smoking when I knew the risks…

And finally… the men who think they believe in equality, call themselves feminists, swear blind they’d never stand in the way,  hurt or discriminate against them, and yet whose behaviors demonstrate they clearly have no fucking clue.

They’d be torched.

#Toxicity #lettinggo #happiness #Selflove #Humor