‘Another New Years Apart’ (extract from ‘From Nobel Prize to Ride-On Mower’ p161/162)

In spite of everything, Patrick and I enjoy the evening. After dinner we go out and mix with the other patients and their families. I meet people who I would not have met if I was not a guest in a mental ward on New Years Eve…

Life throws out a lot that moulds us into the person we are meant to be. I wonder what I am doing here. What it is I am meant to learn from this situation? To be humble? Grateful? Sad?

All these people with such different backgrounds, are joined here tonight to see in the New Year with new aspirations, new hopes and new goals to conquer. When a human being is deprived of all hope, all happiness, does he turn to staring blankly out a window? Scratch her flesh until it bleeds? Hug himself because no one else will? Do her eyes become a mirror for all the inbound sadness that has nowhere to go?

When it gets closer to midnight, Patrick and I go into his bedroom and light a candle.We sit down on his bed. We are both thinking, Where do we go from here? What promises or hopes can we give each other for the next year?

First Time in Court  (extract from ‘From Nobel Prize to Ride-On Mower’ p77-78)

“Immediately upon arriving at the court, a female police officer shows me to a room for women only, where I wait to be called. There are others also waiting their turns. Their turns to lie, so that they feel safe from their abusers for another day, or their turn to tell the truth, so that they can be free. For me it is time to lie.

I have not been in Australia a year yet and here I am in court, telling anyone who wants to listen, that I live in a healthy happy environment. They probably know that women lie all day long in order to keep everything together. But it is true, as they say: only the truth sets you free.”