Breathing While Drowning: One Woman's Quest for Wholeness

by Veronica Strachan

Overview

A life map for anyone drowning in loss

Losing something deeply important – a child, a friend, or even a piece of yourself – can feel like drowning in an ocean of grief.

But there IS a way through that ocean, and there are life buoys to cling to while you search for and regather your strength. And then, when you finally reach the distant shore, there’s feeling, healing and reconnection waiting for you.

In “Breathing While Drowning”, Veronica Strachan charts her 20- year journey back to life after the death of her young daughter, Jacqueline Bree. She also shares her raw journals, tools, inspirations and powerful lessons to help and inspire you to do the same in your own life – in your own way, at your own pace.

This book will do more than help you to move through your loss. It will teach you to be surprised at your own potential; to dust off your own dreams; and to live your life consciously, creatively, confidently, and remarkably.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781504303170
Publisher:	Balboa Press Australia
Publication date:	10/17/2016
Pages:	462
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.03(d)

Read an Excerpt

Breathing While Drowning

One Woman's Quest for Wholeness

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By Veronica Strachan

Balboa Press

Copyright © 2016 Veronica Strachan
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5043-0317-0

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CHAPTER 1

The "Unremarkable Early Years

A couple of years ago, I read Maureen Murdock's The Heroine's Journey — Woman's Quest for Wholeness, and a whole lot of things fell into place for me with a big, fat clunk that must have been heard blocks away. I felt, as many women have, as though Maureen was a witness to my life. So many things she wrote resonated with my experience, my thoughts, and my feelings.

One of the best things to happen as I read was that I realised I wasn't alone. I wasn't even particularly special or unique (not remarkable at all). Many women were confused, lost, searching, yearning for purpose or forgiveness or love.

So as part of this book, I'm lining up my stories with Maureen Murdock's, The Heroine's Journey. I will attempt to incorporate the stages described in that text and work through my own journey, my own quest for wholeness. It's not always clean and clear — as Murdock writes, "The journey follows no straight lines" — but stay with me and you might recognise yourself in here somewhere.

My life belongs to me, and what I think, feel, do, and believe matters — and that's what counts. It's taken me until now, at fifty-four years of age, to recognise those words in a way that my whole body and mind know it and know that it's right and true.

As Murdock points out, "Our society is androcentric: it sees the world from a male point of view".

So is it any wonder that the first stage in The Heroine's Journey is to reject the feminine, to see it as something that's holding us back, that's not enough? "Men are rewarded for intelligence, drive, and dependability through position, prestige, and financial gain in the world".

Women who try to be like men or see themselves through the male-centric lens in the world of work are not equally rewarded. As women, we will always find ourselves lacking if we look through the male-centric world value lens because we are not men. As women, we have our own world value lens, and we are enough in our own right. Both men and women are challenging the patriarchal forms and norms, but there is a personal journey to be taken, too. Murdock says, "The heroine's first task toward individuation is to separate from [the mother, the feminine]". The devalued feminine seems insufficient, and the struggle with the separation can take your whole life. Initially, this separation is usually aimed at mothers. They, like their mothers for generations before them, are steeped in the low self-esteem experienced as part of living in a "culture that glorifies the masculine".

Separation from the Feminine

So what about me? How do I see my separation from the feminine? For me, it isn't in one particular moment or year. I feel there are moments that fall under this part of the journey that happen over and over throughout my life.

I'll start at the beginning and then work the journey stuff in as it comes up.

Born the third child of eight to working-class parents in Melbourne's northern suburbs, I was as loved as all the other children who were squeezed into our small, suburban home. My parents worked hard to support the family, to help us become healthy adults capable of learning and loving. Though we didn't have a great deal of material wealth, there was always someone to play with or look after, and there were always chores to do.

I had the usual struggles growing up and finding myself in the middle of a large family. I watched the older ones do everything first and the younger ones get away with way more than I did. It was easy to stay under the radar and find a quiet corner to play or read.

Strack's childhood home was a little quieter, but it was just as loving. His parents emigrated from the United Kingdom when his older and only sister was two. Both his parents worked, and he learned independence early.

All our siblings were healthy and bright, and both sets of parents remained happily married all their lives.

When I reflect now, though I was happy and loved, childhood was also the beginning of feeling powerless and being guided by people who knew better: parents, older siblings, teachers, adults, men. I often think of the scene in the movie Matilda where the mean teacher says to Matilda: "I'm big, you're small, I'm right, you're wrong." She dismisses her as a girl of no consequence. No consequence, just one of the crowd; it's hard to have an identity when there are so many — so many that it was easy to forget one. At least that's what I remember. I was once left behind after a visit to my grandparents. I came out of the toilet to see my grandfather closing the door. The rest of the family had driven off without me.

Primary school was my introduction to the world of words and learning. I learned quickly and was happiest with my nose stuck in a book or writing stories (which was also a good way to get out of chores). I was quiet and shy, never quite one of the members of the popular crowd, but I had my best friend and a few others to play and grow with. I played netball and did well at athletics; I enjoyed the camaraderie of teams. Looking back now, though, I can see I often avoided crowds and more public events, content with my own company or close to home.

I spent many hours reading and learning about this world and others, even pretending to be asleep for the parental check and then turning the bedside lamp back on to read into the wee hours of the morning.

I wrote stories, mostly fairy tales or tales where I was secretly discovered as having magic power. And in those stories, I rarely belonged to the family I was living with. Wishful thinking, perhaps.

The thing I most remember at high school was being bullied for four years for being bright — the Australian tall poppy syndrome. (This is our national tendency to eagerly cut down anyone we see as successful in a given field, particularly if that person shows the slightest imperfection.) Up to that point, I'd been encouraged to learn. Now it was unpopular, and smart children were seen as arrogant or nerdy. Though the bullying was blatant, from my view the teachers and nuns did nothing to help or address the culture in the school, leaving me leery of religions that preached kindness, tolerance, and love but practiced meanness, intolerance, and fear.

In my penultimate year, I changed to a mixed-gender high school with far less focus on religion. And I found that boys were much easier to deal with than girls. In my experience, girls were often mean, and boys were mostly fun. They still teased me, (like brothers, and I had plenty of those) but they didn't hold grudges. The best thing was that some of the boys and girls were smarter than I was — and proud of it — and I wasn't seen as quite such an anomaly. Learning and striving to achieve were okay, especially if you happened to be male. Balance was restored. I re-established friendships I'd lost in primary school and made some good, new friends.

In retrospect, I was learning lessons about the patriarchy. Girls were apparently equal, allowed into the science and maths class, but we were still a minority and not quite in the club.

My mum was a traditional mother and housewife for most of my childhood. And although I didn't consciously try to distance myself from her way of life, I was encouraged to make the most of the opportunities she and Dad had given us through education and a loving home. Get a job, get married, have children — that was the unsaid message. What was not spoken about was making a difference, making a contribution to the world. My family didn't have a particular political or social passion. In fact, my dad would not even tell me who he voted for in elections. No, social passion doesn't ring quite true. A quiet achiever, my dad was always a part of his church groups, counting the donations, helping at the homeless men's centre, and transporting second-hand goods to those in need. Mum was involved as well, but with eight children, most of her energy was spent on us. In later years, when some of us had left home, Mum followed her dream and went back to school to earn her Higher School Certificate. She came home full of stories of injustice in Australian history and the beauty of English literature.

After high school, I followed my older siblings to university. I intended to do a biochemistry degree, but I found the lessons repeated much of what I learned in high school, and the disrespectful and spoilt eastern suburbs kids who ran rampant in the classes were too much to swallow. These kids seemed to have an expectation of privilege that stuck in my throat and made me angry. I was here to learn; they were here to mess around and disrupt. There was no adult intervention or discipline to curtail the riotous behaviour. University life was not quite what I wanted.

On reflection, the feeling that I was not quite good enough — I came from the wrong side of the Yarra, I was Catholic, and I was female — were all pretty heavy marks in the wrong column. But it was also the chance to do something on my own, unlike my older siblings. I left university to work as an office assistant in a frozen food factory where I grew up really fast among the truck drivers and storemen who embraced life with gusto and colourful language.

I applied to nursing school at the same time because one of my best friends who had always wanted to be a nurse was there and getting paid to learn, work, and have a great time. It sounded way more fun than university. Three months later, I was in my starched white uniform, my cap, my black shoes, and my red cape. I was all shiny and ready to begin.

Identification with the Masculine

The health sector has been my home for more than thirty-five years, and I still find it one of the best places to be. On my very first shift that I worked in a hospital, an elderly woman with chronic lung disease who'd been resuscitated the night before stated that she didn't want to be resuscitated again. In short, she wanted to die. That was my raw introduction to life-and-death struggles and people's frailties in the face of disease and a finite existence.

Working in health is tough, and it takes a certain practice to manage the see-saw balance in yourself to care for others but still function individually in the life-and-death struggles you see almost every day. Healthcare is often seeing people at their worst or lowest, at the most vulnerable and challenging times of their lives.

After almost four years, I couldn't wait to get out of my training hospital and see the world — free from the shackles of studying and the meanness of small-minded charge sisters and arrogant surgeons. Talk about separation from the feminine! Most of these women were tough as old boots and loved nothing more than forcefully pulling young nurses into line. You learned to take whatever was dished out and get on with it. If you got on the wrong side of anyone in power, you were history — they made life miserable.

Even though it'd been tough, I had lots of happy memories of that time and lots of firsts: living away from home, flying in an aeroplane, visiting another country, driving across Australia, dancing with strangers, getting drunk, and losing my virginity.

I worked in all sorts of places and locations in health. The pattern of my life was to move around, learn new things, meet new people, but never stay in one place too long. I kept things light and breezy, always competent and quietly building on my perfectionist proclivities. I also learned some hard lessons in responsibility, loyalty, deceit, power, politics, and life. There were many bullies in hospitals. Based on decades of military hierarchy, it was a culture where it was easy for bullying and misogyny to be disguised as discipline and order. I learned to do things well the first time, to put everyone else's needs ahead of my own, and to keep my head down and stay out of the spotlight. I was not a fighter or a rebel; rather, I was a survivor.

More lessons! People in leadership roles can be mean, selfish, and wrong. Just because they're in charge of the ward or the shift or the hospital, it doesn't mean they're in charge of your life or your career.

But like so many generations of women before me, I was not taught that my life belonged to me, that I was worthy of attention, that what I thought mattered.

Even when I moved into management — because that's what you did when you were smart — I didn't believe what I said mattered. My opinions were not my own, not really worth listening to most of the time. This was at odds with my natural inclination to be creative and innovative.

I had a highly analytical and strategic mind; I could see patterns and opportunities for improving things. Sometimes people listened, sometimes they took my idea as their own, and sometimes I was ignored. I learned mostly about the kind of leader I didn't want to be and, occasionally, I worked with the kind of leader I did want to be. These leaders, mostly women, were smart, compassionate, and capable. They inspired, they instructed, and they involved people in their vision. They never expected more of people than they offered themselves. They made me feel like I was part of something bigger, something important. And they made me believe I had what it took to get the job done.

I moved interstate to Tasmania, ostensibly to do an intensive care course, but in reality to find myself, my own identity — who I was and what I was supposed to do with my life once away from the loudness and intensity of my family. I guess I did find myself somewhat. The few experiments I made in trying to be different, to be more confident, had mixed success. But while I was there, the love of my life found me and enticed me back to Melbourne rather than me heading off to Europe solo (as I'd planned).

I stayed in Melbourne and did midwifery instead. Strack and I got engaged, found an acre of land an hour out of the city, got married, and moved into our semi-complete, mud-brick house. (Warning for any owner-builders out there: your house is never done. Even after thirty years, we still have bits and pieces unfinished.) The trouble with moving in before it's finished is that you stop seeing what needs to be done. And of course, now that it's thirty years old, there are things that need fixing and replacing to add to the list of things that never got done in the first place.

But on the plus side, our house is a home, lived in and loved, full of happy memories. The flotsam and jetsam of family life lived fully litter the hallways and grooves — there's not much time for housekeeping. Let's face it, mud bricks and exposed, unfinished timber make for great cobweb and dust gatherers. It all adds to the ambience. And this suits me because I am so not a housekeeper ... a once-in-a-while neatness is fine by me. There's comfort in disorder, which is different from how I feel at work. At work, all must be in order, tidy, a place for everything. Maybe that's the masculine keeping me on the path. At home, I surrender to feminine, spontaneous, flowing reality.

I created a strange reality when I started my own business and started working from home. I have a corner of the house — it's an open-plan space and, in the beginning, I often struggled to get my head into business because I was easily distracted.

Life rearranging itself, something new, never standing still, never content, always searching — this is the map of my life. My searching began as a child: I had an insatiable curiosity ... Why do things work? How do they work? I always liked to get in to the nitty gritty, right down to the microscopic and quantum level.

Becoming a wife was joyful and wonderful and hard. The joyful bit was finding my man with heart who loved me and wanted to share his life with me, witnessing through sickness and health, richer and poorer. Mind you, when you're young, it's hard to imagine the sickness and the poorer bit because it all seems so theoretical.

The hard bit was that, for a while there, I lost my independence because this person loved me. I got caught up in the story of being in a relationship and forgot that my life belonged to me. I forgot that what I think, feel, do, and believe matters. I caught the fairy tale and lost some of the independence I had been nurturing. I'd been totally independent as I travelled, worked and thought as an individual.

There's one memory that stands out around that time. I was living in East Melbourne and often shopped in Collingwood. I had a good radar for trouble and could keep myself safe. Strack and I were on our way out somewhere, and I needed to stop and get cash from the ATM. I got out on my own and was almost finished when Strack got out and stood beside me. As I looked up, a young man of dubious character was stumbling past. Strack felt the need to protect me. In that moment, I remember feeling cherished. How wonderful it was to be protected by this man who loved me.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Breathing While Drowning by Veronica Strachan. Copyright © 2016 Veronica Strachan. Excerpted by permission of Balboa Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgements, xi,
Introduction, xvii,
Part 1–Defining Moments, 1,
Chapter 1: The Unremarkable Early Years, 7,
Chapter 2: The Unaware Years, 21,
Chapter 3: The Programme Years, 73,
Chapter 4: The Closure and Descent, 190,
Chapter 5: The Years of Guilt, Shame, and Despair, 214,
Part 2–Finding the Feeling: Do You Remember How It Really Feels to Feel?, 295,
Chapter 6: Is This as Good as It Gets?, 297,
Part 3–Where Do You Find Healing?, 305,
Chapter 7: The Search Begins, 307,
Chapter 8: Coming Home, 348,
Part 4–Searching for Connection, 359,
Chapter 9: A Conscious, Purposeful Life, 361,
Chapter 10: And now?, 411,
Bibliography, 425,