For most of us, the prospect of death evokes the threat of pain. And who needs pain? So we lap up crapitalism – it sells us pleasure 24/7, manufactures desires, feeds the social media that starves our brains, fuels a sense of entitlement, and normalises comfortable numbness. Take eastern Sydney residents who light fires on mild autumn nights, filling the temperate coastal air with smoke as swimmers flock to a warm ocean. And, more than any other item, dumped pedestal fans burden kerbsides all year round, destined for landfill. Cocooned from not just pain but discontent, we’ve lost robustness since the West entered its death throes.

But pain needn’t be the main, nor even the worst, part of dying. As humans (and their pets) last longer, dogged by comorbidities, cognitive loss can confound and compound the issues. Most authors don’t pen classics in their eighties or beyond. Old artists are more likely to cark it with a masterpiece on the easel because true power and beauty can be born of derangement (less logic to get in the way), and limitations like failing sight can reduce impressions to their essence. A few directors, too, working with established collaborators, create great late-life films. But today’s geriatric politicians rarely make sense, let alone sound decisions.

Yet cognitive loss, a corollary of growing old, can strike at any age; more so as online culture speeds the decline of our civilisation. Risk factors for individuals (and societies) include brain injury (or brainwashing), exposure to environmental and pharmaceutical toxins, anxiety, depression, stress, sleep debt, obesity, and [insert any chronic Western disorder or disease].

For years my mother modelled the above conditions (most of them self-inflicted) except for obesity. But thinness brought vitamin and mineral deficiencies, also fatal to cognition, and she defied my bids to intervene. Perversity is a great teacher. She taught me how to repel help by pretending not to need it; how to feign forgetfulness for the sake of expedience; how to hide memory loss until it gets unmanageable; how to evade obligations with self-induced panic attacks, how to attract thieves and scammers; how to go rigid when falling and maximise damage. Dementia? No, she taught by example while I was still a child. Mental illness, said a neighbour who knew her for decades. Yet even as a teen, I never suspected. Her mother, who died before my birth, was the crazy-looking one. Trauma can be intergenerational.

Greek for ‘wound’, trauma used to refer just to physical injury. But with the rise of psychology, its meaning began to broaden. And since octogenarian PTSD expert Bessel van der Kolk – ‘the world’s most famous living psychiatrist’ if New York magazine is right – has popularised the topic, the definition has stretched even more. Hence, an ever more heavily censored media. Indeed, with trauma now so easy to trigger, we need vast legions of thought police to crush not just hateful but hurtful speech. As science writer Danielle Carr says of ‘traumatic literalism’: ‘this wound provides our new identity, at once the thing that gives us the right to speak and the only thing we have left to say when we do.’

Guilty as charged: I once wrote a novel, largely true, when memoirs were huge (not that the genre has dated), and the same tale rejigged as a mental-illness memoir might have been saleable (RIP imagination). But participants in mainstream literary discourse must bow to the official religion. Which means professing belief in all products termed ‘vaccines’, spurning alternative cancer treatments, and honouring diagnoses defined by the DSM-5 (psychiatry’s oft-updated bible) as holy writ vs. hotly contested and highly political. Yet why medicalise my mad phase by affirming ‘recovery’? I emerged, that’s all. Integration follows disintegration. End of story. But no – all stories are artificial constructs; personal explanations of existence.

My voyage through madness led away from an art degree to new vistas. Who or what was I? And my astrology clients, too, asked me who or what they were. A work in progress, I danced, acted, wrote. And after none of my paintings sold during five shows in the mid ’90s, though a few kind folk bought direct from my studio, I couldn’t afford framing or storage. Yet I had no illusions my writing would sell. Too dark, twisted and personal, like my art. So now I stood at a crossroads. Ditching my astrology business had freed me to create full-time. But how to survive? I rented the back of a sculpture workshop-cum-garage. And if painting wasn’t practical, writing just might be. A self-styled benevolent patron, the sculptor donated a dated PC and printer, I joined a writers’ centre and a group that met there, and off I went.

A year later, a new indie publisher offered me a contract. I ran it past some agents, who sent back my manuscript, but kindly supplied free contract advice. Yet my would-be publisher, a lawyer and failed poet, refused to negotiate, so I said no. (His press soon sank without a trace; he’d also failed as a gatekeeper.) No other publishers bit, though, and I needed readers, if not recognition. Five years, I promised myself. If I’m not published by then, that’s it. I didn’t know what I’d do instead, but writing full-time is unhealthy. Too many writers, like painters, squint, hunch, drink too much and lose touch with their bodies. After five years, if I’d hit a wall, I could quit. But receiving professional mentorships and a query from a big publisher inspired me to persist. And then came inclusion in an anthology featuring Tim Winton, and a creative writing MA program. Though I didn’t fit in with the other mature-age students, some of them mums, tutors thought I had a future. By the time I graduated, I’d been writing for over a decade. With publication closer than ever, I couldn’t risk changing direction.

Other things, though, had begun to change. Good neighbours moved out and bad ones replaced them. Sleep proved increasingly elusive. Housing authorities and police proved useless. My mother – who, unlike her peers, couldn’t adjust to widowhood – became even more obstructive and erratic. But having a few short stories accepted encouraged me to push on – until I was forced to admit that, in the emerging cultural climate, my work had become invisible. It didn’t engage with the order of the day: identity politics. Though my characters weren’t exclusively Anglo, hetero, gender-normative or able-bodied, they didn’t struggle explicitly with ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender dysphoria or limiting physical/mental conditions and the attendant prejudice. Maybe, I thought, the mania would wane, as all trends do eventually. But since governments across the West have aligned to play the woke card relentlessly, the ethos of political correctness is here to stay (at least until it becomes so seamlessly institutionalised that writers don’t get awards just for fetishising it).

Anyway, to stay sane I’d been venting here, safely anonymous. But publishers want to see your blog. So I started another – but posted just nine times in eight years. Editing out heretical sentiments felt insincere. So, while struggling to build an online presence for PC publishers and peers, I explored more burning concerns here. And the urge to blog under my real name disappeared around when the Covid vax got rolled out in Oz general practice. I’d long since emerged from the depths of insanity only to watch the whole world go wacko.

So much for that fake online persona with my real name. Seems I feel freer to be real when using a pseudonym. And since I’d found no fame (or infamy) before the dominant culture demonised us vax dodgers (like Vietnam-era pacifists?), clarifying, in its confusion, what our actual status is, why should my name matter now? It’s independent thought, not any of the few billion identities our digital panopticon surveils and digests to shit out as statistics to train emergent AI, that counts.