After sharing their tales of personal hardship, the other trainees were left speechless.
Tracey is a young woman who recently did a company directors’ course. Her firm must think well of her because it’s an expensive enrolment, arranged and paid for by an employer for an up-and-comer, someone they rate, someone they’re prepared to invest in by teaching them financial literacy, strategy, risk management, fiduciary duty, corporate structure and legal responsibility.
Company directors need to be bound by an ethical and legal framework, or you get robber barons, ballrooms, oligarchs, slush funds … and as much as Melbourne’s inner north likes to demonise the suits, our capitalists are a tame folk. Business here is more milquetoast fest than Wild West.
The cohort at the directors’ course studied and wrote essays and attended lectures and sat exams, and on the last day of the course they all sat around in a relieved pow-wow for their debrief – about 20 of them, casual in their $500 runners, their defiantly unmade faces sucking bubble tea through fat straws. The course instructor said she wanted to know how they got here, how they’d arrived at this day of achievement, what they’d overcome. Tell us your journey.
The first in the circle told them his mum had lost her job, so he didn’t even finish school … yet here he was. The people said, “Go, you” and “Major props, dude”. The next said her dad had died when she was only little and she had been diagnosed with a learning disability. She received eager applause. The third speaker, sniffing the wind, perhaps, told them he grew up an orphan in Sri Lanka with scant schooling and English his second language. A big ruckus of support for him.
When it became obvious that pain was the currency, they were all in. Whether their revelations were exaggerated, true or relevant was immaterial – the impulse to self-identify as a sufferer was understandable and perfectly represents the age. They told increasingly brutal tales, escalating episodes of excruciations en route to the here-and-now, each speaker seemingly determined to own a blacker history than the last. Brothers took to drugs, sisters were estranged, syndromes were cited and fathers denounced.
Tracey was last in the circle of 20, and the vortex of woe was circling towards her at pace. She either had to buy in, like a pentecostal congregant collapsing as demons are sucked through her forehead by the touch of a gallant pastor – or become a heretic by telling the truth about herself. Her problem was that she’d grown up in a harmonious home and gone to a good school and done well academically and was happily married to that Australian unicorn – a good man. Damn, what a shitshow. Still, she couldn’t compete with the aforementioned agonies, so, biting the bullet, she confessed all.
After she’d spoken, there was a confused silence while listeners contemplated this risky new direction. Then they laughed. No applause. Who knows what they were thinking? Some probably felt a dim shame at amplifying their own struggles to fit the day’s needs. Some were likely outraged that a woman had come along here brandishing happiness like a Rolex. Some were likely astounded you could, in this day and age, stand up in a public forum and admit to being OK.
Statistics as painstakingly built as a Lego Charles Ponzi by the social scientists at our universities and fanfared as truth nightly by the ABC suggest that life is way more painful for their current crush than it is for anyone else, and that painlessness is a type of privilege approximating evil, and happiness is a rationed reality that must have been stolen from your fellow human.
Only starting from a domestic dystopia or a failed state can your journey resonate and mean something. Only a rocky past makes you virtuous. And while it’s true a rough upbringing is more likely to lead you into calamity than a happy home is, it’s also true that only a fool, when caught in a stolen Porsche, wouldn’t claim causal circumstance. “It wasn’t me, your honour. It was the pills, it was the parents, it was the pokies, it was a Marxist revolution followed by a banquet of betting agencies.”
These days most of us are at pains to hide our lack of pain, so kudos to Tracey for admitting to hers. It tells you something of the sour now that growing up unscarred and living without torment is so on the nose as a “lived experience” when it’s what we’re all trying to achieve.
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Anson Cameron is a columnist for Spectrum in The Age and the author of several books, including Boyhoodlum and Neil Balme: A Tale of Two Men.
