Challenge Accepted!: 253 Steps to Becoming an Anti-It Girl

A friend of mine has been advised by teachers that she look into getting her seven-year-old son put on Ritalin. She’s freaking out. The first question I asked was, do these teachers go on camping holidays and generally hate kids? After she assured me they didn’t, I told her that I think seven is way too young to be going on any sort of behavioural medication. Kids are flat out trying to sit still for an entire five-minute episode of Peppa Pig (aren’t we all!) let alone six hours a day listening to the same teacher talk about numbers and letters. Of course they are going to get bored, child! (spoken in RuPaul’s most sassy voice). I’m a little torn with the timeline of my diagnosis – part of me thinks if I were diagnosed earlier, school may have been easier. But then I think if I was on the drug from as young as seven I wouldn’t be as resilient as I am. And that resilience has been needed so much through my life (ohhh, yes, that’s another little nugget to keep you sexy bookworms reading). If I had been medicated from a young age, I would have thought that I was just normal and that everyone was on drugs, or some sort of ‘help me learn’ stimulant. But because I started later than what is considered ‘normal’, I knew I wasn’t normal, I knew that I was a little different and different is interesting. Different is the tits!

It didn’t stop me from getting into trouble. My mum’s concerns that the drug would change me were unfounded, as I was still a loudmouth and smartarse, but I could also concentrate long enough to let someone finish what they were saying to come back with a kickarse comment, instead of interrupting them.

I thought once I left school I would never get into trouble again, except from my nana, who always had a problem with my posture. But I was wrong: getting into trouble still happens to me in my adult life. I seem to attract it – not the getting-bashed-up or having-drug-dealers-feel-me-up kind of trouble, just if there’s naughty shit going down, or someone is going to make an arse out of themselves in public, I’m usually at the epicentre of it. I noticed from a young age that I have the type of personality that people either love or loathe. I don’t look for it, it just happens.

* * *

In my early twenties I started taking an antidepressant, Zoloft. I can’t remember why I went on it; I think as I had just graduated from drama school and a lot of emoting was involved I thought I was broken and needed to be medicated. I remember feeling a little bit weird mixing Ritalin and Zoloft. I wasn’t just feeling weird about it emotionally and metaphysically but I was literally feeling fucking weird. I was having anxiety attacks and struggling to string thoughts together that didn’t involve negative self-talk coupled with a lot of hysteria.

Api and I had been dating for about six months and we were having a fancy breakfast at a fancy café in Sydney when I had a major panic attack. I felt like the poached eggs were out to get me and the overpriced coffee was sitting on my chest like a pregnant pig. I couldn’t breathe or talk. Api didn’t miss a beat; he took me home, fed me lollies (not a euphemism), and avoided direct eye contact. This was when I realised that Ritalin and Zoloft weren’t the cocktail that I had hoped for. I went to the local shrink located next to an animal rescue – so I trusted him with my life – as my usual shrink had an appointment with her shrink, in Mexico. I told him about my weird feelings, asked him what ‘metaphysical’ meant and he said that I was ‘the least depressed person he had met’ and suggested I come off the drugs and see how I go. I started this process, which is very similar to pushing shit up a hill with a sharp stick. It’s horrible and, at times, hard. Turns out if you try something 20 years later and expect the same outcome then you’re an idiot. I continued on for a few years drug free. Then, when a close friend died, my world fell apart. I decided that I needed to go back on Zoloft and I have been on it ever since. Leading up to my US tour this year I wanted to try to go back on Ritalin because I felt as though my workload was getting on top of me, and I was a grade-A clusterfuck and wanted to get my shit together. I spoke to my doctor about the effect Ritalin has on adults and if it’s OK for adults to take Zoloft as well, or if the drugs still aren’t friends. I was advised that mixing the two still wasn’t an awesome idea. So I tried again to come off Zoloft in preparation for Ritalin, in the hope of falling back into the awesome routine I had established as a teenager.

Turns out that wasn’t to be the case – I know, I’m as shocked as you. Trying to come off antidepressants while planning a US tour, looking after two young boys, moving one teenage stepdaughter out of the house and another one in, writing a book and dealing with dying friends and parent–teacher interviews is dumb dumb dumbity dumb. I thought I was onto it and the bottle of wine I was consuming nightly wasn’t self-medicating; rather, an easy alternative. When I talked to a friend about my new hopes for Ritalin coming back into my life and kicking Zoloft to the kerb, he politely and smartly reminded me that I’m fine as I am, and that I should just continue being a clusterfuck because everyone who knows and loves me has accepted it. That I should just get on the acceptance band wagon and keep on keeping on and stop trying to shake things up.

So that’s what I’m doing. I’m just accepting what I’ve got and getting on with it.

Scholar Celeste Barber mid-Ritalin as a Senior. St Joseph’s College, Banora Point, 1998. No big deal!

Working the room.

@kyliejenner

The One About My Dad (#ulink_cc8a1f94-9aef-5107-bd38-38b9fb159e9c)

I’VE NEVER REALLY ASKED MY DAD if he wishes he got an official diagnosis and subsequent medication, because I think I know the answer. ‘I’m fine as I am, Princess. If I can last this long without it, then why would I start now?’ Well played, Neville, well played.

My dad is everybody’s mate; everyone loves a bit of Neville Barber. ‘Nifty’, as he’s affectionately called. If he’s not making you laugh, he’s laughing at you not laughing.

There are three certainties about my dad.

1. He Doesn’t Share Food

Dad:If you want some I’ll buy one for you.

Me:No, Dad, I just want a bite.

Dad:Well, I’ll buy you one and you can bite that.

Me:But I don’t want a whole lasagne, I just want to try some.

Dad:Well, I do want a whole lasagne, that’s why I bought it.

Me:Are you serious – you’re not sharing with me?

Dad:Deadly.

And with that he will set up a barrier around his food, made up of salt and pepper shakers, sauce bottles and glasses, while firmly holding a knife in his hand as a weapon.

2. He’s the Originator of Dad Jokes

Neville Barber’s go-to joke:

A grasshopper walked into a bar and the barman said, ‘Hey we have a drink named after you.’ And the grasshopper said, ‘Really? An Eric?’

And that’s it, that’s the fucking joke. But it’s not about the joke, it’s about the joy he gets in telling it. He doesn’t usually tell jokes to make you laugh, he tells jokes – well, to me and my sister anyway – to annoy you. If he knows he’s onto a winner he will repeat it over and over, breaking the main rule of comedy: ‘Don’t treat your audience like idiots.’

Dad:Get it? The grasshopper’s name is Eric?

Us:Yes, Dad, we get it.

Dad:But the bartender meant he has a drink called a grasshopper.

Us: Yes, Dad.

Dad:But what the bartender didn’t realise is the grasshopper had his own unique name.

Us:DAD! FUCK.

Jackpot!

Neville 1, the Barber daughters 0.

3. He’s Always Ready First – ALWAYS

When we were kids, if Mum said we were leaving the house at 6pm, at 5.45pm Dad would be sitting on the couch with the car reversed out of the driveway, air conditioning running, cooler bag of lemon, lime and bitters

and a nice bottle of white wine for Mum. He would wait patiently for her as she figured out what perfume to wear from the collection he had bought her over the years, and for Olivia and me, who were fighting over whose acid-wash drop-waisted skirt was whose.

When we paraded down the stairs at 6.05pm Dad would always greet us with a compliment. ‘You look lovely, dear,’ he would say to Mum. ‘You look lovely, girls,’ he would say, continuing the compliment. Then we were in the perfect-temperature car and off!

My dad is solid like a rock, always there for anyone and always happy to tell you a dumb joke that you will roll your eyes at then excuse yourself from the conversation to go to the toilet and record in your phone so you can recite it to your friends later at the pub.

He was an only child, and lived in the same house from the day he was born to the day when he and Mum moved in together. Dad lived on a dairy farm near Tweed Heads and when the local milk carrier would come by at 7am to pick up the milk, he would also pick up Dad and take him to school. The school was so small that on a number of occasions the principal would call Nana Rita to make sure Dad was going to school that day, as no one had turned up and they needed him there to keep the school open. He was four.

As Dad got a bit older he would ride his bike to and from school along a dirt track every day. Once he got home from school on a Friday afternoon, he wouldn’t see anyone apart from his mum and dad until he was back at school on Monday morning. If a car went past, the family would go onto the balcony to watch the big display. He kept himself busy, no dramas, no complaints.

His dad, Harold, was a tough man, old school, he didn’t show any emotion. Nana Rita and Dad were a team. And when Dad met Mum, Nana took her in as the daughter she’d always wanted.

Dad was super-close to his mum. Rita had wanted more kids but Harold wasn’t into it, so in those days that was that. I reckon my dad would have LOVED a sibling or 10, but he will never tell you that, because that would be complaining, and that’s something Neville William Barber doesn’t do. He’s grateful for his life and is more than happy just to go with the flow. He’s a master at keeping busy and not imposing his time on anyone for any reason.

My dad works as the maintenance guy at a private hospital on the Gold Coast, a job that started as a one-week job in 1996, and because he’s so excellent to have around and good at what he does the hospital just keeps creating work for him.

He’s so loved that when he was in hospital for the second time in his life (the first was the time he was born), the staff put him up in the presidential suite and there were nurses who weren’t rostered on that day visiting him to make sure everything was OK. (He had tightness in his chest, which freaked everyone out. Turns out it was gas. Classic Neville.) My mum, who has been in and out of hospital her whole life due to dodgy lungs, is lucky to get a bunch of flowers on her hospital visits these days, whereas Dad gets a full-blown fanfare if he gets so much as a blood test.

When I moved out of home at 17, my dad wrote me notes of encouragement on the backs of business cards. Every time I would go backs home, or he and Mum would visit me, he would have a fresh business card with a fresh note of love and encouragement. The business cards have been replaced with official and professional texts.

Celeste

Just looked at e mail from the copy editor