Abductions From My Beautiful Life

Postscript

About the Author

Anita Link is a writer, mental health advocate and veterinarian. She holds a Master of Arts in writing, editing and publishing from the University of Queensland. At various times, she has lived in Germany, Saudi Arabia, the UK and Australia. She currently resides in Brisbane, Australia, with her husband, two children and an assortment of pets. Her blog, ‘Thought Food’, can be found at https://anitalinkthoughtfood.com/

Abductions From My Beautiful Life is her first book.

Dedication

Dedicated to

Dr Taemets, for seeing the person in this patient.

Michael, for never turning away.

Elsa and Alex, for giving me reasons.

Distance does not make you falter.

Now, arriving in magic, flying,

and finally, insane for the light,

you are the butterfly and you are gone.

And so long as you haven’t experienced this: to die and so to grow,

you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth.

The Holy Longing

(Johann W. von Goethe)

Copyright Information ©

Anita Link (2021)

The right of Anita Link to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

All of the events in this memoir are true to the best of the author’s memory. The views expressed in this memoir are solely those of the author. Where permission has been granted, the real names and details of people and places have been used. Otherwise the names and details of people have been altered to preserve anonymity.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781528983198 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781528983204 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published (2021)

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd

25 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5LQ

Foreword

I first met Anita by phone over two years ago, via SANE Australia; Anita was a SANE peer ambassador; I was on the board. I was looking for people to write about their experiences of anxiety for my book of the same name. Two years later I included a beautifully written narrative from Anita in my book and she appeared in my documentary on anxiety.

In March 2020 Anita attended my book launch at Avid Reader bookstore in Brisbane, where we met face to face for the first time. The world was sliding into the COVID-19 pandemic and we joked that it was a compelling time to release a book on anxiety. This meeting was particularly special as she had made the effort to attend while recovering from a Bipolar I episode and still an inpatient at Belmont Private Hospital.

Anita’s writing style is beautifully descriptive. It evoked powerful emotions in me, and I related to some of the similarities in our stories. The first thing evident to me, from Anita’s writing about her study and working life, was that vets and doctors are cut from the same cloth. We face the same long hours and exhausting, emotionally charged working conditions. Anita and I also shared a feeling of being different at high school, trying to fit in, while knowing on another level that the rejection we felt was the herd instinct of kids not being able to deal with the exotic. And today we share a commitment to, and passion for, de-stigmatising and humanising mental health issues.

As I started reading Anita’s book, I knew where the story was going, but only because I have already had an entrée into the future Anita’s present. This is a memoir of a life well lived, both in safety and adversity. After an idyllic beginning, her planned trajectory abruptly alters. At times it diminishes, but it never fades away.

In the course of writing about living her life with a severe mental illness, Anita describes difficult and heart-wrenching decisions, such as whether having a second baby is worth the risk of relapsing, and suffering from intense thoughts of ending versus continuing life. As a reader I felt as though I was there, making these decisions with her. She describes her journey, her admissions, her psychoses, her breakthroughs and her treatments without bitterness. She writes with love and remains positive and affirmative. After each battle she dusts herself off and re-engages with life and her recovery.

Anita balances the inherent heaviness of some of her experiences with humour and humanness, pathos and hope. I believe that (providing it is not at someone else’s expense) shared humour can be a raw and powerful tool to combat the dark among people who live with mental illness and complex treatments. Anita has made me laugh in the midst of the pain and angst. That is true healing – the journey to recovery aided by laughter.

One of the terms we use in the mental health professions is ‘engagement’. It describes how you form a therapeutic relationship with someone who doesn’t really want to be there – until they do – and they smile, with their eyes, and you know that they are recovering. Anita describes this so well.

Her story engaged me because she writes with emotion and clarity – amidst the highs and lows, wellness and sickness, fear and strength. Anita’s life-force can be summarised in one of her favourite quotes: ‘A ship is safe in harbour, but it wasn’t designed to stay there.’

I invite you to board Anita’s ship. While definitely not smooth sailing, the incredible journey is ongoing, and her warmth and insights shine a light on aspects of severe mental illness most people never get to see before they form an opinion about them.

Thank you for inviting me aboard.

Dr Mark Cross

Consultant Psychiatrist, Northside group Sydney

Lead Psychiatrist in ABC TV series Changing Minds and SANE Australia board member

Co-author of Changing Minds (2016) and author of Anxiety: Expert Advice from a Neurotic Shrink who’s Lived with it All his Life, published by

ABC /Harper Collins, March 2020

Husband to John, father to Clem and Arlo

Part 1

Prologue

Six days after my daughter’s birth, I was kidnapped. My captors sidled up next to me in a big black car with tinted windows and offered me superpowers instead of sweets. They tricked me with promises. They said, ‘Come with us – and the world and your life will make sense like never before.’ They were right. For twelve hours, before I got in their car, they tempted me with what it felt like to be all knowing and all seeing. I could see everyone else muddling along and then me – soaring high above it all, euphoric in the knowledge I would never be plagued with doubt about anything again – because I knew the reason for everything. Meaningless overheard snippets of other people’s conversations ballooned in significance. They were clues to a giant puzzle, and I was slotting the pieces into place quicker and quicker as the day went on. I laughed and laughed because I saw the world so clearly. Its complexity dazzled me, and I felt omnipotent because I had been handed the ability to solve it. I felt so lucky. I had been given the opportunity to spend a day running the universe – doing work experience with a God I’d never believed in.

They said if I went with them, I’d never need sleep again. I had hardly slept for a week and gave in to temptation. I followed them innocently into their black, smoky car. It was only after I got in and the doors slammed shut that I realised I was trapped in the dark with all the things I feared most in life. They sat so close to me I could feel their breath on my closed eyelids. I turned into a claustrophobic who had been locked in a cupboard. The car sped away. By the time I saw my husband again, I had been tortured into saying unspeakable things. My captors lived inside my head. Their ransom was me. They told me if I didn’t comply, my husband would be tortured just like I had been. They made me look deeply into his eyes and say I didn’t recognise him.

They made me say, ‘I don’t have a baby.’

It took a SWAT team to get me back, gun down the impostors in my head and carry what was left of me to safety, and back to my family.

Chapter 1

‘I am still me.’

A scrawl on a Post-it in front of me. I am in hospital wrapped in layers of clothes. The frigidity of central air conditioning with a mind of its own. What are we left with when the ability to control our thoughts and actions has been ravaged? When all the good memories are momentarily erased? The inside of my head feels dry and sandy as a desert, abandoned by all rational thought and all positive emotion. I search for myself every day. I cling to the idea that somewhere in the vast desert buried deep under the sand, I am still me. If I were excavated memory by memory, what would be found?

In the beginning, laughter echoes and light flickers, like a reel of film in an old cinema. The heat is white, and the mouthpiece of my snorkel tastes of salty rubber. My submerged breath, in and out, sounds strange and otherworldly. I open my eyes. Deep pink, filamentous coral fingers spread out in a delicate network, an underwater spider web. At the base of it a clam shimmers, its velvet lips voluptuously parted in a blur of purple, aqua, indigo, azure and turquoise with black spots. Then movement – a school of tiny black fish dance in unison through the piece of coral – a miniature corps de ballet, graceful and mesmerising, as though they had been rehearsing together for years. Against the bleached seabed sand, the black spines of a sea urchin are ink sprayed on white paper. My developing brain captures and lays down this first memory of snorkelling in the Red Sea in Jeddah. I am three or four. When I draw pictures at kindergarten and all through my early childhood, the pictures are never of flowers, the sun or trees. I draw underwater scenes. I imprint on the feel of saltwater and heat.

The smell of jet fuel, and with it the exhilarating prospect of travel, is also mixed into these early memories. We have been on the move since I turned one. They are not small trips. They span the globe – from Germany, where I was born, to Saudi Arabia. Then back to Germany for the birth of my sister Helga when I am two and a half. To Iran for a holiday, to Sri Lanka to visit friends and to Australia to visit my mother’s family. Movement and change become part of my DNA. This immersion in multiple cultures and languages opens me up to a life lived big, just outside one’s comfort zone, never slumped in the corner of blinkered habit.

Even though my geographical location changes at a brisk pace, I have constants. My family is a solid unit. My mother is far from Australia, the home she grew up in. But she is extremely adept at creating new homes wherever we go. She is the sun. She lights our paths and warms our lives. Every morning she greets us with a hug and a delighted smile, as though she were greeting a long-lost loved one at an airport. My father is the soil. He feeds and clothes us, provides our shelter. He shows his love for us in different ways. He is a solid reliable presence. He takes us out into the natural world. He gives me the gift of logic. My parents don’t follow convention for the sake of following convention. They don’t buck convention for the sake of bucking convention. They make up their own minds about how they want to live their lives. They are both very much individuals.

***

Just before I turn six, we move back to Germany. This time is filled with nature and wonder, friendships and love. We live in a small village about forty kilometres outside of Munich in a beautiful part of the country, known for its Alps and castles. Christmas is in wintertime. We ice skate on frozen lakes and drink rosehip tea from thermos flasks. We go tobogganing down the hill just behind our house and learn to ski. In autumn we collect horse chestnuts for art and craft. At the end of autumn, we look out for any baby hedgehogs that are not fat enough to survive hibernation. Then we take them in and keep them warm in our cellar over winter. One year we have three at once. They are usually flea-ridden. We feed them boiled-up chicken hearts and, when spring comes, we release them into our garden where they grow fat on slugs and worms.

In springtime, snowdrops poke their hopeful heads through melting snow. We collect frogspawn from nearby ponds. It goes into a plastic washing-up basin my father has dug into the ground in the garden and landscaped with rocks and water plants. Crocuses bloom and the tadpoles hatch, grow legs and eventually metamorphose into frogs. As spring slips into summer, my best friend Sandra and I stay out all day on our bikes, pretending they are horses. We eat wild raspberries and blackberries. After it rains, my family goes for walks in the nearby woods. My father carries a basket and a knife. He teaches us which wild mushrooms are edible and which are poisonous.

We speak German, except when it’s just the four of us at home. Then we speak English. The school year lasts from September to August. For the first four years I attend the village primary school. It’s a short walk from home. We get the day off if the temperature rises above 28 °C. It doesn’t happen often. The reverse doesn’t apply. We go to school no matter how cold it is. One day it gets to -24 °C and the moisture in my breath forms tiny icicles at the edges of my nostrils.

In year 5, I catch the bus to school, the Ignaz Koegler Gymnasium in Landsberg. Landsberg is picturesque and old. History seeps through everything. I walk from the bus stop to school through medieval archways and over cobblestones with friends who at ten, eleven and twelve are fast becoming trilingual. It’s an academic, refined environment. I also do a lot of ballet, which I started when I was four. Now I attend several classes a week. When I’m twelve, I progress to pointe work, and for a while I see a future of dancing professionally.

***

Then one summer evening, just before I turn thirteen, everything changes again. My mother gathers my sister and me at dusk. Spread on the bed in front of her are two pairs of summer shorts and two brightly patterned T-shirts. The next season here is autumn. Suddenly, I know what she is about to say, and I am right.

‘We are moving to Australia in October.’

My heart jumps with excitement. Moving. Jet fuel. The sea. I have blurry memories of a visit to Australia when I was about four. I don’t fear moving because I know that what is left behind in a plane can be returned to in a plane.

The decision for such a big move was not easy. It was born of my mother’s homesickness and was reinforced by the Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster, which saw much of Germany covered in radioactive rain in its aftermath.

We have about two months before we leave. This is the last summer of my childhood. I start year 7 in September in Landsberg. My friends at school are interested and a little envious of my impending move to such an exotic location. In the weeks before we leave, the house gradually empties. In the last few days, comfort departs with the remaining boxes and furniture. I feel a mixture of excitement and apprehension. The afternoon we leave is rainy. The last person I say goodbye to is Sandra. We cry, hug and wave goodbye to each other. Me from the back of the car, her from her garden fence. It’s a long flight from Munich to Canberra. The plane refuels during a night-time stop in Bangkok. We get out and walk across the tarmac to the terminal. As I step outside, the heat and humidity assault me. My nostrils, my lungs have never dealt with air this wet.

***

When we arrive in Canberra, we are swamped by aunties and cousins – my mother’s family. They are so happy to see us. Although it’s English, their Australian chatter sounds foreign to me. On the drive to my grandmother’s house, I see a road sign saying 100 kilometres to Cooma. I’ve never seen a destination sign with that many kilometres on it. In a cacophony of screeches, a cloud of pink and grey galahs shifts upwards from a roadside paddock, and I can’t believe I am seeing such large parrots outside of a zoo. Jet lag takes over, and I fall asleep.

Over the next few weeks, we drive from Canberra to Brisbane. My parents buy a house in Petrie, on the north side of Brisbane. We spend Christmas camping in a caravan at Maroochydore on the coast. I love being close to the sea again. Its briny breath takes me to a safe place. Instead of new skis, we get new swimmers for Christmas, but it doesn’t feel as though it is Christmas because it is bright and hot. The heat in Brisbane is different to the heat in Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia it was dry and glaring. This new heat is heavier, muggy, filled with huntsman spiders crawling indoors before the rain. It rains so much in this new oppressive summer. Mould blooms on everything. It is impossible to get dry after a shower.

The school year starts in January instead of September. I am thirteen. I started year 7 in September 1986 but go into year 8 in January 1987. In the classroom my thighs stick to the plastic chairs. The odd salt-laden breeze snakes through the louvres as ceiling fans spin lazily overhead. They do nothing to relieve the humidity. I long for snow and central heating. The year 8 schoolwork is easy compared to years 6 and 7 in Germany. And yet I would trade all of my academic knowledge for an understanding of the local vernacular. I don’t know what a ‘port’ is, or ‘togs’. Wearing a school uniform is a new experience. I am sent out to play a softball game. I don’t know what I’m meant to be doing. The other kids yell at me when I get it wrong.

My accent isn’t right either. It’s not German, but it’s more English than Australian.

One day at lunch time, I sit down next to a group of girls in my usual spot. One of them, pimple-faced with thick, shaved thighs that are as mottled as sausages and a fringe teased high and hair sprayed stiff, walks over to me. The others fall silent.

‘You can’t sit with us anymore.’ Rejection stings. I move, flame faced.

The first year is hard. I am teased about my looks, my accent, getting good marks, being different. One of the boys yells ‘Heil Hitler’ at the top of his lungs every time he sees me. My softer feelings retreat. I become coated in a protective shell of independence, because that is what it takes to survive this onslaught. The experience of being intensively excluded fosters a sense of emotional independence that stays with me. It fosters the knowledge that I am responsible for my own present and future. Reliance on others makes me uncomfortable.

All of my energy goes into doing well at school so that I can go to university. For a while I’m interested in becoming an interpreter. But by the time I start year 10, two things happen to change my course. I do work experience in a veterinary clinic and I come across Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘The Surgeon at 2 am’. I love watching surgery and am fascinated by how Plath uses metaphor as a powerful descriptive tool: ‘tissues in slices – a pathological salami’, ‘The blood is a sunset…’

I like and am good at English, but don’t have the confidence to see it taking me anywhere concrete. I also love animals and biology. I start helping out at a local veterinary clinic every Saturday morning, wiping down the consulting room table, cleaning and holding animals. I quickly become hooked on the idea of becoming a vet. At the end of year 10, I choose the prerequisite subjects to get into Veterinary Science at the University of Queensland: Maths 1, Physics, Chemistry and Biology. I love Biology, don’t mind Chemistry and do quite well at both. I loathe Maths 1 and Physics and am not naturally talented at either. I have to work hard just to pass them.

Although I push myself hard academically, at the beginning of year 11, life gets easier for me. Many of my tormenters have either given up teasing me or have dropped out of school, soon to become parents to their first children. A disdain for motherhood slips into my nascent set of opinions.

I don’t have time for boys. I’m so focused on my future. Then one night something changes. A mixed group of us are out at a Chinese restaurant. While we’re waiting for our food, I lean into the conversation and look up. He’s sitting back in his chair, arms crossed, looking at me across the crowded table. I look back, hold his gaze and there is a click; the click of something fitting correctly, slotting into place among all the rough, jostling years of square-peg-in-a-round-hole feelings.

Inaudible but unmistakable.

At the end of the night, he drives a group of us home. He moves around to my side of the table.

‘Do you want a lift?’

‘Yeah, thanks. I got changed and left some of my stuff at Anna’s place. Can we stop there first so I can grab it?’

‘Sure.’

His jeep smells of diesel, is noisy and crowded with voices toppling over each other, then gradually quietens as it empties by one or two at each stop. Then it’s just the two of us. He drives very fast, and I feel the air in the car move in and out of me in a good way. Breathless with no exertion. It’s raining heavily, and the median strips and curves fly by. The road feels like a magic carpet.

When we get to Anna’s place, the car stumbles drunkenly over the potholed driveway.

Anna got a lift with someone else and isn’t home yet. The windscreen wipers flick and squeak over the glass.

He turns to me, ‘You want to wait?’

I am tempted, so very tempted. I can feel myself shedding the last raggedy childhood layers like flaky remnants of sunburnt skin. I can feel myself emerging polished, blank as a blackboard, waiting to be written on.

But I think, No I’m not going to make it that easy for you. So I smudge cool politeness into my voice.

‘No that’s okay. Could you just take me home? I can get my things from Anna’s tomorrow.’

And he does exactly as I ask. He drives me home in the pouring rain.

It is months before he dares to strike electric sparks in me with one slow stroke across the crease of my right knee. And before that there’s a lot of verbal intercourse. He is witty, teasing, light-hearted and supportive of my aspirations. He is older than me, unsuitable enough to make him irresistible. At one point, early on, he looks at me seriously,

‘You know you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.’

I smile back, bemused.

‘How can you think I would ever be naïve enough to do anything I didn’t want to do?’

The inside of my head feels older than time, wallpapered with wisdom.

We talk as much as we kiss. He tells me how clever I am, how beautiful, and I lap it up like a cat with a saucer of cream. I grow fat on his compliments. I grow confident on them. I love the look on his face when he sees me, short-skirted, walking towards him, the heat rising up from the road around my calves, his eyes hitting my skin like the arms of a drowning man hitting the water. A slow, dimpled smile just for me.

Chapter 2

Year 12 comes with push and drive. I am focused on the end of the year. Getting in to uni. I still struggle to focus in Maths 1 and Physics classes. They are dry, theoretical and I grow bored quickly. And for the first time ever, I am distracted by a boy at school.

Michael is repeating year 12. We share a Maths 1 class on a Friday afternoon. He sits behind me and always swings on his chair. Every week he quotes something or someone to me. Words always beat numbers when it comes to my attention span. A friendship forms.

Every time I try to pin down his appeal, I can’t. It’s nothing tangible. It’s an ease, an absence of awkward silences in our conversations right from the beginning. There’s no desperation or ulterior motive. He doesn’t tell me things I want to hear. He tells me things he wants to say.

One afternoon, on his swinging chair, out of nowhere among a wave of trivialities, he smiles with his eyes and says, ‘I’ve got a new quote of the week for you.’

‘Yeah – what is it?’

‘A ship is safe in harbour, but it wasn’t designed to stay there.’

In that moment, a bubble forms around the two of us. I don’t want to be too encouraging, but I can’t stop myself thinking, That’s quite something for an 18-year-old boy.

I smile back, ‘That’s a good one.’

And then I take the time to savour his words. They roll around deliciously in my head all weekend, because they sum up everything I believe.

Michael radiates authenticity. This blond boy, green-eyed and dimpled, can’t be classified. At the end of the year, we go to our year 12 formal together as friends.

***

In January, Tertiary Entrance (TE) scores and university offers are published. The highest TE score possible is 990. To get into Veterinary Science, you need 985. My score is 975. So I miss out on Veterinary Science, but am accepted into my second choice – a Bachelor of Science at the University of Queensland. I am disappointed, but I know there is another chance of gaining entry into Veterinary Science. If my marks in the first year of my Bachelor of Science are good enough, I will be able to upgrade into Veterinary Science the following year. So I accept the offer for Science and resolve to do what I need to do to upgrade.

I love the change from high school to university. I feel myself unfold, my wings drying in the sun of this expanded environment. Every morning I ride my bike to the train station, catch the train and then the bus to the campus in St. Lucia. It takes just over an hour and a half each way.

Michael is studying Civil Engineering at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in the city. We often catch the same train in the mornings. He is still as impossible to define as a gust of wind. He is an energy moving from one invisible point to the next. Our friendship grows, becomes difficult to contain and segregate. I know deep down I want more from him but it scares me, this want. He tempts me to shed some of my armour. I feel naked and as vulnerable as a slug in the path of a bulldozer. My heart battles my head. I know if I stop playing the butterfly he could hurt me, not just hurt me but annihilate me. I also know he is the ship that will take me out of my harbour. I know he will expand my wisdom and experience further than I could dream. Not only is he his own person at an age when so many others aren’t, but