Bec

Why I’m Doing the 20 Talk Challenge

Because connection saves lives.

Because silence doesn’t.

Because I’ve seen what happens when we wait too long to ask, “Are you okay?”

The 20 Talk Challenge is my commitment to do something about it  

This story is the reason I’m doing it.

Scarlet.

The last time I saw her she didn’t see me. Our cars passed each other on Sydney Road, in Coburg, Melbourne.

She was heading north. I watched her drive by but I didn’t wave.

Scarlet had been one of my closest friends for the past 10 years.

We’d known each other for almost twice that, but our second act was by far my favourite of the two.

That’s not to say we didn’t like each other at school. We met in year 7 or 8 and had some cute moments. We hated each others guts for almost all of year 10 but slowly grew indifferent and the relationship was tolerable. Our shared interests kept us in almost all of the same classes, drifting in and out of the same circles.

We were incredibly different in every sense of the word. Scarlet was tall and slender, appeared confident and worldly, older than she was, with dark eyes and an even darker sense of humour.

I was almost the exact opposite. Inexperienced. Short. Childish. I suffered an almost allergic response to anything to do with boys and was severely challenged in the fashion department.

Yet we clicked.

Key moments and memories stick out more so than many other friends I had at school. There was the time she told me she broke up with a boy by telling him, “it’s not me, it’s you.”

(The audacity, I thought to myself).

Or that she wasn’t going to the year 9 blue light disco because she had already “been there, done that.”

Sometimes we’d walk our dogs past the house of a boy she liked. He was  older. Year 10. We’d slow down as we turned up Kenilworth St, just in case he came outside. Sometimes he did. I remember her recounting their love affair. She broke his heart. Of course.

Then there was the only time I ever saw her show the slightest inkling of fear. We were busted stealing pick ‘n’ mix from Kmart. 14 years old. Hearts pounding. I remember feeling shocked and confused as I watched a solitary bead of sweat trickle down her face.

I’d never seen her afraid before. A haughty, middle aged, Karen haircut caught us and kicked us out of the shop, threatening to call our parents.

We legged it two blocks with our school bags thudding against our backs before we stopped to realize no one was chasing us.

Scarlet and I found each other again in our early 20s. We’d left school, started and stopped uni. Taken some u-turns and both ended up in Melbourne.

Turns out we liked a lot of the same things, music, bud, boys and beer and it just made sense for us to become friends again. We made sense.

She had grown into such a beautiful person. Physically striking. And equally compassionate. She carried herself with an affect that could easily be confused for arrogance. It wasn’t. Or sometimes it was, but well earned because she was special.

She was fire, in her warmth and her comfort, her quick wit and her quick temper. Passionate. Emphatic and dramatic. She used her hands a lot when she spoke and could shut you down with one subtle raise of the eyebrow.

“Really, Rebecca?”

She always called me by my full name.

We sauntered through our 20s, drinking beers on rooftop bars, smoking cigarettes and rolling joints late into the night.

We often slept in the same bed, lying side by side, shoulders touching as we stared at the darkness talking about love and freedom and family and life. Our expectations of it and the expectations of us.

We took trips home to the country together. Me, manning the wheel of my 1987, two door cream beema. Scarlet, winding the window down as soon as we hit the open road. Laughing and smiling, the wind flicking her long dark hair across her face as we jettisoned down the Hume Highway.

Talking. Always. Endlessly.

Our magic was in our ability to connect with each other. To understand each other. To listen. And love each other no matter what.

There was never a bullshit I could get past her. The one eyebrow raised as an indicator, gentle but obvious, that she thought I was talking shit and I’d be forced to either come clean or somehow justify the unjustifiable.

We moved in and out of the same circles. Sometimes going for months without speaking and then landing in each others share house lounge room.

We would fall into conversation with a wine or a coffee in hand, her big beautiful smile and bright, brown eyes letting me know that she was so happy to see me. Time meant nothing in our world. We could simply float in and out of each others lives as needed.

Yet, when I needed her, she was there. Physically. Or offering to fuck some one up down the phone line.

Scarlet had a way of making you feel special. She would focus on you. Pour herself into you. Listen with her whole body.

She was the first person to introduce me to the idea of being an empath and our parallel journeys into the studies of the mind, the self, ego, shadow, meditation, personal development and healing meant we would enter conversational rabbit holes and emerge having no concept of the passing time.

Predictably so, our quests into ourselves often went in totally different directions. Whilst we both took up conventional, predictable and socially acceptable careers in allied health, (she was a psychiatric nurse and I was a social worker) we both wanted more from life. We wanted to understand more.

My extracurriculars focused on mindset and fitness and she studied somatics, tantra and transpersonal therapies.

We were both looking for peace, in all the many ways one seeks to find it.

In 2017, Scarlet was one of the very first people I went to when I realized I’d been raped by my boss. In fact, I’d gone to her, months before, confused and in denial telling her that, “I ‘think’ I cheated on my husband.”

“You ‘think’?”

There was that eyebrow again.

When I finally came clean to her, to myself, to those around me, when I went to the police - it was messy and I was a mess.

Yet, with Scarlet, there was ne’er a moment of questioning. I didn’t need to explain myself or my actions. She never hassled me to contextualise for her why I’d been confused or exactly what had happened. I didn’t even have the words for it, at that point.

She always believed me. And she held me accountable to myself, to do what I could to heal.

That was one of the remarkable things about her. About us. About the clarity and compassion and focus we maintained when holding the other through the big things in life.

We respected each other.

We expected better, for each other.

And we expected each other to respect and expect more for ourselves.

On a coffee date a year later, upon my umpteenth reexamination of the circumstances around my assault, circles I’d been looping and tangling myself in for months - she stopped me mid sentence.

I’d been talking at her. Going over scenarios. Obsessing. Excruciatingly. Painstakingly.

“When are you going to stop talking about this?” She said bluntly.

Admittedly wounded, picking my jaw up off the floor, I stammered for a response.

She placed her coffee on the table and looked me dead in the eye.

“You’re so much better than this. You don’t need to let it control you anymore.”

There’s so much more to that conversation than I can convey. She reflected to me the holding pattern I’d been in.

Self flagellate.

Personal pity party.

Reject the help of those around me.

Repeat.

She lovingly guided me to understand the ways in which I was keeping myself stuck and I experienced a shift in that moment that allowed me to move forwards and start accepting support. I texted her afterwards.

“I’m so lucky to have you in my life.”

One year later she talked me down once again. Broken. Confused. Traumatized. I’d isolated myself from my family again and was now having flickering thoughts, fantasies of walking into the ocean in the middle of the night. I was scaring myself.

Holding space down the phone line,  from over 1000km away, once again she reminded me that I was better than this.

“You’re being intentionally self destructive. And that’s ok. But if you’re going to do it- you have to admit that you’re doing it.”

She showed me that if I kept playing out the same patterns, now I’d acknowledged them, then I had to do so knowing it was a choice. My choice.

“You’re so much stronger than this. This is not who you are.”

It was another big moment for me. A shift in my awareness prompted by candid and honest reflections. Words that can only be uttered, understood or accepted when said in deep rapport and with unyielding love and enduring respect.

I picked myself up off the floor physically and metaphorically speaking, dusted myself off and found myself making more positive changes.

The last time I saw her she didn’t see me. I didn’t wave. I didn’t try to get her attention.

I just watched as she drove by. Her her eyes shaded behind dark sunglasses. Maybe she wouldn’t have seen me anyway? She appeared focused. Deep in thought. Brow furrowed.

I thought about sending her a message and seeing if she had time for a coffee but couldn’t summon the energy.

I remember my thoughts exactly.

‘She’s just such hard work at the moment.’

I felt my guts twisting with guilt.

Or was that morning sickness? I was somewhere in the first trimester at this point, it was early 2021 and as well as  post pandemic fatigue, I was feeling physically and emotionally exhausted.

The smell of Subway sickened me, yet all I could imagine eating for 3 weeks straight was a toasted 12 inch chicken teriyaki- go figure.

I remember telling her the news. I picked her up from the station near my house, sidling up to her in my husbands single cab, before throwing open the door and telling her it was something big.

“We’ll as long as you’re not fucking pregnant,” she scoffed.

We laughed about it afterwards and I know she was genuinely happy for me. I even asked her if she’d like to be a part of my home birth team, she gave me a sly smile.

“Rebecca,” she said.

“I’m a psych nurse. So unless that thing comes out with bipolar, I’m not going to be any good to you.”

It was a nice moment but I remember thinking on that day that she was off. She was happy for me. But a flat happy. Lights are on but noones home, kind of happy.

She was a bit dissociative. She didn’t follow the conversation and spent long stretches of time staring into the distance.

She’d been having a hard time and the pandemic had been especially unkind to her. There’d been a work crisis, a bad hair cut and a break up, all in one day.

As any woman will tell you, that’s fertile breeding ground for a full on menty b, but that day I remember looking at her and feeling uneasy.

Cautiously optimistic, somewhat in denial but also hormonal and coming to terms with the imminent changes in my own life, I opted to park it for now and keep checking in.

A text message here.

A funny gif there.

The last text conversation we had was about my underarm hair, of all things.

“I’ve given up shaving. What’s the fucking point.”

“You should dye it blue,” she replied. “So that kid of yours can see how cool you once were.”

We exchanged images of rainbow coloured armpit hair we’d found on Google and went to bed. All felt right with the world.

You know, if I can speak directly for a moment, I think the reason this piece ended up being as long as it has, was because I’m procrastinating the inevitable crux of my story.

Telling you, and myself about all the beautiful moments, as if, I can balance the cosmic scales and pretend for a moment that I’m ok with what happened next.

That it’s enough.

The time we had was enough.

I don’t really want to tell you the next part of the story but it rolls around with such inevitability.

It’s unstoppable because it’s true. It happened. I cannot pretend that it’s any other way.

Scarlet isn’t here anymore and it feels completely and utterly unreal.

When she took her life, on May 18 2021, I was 5 months pregnant and I feel as though my body, in it’s incredible wisdom, shut down the part of me that’s meant to feel it or accept it. And so, I haven’t.

She exists in a surreal suspension.

Between worlds.

Like I’m waiting for her to text me back or burst through the front door. Wrapping me in the kind of awkward hug a tall person gives a short person.

Calling me ‘Rebecca,’ with her melodic and particularly drum like emphasis on the B.

I’m waiting for her to meet my son.

For her to say his name.

For her to tell me who he looks like, to her.

I want to tell her about my experience of birth.

About the bits that were scary and hard.

And the anxiety that’s grown more consuming since becoming a mum.

I want her to hold me through it.

And tell me how strong I am, in her eyes.

I want her to let me do the same.

To let me in, in a way she never did.

I want to tell her off for that.

And hold her accountable.

To reflect to her what I could see in this smart, brave, passionate soul of hers.

That she is strong.

So much stronger than what ever it was she was facing.

The last time I saw her she didn’t see me. And whilst I have already cried and cursed, languished and flagellated myself for simply watching her drive by, I’ve played that moment over 10,000 times - I don’t regret it.

The thing I honoured in her and she in me was the mutual expectation of self awareness and respect. I know she’d never have wanted me to put myself out or extend myself further than my capacity.

She didn’t see me. But I saw her. In every moment of the last 15 years. In every heart ache where she came back twice as fierce. In every conflict where she chose compassion. In the beautifully mundane and seemingly insignificant seconds that I was in her presence.

I saw her.

And right now, there’s someone who sees you.

You’re not looking and even if you were, perhaps you wouldn’t see it.

They see you.

They love you.

And they never want to live in this world without you.

For Scarlet. For all of us.

This story isn’t easy to tell — but that’s exactly why I’m telling it.

Because every conversation matters.

Because love isn’t enough if it stays silent.

If even one person starts a conversation after reading this — one message, one check-in, one “Hey, how are you really?” — then every word will have been worth it.

This is why I’m doing the 20 Talk Challenge.

For Scarlet.

For Sophie.

For Martin.

For Mary

❤️