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There are many things in my life that I have been very good at from the start: climbing trees, writing letters, manipulating men, but I have never been good at coping. I grew up in a really lovely home with a lovely family who had lovely intentions. However, due to either the things they said to me, or a sense on guilt that I was born with, I felt like I was a bad child with many faults. At the age of eight I started restricting my food intake, a pattern that still haunts me due to my mother telling me I was getting a little bit too fat. Enter life-long body issues. Soon after this initial reaction I started to self-harm in my backyard- hitting my arms with bricks, breaking glasses in my hands. Coping.

My parents had no idea that this was going on, as I showed no signs of being upset by their criticisms. This behavioural pattern continued on through my life, as I didn’t think there was anything unusual about it. By the age of 12 I turned to alcohol as something to make me confident, bold: quite childlike I suppose. By the age of 14 I was self harming in ways that were much more violent, yet I suppose quite reminiscent of my childhood also. My writing turned dark, as did my clothes which covered contusions. Outwardly, this was a phase that seemed normal of a teenager, and it was not until the next year when I became a different person. Despite the feelings I had been harbouring inside, I had always been quite an exuberant and over confident individual on the outside. The age of 15 saw my personality dramatically change as I was attacked by a bunch of older girls via the Internet about aspects of my personality and appearance. I was sent venomous emails, and was tricked and lied to over my Internet journals in order to have information extracted about my friends and myself. I guess being overly excitable and loud did draw attention to me, but other than that, these girls had only seen me from a distance, yet still managed to tear me to shreds. I stopped talking in class, I stopped going to shows on my own, I toned down my dress sense and started to self-harm close to everyday. I would not eat for whole days, losing about 15 kilos, and secretly passing out in bathrooms. By the end of high school, I was functioning at close to zero: going out and getting drunk 3 times a week, letting my grades drop, and eventually failing my TEE.

My parents started to get me help around this time, mainly out of the disappointment of my high school potential travelling down the drain. They sent me once a week to a counselor whom they resented because of his price. I ended up lying to his face about the way I was feeling, to the point where he saw nothing wrong with me. I moved out of home not long after all this happened, getting a full time job and forgetting about study all together. During this time I started using alcohol very heavily, sometimes even drinking before work. Food became a vice in a different form, my size changing from a size 8 to a 14. I discovered boys who were a great form of escapism and also a way to be abused with out the direct self-infliction. I fell in love for the first time this year, got my heart broken, lost my virginity and got pregnant, all to the same person. My family did not know this and soon after a self-termination I tried to take my own life.

A doctor at some point had diagnosed me during these years as suffering from clinical depression and anxiety. I did not let my family in on any of this, of course and always ran out very quickly when trying to get help because these kind of things can be quite daunting for a 16 year old trying to fend for herself.

The next few years were an extensive blur of fighting and self-harm in different forms. It was not until October last year when I had a seizure in the middle of my workplace that these problems in my life were called back into focus. Within a few months I has been diagnosed with a brain tumour, and during the countless interviews with doctors I was also diagnosed with clinical depression and anxiety disorder, again. Being surrounded by family and friends made me have to admit to these things and be put on various medications. I was hospitalized for quite a long time with my tumour, which compounded my anxiety to I point I had never before experienced. I started having panic attacks and seizures in public places, injuring myself in the process. The depression I had been feeling for most of my life started manifesting itself in a complete lack of motivation and energy, staying in bed for days and nights at I time, overdosing on whatever I could find, many emergency trips and eventually a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, with bi-polar tendencies. I got placed in Perth clinic to finally have a go at recovery.

Despite having worked for Headspace, whom send a strong message regarding help-seeking, this was the first time that I realized I could lean on someone to help me work through the pain that had triggered this long, abusive cycle I had been living through. Who knows why these diseases manifest in some people but not others? Anyone who looked at me in the street would not have the slightest inkling towards anything that had happened to me in my life, or that I was carrying around this illness that was as debilitating as something like a broken leg, yet completely invisible. It is so, so important to seek help for this reason. God knows that if I had lost my pride earlier my mind and indeed my body, inside and out, would not be carrying the sort of scars that it is.

I am still fighting an ongoing battle with myself. ‘Getting better’ is a lifelong task, not an overnight quick fix. There are times when self-harm looms over me like a shadow, and eating without purging is a daily chore. The difference now is that there is some light in my life, I am not crazy, I am not the only person who has this inside. And I can talk about it. Which believe me, is the most important step of all.

I was never diagnosed with depression but looking back all of the symptoms were there. Low mood pretty much all day, almost every day. Loss of interest in things I previously enjoyed. Poor appetite. Insomnia. Low self-esteem. Suicidal ideation. I also had most of the symptoms of social anxiety from as early as year seven. I remember being afraid of eating in front of other people to the point where I would go without food at school or at social outings. Having to speak in class is still something that provokes an excessive amount of anxiety, and at times I have trouble speaking to people on the phone. When I was in primary school I also had most of the symptoms of separation anxiety disorder and I’ve suffered from a high level of perfectionism on and off since high-school.

If I had to write up a clinical formulation for my issues it would look something like this:

Predisposing:

Genetic: My mother suffered depression (postnatal) and anxiety which she saw a psychologist for briefly. My grandmother also suffered depression and was on medication almost all of her life. This increased likelihood that I would inherit a genetic predisposition for depression and/or anxiety.

Early childhood/development: According to my parents I had a difficult temperament as a baby which would have increased stress in the family environment. Increased stress for them would have meant increased stress for me. Increased stress for me would have increased the likelihood that the genes for depression and anxiety would activate.

The stressful family environment also resulted in a lot of arguments between my parents. My father occasionally threatened to leave. Possibly as a result of this, I developed separation anxiety. I remember standing at the screen door, waiting for my mum to get home from work every day. I did that late into primary school and would freak out if her bus was even five minutes late. I also remember feeling anxious about being left at friends’ houses and going to sleepovers. I declined invitations, claiming to be sick, on numerous occasions.

Social-emotional learning from parents: The family environment was also stressful because there was little emotional disclosure. There was also no problem-solving so if two people had an argument then they didn’t talk about it. There was no reparation just time for rumination. And then eventually something distracted you and you started talking to the other person again. Without the modelling of emotional disclosure and problem-solving I didn’t develop those skills myself. To make it worse, both of my parents, to this day, engage in a lot of black and white, dramatising (catastrophic) negative talk.

It was probably their catastrophic thinking and general anxious and negative thinking that lead them to be so overprotective. They disallowed and discouraged most social interaction, huffed and puffed about having to change their schedule whenever I mentioned parties, camps and so on, and caused me to feel guilty whenever I wanted to spend time with friends. They often spoke about the horrible bashings that had occurred in nearby parks to dissuade me from going out.

Their distrust of others and negative attribution style also meant that they pounced on the smallest injustices that arose in my friendships (someone getting to a movie late or someone forgetting to pay back borrowed money) and spoke about them as if they were the most unfaithful, untrustworthy individuals under the sun. Their hypercritical attitude of others probably explains their dwindling social circle and certainly impacted on my own. Of course, I picked up their negative thinking style and spent a good deal of my childhood and adolescence perfecting the art of catastrophising and rumination. I spent hours awake at night rehearsing my failures in my head. The lack of opportunities for social experience, the micromanaging, and the invalidation that sometimes occurred, all stopped me from practising social and friendship making skills. Their high expectations turned me into a perfectionist who didn’t have the skills (artistic, social or academic) to be anything close to perfect. So I beat myself up about by failures and found it impossible to find pleasure in the achievements I did have.

Precipitating:

Bullying at school. Familial, social and academic stressors. Etcetera...

Perpetuating:

During the worst of my depression I self-harmed. I thought that life was meaningless. I hated myself and I didn’t feel like I had any close friends. The close friends I did have seemed to leave me and form other friendships. I fretted over my elderly parents’ mortality. I argued incessantly with them and then felt excessively guilty. I didn’t speak to people much, especially in groups. I drew and I wrote and I tried to find a reason for everything. I felt like things would never change. I had relationships that were hopelessly co-dependent and accentuated by longing, uncertainty, and wanting to be loved but not feeling love for the other person. Then guilt, for not feeling love for the other person. I fought with myself and my thoughts constantly. Hated how automatically my thoughts turned to negativity and depression. Always felt exhausted. I experienced extremes of emotion – odd, wistful feelings of connectedness to everything, and a deep depression that I romanticised with rumination and music long after I had any reason to be depressed.

I stayed on the computer too long, I went to bed too late. I avoided social situations, I avoided speaking on the phone and I avoided my own voice. I felt self-conscious about smiling, about laughing. I pulled out my hair and cut my wrists. I spent nights and nights alone in my room, wracked with anxiety and uncertainty about unreturned calls from friends or events I had voluntarily skipped but really wished I’d gone to. I battled with an overwhelming sense of uncontrollability. I thought I was abnormal, broken, and unlovable.

But all of those thoughts were just thoughts and all of those social deficits were slowly improved with practice.

Treatment:

Looking back I can identify lots of little steps I took to treat my depression. Some of them were accidents and good luck. Some were thanks to altruistic friends. Some were more self-directed.

It sounds ridiculous but one of the first steps I took to feel better about myself in high-school was getting dreadlocks. I immediately stopped getting teased at school. Much later I would also gain the independence, finances and motivation to go clothes shopping and start to look the way I wanted to look as well. For some reason I was never given that option as a child. But this first step reduced some of the tension at school and taught me – if only in a very small way – that I had some control over my appearance and my environment.

Going to uni was probably the next step. It provided me with a new environment in which to invent myself, away from all the people I assumed didn’t like me in high-school. Away from bullies and cliques and five years of feeling embarrassed and socially incompetent around my peers. Uni was also significantly less stressful than year eleven and twelve.

I decided to study psychology and I learnt a lot about erroneous thinking styles, cognitive biases and so on. I started to realise that when I was depressed, my brain was hardwired to think depressing thoughts which made me more depressed. I realised that being depressed made it more difficult to think of better times, and almost impossible to think of disconfirming evidence for my negative thoughts about myself. I did start to discover positive things about myself. But I didn’t lose the sense that everything was meaningless until much later.

Much later when I started to work full-time. Working full-time gave me access to the finances to go out and socialise. It also gave me access to a lot of well-adjusted adults who modelled good social, emotional and coping skills. At around the same time some of my university friends started to hassle me about hanging out again. With an incredible feeling of reluctance and anxiety I started to go to pubs and clubs which helped me to develop stronger friendships with them, learn how to enjoy myself and improve my social skills. With a lot of difficulty I started noticing when I was intentionally avoiding social situations and forced myself to go to them anyway. Eventually I started to enjoy them.

I also gave up art. I gave up my search for meaning. I decided that it was easier and more fun just to sit around and play video games. I changed my life philosophy to hedonism, which involved learning two good treatments for depression – distraction and positive event scheduling (or having fun.) Giving up art was important in building my self-esteem because as a perfectionist (and an at-best mediocre, untrained artist) I was always down on myself because of my work. Later on I returned to art with the self-confidence I needed to appreciate my work and enjoy what I was doing.

Hedonism helped me to stop thinking about meaning. Hedonism had a lot going for it. You make yourself happy and by making yourself happy you make other people happy. You have fun and other people have fun having fun with you. It was a unique brand of hedonism that still had other people’s interests strongly in mind. I suppose I never lost the sense that positively influencing others was important.

Another factor in overcoming my existential woe was realising the negative slant I was putting on all of my existential musing. In my head I got to the point where I was thinking “life is meaningless” without realising that if life is meaningless it doesn’t matter what you do, how you live or whether it’s meaningless or not. Meaninglessness is liberation.

I always figured that death made all achievements moot. You can achieve things but the people who will benefit from your achievements will die and eventually the entire universe will collapse anyway. What’s the point? But I decided that death doesn’t wipe away the things you achieve while you’re alive. Nothing is eternal so why should you or your achievements have to be eternal to be meaningful? I decided that the only thing that’s important while you’re alive is what you do while you’re alive.

I also realised the importance of selfishness, a word that is often put in a negative light. For most of my life I felt guilty if I did something just for myself, because I thought I wasn’t worth it. With further thought I decided that selfishness is at the centre of everything – humans, animals, nature. It’s an important part of survival. You think about yourself so you can survive. For people in middle-class western culture, it’s more about emotional survival than safety. You need put yourself first before you can properly attend to anything else.

To some extent experimenting with drugs helped me to learn about myself and experience competencies I didn’t think I had. I found that many of those skills were things I could transfer to sober social interactions as well. They also helped me to relax and build my social skills and learn how to have fun.

Experimenting with my sexuality helped me to better define and understand my personality.

Being trained in Aussie Optimism, a social skills and optimistic thinking program finally gave me some practical ways to make decisions, solve problems, be assertive, cope with my negative feelings and challenge my negative thoughts. Later on I would return to the program and also learn some excellent skills for physical relaxation.

Getting an exercise bike and slowly developing a daily exercise routine helped hormonally. Fixing up other little bits of my daily routine, like getting to bed earlier and taking a shower at night to relax, also helped.

Discovering happy music was enormously important because it allowed me to transfer my love of music to bands that didn’t depress me to listen to. The Beatles, The New Pornographers, Of Montreal, and Belle and Sebastian were all helpful in doing that.

Taking the plunge and asking a friend to escort me to the counselling building at uni was important. Making an appointment to see a counsellor allowed me unload and unpack ten years of shit that had mostly just sat around inside of me. It was cathartic to bounce off an intelligent, trained adult, and learn more about mindfulness and visualisation.

Discovering I was a perfectionist was important and taking steps to overcome it were surprisingly easy for me. I realised I was a perfectionistic one day when I was sitting in front of a two sentence e-mail for a full 30 minutes trying to ‘refine’ it and make it ‘sound good’, all the while my anxiety rising sky high as I thought about how much time I was wasting. I quickly developed a self-timer for perfectionistic procrastination and now I tend to realise when I’m pedantically adjusting things for no reason and move on.

Moving out/house-sitting allowed me to disentangle my life from my parents’ and the strange, emotionally charged interactions I had with them. It helped me to develop my own daily routine, which was much more relaxed and enjoyable. And the distance helped us to develop a healthier relationship which we have managed to maintain despite having moved back in.

And meeting somebody who is amazingly insightful, supportive, affectionate and fun, has also had a big impact on my life.

And that’s where I am now. Over the last couple of years I have shed most of my depression. Up until three or four months ago I still experienced and even sought depressive episodes once or twice a week. Such was the strange romantic pull of a mood I experienced in varying severity for over ten years of my life. I haven’t experienced anything as severe to depression in a while, though I would be surprised if it doesn’t arise again. It’s different now though – I can recognise when it’s coming on, and I have the coping skills and social support to deal with it if it does. I also have a wealth of positive experiences now, that make the depression I used to yearn for unappealing.

Despite being very happy I still suffer from some symptoms of social anxiety. I sometimes experience an excessive amount of fear when speaking in some group situations. I sometimes feel uncomfortable speaking to people on the phone. And I sometimes avoid people – generally people I don’t know very well – to avoid social interaction.

I also have a general level of anxiety that is perhaps slightly higher than is normative and a thinking style that occasionally (but less and less) lapses into anxious thinking. Right now I’m realising that a lot of my anxious thoughts revolve around perceived deadlines. I start to think about what ‘has’ to be done and I get anxious if I don’t do it. It’s not necessarily easy to ‘just do it’ though, because my perfectionism causes me to procrastinate, which increases my deadline anxiety, which (sometimes) decreases my performance when I finally do what I need to do, which increases my perfectionist anxiety, and so on. Like most issues in psychology, the relationship between many of my symptoms is cyclical. I’m working on it and I know I have access to a counsellor if I need some extra help.

I am a clinical psychologist trainee and I got into the field of psychology for a few reasons – people came to talk to me in high school about their problems, I knew a lot of people with mental health issues growing up, I was interested in cognition and why people do what they do, and I wanted to understand myself better. I sometimes worry about being a ‘psych who has issues’ but the truth is everyone has issues. Every single person has issues but some people have the social support and internal resources (often because of professional intervention or training) to better cope with them than others. Some people are lucky enough to have had a mostly positive, early childhood experience, and gain those internal resources naturally. Others need to gain them through professional intervention and study – like I had to.

Professional support is ALWAYS available whether it is over the phone, through your GP, through your school psychologist or through your university’s counselling service. The following is a list of services available in the Perth metro area.

Purple Pixie

It was early August 2009 that I started noticing changes. I started looking for hidden messages in books, what people said and how they said it. Doubtless that helped my English mark. In the lead up to TEE other people started noticing it as well; I was jumpy, made little sense and was prone to long silences. I was also trying very hard to keep people happy. I think I was scared of them being angry or disappointed with me. About a week after exams things started making less and less sense, I watched a movie in English and couldn’t understand anything except a few odd phrases. I became obsessed with the boy I was with, and was convinced, without any grounding, that he was leaving me. Oddly enough, that scared me more than anything else. I started hearing voices that were giving a constant commentary on how wrong, weak and pathetic I was being. I couldn’t understand anything that was going on, I felt guilty and ashamed of everything I had ever done, and the voices weren’t helping. It was at this point I confronted my younger brother and apologised profusely at having sexually abused him when I was seven. Of course, it wasn’t really sexual abuse; all kids play sex games when they’re younger. No-one told me this though, and it was my greatest fear that someone should discover my various sexual encounters as a child. I experimented with my younger siblings, myself, kids at school and in the neighbourhood. All this is normal, apparently, but NO-ONE TOLD ME. I always felt the outcast; developing a crush on my female teacher didn’t help, it was more reason to stay hidden at the back of the class, not talking to anyone lest something slip out.

Often things would accumulate in my head, illogical assumptions building up until they’d explode. I was once sent home because I couldn’t stop crying as I had forgotten my dictionary. Another example was where I had failed to write up notes for a math exam, and literally broke down in front of the library. I realised later that these were signs of anxiety, but of course very few people realised this and the only time I was ever sent to mental health “professionals” was when I punched a girl at netball. I can’t remember why. All I remember was being mildly frustrated at something, next thing I know I was standing in front of a girl twice my size doubled over on the bitumen. Basically, the most insignificant thing could set me off. But that's under control now.

It was early high school I started craving pain. I’d run into walls, scratch myself until I bled and pull at my hair. I could never bring myself to cut, I don’t know why. The most extreme I went was when I somehow managed to convince a friend to brand me. I wanted to feel pain, you see, and I couldn’t think of anything more painful than white-hot metal against flesh. “It’ll be like being raped”, I remember saying. I wanted to be beaten and tortured, raped. I felt like I deserved it. This too, I have learnt to control, because I have realised that I am better than, that I don’t deserve that.

Later, my childhood escapism which consisted of lying on my bed thinking about dragons took a new turn. I started experimenting with drugs, namely hallucinogens and pot. This was during TEE. I was also doing TEE art at the time, and spent many nights with little or no sleep, stoned and on the verge of passing out from paint fumes. My average bedtime was 2:30 a.m. I lost count of the number of all-nighters I pulled, fuelled by caffeine and the occasional dexie. I do not recommend this mode of study for anyone, no matter what course they’re doing.

Eventually this all came to a head. I was so lucky it happened after my final exams. After a day of trying to explain to my mother that I needed to see a doctor, that something was wrong, I was admitted to Charlie’s psych ward. I met a girl called Anna with huge scars on her arms and thighs, and was convinced she was there to spy on me. I was convinced there were cameras everywhere. Watching for my reaction to anything around me, trying to deduce exactly what was going on. I refused to take medication, as in my mind “meds” were synonymous with “drugs”. I don’t really remember anyone explain where I was or, or why. After a week I was sent to Bentley Adolescent Unit, and thought I was in jail. Over time I became aware I was in hospital, met the other kids and started, very gradually, to put things in the right places. The nurses there were really friendly; you could tell they were trying to help. I was there for almost three months. I was diagnosed with first episode psychosis and associated depression.

Since then, I have made a complete recovery. I’m able to appreciate myself for who I am, rather than strive to some unrealistic expectation and punish myself when I don’t achieve it. I’ve started a nursing course because I want to help people, and have just gotten approval to run a visual arts workshop for people with a mental illness aged 15 to 25. I have an amazing supportive boyfriend (blegh, I know, another boy) and the most incredible thing is, despite everything I’ve put them through, and everything I’ve told them, my friends and family still continue to support me. I think the most important thing to remember is, that no matter what you’re going through, there are people out there who really do want to help, and see you get better.

...The doll is propelled through outer space,

A kind of miniature Barbarella.

She sports “Miss Astronaut” (1965),

A metallic silver fabric suit

(The brown plastic straps at the shoulders

And across the bodice feature

Golden buckles) and two-part

White plastic helmet. Her accessories:

Brown plastic mittens,

Zip boots, and sheer nylon

Mattel flag, which she triumphantly sticks

Into another conquered planet.

- David Trinidad, from Of Mere Plastic

Around the world, two Barbie dolls are sold every second[1], and in 1992 it was determined that if all the Barbie dolls ever sold “were placed head to toe, they would describe the circumference of the earth four times”[2]. Barbie is “America’s most beloved, most notorious piece of posable plastic”[3] – born in 1956 when Mattel founder Ruth Handler found a risqué doll called Bild Lilli during a trip to Europe. The Lilli doll was a novelty item from a popular adult cartoon strip, designed for men – but she inspired Handler to develop an adult doll for young girls, with the intention of allowing them to project their fantasies of the future onto her[4]. Barbie first experienced controversy – criticised for being too overtly sexual, with her imposing measurements (40-18-32 if she were a real woman[5]), but quickly won over many fans and now has 100 per cent name recognition with mothers of girls between the ages of three and ten[6]. While Barbie is surrounded by huge controversy about her sexuality, whiteness, agelessness and narrow depiction of femininity, it is her plasticity (both physically and ideologically) that becomes apparent when considered in relation to Barthes’ ideas regarding plastic.

Barbie can be argued to be reflective of both the transitory nature of plastic, and of the later criticism of its stiff, fake and common nature. Importantly, she was originally intended to be something of a blank canvas – says Handler: “I designed Barbie with a blank face, so that the child could project her own dreams of the future onto Barbie. I never wanted to play up the glamorous life of Barbie. I wanted the owner to create a personality for the doll”[7] - this same argument has been used to dismiss claims that Barbie’s sexuality influences the children who play with her: “Is there such widespread contempt for the intelligence of children that we really imagine they are stupid enough to be shaped by a doll?”[8] – the doll doesn’t make the idea[9], and instead gives the user (and their imagination) the power – “excuse the pun, but she becomes plastic in children’s hands”[10]. Barbie is also credited with the power to shift classes[11], not only switching from town house to camper van to office to spa, but also by forming a link between the demographics of children who play with her. Perhaps one of her most commented on ephemeral aspects is her costume – sometimes remarked upon with horror (Quindlen likens her to Dracula, constantly masking her true nature[12]), but often suggested as being evidence of her power to transcend sexual and cultural boundaries, by opening herself up to any occupation, future or personality. Is Barbie’s fluid state evidence of her inherent ideological plasticity? Perhaps if she is shaped by children’s imagination, she is in a constant state of transformation, just as plastic is identified to be by Barthes – Jong believes that “whether you give children cornhusks or nutcrackers or Barbies to play with, the subversive imagination of childhood will triumph. A toy is a repository of fantasy”[13].

What then of the other aspects of plasticity mentioned by Barthes? The ones he so vehemently criticises – its commonality, cheapness, fakeness? These too are present in Barbie and her empire. Physically, Barbie has been changed over the years to include a twistable waist and bendable knees, but many still express dissatisfaction with the “inherently displeasing limitations of Barbie’s anatomy”[14], and describe many often ill-fated attempts to make her sit properly, ride horses, or walk bare-foot. Attempts in 1975 to create a Skipper (Barbie’s younger sister) doll that hit puberty and “grew up” (making her transcend the plastic tomb of age in which she is trapped) are criticised for being lame and ignorant attempts to transform her into two dolls – a child and a teen. When her left arm was cranked backwards, small breasts “emerged from her formerly flat chest”[15] – her function to constantly go backwards and forwards between the two stages in life, never really achieving any meaningful transformation, and never really growing up (Paris points out that this limited view of a girl’s puberty involved only breasts, not blood[16]). Celebrity versions of Barbie have been made – when Diahann Carroll, of TV series Julia saw the doll for which she modelled she brusquely stated: “It looks like all the other Barbies”[17]. She is unable to look different, any more real. This can be considered a symptom of her material – Barthes claimed, plastic is unable to attain the perfection of nature, (although ironically Ruth Handler went on to create Nearly Me, a plastic breast prosthesis with a natural look and feel[18]). Barbie has been developed to increase diversity amongst the range – she has had many careers, and has been released with different skin tones and hair and eye colours – and yet her representation of the white middle-class American ideal remains the same[19].

Both Barbie and plastic have been criticised for much in their time, and often these criticisms are linked. While Barbie has been celebrated for mirroring plastic’s fluidity – physically, socially, philosophically – she has been similarly criticised for being “plastic in the worst sense: hard, fake, a mass-market commodity”[20], forever trapped in her plastic state – both ultra-feminine, and robbed of her femininity, sexual, and without sex, she embodies the optimism and economic growth of the post-World War II America in which she was created[21], and the social and physical ideals of her consumer society. Do her many costumes and occupations function as freedom from any one path, or as disguises and masks to cover her true nature, her true existence – the negative existence of plastic that leads Barthes to turn so viciously against the material which was once an expression of power and freedom? Barbie is a doll “famous for her capacity to constantly change, as well as her paradoxically concomitant capacity to always remain the same”[22] – she embodies the positive and the negative characteristics of plastic, be they physical or ideological, for better or for worse.

Sylvia Sippl

Sources Used

Barthes, R., “Plastic” in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers, Phaidon Press, London, 1973

McDonough, Y., ed. The Barbie Chronicles: A living doll turns 40, Touchstone, New York, 1999

The History of Plastic, American Chemistry Council, Inc., Virginia, Available on-line at: http://www.americanchemistry.com/s_plastics/doc.asp?CID=1102&DID=4665#alexander, 2005-2010

My name is Tobi-lea Gogo. I’m twenty years old and I am a stereotypical unemployed stoner musician. I play guitar and sing in the Perth grunge/punk band AAAGH BATS!. I always loved music and had an appreciation for the buzz it would give you when you heard a great song.

Here’s how I got into music.

When I was a little tacker of three years old or so one of my first memories was my mother playing me Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, and Metalica’s One, and telling me about what these songs meant. I sat there and cried but it felt good. Music has always made me feel more than anything else. As a kid I would steal my mother’s albums and play them in my room for months. Some of my favourites were Pink Floyd, The Cranberries, Alanis Morisette, Jewel, Hole , Tracy Chapman, Fleetwood Mac, Thin Lizzy, The Police and Offspring. They would stay in my room till my mother would eventually steal them back and I would go hunting for more. I think the first time I knew I wanted to sing I was like 8 and I was watching sister act. I would sing all the little red heads high parts and I felt this buzz through my whole body.

When I was 12 years old my mother came into my room after having just listened to Eminem’s ‘The Marshall Mathers’ LP and told me I needed to listen to it. She would put it on when her and dad argued and crank it because dad fucking hated Eminem. I listened to the album start to finish. It scared the shit out of me. His anger inspired me the way he perfectly took apart hypocrites, and the liars. The album kicked something inside of me and I decided that day that I had to be a writer and I started writing songs. I originally started rapping because you could say so much more and be so much more aggressive. The first or second rap I ever wrote is on recording somewhere (CRINGE) I was trying to sound American and had no idea how a female Aussie rapper was meant to sound (this is before anyone had heard hilltop hoods) but one thing was certain is that the little 12 year old girl who dressed like a goth and did nothing but write raps all day was fucking ANGRY. I had a group of mates and we used to rap together but they all stopped after a few months. It was basically my first band break up and it broke my heart.

I then went and did some screamo songs with some guys in town but they were unreliable and I HATED having to wait for someone else to be inspired to write a song. I started learning the guitar at 15 so I didn’t need anyone else. I never wanted to be a guitarist. It was a necessity thing. At 16 I was living in a small town in the Pilbra. I had no friends who wanted to do music. I had no outlet and I was dying. I heard My Chemical Romance’s music. It kicked me in the head. I LOST MY SHIT and ran away from home to Perth looking to get myself a punk band. In Perth I went to EVERY AUDITION in x-press looking for a band just to be shot down. “You’re too young but can we use some of the songs you wrote” “we don’t want you in the band but can we record you” “we don’t want a chick in the band it’s just not our image” IT FUCKED ME OFF. Little did I know it wouldn’t be till four years later that I found a band.

During that time band searching, I was forced to do solo acoustic shit which I actually hated doing and never wanted to. I never wanted to be that chick in a bar with a guitar no one was even fucking listening to but I had to play so I did. Now I have a band everything is hunky dory and my mood depends on how my bands rehearsal went that week. Music is quite literally the only thing I want to do. I’ve pretty much sacrificed everything else in my life to do music and I’m glad I did. And hey guess what? Three of those people who said “you would be a great front woman and you can sing but I would never be in a band with a chick” have asked me to start bands AND write songs with them. NOT BAD FOR A CHICK. Best feeling in the fucking world.

“I’m not pouting. I’m not playing anything up. I don’t have parents that I acknowledge. I’m nobody’s daughter. I’m nobody’s wife. I’m nobody’s bitch. I’m nobody’s daughter. I’m nobody’s widow. I’m somebody’s mother. Other than that, I don’t identify with these other female roles I’m supposed to have.”-Courtney Love (Spinner)

by Tobi-Lea GoGo

The most controversial woman EVER is and probably always will be Courtney Love. Courtney’s band Hole, who’s last release was 12 years ago in 1998, (Celebrity Skin) have “reformed ” and released the album Nobody’s Daughter this year in April. None of the other original band members worked on the album except Courtney. She has recruited so

me new blood, Shawn Dailey (bass) and Stuart Fisher (drums) to fill in. Despite having only Courtney from the original Hole line up; the album looks, sounds and feels like a good solid Hole album.

Courtney has been waiting a LONG time to get this bitch out there. She began writing Nobody’s Daughter back in 2005 in rehab. Originally the songs were going to be for her second solo LP under the same name. I was surprised to find that many old school fans who I told about the release when I bought it, didn’t even know about it! I even offered to lend it out to everyone but no one was interested. I think this is because they were scared it would stink of Courtney’s disappointing failures and they would be let down. Which is a shame because the album actually rocks and I can firmly state that anyone who liked any of the previous albums will like this one. I even conducted a little social experiment and I played this album to people who I knew didn’t like Hole (all men) in their cars without telling them who it was and they ALL said it was a solid rocking album.

From the first song it’s obvious to fans this is a Hole album. This album’s edges are all much softer and generally less abrasive than her earlier work because eight of the eleven tracks all have an acoustic guitar running through most or even all of the songs. The extensive acoustic and cello work is refreshing enough to be a nice new touch and contrasts well with the more brutal songs on the album, as Hole have always done very well mixing razor blades with candy to make their own unique sound. It boasts some nice poppy production similar to Hole’s last album Celebrity Skin, which was shared by the guitarist Michael Beinhorn, Micko Larkin, and Linda Perry (from 4 non blondes).

Courtney’s music, unlike her face, has aged gracefully. Her voice just like her lyrics has lost a lot of hate. You can tell she struggles with some of the screaming. Her voice has matured beyond rage filled screaming and elongated vowels into something much sexier. Sometimes she sounds like she’s so short for air, panting, begging like a stung lover to get let back inside the house. It does it for me.

But don’t worry, songs like “Skinny Little Bitch” (the album’s first single), “Loser Dust” (co written with Corgan) and “How Dirty Girls Get Clean” still have enough balls to sing along to angrily in the car on a day where you just want to punch someone’s face in. You’ll notice her vocals have some distortion on them, probably because of her aging pipes and refusal to give up the cigarettes.

Her lyrics hold a new unfamiliar level of fragility, vulnerability and honesty for Courtney. She’s not playing the ‘tough chip on her shoulder angry young woman’ role she was shoved into years ago. She’s looking in at herself. Not glaring outwards. Lines like “I always wanted to die but you kept me here alive” are pretty powerful and “I never wanted to be the person you see but thank you” in the beautifully introspective track “Letter to God” (the only track written solely by Courtney Love). Billy Corgan and Linda Perry worked on writing some of the songs with Courtney and the whole album is largely a collaborative effort between Love, Perry, Corgan and Larkin. The whole album is very well written, produced, performed, and structured brilliantly giving for a satisfying listen start to finish. It has everything an old or even new Hole fan could want: balls, brains, sex, anger and forgiveness. You will be glad Love took her time with this one. You get the feeling you are hearing something more personal that you have ever heard with Courtney, like she’s whispering away the last of her secrets to you.

The theme of this album that screams out to me, in both the music, lyrics and feel, is Redemption. Forget “Courtney’s come back album” this is her redemption album and she pulls it off. If you own any of Holes other albums go out and buy this one.

Don’t fucking download it.

Go buy it.

It’s worth it.

If you have been too scared to even listen to it like I know a lot of oldschoolers are, forget that and go and buy the album. Its well rounded, well written and solid. Go buy it. You won’t regret it.