Chapter 12: Life After Taxation
MARTIN: The day I finally left the ATO, I went to a nearby coffee shop (“The Coffee Club” in Moonee Ponds Arcade, one of my favorites), ordered a coffee, sat down – and burst into tears! I know that seems strange, given that I hated the bloody place by the end of it.
FERDINAND: I suggest it may simply have been relief that the decision to leave - with which you struggled for so long - had, at long last, been acted on.
MARTIN: Yeah, you could be right. And also, I was definitely going to miss the people, though not the work. In fact, I’ve managed to stay in touch with quite a few of them, if only via social media…
FERDINAND: Something that you have become rather addicted to over the last few years!
MARTIN: Oh, I know.
FERDINAND: But I must also say that, on the other paw —
MARTIN: Hand!
FERDINAND: Hand, sorry — it’s a change for you to even try to stay in touch with your old workmates. In the past, when you moved away from somewhere, you wouldn’t even try to stay in touch with your old mates. You simply seemed to forget about them, pretend they never existed!
MARTIN: That’s true. I have changed over the years and certainly become more sociable than I used to be. Quite often these days I actually find myself liking humanity, which is an enormous change for me!
FERDINAND: Also — I hate to bring this up, but I think that you, like a lot of humans, have a tendency to identify yourself with what you do. You enjoyed being part of a religious order, and later you enjoyed being a public servant. Both with the MSC’s and with the tax office, you could feel you were part of something larger that yourself. And both times, after you left the organization, you felt a loss of identity: you had to go back to just being Martin Murphy, a human being.
MARTIN: True, I’m afraid…. All too true.
FERDINAND: Martin and Madeline had resigned from active membership of the Legion of Mary some time earlier, mostly because of their jobs. So for Martin, after leaving the ATO, there was a lot of free time.
MARTIN: I was thinking of trying to become a full-time writer when I left the ATO – that was what I told people I wanted to do. But I found that I had trouble sitting down and focusing on writing (even though I had ideas, including the idea for this book). And I found that I still wanted to be with people: having worked a regular job for many years, I certainly didn’t want to sit at home and do nothing. Luckily I had a Plan B… rare for me, I must admit. Often I haven’t even got a Plan A!
FERDINAND: During a period of leave from the ATO, Martin had obtained a Professional Diploma in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages). This is an area he had been interested in for a while. After finally leaving the ATO he did some “one-on-one” teaching English to newly arrived migrants, through AMES Australia, an excellent organization that specializes helping migrants and refugees. You see, my human, who does occasionally show worrying signs of intelligence —
MARTIN: Excuse me??
FERDINAND: — has gradually developed an interest in linguistics, and this English teaching job fitted in with that interest.
MARTIN: Yes, indeed. I’m definitely a “grammar Nazi” — misspellings and poor grammar really annoy me. But it is also true that languages can, and should, change. The only languages that don’t change any more are the dead ones… such as Latin, although some Catholics are still trying to revive it! So, when you think about it, it’s really quite healthy that the English language should change and that new dialects, new types of street language or Internet language or whatever, should evolve. “But I digress,” as Ronnie Corbett used to say. Carry on!
FERDINAND: Thank you…Unfortunately, a while after leaving the Tax Office, Martin started to have problems with anxiety and depression once again. He stopped doing the TESOL teaching because it was stressing him. And then, in middle to late 2012, things really took a turn for the worse.
He had been known to have mood swings from time to time, although I think these are fairly common among humans. But on the basis of that and of his own online “research” he convinced himself that he had bipolar disorder —and then, when Madeline took him to see a doctor friend of hers, he convinced the doctor he had it!
MARTIN: Now, I don’t blame that doctor at all: he based his decisions on what I told him. But he prescribed a couple of medications for bipolar disorder, and this proved to be a disaster.
The medications made me enormously worse, not better. They put me into a state of truly horrendous anxiety, beyond anything I had had before. I soon stopped taking the new medications, of course, but even so, I went through two or three weeks of hell. I couldn’t eat or sleep, and I kept having obsessive thoughts about death.
I had avoided thinking about my own mortality for a long time, but now the thoughts of mortality came crashing in with a vengeance. I could think of nothing else but the inevitability of death and that made everything seem pointless. I felt like I was constantly gazing into an abyss.
For a while, I was afraid to go to sleep because I had (for some reason – I don’t know why) the idea that I might die in my sleep. And yet at other times I actually wanted to just die and get it over with, because I could think of nothing worse than living with my fear of death for years to come.
My old problem of a nervous bladder also flared up again. Even during the night I had to keep getting up so I moved into the spare bedroom, which was closer to the bathroom and toilet.
I have read somewhere that hell can be inside your own head. I know now that’s true. I’ve experienced it.
FERDINAND: I was forgotten and left in a corner for a while. Unfortunately, when your human is in too much pain, even the most affectionate of teddy bears can’t help.
MARTIN: I’m sorry, old bean.
FERDINAND: Oh, I understand.
Fortunately, Martin’s state of tension gradually reduced, but it was a long process. Madeline took a couple of weeks off work to look after him, and he sought outside help, including seeing a psychiatrist. But he also believes that, when things were at their worst, God helped him…
MARTIN: I remember one sleepless night I was wondering if God was there or if he cared about what was happening to me. Suddenly I found myself thinking, for no apparent reason, of Madeline and how she has stood by me through everything. And something told me that God’s love was like that, but even greater. I believe that was God’s way of reminding me he was still there.
FERDINAND: On a more humble level, he also credits obsessive listening to folk music (including the Scottish band Silly Wizard) and re-watching of old Doctor Who episodes, with helping get him out of his crisis!
MARTIN: Anything that helps to get you through an emergency is good, I reckon! But I also believe that it was beneficial for me to face my own mortality, and to be reminded that I don’t have forever… not in this world, anyway!
Whether you believe in an afterlife or not, we are only in this world for a limited period of time, so we need to make the best of it. Whatever impact you want to make on this world, you don’t have forever to make it. So get started!
In fact, as I was recovering from this crisis or whatever you want to call it, I came across a famous story that highlights this exact point. This story, usually known as “The Appointment in Samarra”, started as a Babylonian myth and has been retold many times, by different authors.
This is one version:
“The Appointment in Samarra”
(as retold by W. Somerset Maugham [1933])
The speaker is Death.
“There was a merchant in Bagdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture. Now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me. The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning? That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.”{13}
FERDINAND: After this, Martin started seeing another doctor (understandably), and went on to different medications. Gradually he recovered from what does seem to have been a minor mental breakdown.
He started seeing a counselor at the Prahran Mission (a wonderful organization run by the Uniting Church) and did a course there, which was aimed at helping people to get ready for work again. He was also put onto “Cognitive Behavioral Therapy” (CBT), an updated version of Rational-emotive therapy, which he had tried in the past. This involves challenging the negative thoughts that come into your head – arguing back against false beliefs such as “I always have bad luck”, “nobody cares about me”, etc. – beliefs which are usually seen to be false once you look at them critically.
It also involves becoming aware of the way we often short-change ourselves by, for example, concentrating on the one thing that has gone wrong instead of the ten things that have gone right during a particular time period. This focusing on the negative instead of the positive is a common habit of though that leads to depression — Martin has, of course, been doing it for years! So, although his mental crisis was an awful experience, it did force him to look at the wrong attitudes and beliefs that had been controlling him for so long…
MARTIN: Lurking in the dark corners of my brain, so to speak! In fact, sometimes I can see my negative thoughts as a bullying sergeant-major, like the one played by Windsor Davies in the BBC comedy series It Ain’t Half Hot Mum; sometimes I can almost hear the voice yelling abuse at me, saying I am no good at anything, a waste of space, will never amount to anything, etc. It is vitally important – I can’t stress how important it is - NOT to listen to that voice. You have to start arguing back against those negative thoughts, or else they will ruin your life.
FERDINAND: It took a long time (about a year, in fact) for my human to recover from this and get back to something like normality. Getting his confidence back was difficult. But in Moonee Ponds one day, he saw a sign outside the Red Cross “Opportunity Shop” asking for volunteers. On an impulse, he went in and signed up as a volunteer, and started working there once a week.
At the time we’re writing this, he still works there on a regular basis. His tasks may include sorting through newly received donations, steaming clothes that have been received as donations, tidying up the bookshelf (something he enjoys doing!) and generally keeping the store tidy. Sometimes he can also been seen out the front of the store with a money tin, collecting donations, which demonstrates that he has lost a lot of his old self-consciousness.
He has told me that this job gives him more satisfaction than all of his years as a public servant… and that he has received far more from the Red Cross (including some beautiful friendships) than he could ever give them.