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Rest in peace, Mr Gregory (Greg Wuth)
November 14, 2024
By Ross Hope
(10/04/1963 – 19/09/2024) Mr Gregory was my high school drama teacher. But he was so much more than that. If you had Mr Gregory as a teacher, you knew about it. And you never forgot it. It was impossible to. Every single day of my high school years he dressed in all black, head to …
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You are my hero: surviving the medical mystery tour
April 27, 2023
By Ross Hope
This is one of my favourite photos of Meg from our recent trip to Byron Bay. It’s a stunning silhouette — but that’s not why I love it. I love it because it is one of the few moments in the past three years where I have seen Meg completely free and unencumbered. As she …
Continue reading “You are my hero: surviving the medical mystery tour”
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Bedtime mantra
March 1, 2023
By Ross Hope
Here is a little bedtime mantra for when those awful swear words are gnawing at your brain and keeping you awake. I’m talking about the S-word, ‘should’; the F-word, ‘failure’; and the C-word, ‘control’. [Take a deep breath, in and out, after you say each line out loud.] There are things that are out of my …
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I’m Ross, and I’m bisexual…
November 7, 2024
By Ross Hope
The very first inkling I had that I was bisexual was while watching Astro Boy cartoons as a child in the ‘80s. There was something about his asymmetrical haircut, soft voice and big eyes that made me feel things beyond the realm of a regular six-year-old fanboy. Of course, at the time, I had no …
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Giving up: the end of the ‘never give up’ mindset
November 7, 2024
By Ross Hope
Any path is only a path. There is no affront to oneself or others in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you. —Carlos Cataneda We are frequently told that ‘never giving up’ is the secret to getting what we want, doing what we want to do, and becoming who we want to …
Continue reading “Giving up: the end of the ‘never give up’ mindset”
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“The hurrier I go, the behinder I get”: 2020 is teaching us to slow down
November 7, 2024
By Ross Hope
The hurrier I go, the behinder I get. —Lewis Carrol [the White Rabbit], Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland In early 2020, the unthinkable happened. We stopped going to work, school, restaurants, bars, and shops. We stopped visiting anyone. Basically, we didn’t leave the house unless it was absolutely necessary. To try to protect ourselves and the …
Continue reading ““The hurrier I go, the behinder I get”: 2020 is teaching us to slow down”
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I went on antidepressants and the world didn’t end
November 7, 2024
By Ross Hope
Depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide. In Australia, it is estimated that 45 percent of people will experience a mental health condition in their lifetime. In any one year, around 1 million Australian adults have depression, and over 2 million have anxiety. —Beyond Blue, 2015 I thought it would be the end of …
Continue reading “I went on antidepressants and the world didn’t end”
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My ego made me do it: life as a musician in Iron On and Disco Nap
November 7, 2024
By Ross Hope
After the demands of the ego and its greed surrender, the struggle for fulfilment of personal desires lessens: life takes on a new zest like a breath of fresh air. —Swami Sivananda Radha In my early twenties, I started playing music in an indie rock band called Iron On. I had dreamed about playing in …
Continue reading “My ego made me do it: life as a musician in Iron On and Disco Nap”
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When we get sick we don’t stop
November 7, 2024
By Ross Hope
The world will change for the better when people decide they are sick and tired of being sick and tired of the way the world is and decide to change themselves. —Sydney Madwed When we get sick, rarely do we stop to give ourselves the time we need to heal properly. Rather than seeing sickness …
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A world of pathological doers
November 7, 2024
By Ross Hope
You are never more essentially, more deeply, yourself than when you are still. —Eckhart Tolle One night in the early 2000s I was out at a bar in Brisbane with a friend of mine, Fliss. After a short time, she ran into a guy that she knew from her high school days. They hadn’t seen each …
Letters
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Dear Former Self, Sometimes you have apocalyptic nightmares about enemy warplanes flying over Brisbane, ready to open fire into the streets. These nightmares seem strange to you, because the only times you’ve ever witnessed warplanes in action is during a Riverfire event—and they were undoubtedly ‘friendly’ jets. There were no bombs, no intent to destroy, …
Waiting for the bombs to drop
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Dear Future Self, Last year I wrote to you about the day I met Anxiety and Depression, but we’ve never really talked about why all of that happened, have we? To be fair, I haven’t talked to many people at all about it. I’ve certainly never written songs or letters like this about it, mainly …
Continue reading “Everybody loves you when you’re bi, but I was learning to love myself”
Everybody loves you when you’re bi, but I was learning to love myself
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— This letter was originally read out live on stage at The Zoo in Brisbane on Sunday 10 November 2013 as part of a Men of Letters event. It is now published as part of a collection of letters by Women of Letters, called ‘From The Heart‘, released December 2015. All proceeds from the book …
Continue reading “A letter to the woman who changed my life”
A letter to the woman who changed my life
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Dear Former Self, I watched as you waited in that empty hospital room. I watched as time killed hour after hour and you wondered why it was taking so long, if something had gone wrong. I watched as you felt the depth of your powerlessness, as you realised that everything was out of your control …
The letting go
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Dear Future Self, There’s this thing I’ve been grappling with lately: the feeling of ‘being enough’. And I’ve been wondering what it means to be enough—whether I am enough. I keep coming back to it. When I’m feeling anxious or depressed, or have an excessive reaction to something, there it is underneath it all. Over …
Continue reading “The value of self-worth: how much is enough?”
The value of self-worth: how much is enough?
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Dear Former Self, Thank you for your letter about Anxiety and Depression: the cousins no one likes a visit from. I’m glad you travelled back in time, all the way back to those brutish cousins’ first visit in 2001. Sometimes revisiting the past in order to reinterpret and make peace with it can help the …
Continue reading “Anxiety and Depression (part 2): the philosophy of time travel”
Anxiety and Depression (part 2): the philosophy of time travel
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This blog letter was originally featured on The Vine on 10 May 2013. Dear Future Self, You know how much I enjoy talking about anxiety and depression. I mean, where do you even start? How do you wrestle a bear? I suppose you would respond: ‘at the beginning’. Yes, you’re probably right, but delving into …
Continue reading “Anxiety and Depression (part 1): the cousins no one likes a visit from”
Anxiety and Depression (part 1): the cousins no one likes a visit from
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Dear Former Self, I see you’ve been a little nostalgic lately? That’s no huge surprise considering what’s been going on in your life. Believe it or not, I still get nostalgic sometimes too—yes, even now. Every spring when smoke from the season’s first sugarcane fires wafts into the air, I’m taken back to the 1980s. …
Nostalgia Town
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Dear Future Self, It sounds so easy, doesn’t it? Having fun. So why is it that having fun can be such hard work? I think, maybe, I’ve always been like this, but I’m only now recognising the true extent of my ability to ‘kill the fun’ in my life. I’m not talking about the spontaneous …
Resident Killjoy and the perfect storm
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Dear Former Self, I thought it was time I wrote to you about pain. Do you remember what pain felt like as a child, as a little baby? Your muscles grew, your limbs ached, and you cried. Your body doesn’t grow that way anymore, and yet you still hurt, you still feel pain, and you …
Growing pains
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Dear Future Self, I’m writing to you to ask about success and failure. It seems to me that many people spend a great deal of time and energy—sometimes their entire lives—striving to succeed at something or other, and giving everything they can to avoid failure. Who can blame them really: failure is about as sexy …
Successfully failing