Kylie Maslen
What does a day in the life of Kylie Maslen usually look like?
My days are a delicate balance of not pushing myself beyond my abilities, and being productive enough that I’m intellectually stimulated and can pay my bills. I’m usually at my desk around 9:30am. I do half an hour of emails and admin while I wait for that all-important second cup of earl grey to kick in. I write from 10am to 2pm, break for lunch, and then spend the afternoon reading, staying on top of the zeitgeist (aka watching TV or movies) or going to medical appointments. Recently I’ve been eating dinner and going to bed earlier and earlier, as if I have by-passed middle age entirely and moved straight into my eighties. I’m not against it.
How do you set yourself up for a day of writing?
As noted, cups of tea are crucial. I can’t drink coffee anymore as it spikes my anxiety and hypomania, so any way of being caffeinated by slow release is lifeblood. Other than the basic requirement of being awake, getting words on the page comes from being organised in a way that is insulated against brain fog (a symptom of many chronic illnesses). So when I’m planning and drafting I’m constantly scribbling down ideas as they arrive so I have prompts to pick up on. I also use a rough bullet point system in a paper planner to keep track of deadlines and break tasks down into smaller steps.
What was your motivation for writing about invisible illnesses?
I knew how much it would have helped a younger version of myself to have a book like this. To see that my experience of menstrual health is not normal and something that warrants treatment and care, that (sadly) other people have had to fight for the right to be heard too, and to see my life validated in a tangible object. I also wanted to help communicate this experience of invisible illness to families, partners, co-workers and doctors. I know from personal experience that not only is it difficult to convey, but the pain and its effects raise the same challenges of belief and understanding within the self.
What part of Show Me Where It Hurts was the most challenging to write?
There were instances in writing that were re-traumatising; these were mostly in the recounting of experiences in hospitals. But the most challenging part by far was the chapter about self-medicating in order to deal with the pain that doctors weren’t taking seriously enough. It was an incredibly difficult time in my life, one that I nearly didn’t come out of, though writing about it has made me see with a clearer lens just how incredible my family supported me during that time, particularly given we were in different cities.
In your writing you reference music, television, social media, books, as well as art to make sense of what it is like to live with in an invisible illness. Now that you’ve written a book, can you share some of the books you found useful that explored disability and mental health?
Oooh, love this question! My friend Sam Twyford Moore’s book The Rapids: Ways of Looking at Mania is an incredible account of bipolar that also acts as a cultural history of mania from film and literature to our lives online. Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias talks about the interaction of chronic physical illness and mental illness, which is something I’ve experienced too but rarely see discussed. Fiona Wright’s work has been a real marker in terms of gender, illness and cultural critique in Australia and I was incredibly fortunate to be mentored by her in the writing of this book. Finally, though she does not have lived experience of chronic illness or disabled herself, I feel I need to make mention of Leslie Jamison’s debut essay collection The Empathy Exams. It made an enormous impact on my writing practice and I wouldn’t be the writer I am without it.
Why do you think it’s important that society better understands invisible illnesses?
From a social justice perspective I think challenging our presumptions about what illness looks like plays into a greater conversation about all the ideas, people and services society ignores when they can – or is deliberately – hidden. At an individual level, there’s a much-quoted line from Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor: 'Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.' You never know when you’ll be crossing the border to the unwell and need this understanding yourself.
For me, your title Show Me Where It Hurts reads like a sympathetic invitation for those whose pain isn’t obvious. What does this title mean to you?
Thank you, I really like that reading of it. I guess it came to me out of a vision of doctor’s rooms from childhood through to hospital emergency beds where I have been asked to point to pain that is, by its very nature, impossible to show. Having a visual title for a book about invisible things was key to opening up the kind of conversations I hope readers have not only with the book itself, but with the people in their lives as a result of reading.
Fun question: what are your top three played songs on Spotify?
Oh boy. My Spotify is currently a mess as I’m using it for research on a New Thing (potentially similar to ‘A Playlist for the Love Sick’ in Show Me Where It Hurts). But the three songs I’ve been seeking out as “brain balm” recently are ‘Someone Great’ by LCD Soundsystem, ‘Black Parade’ by Beyoncé and ‘party 4 u’ by Charli XCX.