Where the story begins..

Hi, I’m Shannon. aka Song. aka Neomyth. This is my webpage where I prattle on about stuff.

In October 2007 I was diagnosed with IBS. My doctor pretty much told me if I didn’t relax more and eat healthier I was going to be in horrible excruciating pain for the rest of my life. Not being a complete moron, I decided to take her advice.

Taking a long hard look at my life and the way I lived it I realised several things. Firstly, just how much processed food I ate, even though I had always considered myself ‘healthy’. White bread, Quick cook pasta, take away chips and burgers, freezer meals, ham and pressed chicken.. the list goes on and it’s quite depressing. Even the apples I ate had been picked unripe, waxed and stored until most of the nutrients had disappeared. My meat came wrapped in plastic and foam, all the blood nicely soaked out of it. My cereal came smothered in cocoa and sugar. Everything I ate I added salt to (yes, even salad). Until you start keeping a food diary not only of what you eat, but what it’s had done to it (including what it’s wrapped in) it’s very hard to realise how much crap you are putting into your system.

Secondly I realised how much plastic I use. While I kept all my plastic bags hidden away in the kitchen cupboard to use as bin liners, they were stacking up and if there was any leaks from the sink the whole lot where thrown in the trash. We were filling our large sulo bin in 5 days, not 7, and most of that was plastic – wrapping from things, plastic bags, broken plastic items etc. While wood, paper waste and food materials eventually rot down and metal can be recycled, plastic simply sits in landfill for thousands of years until it degrades down into smaller toxic plastic pieces.

Along with using up land with all my rubbish, I also took a look at my water and energy consumption. While we have a water saving shower head and solar hot water, my son was having a full bath every night and we turned the electric booster on and simply left it on for weeks at a time in case it was ever cloudy or we needed a shower in the middle of the night. I was quite happy to let the tap run while I rinsed dishes, brushed my teeth or scrubbed the counter tops. The garden was ok, partly because our retic doesn’t work and partly because when I use a sprinkler it’s on bore, but it was a big shock getting $300 a month energy bills and large water bills (even at my discounted rate).

I thought a lot about my mental state – I suffered from severe depression for most of my teen years and was hospitalised several times when I was 21 and 22. I now have my depression under control and only have to take a small dose of zoloft to help control my anxiety levels. I still have panic attacks quite often, I can get very moody and unstable at times and occasionally I can be very negative – poor me and the like – so I feel the need to work out some techniques to help with this.

I never considered myself a creative person, but I always wanted to be. So I set some creative goals for myself – to learn to draw with Betty Edwards ‘Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain’, to learn how to make paper and do bookbinding so I can create my own journals for writing stories and poems in, starting to create jewelry and candles to sell online and finally fulfilling a long forgotten dream, to learn how to dance. I have put creative endeavours on the backburner for so long, telling myself that it wouldn’t make any money, so what was the point – now I want to become more creative purely for the joy it will bring me.

Lastly I thought about what I was giving back. Giving back to my family, my community, my country, my world. And it didn’t come to much. I quite often forget to vote in elections, even though it’s compulsory in Australia. I only got through my depression due to support from my family and friends – a lot of whom I stopped talking to once I got better. I remember throwing cigarette butts and McDonalds wrappers out my car window when I was younger and never once picked up litter off my local beaches or at the park where I walk my dog. I was happy to consume and consume with no thought and no conscience.

Many many things had to change.

So this is my blog about how I am becoming a better person. Cleaner living, more at peace with herself and those around her and trying to contribute in every way she can. I’m not saying I turned into the perfect green-loving peace activist overnight, it very much a work in progress, but I hope you’ll stay with me for the journey, the setbacks and the progressions, as I start to write a new story for my life.