Why Backflip?

 TL;DR – I used to ride BMX. It’s what my friends called me because was never going to land a back flip. I thought it was a good metaphor for my life. Also, alliteration for a hard to pronounce surname! Hidden away in the bush land behind my parents’ house in Maryborough, across the road from Aldridge State High School, lies an abundance of hand built bmx dirt jumps that stoners and misfits have been frequenting for the last two decades. I don’t know who founded it.  I don’t remember the first time I went.  I can tell you it was many years after I finished at Aldridge, because I was too much of a nerd to get asked when I was there (but that’s another story).

But I fell into a strange crowd, managing bands, dating lead singers, and thinking that spending my time digging 10metre high jumps and 2metre deep fire pits to jump over was a worthwhile way to spend my time. Voluntary hard labour to build things I could never aspire to utilise, but it gave me what I sought, which was the very human need to be accepted and a part of something that I thought was very real and important… although I was cheated on, stolen from, lied to, manipulated & used, and laughed at for my trouble. But what did I know. Silly emo kid. I don’t talk to those guys anymore but I do think about them a lot because I tried my best to help them. One was a sociopath, one had drug induced psychosis, one had schizophrenia… some of them still pop up on my social media from time to time. One of their friends recently had a epileptic fit and drowned in the Mary River. Horribly sad. *On the very off chance that any of you are reading this, I do think of you often (especially when I go home), almost miss you, and desperately hope you are all ok*

No matter how hard I try, you just can’t help people who can’t themselves, and sometimes you are lumped with the blame of their failed lives. I left Maryborough soon after that for Toowoomba. I realised there was no future for me in that town. I’m not going to say ‘don’t let your kids grow up in country towns’ – I’m going to say ‘support them in leaving to get a trade or university qualification or travel as soon as they finish high school’.

That is why it is so funny to me I guess, ‘Backflip Bacchi’, because no matter how much I practiced trying to ‘jump’ my bike, no matter how many time I fell off, and not even the elation I felt when I DID manage to make it up and over a milk crate without stacking, was ever going to equate to me doing an actual back flip. And then I did. Just kidding. I’m was not stupid enough to try. I would have killed myself! Because most people did them off the concrete at the skate park. Which I also went to. What was I thinking. Oh that’s right, same time I was getting my tongue pierced and tattoos… when I hadn’t figured out what manic episodes were. In 2005, before my diagnosis.

When I started on the Late Nite Show and needed a Twitter handle, I decided to use it. And I, thankfully, grew out of my emo ‘wrongfullyadorned’ Instagram handle! And I’m sure I will grow out of this one too. Maybe I will want to be more professional in the future, but for right now, for what I am doing, which is pretty much a diary, a fancy tumblr page. I think it is perfect.

Bi-polar disorder has thrown me. Upside down and backwards. So many times. And will continue to do so for the rest of my life regardless of my treatments (of which there have been many, everything short of electroshock therapy – which has been looked into in my darkest moments). This website is a reminder that I have people to support me, and a future to look forward to.

I seem to have spent a lot of my life doing hard labour for other people’s projects, and never really my own. That’s why I made this website, why I have worked so hard on it, and why I named it what I did. I’m happy to be the girl who could never have stuck an actual backflip but I want to make the most of the steps backwards that I so often have to take to go forwards, and the step forwards that I take that get me through the going backwards… does that make sense?!

Sometimes you make a leap, and you don’t know if you are going to stick it. You just have to hope for the best. Hope is important. So is assonance 🙂