Unmasked - Episode 5

Jasper Peach 00:00

This is Unmasked and I'm Jasper Peach. Who are the original owners of where you're watching this? This show was created both here on Wulwundra Land and Jara Country. We know that sovereignty was never ceded and that this always was and always will be Aboriginal land. I extend my deepest respect to Elders past and present and to all First Nations people watching. 

Reflecting on the subject of this episode really cast my mind back to the age of 14 or 15. You know that time where your body is changing, there are massive spikes in hormones and everybody is being really intense and you also need to choose subjects that will inform what you do after you finish year 12 if that is indeed what you end up doing, which is frankly quite a bananas system. So much pressure for kids to work out what they want to be when they grow up. For me that system didn't really align well with my poor self-esteem. I didn't know if I was good enough to do anything really.

I wound up in a Random Health Sciences degree but found the social aspect of tertiary education too overwhelming. I'd moved out of home for the first time and I really wanted to but my brain completely imploded. I dropped out and felt like that meant I was a failure as a person. Receiving praise for being good at producing high marks at school was one way I related to myself as doing OK. Looking back I don't have any idea what was even happening in any of those lectures or tutorials because I was so terrified, activated, overstimulated all the time, scared of all these new people finding my way, figuring out where I would fit in the scheme of things.

Since then I've had so many beautiful jobs. Life isn't always about work and purpose. It isn't always about what brings in the dollars that we pay the bills with. I think for a lot of neurodivergent people what we spend our energy doing is often linked to identity and employment. I know now what my purpose is and looking back over my shoulder I understand who I am and what it was all for. It's not a specific job I could have worked out at the age of 15, that's for sure. Everything I've found that I love doing or that felt like a natural progression has involved transforming confusion into clarity, whether that's literally as an interpreter or wrangling the alphabet to write a book or a column, speaking to a group of people about why something they need to understand is true, is true.

Saying yes to all the strange and exciting jobs that seem to fly into my life out of nowhere, they're all the same really. They're bridge building, connecting, taking a tangle and gently unraveling it to stitch together something that makes sense, to hold it up and say, I made this thing and that process helped me. Maybe it'll help you to read it or wrap it around you or listen to a voice taking you through step by step. None of it was failure. I just hadn't found my groove yet. 

We're going to talk to some academics in this episode. Thank you for being Unmasked. Academics are these amazing people who inhabit tertiary institutions and research, write, educate, drill down hard on their hyper fixations and special interests. I'm really excited to welcome my first guest today, Dr Polly Bennett. Hello Polly. 

Polly Bennett

Hi, how are you going? 

Jasper Peach

Hello. It's very nice to be hanging out with you inside my brain where we can unmask as much as we can in context of what's going on. Some things I know about you, some you've told me, others are more of a feeling. Is it okay if I say stuff sort of at you and then you tell me if I did okay and then add anything? 

Polly Bennett

Yeah, sure. 

Jasper Peach

Awesome. Okay. Thank you. You are a roller derby person. Your PhD was related to skaters finding themselves and living a fuller life. So cool. You're passionately involved in lots of political action around human rights on a local and global scale and your expertise is amazing, but your employment is precarious.

Polly Bennett 04:57

Yes. It's a pretty amazing summary. 

Jasper Peach

Is there anything I missed or do you want to redress? 

Polly Bennett

That's probably a pretty good start. I feel like, I mean, when you were talking before about your, about the disconnection between work or the not necessarily being a connection between work and your kind of purpose and passions, I feel like I'm kind of an example of that as well. Probably like many neurodivergent people are. My passion is fairness, social justice, anti-capitalism. Yeah, community, community building. And so I've kind of weaved, you know, a bit of it. I mean, it's not really a career, but I've weaved through different types of jobs.

It sounds like similar to you through my life as well. And have also done a lot of sport as part of that. So I really, I think for me as a teen sport probably saved my life in a way. I have ADHD and having that outlet where I could really focus and in an activity that was physical really, really helped me deal with being undiagnosed, which I kind of realised later in life. And then, yeah, I've done a range of different sports. So gymnastics, boxing, roller derby, netball. 

Jasper Peach 06:42

Can you tell us a bit about your PhD? 

Polly Bennett 06:46

Yeah, so the PhD actually picked up on some of these themes, so what I was really interested in when I, so I started, like many, started playing roller derby in my late thirties. I kind of, I was a researcher already then, so I'm all, you know, I go into every space and I'm like, Oh, what's... going on? And I was really interested in a few things, and one was that it was, it was quite noticeably transformational for so many participants, mainly women, like it's a women-dominated sport. 

It's comparatively trans-inclusive compared to other sports, which, I mean, I know it's not saying a lot, but there's a really active, queer group within roller derby and have really lobbied and pushed for, particularly the trans athletes, for trans inclusion. So a lot of the leagues have more flexible kind of gender memberships and definitions. So as part of my thesis, I interviewed quite a few trans women and a non-binary participant as well, quite consciously.

Yeah, and what I noticed was that because a lot of the skaters, because of their gender background, had not really played sport much before and hadn't really felt comfortable in sport, that it was the first time that they'd really been physically active almost in their life. And look, I did quick scans of the new participants, and it was like about two-thirds of the new members were not doing anything regular physically before joining, and I was like, wow, and you're joining such a physical sport. So it clearly wasn't the physicality that was stopping them, it was a whole bunch of other things. 

And so, yeah, I was interested in how inclusive the community was compared to other sports in terms of gender, sexuality, in terms of body shapes and sizes as well. And whereas I think again, many of the skaters would have felt excluded from other sports. So yeah, I started Roller Derby because I'd already started my PhD, I was doing a completely different topic. This is just classic Polly all through my life, just change all the time, completely different topic. A ball machine. Yeah. And then I was like, Oh God, I can't sit at a desk and just read and write the whole time. My body was just like going, you need to move. 

And a friend was like, Oh, I've joined Roller Derby, come and join. And I was like, Oh my God, this is the best. I'd been like an 80s roller skater, and yeah, I kind of joke about how like I started Roller Derby to do a bit of physical activity and it took over my life. And then I changed the PhD to fit the Roller Derby rather than the other way around. I was diagnosed after I completed my PhD, and it was in completing the PhD that I suddenly went, Oh, I wrote my PhD four times.

Jasper Peach 10:20

Wow.

Polly Bennett 10:21

And I didn't even remember that I'd done it until I sat down one day and went through the binders, which were the printouts of the previous drafts and went, This is the same, I've already written it, and went, Shit, I need to check this. And then I went and got the ADHD diagnosis. But anyway, yeah, I mean, back in the early 90s, there was nothing and, there was no talk about neurodivergence, and autism then was treated completely differently.

I mean, various forms of neurodivergence run in my family. I, yeah, I just didn't know any of that then. I felt completely overwhelmed as well, so I completely relate to that. I remember seeking out counseling once and I literally didn't say a word, except Sorry, can I have a tissue? I sat for an hour or 45 minutes or however long it was sobbing. Oh, love, yeah. And then left, and then was so embarrassed, was like, I'm never going back again.

I went to the, I sought university counselling because what I thought were panic attacks were autistic meltdowns and I was told oh you won't get in to see someone for four months and it was very unsafe for me to hear that and you know... thank whoever, I'm still here, and okay, but yeah, being in places where, who you are, what makes you, who you are, the hard bits, the shiny bits all of it where it's just, you can't... get the information or you can't make the connections with people or subjects or whatever it is that helps you feel safe and embodied, it's the systems are pretty hooked.

Jasper Peach

Hey, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Polly Bennett 12:15

By the time I got to the PhD, my undergrad took me eight years and a lot of leave and a lot of failing subjects. I'd get either an HD or a fail. It was kind of like, I'm either going to make an F and I love this or I can't stand this and I don't know how I'm going to get through it so I'm not even going to submit.

Jasper Peach 12:32

This is Unmasked. I'm here with Dr. Polly Bennett, and we will be chatting now with Dr. Clem Basto. So Clem, here are things that I think I know about you. I will begin in ways that relate to me, to show my care and solidarity with you as a person. Community radio-devoted, writer, non-binary, human, queer, lover of film, much spice in the brain, membrane. Moving on to things that I feel are more specifically you-focused. Lifelong lover of the Melbourne show, can be addressed as Dr. Clem Bastow, which I feel very impressed, but also intimidated by it, but not in a bad way, more a Go Team way. How did I go? What do you reckon?

Clem Bastow 13:18

Incredible, no notes. I love that. This might be the best introduction I've ever received.

Jasper Peach 13:24

I'm very praise-motivated. So that's really that's done it for me. Thanks. I'll keep it coming. Yeah... we're talking about academia in this episode of Unmasked. Can you tell us a bit about your experiences in that setting and what led you to really go for it?

Clem Bastow 13:43

So I guess I've had an interesting journey but not an uncommon one, particularly for undiagnosed autistic people, but I think more commonly for neurodivergent people in general - which is that I had a few runs at uni so I went straight to uni out of school. I kind of, you know, stuck a pin in a board in terms of like, what I chose to study - which was fashion design. I know it's hard to tell and that was really because at the time I, you know, enjoyed designing outfits for my Barbies - you know, I drew a lot in my spare time.

It was very much a kind of joyful thing for me and what better way to ruin that than studying at a university. The course itself was actually great but I just, was very bewildered, you know, it was a big big step from school to university, and you know socially I felt very out of whack. I was quite young... so I finished when I finished high school I was only 17 and a half, so I was already kind of on the outer - and yeah, I made it about two years in and then had a kind of radical rethink - you know, took a year off and in that year started writing for what we now call blogs.

So I had a terrible website that I used to run on Angel Fire and because I was enjoying that so much I know it's it's still out there somewhere, I found it and then I lost it again - thank God - so I can't embarrass myself for looking at it. So I started writing for the blog and then I started writing for street press and I sort of thought Oh, maybe I should study writing - you know, make this more kind of intentional. So I swapped out of fashion and went back to TAFE to do professional writing and editing at RMIT, which I really loved.

But by the time I was a semester into that course I was writing quite a lot for Impress - to the point where it was basically my job. I decided to go back to TAFE again, so I went back to RMIT to do the advanced diploma in professional screenwriting - which again I really enjoyed - but I was a year into that where I sort of thought I would like to be challenged a bit more than I was, and so I applied for masters at VCA. I felt like that was a huge, well it was a huge achievement - but especially in light of having had a few kind of stop-start experiences with higher ed.

But you know I always like to tell people that there is often a kind of, you know, there's like the kind of VCE prerequisites then there's the sort of next level down - and there might be kind of down around the fifth or sixth option when you're applying for courses the sort of university of life approach, which is what I did... so I argued that, you know, I'd done enough freelance writing to kind of constitute a three-year BA. And they agreed - and then yeah, luckily I did take a bit of time, so I finished my masters mid-2017 and then I started my PhD in 2019.

And what a great time that was to start doing a very isolating postgraduate study... but you know, it was... in a way I'm glad I had something to keep me busy during 2020 and 21 in particular.

Jasper Peach 16:55

How is it interacting with other neurodivergent academics?

Clem Bastow 16:59

It's great. I mean, I think I think what I discovered was that a lot of what I had found frustrating about both undergrad higher education and also just more broadly like freelance digital writing, digital journalism, was that all the ideas that I was consistently being told No, probably not for the Sunday Age, would make perfect, you know, academic papers because you can go so so deep and granular and niche. And I think that that is something that we, you know, naturally kind of prone to do, you know, as you say, the hyper focus, you get to kind of choose your specialisation and research very, you know, deeply within that.

And I think that that's been interesting in terms of like, kind of working out the nuances of almost like the kind of languages of academia. I found that quite tricky early on because I didn't have an academic background, you know, my Masters was a coursework Masters with a big creative component. So I didn't know how to structure an essay or what an academic paragraph was meant to look like.

And it was very interesting, you know, initially, I'm not clashing, I mean, but but just coming up against my supervisors saying, You actually, you know, you need to have this whole idea in this one paragraph, you can't, I was kind of structuring everything like I would if I was writing an article about it. And so that was really it. But once I was like, Oh, it's an industrial language like screenwriting, got it, you know, then I could do it.

Jasper Peach 18:27

I'm really keen to talk about the nature of employment in universities.

Clem Bastow 18:33

It's really frustrating because, you know, they'll put a job out up and say, you know, We value diversity, we encourage people with disabilities to apply, and then the process is exactly the same. And, you know, I'm very happy to give feedback and I give it freely on these types of things, because for me, I feel, you know, one of my chief areas of disability is in that like form-admin based, like it's like looking at the Matrix for me. And everything is filtered through these. Again, it's like another industrial language. 

And if you don't understand it, if you don't understand how to respond to the key selection criteria in exactly the way that they need you to respond, then you just shit out of luck. And so there isn't a lot of, you know, there's barely any disability support for students, let alone for academics. So I think it's a real uphill battle. And again, it's ironic because, as I said, I think there is a high percentage of people in academia who, and not in academia because we can't do other jobs, you know.

Jasper Peach 19:33

People may be familiar with you from your work on Community Broadcaster RRR or your book Late Bloomer. Have you had a constant stream of feedback since publishing that sharing your story has helped other people to understand their own trajectories?

Clem Bastow 19:52

Yes. I think that's been the most rewarding thing. You know, those moments make it make it all worth it. And I've had just, you know, really beautiful. You know, someone sent me a handwritten letter, like a 15 page handwritten letter about what they felt it sort of reflected of their own experience and just little things like that. Day to day, sort of thinking, well, what was I put on this earth for? What is going to be the sum of my life? You know, I do often think, well, I wrote, you know, I wrote that book and it's been meaningful to a lot of people and that's really, really important.

Jasper Peach 20:25

Yeah, I think about that a lot too. I just think I need to be the visible weirdo that I am because that will mean that other people won't feel so, so othered, yeah. Oh, could you share a bit from late bloomer with us?

Clem Bastow 20:39

Sure. Well, I thought actually, since we're talking about academia, it might be fun to go to the chapter about my higher ed journey. So I'll read you, this is from the chapter Higher and Higher, which is a little Ghostbusters reference, Ghostbusters 2.

In July 2017, I received my Masters of Screenwriting. The last time I had graduated from anything educational, I wore Velcro hair jewels and Green Day's Time of Your Life featured heavily in the ceremony. There was a part of me that half expected a vaudeville hook to emerge from the wings and yank me off the stage. This is an outrage! This woman is receiving a postgraduate degree, despite having never graduated from university.

The spectre of being a three-time university dropout had haunted me throughout my life. Even as I was working more or less full-time as a professional writer, the thought was never far from my mind. You'd know more if you got a degree. Labels like dumb or remedial or incompetent have a habit of sticking. Once we leave school, it may be that nobody calls us those things out loud, but the words burrow down into our minds and memories.

I'm now a PhD candidate, having received my Masters with a High Distinction in 2017. But prior to that, I dropped out of three different university and TAFE courses across a decade. There's always a part of me that remembered school and the dreaded maths nightmare and went, Yeah, you're probably not smart enough for uni. Now is one of only a handful of Vice Chancellor's scholars at RMIT. I can see that it was precisely because of my unique and autistic approach to research and writing that my PhD proposal was received so warmly.

After quitting fashion design, I studied professional writing at TAFE while working as a waitress, which thanks to my chameleon tendencies, new persona, best waitress ever, I was very good at. A semester into that course, I got my job at Impress and never went back to TAFE. With Impress as the starting blocks, I had carved out, continued work for myself as a freelance writer. In a way, I now see my 15 or so years of freelancing as my own version of a bachelor's degree. And then I sort of go into a bunch of the stuff that I have already told you about, but I just thought it would be good to mention.

I'll skip a page ahead. Autistic people are uniquely likely to drop out of higher education, be it university or vet TAFE. The change to routine post school, the social difficulties that can arise, O week, going to the pub with fellow students, making friends, sensory and information processing and issues with executive function, independent and unstructured study, getting to class on time, submitting assignments by the deadline can all compound to create a hostile environment for autistic people.

So it is, you know, I really admire any autistic person who manages to make it through the schooling system and to university and beyond. I think it's a huge achievement. And I really, I was hanging in there by the skin of my teeth by the end of year 12. I think, you know, were we to do it again, you know, have a have a go over and know that I was autistic. I'm, you know, I'm not sure that I would have finished school.

Jasper Peach 23:34

I can't tell you how much that part meant to me, about the, specifically the part about the jump from year 12 to university and how hostile an environment it is. I didn't have the language for that. So yeah, thank you for your work and for being being on the crest of that wave... just picturing the little surfing emoji. That's me. Thank you. Now I've got my brain here. 

This is... the neurodivergent utopia that all of our guests are creating together and I'd love for you to add an ingredient to the recipe and I'm going to write them all up and create a little beautiful space where we're in charge and everything is better and it is designed with us in mind. What would you like to pop in there?

Clem Bastow 24:24

I think I would like a world in which all autistic communication methods are seen as valid and intentional. I think a lot of non-speaking people use really vibrant and varied intentional forms of communication, but we have such an insistence in our society on speech as, you know, primary mode of communication that those people are underestimated, you know, that they're not heard. So I guess whatever the pithy way of putting that on an index card is...

Jasper Peach 24:57

Again, a thing I didn't have words for or really think about as being a thing, but now that you've said it, I can't unsee it and I'm outraged. Yeah, I feel good with my outrage. I'm going to use it. I'm going to channel it. Dr. Clem Bastow, what a freaking legend. Thank you.

Clem Bastow 25:17

Thank you. So great to talk. And thank you for this accessible interview format too, it's a real treat.

Jasper Peach 25:24

So Dr. Polly Bennett, I want to talk about the way that staff in academia treated my perception so poorly. It seems, I don't know, maybe I just have like this set of rules around justice like that is often a neurodivergent thing where we're just like, but it's wrong. Why that happened? Like, was that, I don't, I don't understand it. Do you have any insights from working in the belly of the beast around that?

Polly Bennett 25:57

Yeah, it can really be the belly of the beast sometimes. I feel like sometimes we're expected to be almost propagandists for social systems that want us to produce research and thinking in particular ways, and I really resent that kind of containment of our intellectual contribution. To me it should be public and it should be shared and available, like, but not behind closed systems that lock public knowledge away.

It's basically about privatisation of the university system, there's no other way of talking about it... and massive cuts to public funding of the universities, our health systems are struggling, secondary schools that are public are struggling because they're only getting the same amount of money as a private school gets from public funding.

Jasper Peach 26:57

Sometimes I feel such intense grief about missing out or removing myself from that system before I had a chance to find connection and belonging. And then sometimes I feel like I've dodged such a bullet as well. Like it's both of those things are true. I've needed to find a different pathway to, I guess, the majority of people in my world. And through finding a different way, that's when I've met far more broad range of people who I can connect with and it makes life better, you know.

Polly Bennett 27:34

To be honest, what you're creating is more important than some of the really crap work, honestly, that I've seen come out of those who are literally part of the official university system. I think the official university system is toxic. It's also part of a colonial system in this country. It's part of creating the colonialist ideas, not to mention patriarchal, absolutely completely ableist to its core, so I don't consider myself part of that official system either. You're part of us on the margins that are producing and sharing public knowledge in a way that those official systems never will.

Jasper Peach 28:26

So I also wanted to talk about stims, do you, experience, I'll tell you about one of mine and then you can share one of yours if you would like to. So whenever I hear or read the phrase Give it a go, I need to say either internally or externally, depending on where I am, she said, hello, hey Joe, you want to give it and then the Christina Aguilera from the Moulin Rouge group cover of Lady Marmalade, and if I'm interrupted I have to do it again from the start or it's physically painful that I haven't expelled it from my body. Would you like to share a stim that you have?

Polly Bennett 29:05

Because of when I grew up, which was in the 80s, mine are all like ones that I learned to hide. And so like, this is why I've got rings. I've literally got rings so I can spin them round. I also have these things I do with my nails where I have to run my nails along like the crease there around my fingernails. So they're all like really quiet ones that aren't going to bother anyone. But I kind of have grown to really love them because they're so part of me. So.

Jasper Peach 29:40

I think we have time just like for our final sort of, things that we do here on Unmasked. Thank you so much for being here. I've so enjoyed our conversation. 

Polly Bennett 29:5

Thank you for inviting me. It's so nice to hang out. It's really lovely, yeah.

Jasper Peach 29:57

So I've got another representation of my brain here, this is the bucket in which we will build a world, this is the neurodivergent Utopia, and every guest is putting in a little little brick for the wall, we get to control what happens here, what would you like to happen in our Utopia?

Polly Bennett 30:20

Just listen to what we say, like whether it's, I need this adjustment, I need this thing, this is too loud, it's too bright, I learn best this way, not that way. Let me move around in a classroom. Just listen, like, that's it, just...

Jasper Peach 30:46

So epic, so simple, would change everything. Whack it in there, my friend. Oh, my gosh. It's the Utopia. So what I'm going to do with this at the end of the season is, I'm going to write up a little story and we'll put it online. And we can all bask in the beginnings of the possibilities of that world. And have a think about what you would add to the bucket. And maybe we could try and just not to be Woo-woo, but we would just manifest that that can be real. We can sink into these ideas and ways of being. 

Now, another thing that I do a lot is begin craft projects and then never look at them again, but I can't throw them away because that would physically hurt me. So I've got a big tub here and I've kind of been matching my guests with the thing. So I cut out this print because I thought you, yeah. So I was going to stitch it onto a pillow. I don't know what I was going to do, but I feel like this is for you to do with what you will. And I'd love to see if you do something with it or even if you just put it in a pile somewhere.

Polly Bennett 31:58

I think I'm going to sew it to another t-shirt. Wait. Nice. Yeah. Or a bag? Yeah, that would be a great bag. Oh my God. I adore Prince and Purple Rain.

Jasper Peach 32:11

Thank you. You are so welcome. Thank you for Unmasking, it's not always easy to do, but yeah I think being with someone else and trying to do it together really helps - and if you're watching, you can have a go too if you want. I never know how to end these things because that's awkward for me so I'm just going to have a drink and look at the wall. So thanks for coming and I think I don't like to say goodbye, but thank you.

Polly Bennett 32:40

Thank you - and also to any students out there, there are a lot better supports out there now and you might have to fight for it but there will be, find your people, find the people who will support you and back you because it is possible to find your place.

Jasper Peach 33:01

Find your people, find your community, find your place. Thank you Dr. Polly Bennett. Thank you. Cheers.