It was all so different before everything changed
Therapy – people like me, like us, like our “leaders”, need help…
So how am I now? How much of an avatar am I still? How much of me is now me and not him or them?
Not long ago, my partner criticised my behaviour and I found myself spiralling into very dark feelings that were far, far out of all proportion to the circumstances. Trying to understand why, I realised that something about the situation, some words, some conditions had seriously triggered the boy in my head. He was terrified. Literally terrified. She will leave him/me. Like his parents left him in hell, like all his contemporaries turned away from him, leaving him so alone. He was terrified that all the love and relationship we had had, all the hope and reassurance he was beginning to feel would become as smoke rising from a charred child heart, drifting away on the breeze of reality to leave an emotional plain empty to the horizon. Not alone again. Please, not alone again – and again and again…
Quite a legacy.
On that day, those uncontrollable feelings were due to the influence of the remnants of the boy who still exists in my head over 50 years on, despite counselling and therapy. Similarly, the husks of the scarred children in the heads of many parliamentary politicians still control behaviour, their influence reinforced and amplified by the Westminster public school environment they inhabit. Placating their inner child is far, far more important to them than their responsibilities.
His terror in my head controlled my mood, my thoughts and my reactions. It took a combination of time, support and counselling for me to understand what was happening, to start the process of healing, to regain some control.
You don’t have that luxury in parliament. Many of the inmates have a similarly induced range of psychological problems to mine, though perhaps many (or most) were bully-ers rather than bully-ees. They. Need. Help. Currently, many of them are not fit for their public purpose. Not that they are inclined to get help because:-
- they are living in a familiar boarding school culture that reinforces unhealthy memes, discouraging insight
- any sign of weakness is like blood in the water (convention-masked piranhas cruise the corridors, tasting the waters and watching for signs. Best drop your head only when behind a closed door and not in the open whilst, for example, if you have a penis, when urinating. Brave face, brave face – mask, mask…)
- why should you change when your livelihood and professional life is dependent on “fitting in”, on being a willing collaborator with the needs of the children in the heads of your specific in-group. Just look at the clusterfuck that surrounded Brexit, Covid and the antics of Boris Johnson et al. That is not rational, adult behaviour.
Quite a legacy.
A painful process
A close friend is a university counsellor. She told me that around 90% of the people who come to see her are wasting both their, and her, time. They want someone else to “fix” them, they don’t want to do the work themselves. This is understandable. “Doing the work” is a game of psychological conkers whereby you deliberately remove your protective skull and repeatedly swing your brain against the counsellor’s chain-hung morning star. Eventually, the juice leaking from ruptured habitual narratives loosens your grip sufficiently to let go of some of the lies you tell yourself and to let go of the internalised lies that you have allowed others to inflict.
It’s a painful process.
Perhaps if you are a powerful political person embedded in system that supports your present persona, you might not be inclined to look too closely at your motivations or to seek insight… Perhaps there’s no “perhaps” about it.
I was inclined to look as, during separation and divorce, I was losing the ability to cope with the sensation of slowly filling with a liquid desperation that would eventually reach my throat and drown me. I sought a counsellor, an experience much like online dating where not only do all the profiles repeat the same worn phrases “person centred therapy” etc., but all the profiles repeat the same worn phrases “person centred therapy” etc…
I settled on someone who seemed appropriate as they had published research on articulate people hiding behind their well-chosen words and who was also a “she”. I called, saying I was looking for someone experienced who would call me out when talking convincing bullshit. She wouldn’t put it quite like that, but would decide for herself what needed to be said.
Sold.
Initially, the counselling made my desperation worse as I had to cast myself adrift from habitual safe anchors and allow myself to be swept away by emotional currents and vulnerability. My new lady, Silvia, with whom I had fallen (and continue the process of falling) very much in love, not unreasonably took flight at one point. I crumpled like a used tissue soaked in a bottle of red wine and wrote:-
“I fall through the thin ice of my self-esteem, allowing myself to slowly drown in a cold, dark place, sinking slowly from the light, from the world. Depression seeps into my bones, my soul. Just let go, just give up, let the feelings of inadequacy, of worthlessness seep to the surface like the water in tamped concrete. Perhaps, they’re right, perhaps they’ve always been right. They must be right. Eat shit, 50 million flies can’t be wrong. Be shit, all my peers, my darling wife and now you can’t be wrong.
I hear: you are something wrong, you don’t fit as a person, you’re distorted, twisted, not right. Keep away from me, us, outsider, other. You. Are. Not. Wanted. Here.
Events like that shape us for good or ill – and often a mixture of both… I’m still trying to prise off the ossified dead fingers that remain clamped round parts of my soul from my formative years, not to mention all the subsequent crap. I have to believe that I am mutable, that I can learn to choose to give up or change parts of myself and some of my beliefs and yet still be me. To believe that I’m worthy of being loved. I have to or I’ll go mad.
You’ve called me brilliant. I don’t feel brilliant, other than being brilliant at being an emotional dick-head far too often. Sometimes I feel such frustration with myself – such anger, such incan-fucking-descent rage at my circumstances, at the moulding of me, at my own past and current behaviour, at how hard it is to cope with so much fucking change and so much financial pressure in such a short time.
The gym was empty this afternoon. Just me. I ended up going berserk for a few minutes. Thank fuck for punch-bags – and thank fuck that no-one saw me. I have to tell you that having a serious tantrum as an adult is extremely tiring. “In the moment” you’ve always been utterly, utterly compelling and made me feel in ways I’ve never felt, never expected to feel. Never dreamt. Never expected to be loved like that. I hope you’ve felt it has been mutual. I so hope so…
I feel the need to write to you, to write a letter about how I feel now, and about the way I have felt throughout our time together. To write in this short window before the emotional callouses I can feel thickening on the psychological cyst growing round the memories become hard enough to distort my perception too much. Callouses to protect myself so that I can start to function without feeling so often on the verge of tears. I want to be alone so I don’t have to put on a face to people, but I don’t want to be alone with myself – if that makes any sense…
You’re in my head, your words, your expressions, the way you’ve looked at me, the way you’ve laughed at my stupid jokes, your hair. Every time I look at a rose. The pillow on the bed. And my body doesn’t understand at all… Having to use the past tense is excruciating. In the flat I see you kneeling on the floor, stroking the wood. Mythos. Poetry. The greatest sense of closeness and connection I have felt in my life. I want to remember all this, to protect it from the coming callouses, to create a psychological pearl, the thing of beauty that was us that I can look back at in the future without it becoming contaminated by short term pain and bitterness.
You have changed me forever. Thank you for everything (except for the last week…). I have a horrible feeling that, if I eventually look and perhaps find someone new, that, deep down, I may always feel that I’ll be settling for something.
People keep asking me if I’m OK. To friends and Ross and Owen I tell the truth. Very far from OK at the moment. And I tell them that you have broken off our relationship. What happened (100% of people in the sample expressed an interest…)? “My issues and circumstances triggered some deep-seated issues for her. Sadly, I wasn’t able to sort them out fast enough…”. Period.
And now, in the immortal words of Captain Picard from Star Trek, I’m going to have to “raise shields”. Gallows humour – but I have to find a way to limit the feelings of grief, of bereavement, to private moments. But I fucking hate it. The unhealthy cynicism, anger, and emotional withdrawal rising from the depths. At the moment, I really understand people who self-harm – it feels as though I’m doing the emotional equivalent. I’ve shed so, so much of my armour with you, a soft hermit crab caught between two shells who’s felt the freedom and caress of the water, yet now has to seek shelter. I’m the boy on the beach who needs to throw the stone away, if only his fingers will unclench. This is me, feeling the pebble in my hand.
When I was 12, trapped in a place that wouldn’t take me, I somehow made an unconscious decision that I would leave myself open, rather than shut down. Somehow, something in me understood that it was worth the pain. I took opportunities to live in the moment. Example: walking into town with a fellow inmate to play badminton. An hour’s walk. We’d talk, as though I was human. I knew it was temporary. When we got back, he’d take the piss, store and expose my weaknesses and errors to all to prove that I was still the outcast, still in my place, that he was not contaminated by spending time with me. I knew this, but still, every time, left myself open. It was worth it just to feel some human connection for a short time, despite the subsequent betrayal.
I’ve read quite a lot about people in those circumstances1. Many shut down part of themselves and thenceforth could never have any kind of close relationship with anyone throughout their lives. I was lucky in my decision, despite the short-term pain. I can relate, I can feel. But I do feel the temptation to clamp down, to raise shields (as that Captain would say). Instead, I cried in the garden for 20 minutes this evening, BUT I WILL NOT RAISE FUCKING SHIELDS. I FUCKING WILL NOT… Despite the added anguish. That way lies emotional death. Somehow, that 12 year old was wise in this.
I really, really don’t need this. But it is this. I’m also quite pissed at the moment – which doesn’t help the articulosity…
I feel the need to write down my feelings in an attempt to make them “external”, so I can look at them and start to let go of them. This is for my benefit in my own head, my own rationalising, so I hope you can forgive any upset it may cause. Too much counselling over the last year perhaps.
I feel like a baby seal who’s been culled. Clubbed.
I’ve always tried to be totally honest about my circumstances and my feelings, from the first day we met (or as honest as I’ve been able to be to myself – still discovering more about me). Sometimes it’s felt like stupidly excruciating honesty. Much grey. Over the past year I’ve formally separated and the decree nisi will be through any day. I’ve been coping with a crisis at work (in a stressful, very demanding job where, as the director of a small company, I can’t afford (£) to take time off). Ross had a relapse that was spectacularly damaging to me. My dad has become a dementia-ed vegetable in a home and needs to die. A cancer scare. Talking about finances and selling the house. And a load of heavy-duty counselling which, because I have been deadly serious, is shredding habitual certainties like the worlds’ worst case of dandruff and making me feel as though I am dissolving.
I’m just trying desperately to plot the least stress path through all my crap. Last night, after going down to see my dad with Ross and Owen, Ross came back and shunned my company. Owen offered to cook for me and, later, after I had texted you, he heard me crying and came in to hug me…
Also, I have been asked to video an updated version of my vasectomy stand-up for World vasectomy day (18th Oct). Whilst it’s a project that takes me out of myself, I would need to find the will and a venue.
I wish I could give you the hug you deserve for being so supportive. Got group counselling tomorrow. Wahh! In my current brittle state, I am likely to burst into tears and sob myself drooly – which could well be an interesting experience (for some value of interesting…). All grist to the process of change and behaving outside my comfort zone (my comfort zone is currently a tiny speck on the horizon from where I stand now…).
Good grief girl! Some of the things you say really resonate. E.g the stuff about trying to catch yourself in the act of feeling/behaving in unhealthy habitual ways. In my own head there are things that have been there so long that they are part of the structure and framework of my mind, feelings and basic assumptions. It’s like gravity: you just don’t notice, it is just there…. Or like abusive relationships. From the outside, it’s easy to say, “that is not good, that is unhealthy”. From the inside, it’s something that started very gentle and small and then gradually grew and infiltrated your life in such subtle ways that you didn’t notice the warping and you come to accept shit as being a “normalised”, part of life. Like the Stockholm syndrome.
I’m with you in saying fuck that, I want my mind back, MY MIND. Free from all the shit and distortions imposed by others – and by myself – to survive. I know I can’t be completely successful, but it’s a process, a journey. And there are other people like you who are there to love and to challenge. I wanted a tough counsellor and I got one. She makes my life difficult by poking some of my assumptions with a very pointy stick and then caring for me when I fall over because I’ve managed to dissolve a few hardened psychological ligaments so new ones can grow. Fucking hard sometimes.
Re the music in therapy: she wants me to get in touch with and express and let go of so much past pain. And music is a way to do that for me. She feels I need to drop my defences in therapy (in a way that I’ve only really done with you and a couple of very close friends). Soooo – next Thursday: I may need to take the rest of the morning off… Strange feeling: planning this… I think I’ve let go of a lot already, but much more to go. I feel that there’s a healthy balance to be struck between your approach – not facing things (music etc…) that reminds of past sorrow, and the other extreme of over-dwelling. Feel the stone, look at the stone, understand the stone and then you can truly let go of the stone as you throw it into the sea…
I’m wondering how you are you feeling. Is that a question? Is this a question? I seem to be experiencing what I can only describe as a serious system crash. Not just emotional and psychological, but also physical. Started to feel a little better over the weekend, but have had a serious relapse this week – had to take yesterday off work – except for the fact that I had to give a high profile presentation to the Chelsea residents association at 7pm last night for a big project. How the fucking other half live – and they made me sound utterly common (between my coughing fits). To be honest, they make Prince Charles sound like a pleb.
Mens sana in corpore sano. I wish. Whilst I enjoyed the evening at Chris and Mary, I felt – dissociated. “In psychology, the term dissociation describes a wide array of experiences from mild detachment from immediate surroundings to more severe detachment from …”. Exact. Same with Ross, with Owen – and, of course, with you. The meaning seems to have gone out of life, the pleasure, the fun, the energy. I diagnose depression, emotional exhaustion and sick-as-a-dogness which has exacerbated everything, not to mention the lack of quality sleep. And reading that back, self-pity of course, which I hate. Fuck. Haven’t felt this ill (or for such a long period) for a very long time, and I’m sure it’s all interconnected.
I also feel guilty about the feeling of dissociation as it affects us and you. Not being able to respond, to talk, to feel as I’d like to, as I need to. I don’t want to feel like this, to feel as though I’m just trudging through each day with the prospect of another dead man walking day tomorrow. It’s horrible…
I know it will pass. I’ve felt like this before a long time ago and more recently when Ross was seriously ill. So, I tell myself “It will pass”. And I have encapsulated memories of being so, so happy and fulfilled with you, like remembrance pearls, that I can take out to remind myself that some other states of mind and feeling are possible. If only I can escape from under this smothering, deadening lack of all kinds of energy…
Please forgive me. Please be patient… Take care of yourself.
Your stupid fucking bastard xxx”
Fortunately, therapy helped me to upgrade to Peter 2.0 – with bug fixes and psychological security updates. This had sufficient feature improvements to make us re-compatible and to be able to File: Save as: “I’m in a loving relationship”.
Dear candle
Dear candle
ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow
ow, fucking, ow
love
moth x
My friends have all said that Silvia has been very good for me, that I’m more relaxed and happier. This is truth. She has helped me feel less of an imposter in my life, gradually illuminating the deeps where the phantoms of worthlessness lie in wait. I’ve found it increasingly difficult to keep those ingrained habits of thought sequestered when someone you love loves you back quite so fiercely.
I was also in group therapy. A group of apparently normal people with some very serious problems eventually sharing very deep feelings and issues with people they don’t know other than once a week for 2 hours. Opportunities to learn and, most importantly, to practice psychological skills. We all learnt much about ourselves when simply just listening to others.
One evening I felt that I was pouring out my heart, tears falling, when one of the women says “I’m bored now”. There was a moment of group shock and a physical ripple, as from an invisible pressure wave emanating from her. But she was right. It was a practiced narrative, a very upsetting narrative, but nevertheless my sorry emotional state was once-removed from the reality of what I had been describing..
I am a master ruminator with a black belt in looped thoughts. An inner voice that tries out potential situations and responses and variations and what-ifs or on the other hands but it might be or not withstanding up to them could make it worse than this is what they may say what you mean something else and someone else and it‘s still fucking 3am again and again and again…
To become such a master took many years of assiduous practice. An attempted defence mechanism whereby a 12 year old boy went over the day’s events in his head again and again to try to reason why and to try to reframe some of the shit so it didn’t make him feel so execrable.
But the shit stuck, so he must have been the blanket that they said he was.
If he’d said that, or done this, would it have changed things? What did those words mean? Could they have meant something else? What would be the best way to minimise the damage at that interaction tomorrow? He’d had those (often irrelevant) facts on his side, so he was right about that one, tiny, specific thing, so a minute morsel of self-esteem there. Could he work out some words, a script, that would be the right thing to say? Internal ruminatory monologues that just went on and on and on…
After the worst events, the ones that hurt so much they were almost unbearable, he would replay them over and over and over in an attempt to deaden his feelings and his response to the event so that he would be better able to control his reactions next time. His thesis was: familiarity breeds insensitivity: insensitivity will make it easier to pretend that you are dead inside so, eventually, you won’t have to pretend. Whilst somewhat true, unfortunately it also breeds deeply embedded damage. If I donate his brain to science, they’ll find deeply grooved cerebral convolutions marking the tracks of his repetitive, un-reassuring ruminations.
I am, however, getting better at not repeatedly ruminating, and also getting better at not repeatedly ruminating…
Killed by the girl in her head
My best friend at university was eventually killed by the girl in her head. A damaged child living in your head can be a very dangerous virtual companion. She was vivacious, beautiful, clever and, to my very grateful amazement, she made me her closest friend. I understood at the time that part of the reason why she felt that way was because she had a serious problem with sexual relationships. And I was safe, so very safe as I was engaged, in love and went around emanating an aura of “heterosexual gay male friendness”. For my part, I felt very privileged and honoured by her confiding so much in me. Emotional catnip.
After breaking up with her boyfriend, she left university and spent a year doing displacement activities by helping others as a distraction from her internal psychological issues. She returned for a final year and we so very nearly became a couple after she’d helped me through an agonising hiatus in my relationship. So very, very nearly, but, in the end, she considered that the risk of losing her dependable close friend to a sexual relationship was too great.
We remained very close, getting together regularly to feel deep feelings and to share in each other’s lives – although I always ended up doing any cooking as an act of self-defence. However, many years later, with a husband, two children and a high-flying career, she became an alcoholic. Despite all our efforts (and they were many and intense), it was a downward spiral that led to her death, aged 47. She could not bring herself to allow the young girl in her head who had been abused to be loved or to be healed.
The official cause of death was a heart attack, but, in reality, the child in her head had drowned herself in alcohol to dull the pain and took her host with her. I miss her and still sometimes feel a lingering guilt that there must have been something more I could have done, could have said that might have made the difference between life and death. Intellectually I know that we tried everything we could think of at the time, but in my emotional heart a doubt remains…
Give me a break. I’m an engineer. My mindset is one of being able to fix things. Sadly, that ability does not extend to people.
Thank fuck for family
It’s a very small family as both parents were only children, as was my ex. My brother, David, has always been an important part of my life, particularly as an adult. Whilst at school, there was virtually no connection once he graduated to the senior location (can’t have collusion between different age groups, just isn’t done), we became increasing close afterwards. He followed a weirdly identical path to mine after school, getting sponsored to go to university by the same MoD to do the same course at the same uni. He also lived in the same licenced squat (we overlapped for a year).
In hindsight, this was either flattery via emulation and the path of least resistance, or I had been temporarily cloned without my knowledge.
For me, the best thing about having a brother is that he is, quite literally, the only person in my life of whom I have never thought that at some point they might think I’m shit. He’s my younger brother – not only does he have to like me (it’s compulsory), but he can never not be my brother. Despite him coming out of the same school with substantially different forms of damage to me, we are very alike in many important ways. This makes mutual understanding and support easier (often through sibling ribaldry) and we’ve spent a lot of reassuring time together as families. Here is someone else with similar genes who’s trod a similar path, who has survived in an unsimilar way and who loves me unconditionally. Me too.
I am a dad. As Ross and Owen grew up, they often drew things from me, like human poultices. Comparing and contrasting their characters and some of the events in their lives with my own experiences was sometimes – strange/sad/joyous/relieving/emproudening/envying – and all of the above. Being a dad has affected me deeply. It plugs into something very visceral, spreading extensive fractal roots throughout my soul and my life.
The plan was not to Larkin them.
Thank you, Philip Larkin
they’ll stress you out
your offspring will
they may not mean to
but they do
by inheriting all the faults you have
and acquiring new ones
just for you
they’ll stress you out
your offspring will
and so will your parents
and that bloke in the petrol queue
and the check-out woman
and your partner too
plus those bastards at the Mail
and those bitches – you know who
religious leaders who homilise
and them and those and they and you
political leaders who tell lies
not to mention bankers
is there anyone I’ve missed
not much of a poem really
more of a list…
My determination not to pass on my own issues was, I feel, quite successful, but has no doubt spawned a host of (I hope much milder) others. They have been responsible for many of my peak moments – and some of the worst (all children will find unexpected and unusual ways to try to kill themselves at some point). The best was the power to make me feel, time and again, in long now moments, complete and completely full of nothing but love with no space left for anything else, including the boy in my head. A close relationship with them both, bliss. Watching them create incredible music together, jamming, performing in their band, double bliss.
The dark side of this emotional moon is that the one face, so brightly lit, creates a second face that is so, so utterly black as to be the worst…
Psychosis strikes
I sit on a stool in the kitchen, staring at the hob. It is midnight and I am being a coward. In the hall, I can hear the constables forcing Ross’ face to the floor as they handcuff him and take him away to be sectioned under the mental health act. This is the third attempt to have him sectioned and, this time, this time I cannot watch. I cannot. Rationally, having him sectioned is the right thing to do, the only way to get him help. Emotionally though, I feel I am betraying my son. I have not just failed to protect him, I have caused him to be assaulted by the police. I am pinned to the stool in the kitchen at midnight in the family home by a nail of guilt that pierces the whole of me. I stare at the hob, trying to be empty.
A 2-year battle, literally. Ross at 21, psychotic and purposely destitute in New York. He is badly assaulted. A high probability we’d never see him again. 2:15am, 2:15am, 2:15am. It’s always fucking 2:15am and dark, dark even during the day. Eventually, we get him back somehow and my fight with the mental health services steps up a gear. My life strobes. Mini-breakdown. Function. Mini-breakdown. Function.
At a support group I meet many people, mainly women. Mainly women because they were from families where the men had suffered psychotic offspring or partner induced breakdowns and who could no longer cope or work. People who have been broken by similar experiences, even unto death. Men who have been trained from birth to suppress their feelings, to internalise the pressure, to pinch-off any relief valves.
But I have a secret. Every time I die, the boy in my head triggers a psychological defibrillator. With 3,000 faults at his command, he screams in my face that You – Don’t – Get – To – Let – Ross – Go, because that would betray not only your son, but him too. If you could survive school, you can survive anything.
So I cannot let him go, and yet I feel he is leaving, that the son I know and love is fading like a dissipating Cheshire Cat, leaving nothing behind but the faintest echo of who he was.
A Father Dreams his Distant Son
Flailing feelings, flailing, blind
He goes away in thought and deed
Lashed by whips that flay his mind
Grasping nets that turn to mist
Grasps and grasps but falls apart
A part of him a part of me
His beat beat beating in my heart
Exhaustion feeds a form of sleep
As father dreams his distant son
Strains to hold a fading ghost
Of the one, the son who’s gone
Drown breaths open floating eyes
Oppressed by deepest, darkest night
I cannot have these feelings yet
With darkness brailling his mind’s sight
I must act with careful calm
As dying thoughts breed deadly schemes
I dredge the words to ward his death
But deep inside, a father screams
Writhing on his spit of love
Impaled again, and torn and torn
Blame barbed spear is pressed so deep
A primal pain that can’t be borne
Then past a headland, a mirrored loch
Over deathly deeps where lives are lost
Float songs to tempt the tears of hope
I’ll will him well at any cost…
One morning, I finally win the war with the psych services by getting myself interviewed on BBC radio. 20 minutes later, a very senior NHS Trust person calls to explain how it has all been a misunderstanding. She is right, there has been a misunderstanding. A misunderstanding about how far a traumatised father would go to protect his son and assuage the boy in his head, a misunderstanding of how much embarrassment he was willing to inflict on an unfeeling bureaucracy that he feels is behaving like a bully.
We know how I feel about bullies.
Things are sorted. Ross responds to treatment. We go into schools. With friends, we do a show, Hugging Barbed Wire2 (named after a song by Owen, then just 17, about having a brother with psychosis) at the Brighton Fringe. I’m on mental health committees and we end up on TV in the “Time to Change” national television advertisement anti-stigma campaign. Ross is in documentaries.
Something positive has come from the pain.
Years later and Ross is relapsing. I have fought the mental health services to a standstill again, forcing them to act. Sadly, just too late. The experts are so sure they have his measure, despite everything I say, despite all the incontrovertible evidence I and others have accumulated that he is a danger to himself and to others, despite the fact that I show them exactly how he is gaslighting them. He is more articulate than them. He is more intelligent and cunning than them. They don’t believe me, and he escapes the hospital and disappears. 6 months of intense effort and pressure on the mental health services to get him into hospital where he can be helped are casually put to the sword by professional arrogance.
That last paragraph. Repeat for a different hospital in Dorset 18 months later.
This time, there has not been, and may never be, a “happy” ending. They have once again snatched defeat from the jaws of victory and I implode…
I’ve taken up stoic philosophy in an attempt to come to terms with my inability to help Ross and to be his “I’ll make it all right” dad this time. CBT and other therapies are based on stoic thought. A key idea is that of separating your world into those things over which you have control and those you don’t. As in Buddhism, let the latter go. There are some windmills at which you cannot tilt. But he’s my son. This is hard, so fucking hard both on me and on the boy in my head. The philosophy helps.
A bit.
An update
Ross is finally getting help. Before dying from living on the street. Most mornings in winter I would wake up to wonder if he had died in the night. It was winter both out on the streets and within me.
Dying on the street
My sick son is dying
Out on the street
But every night he’s there
By my bed
Watching me sleep
Behind my closed eyes
He waits in my head
Consultants condemn him
To death by default
Too clever to section
Pontious Pilate’s their way
You must watch him die
Out on the street
They say
My son is in hell
His dad can do nothing
My son self-medicates
To quell the thoughts
To quell the fear
The pain
The paranoia
When your brain is burning
Alcohol anesthetises
Cannabis cools
And bin found sertraline sooths
My sick son is dying
Out on the street
But every night he’s there
By my bed
Watching me sleep
Behind my closed eyes
He waits in my head
And I
I await his wake
You think you’re funny dad…
When Ross was recovering, I bought him a stand-up comedy course to help him get his confidence back. We would discuss the theories and homework, and one day, he and his brother declared that, since I thought I was funny, I should put the theory into practice and prove it by doing stand-up. I couldn’t see any way to refuse. Deciding it was an opportunity for personal growth rather than a terrifying idea, “I gave my wife a vasectomy for Christmas” was born. Much teasing occurred, and, of course, they videoed the first performance as evidence.3
The experience was a combination of a wild adrenalin thrill at taking a character-baring psychological leap and one of those anxiety dreams where you look down and discover nakedness from the navel down. Re nakedness, the stand-up had a similar “giving the finger” feel to the first time I joined the participants (but without the “pants”) on a nudist beach. In both cases I finally faced down the inhibitions installed by my peers and assiduously policed by my head boy. This is me. Case one: this is my body. Case two: this is my mind.
Comedy is completely different to the technical conference presentations I give as part of my job. There, I am an expert and a conduit for communicating with just a leavening of character. Here, on stand-up stage (and later open mic poetry), it’s all me, material and naked persona subject to live reviews with nothing to cover my modesty.
They laugh.
Afterwards, a part of my mind previously stiff with ancient inhibitions begins to stretch. I have a new, occasional, mental yoga hobby.
I’m a grandad now. Owen is a better father than I could be.
And thank fuck for friends
It has been said that friends are more important for your mental health than a partner or even family. It’s complicated, but, barring my brother, I would certainly say that has been true for me. Without my closest friends I would almost certainly have collapsed into myself like a sun into a neutron star, pulled irrevocably inwards by emotional pressure to form a dense protective shell. And, much later, when my eldest son was psychotic, without those friends, my multiple mini-breakdowns would have become a total system failure that took me out completely. A psychological “blue screen of death”: “Peter is unresponsive. Would you like to wait for Peter to respond or would you like to terminate Peter?”
Whilst I acquired my first acquaintances and semi-friends via my girlfriend during my last year at school, I came into real friends for the first time at university. People precipitated gradually out of the diverse cultural solution of the campus into a core group with a network of loose associations. A core group that, amazingly, included me. I belonged. I belonged for the first time since primary school, and it was easy. Easy because it wasn’t down to me. For some reason, a few fellow students seemed to see something in my character and just decided to be my friends. One of whom is still my closest friend and who has been a lifeline throughout the last nearly 50 years.
Julia
After so many years of association, just the name “Julia” is reassuring. At university she was a beautiful Valkyrie of a woman, both scientist and artist. Vitruvian. After a very bad start (I was busy defending myself against the world as a consequence of a destructive break-up and was behaving like a consummate arsehole), she and her fiancé became close friends.
They don’t make Julias anymore. Old friends, long term friends. You can’t keep up a front with someone over decades. If you’re close, no matter how hard you try, your character will leak and the real you will begin to ooze from behind the public mask like blood round the edge of a flesh-coloured plaster. She didn’t care, she was still my friend, still liked my company despite the inevitable psychological incontinence that comes with longstanding closeness.
And for me and particularly for the boy in my head, the fact that someone like Julia, whom I admire, respect and love, still saw me as a close friend after a lifetime is something that has been and always will be, a deeply reassuring and healing relationship.
Until she died.
Her diagnosis of breast cancer meant I could try to be her supporter rather than the (more usual) supportee. I wrote her a couple of poems about our friendship, about how much she meant to me. Years later, when the cancer returned with its vengeful, debilitating scythe, she showed me her end place in the woods where I could go to miss her.
I asked if I could write her a eulogy, a eulogy with a condition. The condition being that I would give her a copy to read and to listen to as an unusual present for her last Christmas in 2023. After multiple attempts, my voice strangled by premonitions of loss, I managed to complete a recording…
“Julia was a clone. I’m a clone, we’re all clones. Every 7 – 10 years almost every cell in our body is replaced by an almost identical copy. For Julia, one of those cloned cells wasn’t a branded copy, but a knockoff that killed her. Since we all auto-clone, how do we know who we are?
Julia recently found out she was 20% Viking and loved the idea. So, once the curtains close, I’ve arranged permission from the council to take her coffin to a local lake, set fire to it and launch it on the waters. It’s what she would have wanted…
Who was Julia? I know someone she was. She was my closest friend. I first met her at university nearly 50 years ago, becoming friends as part of a group. I was a young man in a very bad psychological place with serious self-esteem issues. She was a beautiful, intelligent young woman, both scientist and artist. This truly Vitruvian being decided, completely voluntarily and without coercion, to be my friend. Miraculously, she saw something in me that I couldn’t then see in myself.
Julia has been party to many of the peak moments in my life. Family holidays in France, lying on sunbeds at 1am watching for shooting stars and having cognac-soaked revelations. New Year over the Millennium with Graham, no power, chopping wood by hand, food in cans, but with wine from the gods. Stealing power from Graham’s car for light and music, watching our 4 children surviving being creative with fireworks…
She has also been there for some of my worst moments too. I was having a family crisis induced breakdown at the local crematorium, coming to just long enough to call her. Julia left work and arrived to find a hopelessly non-functional Peter. But because of our relationship and because of who she was, she simply reached past all the anguish, past all the emotional disintegration and pain to switch me back on again. Without her, I would have gone under.
She was not demonstrative. I spent years trying to teach her to hug properly to no avail… Her upbringing meant she associated being demonstrative with feeling vulnerable – and she hated to feel vulnerable. But you knew how she felt, she had subtle ways to let you know.
When she first had cancer, I wrote her a couple of poems to tell her how I felt. This is one.
Before a Friend
we live lives of agoraphobia
when it comes to open hearts
convention masked and turtle backed
we hide our inner parts
whilst keeping up appearances
in a show we’d rather quit
we’re on our knees inside our heads
alone and desperate
you evaded my defences
and saw the soul of me
yet chose to love me just the same
and trusted me to see
someone else who needs a friend
to see ourselves reflected
as better than we think we are
respecting and respected
clinging to my tethers end
when something had to give
I bared myself before a friend
who helped me love and live
intensive care and life support
I owe you sanity
with braided lives and plaited past
no owing what is free
take all you want and all you need
you’ll just increase the store
of human warmth that’s wealth to me
and love and trust and more
clinging to our tethers end
when something had to give
we bared ourselves before a friend
who helped us love and live
you held my head up when it hung
wept my tears, came at my call
so when you’re dealt a felling blow
I’ll catch you as you fall
I’ll hold your hand, and will you well
and feel the way you hurt
and catch the water in your eyes
as soul stains on my shirt
greater love hath no man than this
to hold a friend in need
when words are simply not enough
to sooth the burns that bleed
blank cheques to draw on all accounts
rosary words and creed
as safe feeling is believing
a friend of mine in deed
Using the past tense. Julia was. For me that’s not appropriate. She is a part of me, a part of the person she has helped me become. Over the years, I’ve created a clone of her in my head and in my heart. I’ve used her inner voice in me to help make decisions: “If I had to explain this to Julia, what would she say?” I could always pick up the phone later and check. Now I can’t. But she is still here, she is still present. Forget the past tense. She is here in me. She is here in all of you and we are all, all the better for knowing her. She is still my family. She is still my beautiful friend, and I still love her.”
She thought it was beautiful and told me I had been a wonderful friend. Coming from her, those words had and have such power and such warmth both for me and for the damaged boy in my head.
R.I.P. Peter
One day, I hope that he will die peacefully in my sleep. I will wake up one morning and he will be gone, that 12 year old boy in my head. Perhaps I should then commission a gravestone, engraved with an epitaph:-
In memory of a boy called Peter, born aged 11 in 1964. His courage saved a life. He lived in the head of his host gradually fading away, until, like a Cheshire cat, only his shadow remained. Died aged 12 in the 2020s. R.I.P..
But for him, I wouldn’t be here, I wouldn’t have survived. He created an alternate persona who could endure the purgatory of public school. He psychologically self-harmed, cutting his feelings to protect his soul with thickening scar tissue. It worked. I admire his courage and his resilience, but I don’t need his scars now. I don’t want him in my head, inflicting his needs on my life, controlling my behaviour. For the last few years he’s been connected to an intravenous insight drip that is gradually putting him to sleep.
Some nights I sit by his bedside, holding his hand and wishing he was dead.
My very own psychological post-natal abortion.
And how about our leaders? Your leaders. Their leaders, all around the world. Many of them carry “Peters” in their heads that control or influence their view of the world and the way they behave. I’ve tried to describe how the unhealthy boarding school culture and indoctrination have affected me and my life, my issues, my decisions. I’m one of those who can admit it. Many of our leaders won’t, or can’t admit it, embedded as they are within a Westminster (or some other unhealthy political system) boarding school that feeds and encourages the damaged children that ride them.
And we have elected them to run our country. Once again, what the fuck were we thinking?
It was the done thing. So who’s to blame?
Being sent to boarding school is child abuse. Discuss.
I do not blame any of the boys who made my experience such a life-fucking one. They, and I, were embedded in a supremely unhealthy social system, a mini civilisation, that created the conditions that encouraged seriously damaging and dysfunctional behaviour. They were as much the victims of the system as I was, as are so many of our “leaders”. The “educational” system and the Westminster culture must be changed.
I don’t blame him, the boy in my head, for not “telling” on them, for not letting my parents know about my experience. He couldn’t.
Shit happens.
I don’t blame my parents at all for my experiences at school. My dad was being posted abroad to Malaysia for 3 years and I had just passed my 11+ with flying colours. They lived in a society where, if you could afford it, sending children to boarding school was a good thing, a privilege, and that society had told them that you were very, so very lucky to be able to have the opportunity. They had mine and my brothers’ best interests at heart and thought they were doing the best for us. A good education, no disruption and all the other supposed benefits put out by the marketing departments of all the wealthy, and not so wealthy, private schools.
Apparently, we were lucky, lucky bastards.
It was simply the done thing.
The done thing
The unmaking of me
Was a dead boy walking
In grief for a life unlived
The smell of rotting soul pervades his life
He pokes out his eyes
To not view what they do
Like an elephant on a rope
He plats his prison
Creates his asylum
Peers through the narrow slot
A Burka slitted mind
Peers at his peers
It’s so, so lonely inside
He’s coloured blind
Depression tinted colour chart
Hint of well crushed dreams
They tire of punishing him
As there’s no more need
Auto-punishment mode’s engaged
Conditioned, brainwashed, mind shampooed
He limps across the playing fields
To another night of torture
And another day alone
In a school full of cunts
Behind a gossamer grid of wards
Huddled in the basement of my brain
That small boy still sometimes weeps
They said “it makes a man of you”
“It never did us any harm”
It was just the done thing
It was just that
I was the done thing…
- The Making of Them: the British Attitude to Children and the Boarding School System. Nick Duffell, Lone Arrow Press 2000
- Anti-stigma mental health family website http://www.huggingbarbedwire.com/
- “I gave my wife a vasectomy for Christmas” – my first ever stand-up https://youtu.be/XSHr-8JVexQ