Stheart

(Well I think I went mad, isn’t that so sad

What a shame you lost a dad that you never had.

Oh Mums taken the car, she can’t have gone far)

I had no intention of writing another post, but I feel as if I have to get an elephant out of the room and off my chest…

The main reason I started writing these blogs was because I was inspired by a select few fellow TEFL Heaven Koh Chang 2014 trainees.

I think nearly everyone on my course has written at least one blog post. Those three weeks were truly some of the greatest of my life and life immediately after was tough. All connection to small connection. Just. Like. That. I think we all used them originally as a way of keeping in touch with each other.

I never really wrote too many posts on what I was doing, I started writing from the caverns of my heart without ever really noticing. I’ve never planned the layout of these blog posts, I just type away as things enter my brain from the ether of my consciousness, all following the same narrative, all having the same buildings in the same cities, cities linked by the great highways.

I’ve never ever, ever been someone who would talk about emotions or how I was feeling in any capacity, but these blog posts were the catalyst for change.

Now you could argue that I personify disconnection via a wi-fi connection, typing like I’m bigger than my body and thats fine, you can say I’m such a cliche, but I don’t really see the difference in it anyway because, hey kids – we’re all the same, what a shame!

Writing about how I was feeling, wearing my heart on my sleeve became second nature via these posts.
Now, I’m not where I want to be, but I’m not where I used to be, and that’s alright.

I began writing about self-reflection, reflection in general, muses, opinions that were swimming through the eternally playing stereo that is my mind.

It occurred to me that maybe the reason I became so ‘productive’ on the blog front was that for twenty-plus-years I had shared my name with a stranger, unrecognisable. Twenty-plus-years of thoughts that I had never released, occupying space, in every atom of my body and infinity.

I didn’t just have an elephant in the room, I had elephants in every room of an insane asylum and gradually one by one the beasts began to run the show.

I started to find that speaking openly became easier and easier, specifically to my best friends but in general also.

I now find it amazing how strong the power of human communication is, specifically speaking – you say words aloud, you hear yourself say them and by doing that swimming against the current becomes a little less tiring.

Self-reflection and self-improvement have become integral to me and I think it should be integral full-stop.

Glass half-full, glass half-empty – be thankful for the first half, its gone (whatever happened), be grateful for the second half, its still to come.

Now, I wake up every morning happy that my wooden heart is still beating and with the mindset that I want to be a better person than I was yesterday by being the best person I can be today and if I can make just one soul smile then hell, that’s a bonus. That’s a bonus.

“There is no learning and personal development without reflection.”

I can pinpoint the exact moment I knew that I had to improve myself, it was after one particular comment my mum made to me, one oh so dark and rainy night when the Darkness On The Edge of Town encroached just a little more.

You see, I grew up in a household where love between my parents was an apparition – hollow, empty.
It wasn’t all bad, don’t get me wrong, I have some wonderful memories but they are so incredibly difficult to remember after walking through so many dead cities.

My father’s father left him, and his mother when he was very young. My father never had a loving mother, or family, and for that, I am sorry in more ways that anyone could ever understand. These must be the foundations on what the haunted cities were built on.

My Mum on the other hand, had everything you could ask for in a family. She was one of four daughters and never went without love or compassion – loving parents come grandparents and now great-grandparents who are still together and as affectionate as ever, after decades under the influence of true love. For that I am so grateful, in more ways than anyone could ever understand.

My mum was my father’s first ever relationship. They married and because of that you’re reading the ramblings of a pseudo-mad-man.

“We’re all born to broken people on their most honest day of livin’ and
Since that first breath we’ll need grace that we’re never given
Well I’ve been haunted by standard red devils and white ghosts
It’s not only when these eyes are closed.”

– from the song ‘Wooden Heart’, by Listener.

My father would do petty, spiteful and fucking nasty things, one of which was to make it as difficult as he could for my Mum see her family before I was born and after.  It must have been jealously, jealously for something he never had.
It got to the stage where after arriving at family gatherings in my early and mid-teens my Mum would have to make up excuses about the absence of my father, by the end he had completely disconnected himself from them and pushed both my mum and me away.

I started to become aware that not everything was as rosy as it seemed around the age of twelve, I think. I’d start to notice the arguments, the lack of talking for days, that felt like years.

I can remember on many occasions, far too many occasions, shit… so many fucking occasions – going out to play football with all my friends and constantly wishing for the reconciliation by the time I’d walk through my front door after joy rides on the sun, where for just a few Moments my friends were my Painkillers.

My friends back then were Towers, bigger than the world, that have now become Monuments in the mist. I was the youngest out of everyone, quite considerably too, but they always looked out for me.

I wish I could still talk with you all under the summer skies where all my troubles became shadowed by the nights sitting on an old bench down by the ruined church, looking out to sea, being too cold, being old enough to know but too young to care,  gazing upon an open road to nowhere but everywhere. That bench is still where every drive I ever go in my head ends.

Can we go out tonight, joy rides on the moon?

“I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?”
– from the film, ‘Stand By Me’.

I knew my parents would always split up, but it doesn’t prepare you for when it happens.

It was a few months before my GCSE exams when it actually happened. It was a numbing pain when I found out. I didn’t really know what to think or do, so I carried on like I usually did, just keeping it inside, rotting away.

The years after the separation I can now look back on and say were some of the worst of my life. Misery, uncertainty, poisoned memories and toxic thoughts,  bottled up and placed on cobwebbed shelves caked in dust.

My father did fucking awful things to my Mum, which I still regret, hell, I regret not being able to do anything about them… I always will.

One of which changed the course of our lives, it was taking all the money he and my mum had saved, basically leaving her penniless with a kid that was sailing on a vast ocean without a north star to navigate from.

She did alright, hell, she did alright.

Looking back now as I’m writing this, it was the best thing he has ever done for me.

She bought a house aided by the money she had from the sale of our home, which my father only had his half and no more. That brought me closer to my friends who at the time were just my friends in school and not out of it as I lived around thirty minutes away, rarely travelling to see them from the village I lived in, the village where I had my childhood friends.
By this time my childhood friends were moving away for one reason or another as they were much older than me.

Relationships, jobs, family problems.

We never had days or nights like we did when I was twelve years old ever again and Jesus, that hurts, they were some of the best times.

I miss you all, not being able to find any trace of one of my childhood friends fucking kills me and not a week goes by when I don’t think of him. Being told another story about a childhood friend’s failed suicide attempt and the aftermath still affects me profoundly to this day.
I think it’s always worse finding out things like that when you’re not around said person and haven’t seen or even spoken to them for a while rather than still being in regular contact with them.
The whole ‘life’s too short’ monologue plays on an autocue in your mind, that feeling of being able to not really do anything. I still think about you all and what we had.

Ugh.

But, in every negative a positive will appear and by moving out of my childhood home in a little village where my childhood friends were, to the main town in my county where my school-friends and school were. My school friends would become my best friends. I kept in touch with my childhood friends for a while after I moved and saw them on a few occasions, but it couldn’t be the same, it wouldn’t be the same.

But, I believe in the universe.

One night in our new house, I remember talking to my mum about what my father was like earlier on in their relationship, when I was a baby, I questioned why she didn’t walk away sooner.

She told me she stayed with him for my sake. I still struggle with that – the the suffering she had to endure, stemmed from me.

As I got older I started to develop many of the bad habits my father had. I would be short and ratty with my mum and I can’t even tell you why.

I didn’t have a positive male role model to look up to, ask questions to or even really quite simply to talk to, maybe that was it?

‘You’re just like your father’.

The moment.

I can still remember the horror I felt when those words echoed around the caverns of my absent Brain.

I decided there and then that I would change. Many years and many books later here I am.

I’m not where I want to be but I’m not where I used to be and for that I am grateful.

There’s always a positive to come out of a negative and there is aways a lesson to be learnt, no matter how the teacher presents the material.

The power of talking, releasing words, typing words, whatever medium chosen is colossal.

People can tut at blogs all they want, to them, I say – show a little faith, there’s magic in these nights and have a round on me, friend, I’ve been there before, a few times.

Speaking for myself, these blogs have changed who I am. I wouldn’t have dreamt of being so open a few years back.

Just talk with people, say hello, ask them how they are and genuiely care because positive human interaction is unlike anything else, anything else.
It’s no coincidence that a form of professional help for your troubles is a psychologist, to whom, you talk.

Who knows what road your next conversation with someone, with anyone,  may take you…just have it.

I have learnt more in the time spent in Thailand than I had in all my years before. The one learn that I regard as the highest is being able to now talk more openly to people about whatever it may be. Whether I am helping them, or they are helping me, I’m sure everyone can agree we’re all in this together and we’re helping each other.

I wish I knew back then what I know now. But thats all part of the journey, isn’t it?

What city was ever built in a day, even if it was haunted?

A leopard can never change it’s spots, well thats alright because we’re human.

Anyone can change if they truly want it and if they truly believe it.
If one door shuts, it’s alright, it’s alright, it’s alright, move on, for a hundred more will open and if you believe, because, We All Need A Reason To Believe that you can knock loud enough, one might just open.

I owe thanks to my father, for showing me how to never treat another human and making me determined to not become the man he was.

I owe thanks to everyone I’ve met in The Cities I’ve built, most people more than some and some people more than most, from my heart to yours, thank you.

I owe everything to my mum.

Make Monuments for everything you love.

Do something and let it consume you.

Find what you love and let it kill you.

Now.

So remember, this is our time.

From the thunderstorms of Koh Chang, 2014 / To the infinity of the universe, XXXX

The End.

The Stheart