Author: Moobs

I am sat in my home office, thinking. Thinking about my death. I am not fearful. That is not because I can sense the warmth of heaven’s light just beyond the veil. I’m not sure why it is. When I was in my twenties the thought of death would sometimes chase away sleep. I’d lie restless with panic at the thought of annihilation. What scared me was not nothingness but the thought of the world simply carrying on without me being there to see it. It was not that my ego required the sun not to rise, I was desperate to be part of existence. In my twenties, life was a thing of the future. The thought of my life being a thing of the past staggered me.

Why am I not scared now? Perhaps because the future belongs to my children. Throughout my life my back has strained and cracked as I have dragged with me the knot and tangle of my childhood. My father’s death snagged and tore away some of that. Now, I worry, I am weighing my daughters down with my expectations, imperfections and frustrations. It’s right that we slip overboard and fall into the wake.

As I look around me, I find myself thinking that I have a lot of possessions. A lot of what is on my shelves has sentimental value, but only to me. I have been building a museum of me where I am both the curator and the only possible visitor. It’s not because I want to be “remembered”. It is, I am amazed to realise, that I have been planning a time when I will conscientiously remember myself. I have books I will never re-read and whose contents I have forgotten, but which I have, sub-consciously, imagined I would one day take from the shelf in the hope of finding a piece of myself, a memory of a time (even if only a moment), inside it. I have a copy of every edition of the law book I have edited. I have the weak excuse that I may need to know how the law stood in a particular year, but they are really exhibits in the dusty cabinet of auto-curiosity.

In such years as are left to come to me, I would like to be an explorer and not a collector.

A few years ago I was standing on a platform at Clapham Junction and felt a new sensation – I felt bored of being scared. I tweeted about it and several hundred people told me I was depressed. I can take a hint.

I signed up for some talking therapy and I think that how it is supposed to work is as follows:

1. They identify some childhood trauma;
2. They help you recognise that the trauma damaged you;
3. They help you be kind to the damaged child you were; and
4. You heal and grow.

Thus far, stage one has certainly worked. Hoo boy. But I already knew my shape was one I’d been metaphorically (and occasionally literally) beaten into. I knew I had been damaged. So far, so pain-wrapped goodness.

The focus that the process demanded changed how I see my past. For example, I was pretty certain I’d enjoyed university even if I had, at times, behaved a little oddly. Forced to think about it, I can now see I was crunching around like a self-propelled bag of broken biscuits. This is the point I am supposed to clutch my younger self in a hug and tell him I understand. Instead I am rearing away from him and gulping air horrifiedly. Now I can see how unbearable I was both to myself and others. I can see all the pain I transferred because I was just incapable of holding it in. I am confronted with my lack of gratitude for those that stuck with me and the lives I made worse by being in them.

I’m fully signed up, in theory, to the idea of forgiving myself and growing into some evolved form, but I literally cannot do it. It’s been a sort of cringe-induced brain prolapse. I can’t take reassurance, or compliments or sympathy, not because I think they are insincere but because they are like someone gently patting the sort of sunburn you’d need to be bathing in the corona to achieve.

Is there some way of reversing therapy? Can I go back to blissful disassociation? If not, is there some way of wiping my younger self from the memory of those who knew me? I say again, hoo boy.

Here I am, blowing the dust off my blog. It wasn’t inspiration that brought me here (as will likely now become painfully obvious), it was fear. Email chatter suggested that the host for the site has a partnership with a company that sends out warnings that your site has been “infected” with something unspecific. Athlete’s Foot, perhaps. Either you pony up a subscription to sort it out or they lock the account. So it’s speak now or forever hold my peace.

I’m conscious that I am speaking to an empty room. That’s fine. I’m very noisy on Twitter (using my real name) and I get more attention than I can handle there. Talking to you, Mr Overturned Chair and you, Mr Threadbare Curtain, is sort of comforting. Or is it? Perhaps there is no comfort in absence; specifically the absence of those of you who were once kind enough to pass by and who shared a little life with me here. There were many times when something you said in your blogs or in a comment made me see the world differently. Sometimes they made me see myself differently. I could pretend that the blog was about scratching some itch to write or that it served a particular therapeutic purpose but, in truth, it was about … well .. companionship and camaraderie. Or, to put it another way, it was about love. I’m not sure I could have said then that I loved you all, but I did. I do. So if this sentiment finds its way to you – tumbling in the electron torrent of the network – I would like to say thank you. If it never finds its way to you, then I am sorry that I did not speak up sooner.