So, I don’t know how to explain my brain. I have tried to. But those nagging doubts others imprinted into my brain pop up. I still they are maybe just a part of me now.
“All you do is post photos of yourself for attention” ~ I used to post photos of me online because it reminded me I belonged. I never cared if it was liked or commented on. It was me saying to myself, I belong here, I belong on a wall, on a desk, on a bookshelf.
“You’re distant and cold” ~ I prefer silence because I can slowly close my brain down. Breathing slower, closing my eyes, thinking of the ocean. The thoughts never used to be intrusive. Constant ideas, blogs, things that popped into my head that I realised had value. Fully formed ideas, songs, poems, spoken word. If you ever saw me sitting there saying nothing, not talking, that was me resetting my mind. Having so much information in there across a wide range of topics that I cannot even remember how I learned – it is tiring.
“You’re clingy and needy” ~ I’m good alone, always have been. It isn’t because I feel I deserve to be alone. It is the opposite side to the reason people tell me I can be distant and cold. Sometimes I become so tired with ideas and creativity that I just need a hug, somebody else to silence it. Actually, I say “somebody”, but that is not true. It was only one person. My head on their shoulder felt like silence and was the only time I ever truly slept without a fight.
“You don’t celebrate your birthday because you feel like you don’t deserve it.” ~ I have no idea why this affected me so much. This has never been the case. My joy does not come from opening a present or a card. My joy does not come from candles and sweets and a big meal out. My joy comes from then many many birthdays I see people I care about.
It just makes my heart fill with joy. I don’t celebrate me – because seeing other people be celebrated is the best thing in the world. Can I do both? Of course I could, but I just don’t care about my birthday, it isn’t trauma, there isn’t a line I can write where somebody made that happen. Since a kid I have always just loved celebrating other people.
And it isn’t just love in that form. When I was a young boy, my cousins passed away in a fire. This was my first encounter with death – and this is why I have the relationship with death that I have today. But I remember being with people who were mourning – the day after this happened. I remember seeing all of the adults in that room crying, some of them had been drinking.
And I just wanted them to all understand that it was ok to be sad. I remember going and giving so many of them a hug, touching their hand, or smiling and trying to give them hope. This has never changed in me. I know, as a kid this was not my job to do, but even today I would do the same thing. I just have an overwhelming feeling of sadness for people who struggle.
100% of this, of wanting to stop the darkness for people I love, 100% of that was invested into Arthur.
So much more as well. I think it became so tiring for me to have to say “no, actually, I am…” that I stopped caring if people told me who I am, rather than listening to who I am. That was happening from age 5 all the way up to 40. Those were the words that made me hold back, pretend I am stupid, pretend I didn’t do work – give others the credit.
Because I did not want to keep being misunderstood. For example, and I will find a little bit from it for this blog, when I wrote the main spine for my fiction book – nobody knows that this idea was not in my head when I went to bed, yet was there when I woke up.
I tell people the story was 10/15 years of thinking, yet it was something almost fully formed in my mind when I woke, when I was maybe 23/24. I then wrote the whole spine of it across a couple of hours. When I write it is like I am possessed.
Music on, over the ear headphones, sat staring at my screen. I don’t know what that is – but it brings all of that idea out till I feel calm. And believe me, I have not even started on the other ideas in my head – all of them in there like a universe of words that just grab my attention from nowhere.
I hid that high-frequency universe away for years, but when I finally let the words out of the cupboard, I gave my own deepest fears to a character named Arthur. This is what it sounds like when somebody finally stops hiding behind his walls:
Arthur:
❝A heavy sob caught in Arthur’s throat, his stooped shoulders folding forward. “But it terrifies me, Red,” he confessed, using the name that burned in his heart. “For thousands of years, I enforced a strict rule upon myself: never let my guard down. Never let myself fall in love. I built walls because of the sheer, unadulterated terror of what it would do to my mind to lose the one person who truly saw me.
The thought of outliving love – of spending a literal, infinite eternity walking through crowds of thousands of people, completely alone, mourning you until the end of time… it was too much to bear. But then you smiled at me in that park, and every single wall I built just turned to ash.❞
Arthur’s world comes from a place of the light versus the darkness. Things that popped into my brain 20-years ago and seem to be more relevant, even to me and my life, than ever. The whole book is there, it is – but I am such an awful perfectionist and just keep editing, changing, using newer ideas from other brain dumps. Being a perfectionist is 100% a reaction to trauma – because I have always felt I have had to be absolutely faultless or face the music. All of my life.
Here’s another piece from the book.
“WE are all special and have been since our souls connected with our bodies and we fell into this world after our mums and dads decided that they wanted more from life, so they created a vision of love, and that vision became us.
When light came into the universe, with it came compassion, hope, love, joy and feelings beyond anything you can imagine. Unconditional love was the strongest of these and with that the ideas and philosophies of our modern-day religions were born.
Love is innocence, it is the little light from the eye of a child watching flowers dance in the sun – it is the joy from holding the one we love in our arms and allowing that moment to spread through us – without fear, without worry, knowing that unconditional love is what we were made to share.
Love is the one shared between Angela Derby and Omar Gupta, a Christian girl and a Muslim man, they met at University in Exeter – Angela’s dad hated anybody who was not born in what he described as ‘his country’, whereas Omar’s mum wanted her son to marry somebody connected to India. But when they all came together and saw the love in the eyes of their children, they let them be – they chose with love. Twenty-something years later they are as happy as the day they met, with two children – both offering something to the world – proving that unity within love creates more than it breaks.
If we lose the ability to love, we lose part of ourselves which is far deeper and more important than we realise. The first human to ever lose love was a man called Devante Jesting, when he lost the ability to love he sat on a stone floor drawing with chalk, he sat for hours muttering about how everything was utterly pointless and that nobody could understand as it was all too hard to describe. He simply gave up.
Arthur had experienced the tender embrace of love. It happened unexpectedly during one of his solitary walks, a fortuitous encounter that would alter the course of his existence. As he strolled, lost in thought, a lively dog bounded toward him, abruptly halting at his feet. It tugged playfully at the hem of his long jacket, and a gentle voice soon followed. “Oh, I’m terribly sorry,” she apologised, appearing almost magically beside the exuberant canine. “He’s quite playful and has a fondness for long coats. My apologies.”……..”
I’m complicated, flawed, I have done things I wish I hadn’t. I am weird, strange and incredibly different. And now, I am realising it is just time to own that all.