Good morning all.
Yesterday I posted the below on LinkedIn:
I’ve just had a conversation with my mother. It’s redrawn my sense of my whole life. And therefore of myself.
Nine months after I was born — my birthday being the 16th of June 1962 — I was placed in a secure facility in Warneford Hospital in Oxford. I was there for a month: so not, in the end, the only occasion I was placed behind closed doors, after all.
My mum was suffering at the time from acute post-natal depression. I knew already that in 1968 she had received electro-shock treatment. What I didn’t know till today — because I had never been told — was that at the age of nine months I stayed with her in the aforementioned hospital, whilst she underwent a course of eight separate electro-shock events.
However, the seventh one went really badly wrong: she had such a painful headache as a result that she passed out. They tried to explain; but faffed, tbh. Her words, not mine.
So she refused the eighth, and after a month in Warneford, we left.
She’d married my father in 1961, but couldn’t recognise him during those weeks in 1963. I wonder now if at the time she was able to recognise me … or perhaps not at all.
Or not clearly enough for it to make any difference.
And then if not, when actually it was that she finally became able to remember and know me — her son — again.
Yes. It’s important to speak to people. You don’t know what you don’t know. And others, even close others, might never know what maybe you did need to have known, but didn’t get the chance to comprehend ever.
Because history is important, and people who tell it well are dangerous. Telling history right is a subversive act, too.
In this case, though, maybe a healing act more than anything else.
I am closer to my mother now than I was half an hour ago. And half an hour ago we had already been as close as … well … thieves. Thieves not of trinkets or jewellery or gold: thieves, rather, of our truths.
Because I see I was broken for the rest of my life because I see she was broken on becoming a wife. And no one of any decent mind can attribute any blame to the broken for breaking another. And here, though it’s still hard for me to admit, I really must include my father as well.
And so I am at peace.
And I know today … so is she.
I’d suggest you went to the original post, too. The comments are some of the most valuable ones I’ve ever had.
Anyways.
Today, just this last half an hour or so, I’ve been thinking now: reflecting on fallen veils.
‘Had the night to do so. ‘Reasons to do.
I once worked with a beautiful mind whose job was one-to-one in a local prison. Their goal, their unique and only goal, was via a personalised conversation over a period of sometimes lengthy time to help a prisoner find their core: what had driven them in their life to do good and what had driven them in their life to do not so good at all.
I’ve had a lot of therapy in my life, tbh. Fits and starts: either ameliorative which is an excuse for not addressing a clearly systemic challenge at the same time; or attempting to find core whilst never being able to.
Along the journey this has taken me I have wondered whether a lot of people, who manifestly chose to hurt me, were the cause of my melancholia or the result of it; that is, that their behaviours were the result of my own and the blame was better located in me, or instead that their acts served primarily to deepen my core — at that point, for me, still undiscovered — and therefore meaning the blame for all the pain still present in my daily life, even today, lying equally deeply with them.
And so after yesterday’s conversation with my mum, I realise this morning on awakening just three things:
1. This thing that was revealed yesterday in conversation with her is my core. A nine-month-old baby suddenly not recognised by his mother. And living for a month with this very same mother I continued to recognise for sure, even as she could not see herself to consistently providing the flicker of reciprocation, that in its presence makes a life and in its absence breaks a young heart. This is my core: why rejection is impossible for me to survive, never mind thrive after. Rejection of any kind in any area of human endeavour: rejection by all in the smallest of ways, too, wherever.
2. If you cannot work out how to thrive after rejection, everything anyone does to you will be interpreted sooner or later as being such. And the people who have most broken me since … well … most of them I still believe did it deliberately. Businesspeople who chased me in bad faith whilst manifesting a superficial good; a lover who knew only how to shame and ridicule and pursue and condemn and gaslight me over decades, and who never ever let me be free — not even to this day; and then again, half of a family that knows only button-pressing and knife-twisting, yet is capable of calling it “simple advice”; and still more re a security state — that of my homeland — which decided early on I needed neutralising, and when I didn’t kill myself, realised reputational disgrace was the next best thing; and finally, maybe worst of all, all those people who stood by all those decades, so many of them on all parts of political and sociocultural spectrums, in full knowledge of what and who was doing what to whom … in full knowledge of the pain being deliberately delivered.
3. And yet my final insight is this: spending a month in the same room as my breaking mother, with the hospital-smelling, former lunatic asylum breathing down our necks all that time, isn’t a matter of assigning blame. My mother broke me that month for the rest of my life; but she was broken by my father the year before; and he was broken by a bullying upbringing that had failed to treasure what in hindsight should’ve been a beautiful gender- and neurodiversity. And so it reaches back … so it reaches back.
And so this, then, is where I am: where I find myself this morning. All the people who hate me now, and have actioned so much deliberated ill on me all my life, maybe since birth too, will find plenty of reasons for them to continue kowtowing to their hatred: still profoundly embedding in their deepest places.
I, meantime, realise equally now that what I need to do is accepting that this thing we call rejection is my core — because for a month all I experienced was the deepest kind: that of a mother blanking her baby — my future job must then be to find some way of acquiring a different skin: but not a thicker one … no.
Rather, an osmotic one that leads me to manifest much more finely and grandly and enthusiastically that better capacity to love everything human, which our humanity today so sorely, so surely, needs.
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