I’ve been thinking a lot this year about my life. I’m now 61: an age at which one of my two favourite writers one day took his own life. This being Hemingway.
I love Hemingway. He’s himself. Grace under pressure. Whatever the reasons. And grace under pressure was the way he wrote his prose. A pressured prose, and yet so graceful. Graceful despite the pressure, never because of it.
I’ve lived a life of similar pressures, though grace was rarely my discourse. Lately a tad more. And I’ve been wondering why this, too.
I spent many months, on and off, in Stockholm Sweden in 2023. I learnt a lot from a culture which my own — British — had never been able to accurately prepare me for. We have a lot to learn from the Swedish way. Really we do.
A tangible outcome was this site:
I then went back to the UK for a longer period from August on, and so began to process all that learning.
More recently I created the following site as I looked to transfer Swedish ideas and concepts and ways of thinking into a British context:
I took advantage of this impulse — and it took me a while to settle into it and feel safe enough to deliver on it — to also bring together a whole bunch of historical online whitepapers which audit my progress in the ideas I have had around intuition validation since at least 2016, but probably since my first university degree in the early 1980s when I had studied Film & Literature:
Part of the reason I began to feel the UK was starting to respect me — instead of wishing to do me harm — was because of a place called Storyhouse in the northwest English city of Chester: modelled I felt (and then had later confirmed) on the Stockholm Kulturhuset: one of my favourite places to be in the Swedish capital.
I felt safe enough in Storyhouse to be able to begin to want to reengage with my homeland really profoundly.
So.
All good thus far.
The final part of my life, and my thoughts around it this year, involves the increasing number of people in my close and wider family who are submitting to and getting successful assessments of differing kinds of neurodiverse ways of being.
In 2003 I was ridiculously diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic. I had already begun to suffer from epilepsy at the age of ten; though whilst living in Spain, and between the ages of 30 to 40, I was completely — and successfully — unmedicated for the condition.
Meantime, in that same decade and after my misdiagnosis, a member of my family was diagnosed with autism, level 1 — then called Asperger’s. On my Croatian side, such cases were already apparent. Then another relative was diagnosed with bipolar within a few years of my misdiagnosis. Honestly, I think hers was also a misdiagnosis.
From the 1960s onwards, one parent had suffered from clinical depression, whilst the other had experienced severe migraines and clear traits of autism/ADHD during their whole lifetime. More recently, this year in fact, two close members of my family have been positively assessed and medicated for ADHD, and yet another case of autism, level 1 has been uncovered.
A couple of members of this tribe I belong to now feel I should request a reassessment for ADHD, too. I’m in two minds. My original psychiatrist clearly made a mistake. After three years (ie, 2006 in my case) it became impossible to argue clinical negligence. I’d still be up for bringing a case of criminal conspiracy to court, but maybe I now have better things to do with my time. Either way, it’s pretty self-evident my family are brainy.
That’s how I now prefer to see myself: neither schizophrenic nor ADHD, nor autism nor anything else. Just brains in abundance.
What I am looking for now, after all these years of strife and denial, is the opportunity to put my brains properly to work in terms of my ideas re intuition validation, complex thinking, and in respect of being able to work on tools to deliver secrecy-positive thinking-spaces where an absolutely free thought can begin to enjoy its flight.
From a deep love of Hemingway and grace under pressure to secrecy-positive thinking. And a chance to stop the Putins of this world … forever.
Yeah?
And so to the poem that follows: it’s a visceral review of some of life’s most insoluble problems.
How complex and fractured family groupings come about when people refuse to ask for help; refuse for their whole lifetime to not believe it’s someone else who’s the problem.
Just what happens when the concept of the scapegoat as a narrative figure becomes the easiest tool in order to structure a network of individuals.
Just this.
Have a really safe Christmas … and the happiest New Year possible.
And do take care.
now comfortable WITHOUT others / the BOSUN’S pieces of infinity / no longer your necessary brother AT ALL
i spent my life
as eldest of my family
being the glue
that meant i wasn't as i could've been
i had to be
for every sibling and cousin i had
the very best sounding-board
they ever could have EVER had
understanding in all respects
accepting all their holes of dark
seeing as absolutely and utterly fair
the roles i was assigned so stark
like lairs and dens
of the dragons and monsters
some of them have been to me
and you really wouldn't ever believe
what i have actually seen
and what i have actually witnessed
and suffered to the extent
they intentionally drove me mad
and so all this time
i found it hard to do more than rhyme
in order to survive
the cruelty of my 61 years
visited on me
and imposed on me
and painted on me as if into a corner around
my every boundary and residual sound
as never could i set my limits
and find in time the core i needed
and just be me for me at all
and avoid the funeral pall
of man and son
and father and brother and lover and done
nailed brutally and abusively
to the cross of quite another
and so after all that
it came to 2015
and all i could do
was scream silently to myself
and everyone thought
again he's going mad
or maybe he's just bad
and maybe that was it
when really what it was
this thing i began to do
was realise that their VACUOUS holes
like gruyère cheese
had prevented my mentioned core
of apple-like pleas
ever forming contentedly
so that all i knew how to do
all this time
for 53 years of foolishness too
was to impale myself like stake to a soul
in such a way
that their very real madnesses
appeared mine all that time
and maybe to this day
most would still find it easy to say
that what they did to me in 2003
as my whole family stood aside
and let me suppurate
as incarcerated foully
by a state of extreme and vicious cruelty
and how it did so
and how it was so
neither good for them nor good for me
as no one ever let me be
neither in 2003 nor EVER since then
and as my monstrous lover of 2004
then took me to her web
of evil spidery claw
and the horrible things she then did and said
as she treated me badly
and without remission
and did all those things to me
with zero permissions
i am reminded also
of the techie folk
who in 2002 in virtual sense
and right to this day in quite parallel way
attacked me and my reputation it's true
as they played their games
with my achilles capacity for foolhardy hesitation
for it's only the clever who ever wonder why
and only the foolish
who can't find it in themselves
to ever care more than a minimum expression
for the lessons of an otherwise historical compassion
and so then it's a fast-forward right to today
and christmas 2023 does approach in its way
and so now my son is adhd
and then a sibling that other thing they say
and my parents both undiagnosed but surely it was true
and my younger relations both clearly that and good
and even two others
who claim to be hyper-sensitive
when really all they acted out
was a fearsome them of brutal cold fish
for all their multiple decades and years ...
and so we do come finally to the VERY first
being me two decades before the worst
when getting a diagnosis unbidden and unasked for
and one of utterly beastly yore
as i was assigned a violent assessment
of a ridiculously inexact psychosis
when if all the above
had come fairly to light first of all
then first i wouldn't have been without my core
and second the family
both sibling and parental
and so wider and much more
wouldn't have fucked me about
as they allowed me to die struggling on my feet
drugged to the eyeballs
by a country caring only to treat
a clever man like myself
as if i were an elf to be tossed baldly aside
like evil mischief
far and wide
because dear cousins
and siblings
and children
and wife and my life
that's what you did to the man i should've been
whilst once i defended you all
as i tried desperately
to be that thing you all needed me to be
when in truth the problem wasn't EVER me
but people JUST LIKE YOU
who needed far more support
than i ever would
being far more support than a crutch to a cripple
and so as we come close to 2024
i realise with joy in no way a trickle
that i need care for none of you any more at all
because what was broken
and splintered
and hurt
was not my job you see
to make complete in the end even then
because i was far less damaged all that time
than you and yours and those you claimed were mine
and i was far LESS incomplete
and far less unseated
and far less nailed
to that cross i mentioned before
when talking of awful loss
and the cost of not talking
to each other as we might've done
and the idiocy of hiding
behind the unassessed
and never embracing
what actually you all were
in respect of something that could have been
a completely beautiful diversity
to treasure and measure
against all other benchmarks
where humans do hark to a GORGEOUS eternity
and so this is where i now
found myself at last
with no right at all
to cast any stones
yet equally no duty remaining
to ever help out
anyone insane enough
to want to stay
as a member of this sad sad tribe
incapable of realising any of you in time
that the very reasons
you refused to defend me
were precisely the reasons why
you should've protected me
and precisely why no longer
there's any point in my trying
to work with and for
absolutely any of you
in health and sickness
or any condition left to me
nor in any kind of frame
where being together
could've been a worthy test
of a humanity hugged close
to a seafaring bosun
of chests of mysterious
pieces of infinity
where once upon a time
it was me that was seen
to be the really crazed guy
when it truth
it's me who finds himself now catapulted
into a place of truthfully righteous change
because family for me
now irreversibly wanes
as we all become
as diverse as each other
thus meaning right on
i am finally released
from ever being again your necessary brother
mil's page 