Kind, good-looking, intelligent, a hero - just, unfortunately, also a pervert

Warning: adult material which may offend. (This warning is, of course, hugely ironic - but hey ho, protocols must be followed... :) 

If you were to see a photograph of my grandfather you’d probably smile.  He had what people call a ‘kind’ face.  He had, apparently, been a very good-looking man when he was young.  Even in his eighties he was a striking figure: his hair was soft and white, his posture upright and direct. He had a great sense of humour – his mouth easily curling into a smile; his eyes crinkling when he told a joke.  And, so they say, he was a highly intelligent man, and also deep-thinking.  My mother used to tell me how, when she was little, he and his friends would sit around the table discussing religion, psychology, philosophy, music, literature, politics… everything.  Oh, and he was brave as well – a soldier in the First World War. 

It was just a shame really that he was an abuser.  A paedophile.  A perv.

I can’t tell you all of this tale – it’s not mine to tell.  But I can tell you about  how he affected me – that is mine to tell.  When I was very little apparently I refused to sit on his lap – I used to run away and hide behind the sofa.  A child’s instinct?  Of course everyone was horrified.  ‘Your poor grandfather.’  ‘How can you be so cruel?’  ‘He loves you so much and you run away? You horrid little girl!’

His first wife – my grandmother – had developed religion. Not just a case of prayer-fests and arranging flowers in church. She’d gone hardcore - joined the Plymouth Brethren and basically turned her back on her family, including her young children.  She died at 32 when my mother was just two – having refused treatment for pneumonia.  My grandfather had allegedly 'adored her'. He married pretty swiftly: the ‘girl next door’; my ‘Nan’ (‘to look after the children’) - not much more than a child herself when they wed. 

I used to go and stay with them for holidays, down in the Somerset countryside – and here’s the strange thing.  Their cottage had two bedrooms.  My grandparents usually slept in the smaller bedroom, which had twin beds.  Yet, when I stayed, my Nan would move out and sleep in the larger bedroom, with its double bed, while I was put in with my grandfather.  Why?  ‘Because he snores,’ she said.  Huh?

I can remember that room so clearly.  My bed next to the window; my grandfather’s bed next to the inner wall. The two separated by two small bedside tables.  There was wallpaper with a pattern of flowers; a window seat; my grandmother’s dressing table with its three mirrors that fascinated me – the first time I’d ever seen my profile; the back of my head. 

But, come bedtime, I used to panic.  I remember desperately trying to get to sleep before he came to bed.  Do I remember being abused?  No, I don’t.  But when, years upon years later, I heard what he had done to other girls, I questioned.  I wondered.  I figured this was obviously what lay behind my ‘issues’; my incapacity to have relationships; my reticence about sex.  I tried everything to find out, to bully my unconscious into giving up the information – I even had hypnosis to take me back. I wanted to know. I like to know what's what - to look things straight in the eye; to know the worst. But I drew a blank.  At a certain point, the curtain would come down each and every time.

‘Does it really matter?’ asked one psychotherapist.  ‘I mean... Whether he did or whether he didn’t, he very probably wanted to. So the psychic intent was the same… and the psychic damage.’  I couldn’t really argue with that.

So that left me as…what?  A victim.  For a while that felt okay – it was good to have someone to blame.  I was part of a tribe, the huge silent shameful tribe of the abused. 

But it didn’t take long for that to wear thin.  I’d seen how buying into victimhood was pretty pernicious.  If you become a victim, if you wear that label, then you have let the bully, the abuser, the one in power, win.  Fuck that! I thought. ‘Fuck you!’ I’d be damned if I’d let him win.  And that was fine, that lovely righteous pure anger.  I swore that this ended right here and now, in this generation.  That the pattern damn well wouldn't continue, sick and swept under the carpet, down through the bloodline. 

And then I went through that too; and – you may find this hard to believe but I actually felt sorry for him. Because really, what kind of place are you in if you want to touch up little girls?  If you want them to give you blow-jobs? If you want to screw them?  I mean, really, how appallingly sad is that?  What kind of hell was in his head?  

But, y’know, I don’t even feel like that anymore.  I was talking about this the other night, to my quasi-guru, and I realized that what I actually feel now is... nothing.  Nothing at all.  It’s just history.  I simply don’t care.  Because whatever happened or didn’t happen, is actually immaterial.  The only reality is how I let it make me feel here and now; the emotions and thoughts I choose to let it stir. 

We cling onto our stories, don’t we?  We allow them to dictate how we feel, what we do, how we live.  For years I clutched grimly onto beliefs fostered by my father’s death, my grandfather’s perversion, my family’s relative poverty.  I watched myself become ill and miserable. I psycho-analyzed myself into tighter and tighter knots.  What a bloody waste of time and energy.  And please...I'm only talking about me here...your reality may be very different and I am not judging, not remotely. How could I?  

Anyhow. Why am I telling you this?  I have absolutely no idea.  Just that I was sitting in the garden just now, smelling the roses (literally) and watching the dogs sprawl in the sun and I felt…the urge. Make of it what you will. :-) 

Better things to do with a windpipe than strangling it...

There are some days I just want to strangle. I feel like grabbing them by the windpipe and just squeezing harder and harder until they hold up their pathetic little flailing hands in surrender. I don’t get many like that now but every so often I feel this leviathan scream welling in my throat.  

This morning I have been trying to sort out accounts.  I hate this crap. I really do. I hate the way you have to beg and scrape and scrounge and whine and shout to get the cash you have worked for. I hate that I have to do this crappy work in order to pay the ever-increasing sodding bills.  And sometimes I just want to…well... be elsewhen. 

Anyhow, this morning I had possibly THE most asinine series of emails I have ever had from ANYONE from an accounts department of a large magazine group which steadily made my blood boil until I could barely trust myself to respond without cursing the stupid unhelpful uncaring bland thick as pigshit shit to seven shades of Hell. And no, I'm not saying ALL people in accounts departments are like that - just this particular arsebiscuit.  And Asbo was barking non-stop and and and and…. 

And then I thought. What would my quasi-guru say? 

Oh yeah... 

Breathe.

So…hang on a bit.  I’ll be back...

obsidiantears83.deviantart.com

Aaaah.  That’s better.  And really, that was what kickstarted this whole journey. Well, it was a big part of it.  Cos Marek is big on breathing.  And I have always been small and crap at it. 

My lungs and I have never had an easygoing relationship.  Off ill from school all the time with bronchitis.  Hospitalised with pneumonia.  Any happy-go-lucky virus around would lick its lips and go ‘Hey guys, weak spot alert!’ and lunge for my lungs.  You could argue it had a good deal to do with living in damp houses with parents who smoked. Or then again you could say it had to do with a deep ambivalence about being here in the first place.  Cos I had had that, all my life.  Never quite felt ‘here’, not earthed, not grounded.  Not in a despair way, not in a suicidal way, just in a ‘don’t really feel I belong’ way.  And really, if you're not breathing fully and deeply, isn't that a bit of a body metaphor for not gulping in life? 

The first piece I ever wrote for a national paper was on rebirthing, for The Guardian. Way back. I can still remember punching the air when I got the commission, in my funny little North London house. I can’t, however, remember how I got interested in rebirthing in the first place but I had a trial session and ended up having a course of ten; followed the whole thing for quite a long while before I became disillusioned. When? Maybe after I took Adrian to a Sondra Ray LRT training and (while he loved the breathing, strangely enough) he stormed out halfway through, saying the whole immortality thing and the loving everyone thing was total crap. I guess it was a bit of a deal-breaker between us and so...

Anyhow. Let's backtrack. It was when I was watching my parents having sex during rebirthing (okay, let me just add that I wasn’t physically in the room; you go into a trance state and return to the time before your conception – Milla, you have full permission to wander off until tea-time; and no, they weren't having sex while rebirthing - I was doing the rebirthing bit) I realised that, no, I really really REALLY didn’t want to get born at all.  No sirree.  And sometimes I still feel that way. Not so often nowadays, not so much since this last year of wonderful weirdness, but still...sometimes.  I just become so...detached.  

 

But breathing helps. J

Okay, so I’ve lost a whole swathe of you now, haven’t I?  *sigh*.  No!  Don’t sigh. Breathe…  You don't have to believe in rebirthing, or immortality, or the business of seeing your conception. No, really, truly you don't have to watch your parents having sex!  Not right now anyhow...  For now...just breathe. 

Because breathing plugs you into the here and now. Breathing is an affirmation of life.  It is, it is, it is.  But really, just spend a bit of time every day becoming conscious of your breathing, how you breathe. Some people freak out when they try it.  It's powerful stuff.  Brings up all sorts.

“Lie down on the grass, Feel the earth breathing…” said my guru.  And, for sure, the earth breathes… Listen. Feel…

“Just sit down and breathe. Slowly, regularly, with every inhale and exhale forming a perfect circle,” he said.  

And I try. I try.  One night he got me breathing consciously for about three hours non-stop and oh my, you should have seen the things I saw in my head that time…and eventually I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed nigh-on fifty years of grief out of me in one fell swoop and felt cleansed, renewed…shattered yet clearer.

studio8design.co.uk

You wanna try it?  Nah, not a three-hour marathon but a taster?  There are conscious breathing techniques in pretty well every mystical tradition and ancient culture under the sun and moon but the one that rebirthing uses is to keep the inhale and the exhale the same length, without a pause between. Conscious, slow, regular.  

You may go a little light-headed.  It may feel strange.  But, hey, why not try?  Or not…Or try a different form of breathing. Just breathe! Consciously. Or don't!  it’s entirely up to you!

As Marek says in Symphonic Bridges.  ‘…There are so many other aspects of life, which are crucial for you and absolutely worth experiencing. Especially those regarding your health and happiness. Therefore, you should not take for granted what others say about positive thinking, conscious breathing, meditation, vegetarianism, fasting, fire walking, and so on. Just go ahead and try them, for sake’s sake! Your own experience of the given thingies can be different from what you’ve heard. Everybody is an individual being, you know.’

Thingies... I love that. *smile* 

Exits stage left, breathing...

Breathing Session

Sounds
And reflections
On the walls
Of crystal palaces
Time
And vast spaces
In my room
Breathe deeply
And close your eyes

I get the answer
Prior to a question
When I open up all my mind
Flying into Light
I keep on breathing
Through pain and heavy air
Past burdens and gravity
I leave behind
Approaching weightlessness

Copyright © Marek Stefanowicz 1990

Black dog, red dog, yellow dog, blue....

It’s time, I think, to introduce you to my own black dog. The more we haul these dogs out into the bright light of day, the more control we have over them. Obedience classes for black dogs. Muzzles on, choke chains checked, heel! Sit. Good dog. Except, of course, it doesn’t really work like that.

My beast first appeared at my heel when I was ten years old. My father died of lung cancer – at a time when death wasn’t discussed and counselling wasn’t offered – everyone (children included) were expected to take a deep breath, brush themselves down and get back on with life. My diary page has drawings of tears all down the margin, my writing very wobbly, slanting wildly down the page. ‘My dear Daddy is dead. Poor Mummy didn’t know how to tell me.’
I suppose we cried then. I suppose we comforted one other but I can’t remember any of that. What I can remember, clear as day, was being taken to see Born Free by a neighbour on the day of the funeral. I’d seen it a few weeks before but didn’t like to say anything and politely sat through it, watching the parched plains of Africa, sucking the salt off stale popcorn, cringing away from the neighbour’s kindness. Then I was sent on a coach trip to a safari park (more bloody lions) with some Sunday School kids and I can still see one organiser talking to another, glancing over at me, and muttering ‘Yes, she’s the one whose father died. No, don’t say anything to the children’. But of course it spread like wildfire. They avoided me like the plague, as if by associating with me their fathers might die too.
After that the black dog bit me hard. I developed asthma and would sit in my tiny damp bedroom, staring bleakly at a line of gonks that seemed to belong to another age, to another child. I went from being a bright, bolshy, even a bit pushy, girl to a silent shy ghost. I didn’t mention my father. I got by. I didn’t cry. Not until I was eighteen and at university and I met a girl whose father had died when she, too, had been ten. She spoke about it openly and frankly and that night, in my room, I drank half a bottle of gin and sobbed until I felt sick.

Those were the ‘don’t care’ years – when I would walk around the toughest areas of Manchester, deep in the night, figuring I would give Fate the chance to finish me off. Sometimes the whole world seemed so unreal I would cut my arm or face to feel something, anything – even pain is better than not existing.

I left college but the dog came with me back to London. However I found that, if you pushed yourself hard enough, if you worked hard, played hard, took the right amount of alcohol and the right drugs, you could pretty well kick it out of the way.
But it crept into my dreams. A dark shape, sometimes a dog, sometimes a cat-beast, sometimes just an amorphous shadow. A sick feeling would wash over me and I would just know it was waiting in the shadows, waiting to bite. I had one of those dreams a week or so ago. I was standing at the top of a flight of stone steps leading down into somewhere dark and frightening. I heard the tick-tack of claws clicking on stone and the familiar sinking feeling washed over me. Looking down I saw a small black dog climbing, slowly, in no hurry. It knew I wasn’t going anywhere. It’s always pointless to run. It drew level with me and grew, stretching up and out until it was the size of a Labrador. I could feel its breath on my hand, hear its breathing and then, oh so slowly, it took my hand in its mouth. I could feel the damp softness, so gentle as if my hand were a gamebird, perfectly retrieved. Then with a horrible sense of the inevitable, I felt its teeth sharpen and draw back and it bit, hard, deep, straight through the sinews, crunching the bones of my hand.

As many of you know, I suffered from post-natal depression after my son was born. In retrospect, I had pre-natal depression too – born of moving out into the middle of nowhere when I was pregnant, away from all chance of support. I was working furiously and did so up until a week before the birth. There were complications, I had an emergency section, then got an infection and ended up on a drip with a blood transfusion. Nonetheless I was back working a couple of weeks later. My doctor was pretty dismissive when I told him how low I felt: how I was barely sleeping; how I was so paralysed with anxiety that every time I left my baby I thought I’d come back to see the ambulance with lights flashing outside the house, Adrian’s face trying to form the words that my child had died. ‘Welcome to parenthood,’ he said cheerily. ‘You’ll get used to it.’
After nine months I diagnosed myself and asked a different doctor what she thought. She plonked me on Seroxat and, luckily, it helped. It pulled me out of the hole. I came off it after six months though as I was terrified of becoming addicted. Since then I have battled the dog with a mixture of herbs (Magnolia Rhodiola complex), exercise, positive self-talk and long lists of gratitude. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. The last few months have been really hard – life has hit me on several sides at once and the dog has been having a field day.

However, I am noticing something interesting. A psychologist once told me that depression always hides other emotions. That it’s a kind of coping mechanism for when other emotions might overwhelm us. Of late, I’ve noticed that my black dog is being joined by other dogs, by a whole pack. There’s the red dog of anger and pure fury, snapping, snarling, biting back for once….. The yellow dog of fear, cowardly, cringing, sideways glancing. The blue dog of grief, of sudden sobbing tears, welling up like a huge wave threatening to break over my head. Anything can set it off. I was reading Cait’s blog a few days back and Halleluyah was playing. I felt a catch at the back of my throat and that was it. I howled for about an hour, great wracking sobs.

This is written, by the way, not for sympathy or even empathy. It’s written for me (because I can’t write about everything that is happening in my life but I figure I can still write about how I feel about it). It’s also written because I truly believe that keeping depression, and all forms of mental illness, hidden and secret only increases the taboo, the shame, and stops other people from seeking the help they need. My black dog is, like my real life dog, pretty badly behaved – but at least I can own it, stick a microchip on it and a name tag on its collar. What is known is always less frightening than the unknown. Just maybe, if I can own my anger, grief and fear, I won’t need that black dog so much.