Your Best Friend

As I sat here, bleary-eyed at 2am from a full day of cricket, frisbee and adventure, I was pleasantly surprised to see that a new Blog Roll topic had been posted - A letter to yourself 10 years ago or 10 years in the future. It's been a long time, no write, so despite the late hour, and my body's inside voice whispering "Sleep! Sleep time!", I think there isn't any time better than the present to get stuck in to it.

However, it's probably not advisable. 10 years ago... phew, that would make me nearly 12. There's a lot of dark memories and emotions that lurk back there. Most have been captured and placed carefully in a chest, buried somewhere deep in the sandpit of my mind, nary to be looked at except for the odd peek or prod over the years. A couple of you may know the reasons, most probably won't, but my early teen years weren't the happiest nor the fondest to look back on.

To be honest, I kinda feel sorry for that kid back then. I think instinctively we all feel sorry for our younger selves. They represent an innocent place. A sweet, pure place before we all grow, lose that magic fervour for life and get corrupted and abused by the world. The innocence and blissful ignorance seems so pitiful, but at the same time wondrously special and unique. It only happens once in your life. Once you are aware of the world, you can never go back. Your younger self is the embodiment of the passage of time and the gift of knowledge, which cuts both ways in giving enlightenment, but also stealing your childhood away. Your younger self is what you've lost.

I feel especially sad for my younger me, because I know what the next few years have in store. And not just that, but because even if I could, I probably wouldn't change the course of the coming years. They hurt. They ushered in the end of my childhood. But they made me who I am today. Looking back writing this, it almost feels like I'm offering him up as a sacrifice while I stand idly by. It's hard, but I know in the end, it all comes right. We can't stay innocent forever, and upsetting as it is, we all must lose our purity in a sense.

I was bullied from a young age. I'd probably even go so far as to say I've been bullied by various people from various vocations to this very present day. It never stops hurting. As a grown man, all my competitive instincts are telling me to write down that it doesn't, but the truth is, it never stops hurting. I've learnt to cope, ignore and grow a thick skin, but it affects you. Maybe you don't get sad or angry any longer, and maybe you even begin to realize that it's not your problem, but the bully's (I indeed spent a good portion of those 10 years blaming myself for the bullying), but it still affects you. I'd say being bullied is like being attacked by shovels. Saying it, it's actually kind of funny, but probably accurate. The shovels dig little holes inside you, taking bits of you out that were good, and replacing them with hurt. Over time, the holes get bigger and bigger until they make a great, deep hole. After that, if you make it that far, the shovels go in but they don't have as much of an effect. But they're still there. They never leave. They're always with you, somehow, some way, even if it's only in how they've altered your life, a sick reminder of how lost little boys and girls can forever brand you with their mark.

For me, being bullied left me with a profound sense of being entirely alone. Even to this very day, I feel that sting often. I remember one instance very clearly. I was sitting at assembly on one of the seats at the back. One of the kids kept looking back and laughing to his friends. He finally turned to me and said I was a loner. Looking back now I almost laugh at how silly it all was, and it's painfully clear why the boy felt the need to degrade others to feel superior - I play in the same cricket league as him now and he barely reaches my armpit. I feel sorry for him just as much as I feel sorry for 12 year old me back then. But the shovel still went in and with it comes a ripple effect. And with a ripple effect comes habits and experiences and deep-rooted emotions that even my now mature and rational brain struggles to root out and placate.

Bullying wasn't the sole part of my struggles as an early teenager, but it was a large part, and not having friends and the feeling of being isolated made the other strifes harder to cope with. So if I were to say anything to an 11 year old me, it wouldn't be long, and it wouldn't ruin all the hurt and joy and adventures and sorrows of the coming years. It would say only one thing: You are not alone.

I had a best friend when I was small, but unfortunately moved away from him, so for the most part, my childhood was friend-less and with none occupying that title of "Best Friend". I still try to this very day to make that connection with someone, perhaps as a way of fulfilling that little boy's dream and showing him he is loveable and worthy, despite the jeers and the bullies. Sometimes when I'm close, the little kid inside stand up and goes "That's not right! You're a loner! You don't have any friends!" and no matter what my rational brain tries to argue, I tend to push more friends away than I'd care. So maybe me in ten years needs to send present me a letter too, because I'd tell that little kid he does have a best friend. One that he'll never lose. One that will never call him a loser or put him down. The one friend who will never abandon him and who will always understand him...

His best friend is himself.

So don't think you're alone. You've had me there the entire time and no matter what, you're gonna turn out great and despite the hate you've shown me over the years, it's not your fault and I still love you. Oh, and you're going to go a family friend's party when you're older. A girl is going to be hitting you; it means she likes you. Then she's going to take you behind the shed and attempt to kiss you. Do NOT run away this time! Geesh...

And that'd be all I'd write. Maybe I'd listen to me. Maybe I'd think I was just B.S.'ing. But at least on those days where it was nearly all too much, maybe I'd know in the back of my head that I had a best friend who was there for me. And maybe it'd make those days just a little bit more bearable.


Phew! That was hard. With that, I think I'll stop prodding the thing in the chest, load the sand back on top of it and leave it until next time.

Misery Loves Misery

Dwayne: I wish I could just sleep until I was eighteen and skip all this crap. High school and everything. Just skip it. 
Frank: Do you know who Marcel Proust is? 
Dwayne: He's the guy you teach.
Frank: Yeah. French writer. Total loser. Never had a real job. Unrequited love affairs. Gay. Spent 20 years writing a book almost no one reads. But he's also probably the greatest writer since Shakespeare. Anyway, he gets down to the end of his life, and he looks back and decides that all those years he suffered, those were the best years of his life, 'cause they made him who he was. All those years he was happy? Total waste. Didn't learn a thing. So, if you sleep until you're 18, think of the suffering you're gonna miss. I mean high school? Those are your prime suffering years. You don't get better suffering than that...

The above quote is from the movie 'Little Miss Sunshine'. If anyone has watched the film, and you really should, you'll probably remember Steve Carrell imparting this wisdom to his nephew. Despite being entirely funny, it is also very true, and probably one of my favourite movie quotes of all time.

The topic is contentment. Happiness in your current state of being. I read the word and imagine someone sitting in a warm, comfy armchair with a blanket, some snacks, watching tv or reading a newspaper. Maybe there's a cat purring away on their lap. It's all very nice. Pleasant. You're happy and don't really care what happens outside or if this moment ever ends.

It is also completely useless.

Contentment is the opposite of living. If you are content, you are more or less metaphorically dead. My philosophy has, and always will be, that experience is life. When you are content, you are experiencing nothing new. You are living in a stale, albeit comfortable, state where there is nothing left to strive for. So by that rationale, pain and suffering is life, as those are the only real times you experience anything meaningful at all. The times you are happy, content, comfortable, you are not learning anything. It's the years of hardship and pain that define us. What do winning sports teams learn? And what about a team that has lost? At the top, the only ways are stagnation or decline and the old saying, learn from your mistakes rings ever true.

People frustrate the heck out of me when they do not want to venture out of their comfort zone. They never want to feel discomfort. They're so zealous to actively avoid displeasure and pain that it rules their entire life. And when suffering comes, and it does, it hits them hard and they scarcely cope. But they learn. What were they learning by avoiding risk and by avoiding pain? They learnt only how to avoid living.

It may sound a bit like I'm stuck in Clive Barker's 'Hellraiser' novel, but I really do believe everything I've written above is true. I don't live for status or fame or wealth. I live for experience, because that is my version of success. The days I'm most miserable are the days where I do nothing. I don't experience anything. The days where I'm at home, stagnating; content and comfortable, but completely miserable at the fact. And from the misery, I learn. Mostly not to sit around being miserable haha...

So every day I strive to add a new experience to my life. At the end, I want to be able to look back with many stories to tell and say "I have no regrets". I may have experienced a lot of suffering, and I really have already in my short life, but to tell the truth, I kinda enjoy the pain. I look back on tough times in my life and think "I made it! I'm here!" There will undoubtedly be times I enjoy an experience, and other times I do not enjoy an experience, but the key thing is to accept every experience, appreciate what it can teach you and don't see failure, discomfort and pain as a bad thing, but as a chance to learn and live. Through being unhappy it comes around and in turn, makes me happy.

This feeds pretty well into a mind-blowing radio show I listened to late one night a few months ago. I kidnapped my family's head-set radio and flicked through the channels. I came to one, the last FM frequency, the local suburb's station, probably with an audience you could count on a single hand. And yet it was one of the most profound shows I've ever listened to, on Buddhism and suffering. If I look through the notes I took down, I'll find the name of the speaker and give it to you sometime.

The speaker talked a lot about suffering and pain. The true way to life is to take the 'middle path', experiencing the high and lows of the life around you. The joy and the suffering. The monks he talked of saw these experiences as positive experiences and that this middle path is the road to liberation. Buddha says himself, "Life is dukkha". No, it's not slang, it means suffering. Life is suffering. For Buddhists, the view of suffering is so vastly different from the association we make with the term in Western culture: unpleasantness, to be avoided, bad. But whether we notice it or not, from the moment we are born, to the moment we die, we are suffering. There is no avoiding it. Whether you learn from it is another thing entirely.

Although it's always nice to be comfortable and content, I think I'd much rather prefer to suffer and be happy in that suffering for the rest of my days. Always happy, but never content. I don't want to know that day I stand there thinking I've got nothing more to achieve, nothing more to learn, nothing more to gain and experience. The day we stop striving, suffering and seeking new experience is the day we are dead.

Greetings Russian Readers!

I'm a huge stats fan, so imagine my surprise when I looked at this blog's statistics and found that it was getting really popular in Russia. This is probably not of importance to anyone (not even the Russian readers), but more for my own bemusement. Stay tuned for more, or as they say in Russia...

Actually scratch that. I put the sentence in the translator, and it instead spewed out a bunch of Star Trek symbols my computer cannot copy. And I call myself a quarter-Russian... pah.

Call Denied

This post is probably best read whilst listening to a loop of 'Best Laid Plans' by James Blunt. I know I certainly was listening to it while I was writing! Words sum up perfectly everything I'm trying to convey through this post. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jWW0-Run_g

You could say this post was a direct result of the Blog Roll having 'a calling' as one of their current topics. You could say this was an easy post to write. It would all be a lie. I've written and re-written this opening paragraph a dozen times already, unsure how to word it, and to be honest, I'm not even sure this is what I'll end up with.

A reminder of a past sorrow came back today, and I needed to let it out on paper for reasons unknown. Sometimes sadness is too great to be kept inside, and when you haven't put brush to canvas for far too long, keyboard to pixel is often the best option for one's sanity. The guise of 'a calling' was probably the only way to deliver my thoughts cohesively, but really, it's nothing more than a slim cover for the hurt that I'm feeling right now. The only real truth I know that can sum up this post is that the one calling I want, no, need, of all the others, is the very one I can never have.

Have you ever wanted something so unwaveringly that every second you don't have it feels like you are strapped to a torture chamber, enduring the most heinous debasement, endlessly? You struggle at first, screaming and thrashing, disbelieving that such a terrible fate can be befalling you. Then after a while, you break. In the back of your mind you'll keep the desire to escape alive, but your body slowly goes through the motions of acceptance. Before long, even your mind has begun to fade and the dream of what you once had are long distant and clouded.

It's dramatic for certain, but it is exactly how I feel when I think about my two cousins. They're aged, well, I don't really know any more. The last time I saw them was many years ago. Boy have those years flown, each a measurable monument to the growing gap in my life caused by their absence. For reasons too complex and lengthy to dissect, I am no longer allowed to see them. You could say my relationship with them was nothing more than a chess pawn in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the decision made only to hurt and alienate.

I remember the very first time I held my cousins. The first when I was about eight perhaps, the other when I was older. I've never loved another being so much. I don't plan on having children for many years yet, but I'd imagine the feeling of love and caring I felt for them in that instant is as close as I'll get until such a time. From that first moment on, I knew it was my job to be their guardian in life. A role model and protector. We grew extremely close. I'd write them notes on how to be better people and look after themselves. I'd spend hours playing with them, teaching them, although I probably was the one who learnt the most out of the relationship; they matured me as a person in ways that nothing other than responsibility can teach. I'd never have thought that I'd know the day when I'd barely remember their faces, let alone struggle to imagine what they would look like now. The only thing I have left is that feeling of responsibility and love. The one that resides in me still from my time with them. A small nugget that keeps me going.

The goal has always been pure. To be there for them and to be a positive force in their lives. Nothing remains now but memories and this faint, nostalgic will I have to still be there for them, despite the miles and years that have transpired between us. You could label it a calling. An unbreakable bond I feel to my role as their guardian. I bide my time, but through the fog of positivity and hopefulness, I know it will be many years before I'll ever seen them again. When they're old enough to come find me of their own free will. Many years, many chances I've missed to be there for them.

I sometimes lie awake at night and sit watching a passing car's lights dance on the ceiling, thinking about how their day has been. What young men they are turning into. Sometimes I get sad. Thinking of the day they were bullied and I wasn't there to pass on the experience and reassurance I learnt when at school. Or when their pet dies and they need someone to confide in. Sometimes I get angry. Angry at the situation. Angry at how it's not fair. Angry at it all. Other times I roll over and go to sleep, apathetic in the knowledge that no matter how I try, we'll be apart.

When I was younger, although it still happens from time to time now, I used to get extremely excited when waiting for something. Not a thing or treat, but something to return. Our back door would be difficult to open, so dad would set me the task of opening it when he returned with another load of shopping from the car, or an item from the garage. I'd sit there, staring at the door, jiggling with excitement. I wouldn't know when or how or what would come through the door. But I knew it was coming. That moment of realization when everything slots into place, and the lifetime you felt standing there crashes into the present and you can see it all. The excitement I will feel, when finally I can fulfill the promise I made to my baby cousins, does dilute the weight I bear of the separation, making it easier to digest. Every day I carry on living, but in the back of my mind there is that metaphorical egg timer I know is ticking. I don't know when it will go off, but I know the day will come. And when it does, I'll be able to resume the calling held on pause for so long.

You may hear me say this a lot - and it's only because it is entirely true and something I live my life by - but you only have one life. One tiny blink of a life to make the changes and do the things you have to do. I have a large list. An infinite list that I know will never be completed. It pains me that the biggest regret, the biggest failure, happens to be the one thing I can truly call 'a calling'. The one thing I want more than anything.

One day, I think to myself whenever something reminds me of them. One day. And then I carry on living. I feel guilty, but I try and convince myself that when they find me, if they even still remember me, that they'll know I tried my hardest and forgive me.

One day...


Well! Hope nobody has hung themselves yet lol. Just had to get that off my chest. Two birds with one stone and all that jazz...

Burning a Hole in My Pocket

Ever feel the sting of a coin in your pocket as you walk through a street? You pass a busker, a homeless man, or more than a few sale signs. Like a kindred spirit, it yearns to be free. Sometimes you'll chuck it in any adjacent guitar case, but more often than not, it'll sit in your pocket. As you walk, it'll get heavier. The heavier it gets, the more excuses there are not to give it away; it may have become a lucky penny or destined for a function you'll never use it for. And there it will sit.

Blogging for me is like that coin. Being an extremely artistic person, who wears his heart on his sleeves made of open wounds and emotion, expressing myself comes very naturally to me, especially in the written form. I've always wanted to blog seriously - at one point I did to some small success, but they were from darker times in my life - but there has always been an excuse. I can feel the sting of needing to write down my thoughts, my fears, my words, but there has always been that fear factor residing in my mind, stopping me from doing anything more than a journal.

And then came along the Blog Roll. I watched it for several weeks, if not months - a group of friends blogging on topics and discussing their thoughts. My previous blog was anonymous. I enjoyed the free reign of being totally open with another being possibly sitting at their computer, reading and thinking about my troubles, knowing that someone out there heard my plea. Although a journal is great, there is something profound about blogging to an audience.

Over the years I've grown. Matured. I'm still in that process. It wasn't until just now that I decided to take the plunge and blog for real. No masks, just me and people who knew me. The risk is higher, but the reward too. I didn't come to the decision lightly. More than ever, I am aware that anything on the internet is public. Once it's out there, there's no taking it back. I'm at a point in my life where people know me. People from my career, my life, my friends. Not all people I expect to understand who I am or why I do. And there in lies the rub.

I, like most artists, work well when I'm emotionally attached to my work. Writing is just another form of that art. Writing relaxes me. Helps me work through my thoughts and understand myself better. It is an extremely personal and internal process. When you share yourself with another person, your emotions and fears and the reality of yourself, you are so very vulnerable. So you can imagine the surge of fear knowing that all this was being released like a torrent onto not anonymous readers, but possibly people I know. I nearly backed out of writing this. Like a coin I was attached to, I nearly shoved my hand back into my pocket and turned away. If I can't write from the heart, then it's not my writing; and yet that very passion is the thing which often gets me burnt. Not everyone sees the world with the same eyes - I'm not special in that regard - but in a way, it's time I liked it.

So here is the result. It may very well turn out that nothing more than bland posturing fills these pages, far from the suicidal and left wing ramblings you're probably expecting after reading all that (!), but at least I've taken the first step away from fear and towards a place where I am unabashed in expressing myself. The training wheels are off. If people do not like who I am, then they are not worth my time trying to convince them. I know who I am and am not ashamed. Expect to see my musings and thoughts on both the topics given by the Blog Roll, and on issues and events in my life. Maybe some of my work or anything I feel fits. However you won't see anything watered down. Edited and redacted in case someone I know might see it and disapprove. It wouldn't serve the purpose of my writing and I won't put you through that - I'd make for far too boring a read! People have always said one of my best traits is that I'm honest and they know where I stand. No masks, no lies. This blogger has seen far too many of those in his life and this is not a time to perpetuate them.

So let's go give that busker a coin. You don't need it any longer.