The Possible Project

For weeks now I've had a pull. I ignored it. Then I was driving out to volunteer for a local group that provides emotional support for young people who have experienced the loss of a parent. The route I travelled took me past the point that was pulling me, namely the walk from my house where I lived between the ages of 3 and 7, to the primary school I was at for the same time. I have many sketchy moments from that time, mainly painful, losses and trauma caused at the hands of my parents.  I woke up on a rainy Saturday morning and I knew that was the day. The day to walk the path I'd not trodden for over 40 years. I've excavated and processed through 27 layers, real identification of psychological adaptations made in the young self to survive what he was exposed to growing up. 27 is a lot. I am tired, my wife is tired. We're all shattered by the taking away of life caused by exposure to unsafe life growing up. Almost tired to the point of the relationship, the last thing...

One of the hardest things about dissolution, the dissolving of the self is being nowhere, no-one. Nothing.  At least when you were adapted and blind, there was a you, a pattern playing out in your world that people associated with you a personality, a person, "there's no-one quite like Richard". My relationships, I have understood relied on the energy that moved through me and into my world to remain afloat. The kind one, the funny one, the crazy one, the one with no limits, the one that would bring every ounce of himself to every engagement. The remnants of this remain as the void starts to take over and the old self hangs on to provide some ballast to the floating in your own space.  This period is also the loneliest. Perhaps the quietest so far, as the need to perform abates and you feel the grief of the self that was and is no longer. The pain is deeper but less violent. It is surrender from within. It is forward motion and sometimes that's all that matters. Today...

Grief hits people in different ways. To me its a definite process. As I write this I sit within it. Like a tree with its core hollowed out. It feels personal and lonely. It is mine.  My recovery is not special but it is complex. My trauma has been interlaced with loss. Loss of a sister to suicide and the loss of a father who I never had a relationship with and who caused a lot of the family pain. I am coming to a place of peace. The journey to get there has been brutal. Physically, mentally, within and without. Family, friends, work colleagues have to exist in the field you create and when the material you are carrying overwhelms, there is only one place it can go.  How do I know I am coming to the end? I am highly tuned to my process after 11 years of cyclical behaviour that has increased in intensity over time. As I have, in parallel built the capability to carry my pain, the emotion has stayed within to be processed, not released (as much) outwards in tears or migraine. The...

Pain lives within. Each scar you carry creates a lens that you seek to uncover in order for you to keep safe in the world (avoidance of the same pain again).  If you were made to feel small, inferior, then that is a lens you will view your world through. Looking, feeling, identifying any opportunity to attach that pain to a current experience to so you can react and control in order to protect yourself. Your response when you identify a threat to your emotional state? Well that could be anger, submission, argument, fawning. It could be any innumerable   response based on your adaptation methods, in turn based on your environment, personality and when the scar was formed.  Complex really. And simple too.  

I didn't know it at the time. At the time it was a pebble hitting the water, clean like a bullet through glass. No huge shock. No time standing still. The shock would come in dribs and drabs over the years. The bullet landed in 2015.  My sister, Josie, took her life on 8th May 2015. It was her last act of control, defiance, arranged around adaptations to her trauma that gave her more hooks than most. It was her husbands birthday. He has to live with this every year until he dies. It is not his fault. She, like me and my eldest sister, were raised in a chaotic and abusive household. Josie's adaptation was to have no needs. To put everyone else in front of her. This means she was liked. It also meant she was invisible. After cancer in her 20's took away her plan to heal, having her own family she could love and care for, the spiral downwards began.  My first experience with "mental health" was a referral from my GP who suggested counselling. This was in 2015, and fo...

I thought I’d start at the end. The end of 50 years of feeling something was off, not quite right. A journey that consumed me, my energy and my lifeblood for all of my life. When it lands, it does so with the grace and power of something that can only be felt, not necessarily understood cognitively. The body took over. Looking back, I think it took control in 2020, 2 weeks into a job as a teacher. I was driving into work. There was no self. Only a realisation that I was heading towards something that was self-harm. Pure and simple. I had left a successful career in IT and had retrained to teach to keep me sane during Covid. Literally. What has followed for 6 years is dissolution at its most profound. A constant and involuntary disintegration of the self. The ego fighting every step of the way to keep me trapped in the patterns I’d built to survive in a turbulent environment from birth. Patterns that showed themselves slowly, deliberately and pulled me apart, a bit at a time until a...