A large part of the tremendous change that I have undertook of myself in the past 8 years has been about developing an appropriate sense of self-confidence and interpersonal behaviour.
Before I started this long process of change and “healing” I did not really interact with other people. I had been hurt and betrayed by my parents and peers a like during an excruciating and traumatic childhood and I had generally had enough of trying to make friends and socialise. I know my parents meant me nothing but good, but shit happens and I have forgiven them. If there were people I was attracted to fear and anxiety controlled me and prevented me from doing anything short of looking like a idiot.
After my time in Kenilworth clinic I started a rapid process of reintegration into society. At the time I had long hair and gothi. I walked around in black clothes and trenchcoat, but I was out and exploring. Every personal interaction I had brought meaning to my life. I was a wild, crazy, extroverted enigma; always carrying my nargilla with me and cracking jokes.
Deep down, underneath I remained sensitive and was able to subtly use that to play crowds quite well. Under the right condition I could be the centre of attention of a large gathering. I suppose I still can, though I rarely venture down that road anymore. I crack jokes, tell great story and am full of witty chirps.
I had successfully changed school and integrated myself into life at Abbott’s college I was happy and matriculated well. I was accepted into medicine in order to help people. People were my higher power, the race of humanity. Those who fed me emotions and made me feel alive. Those who fuelled my recovery.
I went away with my oldest and dearest friends on my gap year, Shnat Habonim; Shnat hachsarah v’hagvurah. I declined my application to medicine and went. I was anxious and had discussed it with the people at Kenilworth clinic. I trusted most of the people I was going with. I had no idea what to expect and I found myself in Israel among the Australians.
I loved the Australians and they loved me. There are people from that cohort that I miss and wish I could live with – still, 5 year later. Then one day it rained chaos, hell and balefire. The program coordinator gave us the option to leave the Ausies and go our own way. I knew how the Ausies would react, but I allowed myself to be spoken down and we decided to leave them.
The rage and hurt leaving them caused tore my psyche into shreds. People that I loved more than other turned on me, shouted at me, verbally abused me and it was my fault. I had the power to have changed things, but didn’t for the good of the group. Humanity – my higher power had betrayed me. They treated me unfairly and unjustly. They were insensitive and they hurt me deeply, raking open new wounds.
For the week the followed leaving the Ausies I was a complete wreck. I slept a lot and felt anxious. Our small group of 9 grew together. He had our good times and our fights, but the damage was done and it was not worth it. For the first time as I write this I realise that I regret this decision. That’s two. I regret what happened with Spidey and I regret leaving the Ausies. It was within my power and it was not worth it leaving them.
After I got back from Shnat; hair cut short, gothi gone; the camp I had to go on was a little piece of hell. The girl that I loved for years was working with me. She hooked up with our Israeli in my tent, every night. I missed the Ausies and I didn’t know where I was going to live after camp. I had told my father in no uncertain terms that I did not want to move back home with my mother. At the time he was living in a bachelor flat. I had stayed with my neighbours the 2 days we had between Shnat and camp. I couldn’t go back there. My best friend betrayed me by not having time for me. I needed him, but he had other responsibilities.
Medicine was difficult. After Shnat I had a lot of social confidence and hoped and believed that I would meet more amazing people. I met a girl and fell in love with her instead. The people who study medicine, with some exceptions, fall into 2 categories: Religious nutcases and very competitive bastards/bitches. I don’t like either of those cohorts of people. So for the first year and a half of medicine I hung around the girl I love and her friends. I eventually wound up feeling like a puppy-dog chasing after its owner; pathetic.
I was working too hard studying and wound up going back into individual therapy at the beginning of 2005 and by mid 2005 I was back on hardcore medication. Kenilworth clinic – those who destroyed my previous personality and rebuilt my current one erroneously lead me to believe that I could do it without medication – and I cannot; the anxiety is too much much – its like a burning all of liquid fire and freezing ice burning out of sight into the sky and washing over me, taking away my breath, my thoughts and my hopes and with it comes it friend.
My depression is bimodal. I have an anxious depression which is subtle. I am well versed at dealing with myself and my feelings and it sometimes can take weeks for me to admit to myself that I a depressed and in need of help. The main sign is sleeping I sleep more and feel body pain more than normal, the classic signs like loss of social interest, anhedonia, etc are still there, but they are within me and the change is subtle. It’s something that is bearable and unnoticeable if it lasts for days or weeks, but prolonged it is not compatible with life.
The other less common form of my depression is an emptiness that knows no bounds. It’s a stillness of mind, body and sole that stretches off as a grey cloud concealing every colour into dull tones and blanketing out the sounds of the world. It feels like that look in the actresses eyes when she is stabbed fatally moments before completing her life’s work, the pleading desperation in her eyes unexpressed by her quivering lips, her limbs flailing uselessly as she falls down dead and empty.
But why? Why did my depression and anxiety return with such avengeance? It did so for the simple reason that it did. Yes, there were numerous extraneous and internal factors at the time like miserable home life, loving a beautiful girl who had the maturity of 10 year old and didn’t share my feelings and made her and all of her friends stop talking to me from one day to the next, loneliness, lack of motivation to study, etc. Betrayed by my own body.
Bottom line is that I am ill. My biogenetic make-up has imbued me with the superpower of major depressive disorder. I will be on medication for the rest of my life. I will have major depressive episodes. I will have anxiety. I will deal with it because there is no escape.
As I said earlier, but I feel I need to mention it again, I told the girl that I love how I felt. I spoke about her for session after agonising session with my psychologist. I knew that she didn’t feel the same. I was no longer in denial about it, but I thought, mistakenly, that she was a sweet human being who would deal with me gently. I was so painfully wrong. I was shaking with anxiety while I drove her to her Rosh Hashanah venue. I told her after I parked for her to get out and she said “Don’t say things like that.” Betrayed again
University got worse. The people who I had called my friends, from 1 day to the next, stopped talking to me. I had been betrayed by my friends. The shit thing was that for the next 12 months I was stuck in a group with them and a bunch of other people that I generally did not get on with.
It was during that time that I was forced by the awkward painful space I was trapped in at university to redevelop myself. I started carrying a book around with me at all times. I read the wheel of time and other fantasy books. At the soonest possible moment after a compulsory activity ended I would run away from the little flaming hell I had created for myself and found a corner to read. I learned to be independent of other human beings and their feelings, irrationalities and betrayals, though that lonely empty part of me that characterised my previous borderline personality ached more I become more independent.
At the end of 2005 the last and final betrayal came and it nearly killed me. During 2005 I had invested a lot of time and effort into Spidey and we were very close. This was all telephonic and over the net because she was now on Shnat. I asked her what we were going to do about it and I scared the living crap out of her and she never spoke to me the same way again. She returned at the end of the year, still feeling awkward as well and still as mature as a new born caterpillar and she ignored me.
My youth movement had empowered me to run the kitchen at camp; a job that I would never have been able to prepare for. Each day at camp I would be verbally abused from dawn till dusk, then after the quite calm of night settle in over machaneh neve shalom I would run to my tent, unable to go relax with my friends because Spidey would sit there and break my heart to burning piece of death. My youth movement betrayed me because they needed somebody to do an impossible job and I was willing.
For 6 months after machaneh I was a wreck. I didn’t see people. I didn’t talk to people. I didn’t do anything. One day I got home from university to find a big fuck-off mountain fire burning so close to the house I was living in at the time as a care taker that I could feel the fire’s heat easily from the front door. Once a helicopter’s waterbomb landed on our lawn. Fucking close. Anyway, so I got home and Spidey was there. I went and did work on my computer, then I walked out to see the fire and saw The Enemy kissing her, the girl I loved, in MY HOUSE! I cried and I went to bed and wrote a note for my door saying “Do not disturb me unless the house is on fire.” Then, yes, you guessed it, somebody disturbed me. Friends from university came to visit and then I locked my keys in my door. The next day I was forced to go to university to watch a movie called “whit.” It’s this really awesome movie where you get to watch Emma Thomson die of cancer – in graphic, soul destroying detail. I sobbed like a little girl, went to a friend for supper and then got home to find spidey and her new toy boy waiting for me.
We had a fight; you know, one with fighting and saying mean things to one-another. There were 2 points that made it different. Point one was that I didn’t say anything mean to her and she said the single most hurtful thing any human being has ever said to me “I used to think you were amazing when you were with !%#$- the perfect guy, but now you’re just fucked up.” Secondly half the stuff she was saying was untrue; lies to try and make me go away.
It took me a year-and-a-half to finally sit down with her and speak about our feelings honesty. I jumped around screaming for an hour afterwards. It took me another year and her being a complete bitch to me to apologise and start treating me decently.
Things have been comparatively better since then. At the end of 2006 I moved in to a house with my father and stepmother in edgemead. It was good to move out of the youth bayit. I was finally able to put huge distance between Spidey and myself. In 2007 I was able to submit a written request to not be placed in the same university group as the girl I love.
There were more betrayals, but they have gotten easier to bear. The other day I even managed to get rejected by a girl I like without even feeling bad.
Since my time in Kenilworth Clinic in the winter of 2003 where my entire world, soul and personality were unmade by shear force of will it has not been an easy ride.
I care deeply about my friends and I always will, though most times I do not feel like seeing people. I spend a lot of time sleeping and reading and a lot more time feeling alive and directionless. There still exists a huge emptiness inside me. It is as much a part of me as my humour and my emotions. When I am busy I am happy, but I struggle to find internal motivation to create and strive. When I am idle I do not feel driven by the emptiness to fill it anymore.
That’s not entirely true; often, late at night, before I go to bed, I will hold my cellphone in my hand and think of a beautiful, intelligent and/or funny girl to sms and hope that she will give me some hope. Often I fight the feeling down and put my phone away. Generally the emptiness rebreads itself. It sits there like some monolithic tribute to my failure to find a mate, to the betrayals that stood testament to the naivety of my shattered dreams. It can cripple me and make me feel like lying down and dying.
I have many things that I must force my self to do. I manage to get myself up every morning, to dress and clean myself, to go to university and help others. I push myself to study, to go out, to see people, to do much, but, without a shadow of a doubt, the hardest thing that I have to force myself to do is to walk away from the hopes that those women who I loved and who betrayed me will sms me, call me or whatever and say “I am sorry. I miss you. I love you too. Everything’s going to be alright.”
There are, however, two fundemantal problems with the above hope.
1. Everything is not going to be alright – bottom line we all suffer and die, its a slow subtle process that is best past unnoticed, focussing on the small victories among the great defeats
2. They are not sorry. None of them and they do not miss me or give a flying fuck. Neither shnicks, nor spidey nor BYT, nor Lolita, nor Alia of the knife, nor Gebsta, nor my dear long lost schizophrenic love. AND THEY WILL NEVER!
So now sit here in my bedroom in my house in Edgemead. I am cold and contently full after supper. I have my desk and bedside lights on and my room light off. I am wearing grey fluffy slippers, white socks, black cargo pants, a quicksilver belt that I have been planning to scrape the logo off for ages, red briefs, red t-shirt, red polar fleece zip-up tracksuit top. My glasses are dirty and my ankles are sore from the pressure of sitting cross legged. My back hurts from my bad posture. My father is washing the dishes an my step-mother is pottering around the house somewhere. It is cold.
I look around my room and see all of the material possessions that I have collect around me. My computer, the big wooden desk my father gave me. My bookshelf with a row of university books a row of leisure books – mostly fantasy. My bottom shelf with a 70cm pile of old Mad Magazines from my adolescence. A shelf of computer game boxes from back when they made computer game boxes and another shelf with other crap. My clothes, my bed, my draws.
This stuff means so little to me and is all replaceable. I spent time cleaning everything and making it neat to fill my empty time. I cleaned my car. I polished it until it shone and I could see my reflection in it just to fill the time. I tutored a beautiful 17 year old girl that I am not interested in so I could earn more money to spend on more shit, or more likely petrol and food.
I can go out for dinner with friends; eat tasty food and feel that nagging emptiness asking me: “Is this IT?” When I was younger I used to feel so fulfilled and excited by just seeing my friends on the weekends, now I feel nothing but let-down. My emptiness laughs mockingly at me and I grin cynically
Who is this empty shadow of a man that I have become? I have born witness to horrors in my life beyond description. I have survived and endured despite the guarded outlook I was given at Kenilworth clinic. Some would argue that I have not survived but succeeded and achieved much.
My medication controls my anxiety to the extent that it is not there most of the time. I need to take medication to sleep. My body hurts me. My joints! My skin! I want to crawl out of my own skin and be free! My medication controls the pain. I reject the yuppie flu / fibromyalgia / chronic fatigue syndrome label.
I ask that I may find somebody to share my life with. Somebody who can understand me and stimulate me and care for me. Somebody who is stable, well adjusted and caring. Should this not be possible I ask that my desire and hope to find this person be removed from me so that I can get on with existing until I am granted my release.
I have found a form of strength in my old age. I am a caring and sensitive person without any spite. I have found my spirituality and sometimes some quiet peace. So help me god I swear it upon those who I love that should you betray me, with intent, I will destroy you utterly and completely so that you live and exist in unspeakable agony for countless miserable years. If you mistakenly betray me I will walk away and never look back.
Grace, grant me the strength to walk away from those who I loved who betrayed me.
Grace, grant me the courage to forgive those who loved me and betrayed me
Grace, grant me serenity to wait in until I find somebody with whom to take comfort and hope.
Grace, when the time is right, grant me the freedom I have sought for so many years