Tag: psychology

short stories

~ In Another Place ~

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in another place

~ In Another Place ~

 “Where are you?” she asked me. 

 “What do you mean?” I said. “I’m right here.”

“No, I don’t mean it like that. Like right now, where are you? I can see that you’re standing here in front of me, but I feel like the real you is far away in another place. A place that I can’t get to. A place I can’t see or touch or reach.”

An awkward silence followed her words. I looked at her and knew exactly what she meant. I could see a sort of sad confusion in her eyes. I knew she could sense that I was not truly there in that time or place with her. She was perceptive and had a vision for those things. There was no way I could pretend to not know what she was on about. I didn’t know what to tell her and, to be honest, I wasn’t too sure of the answer anyway.

“I’m not sure where I am,” I told her. “I guess I’ve never really been sure.” She looked at me as the silence surrounded us. A few seconds passed until she turned away and we continued on with the day to forget about the moment like it never existed.

It was a poignant moment of interaction and one which stayed on my mind for a few days after. It was true that I really had no specific answer to where my true self was, but I knew that it wasn’t here of this earth. All my years I had been there walking through the requirements of life. I opened doors. I walked into rooms. I stood in front of others and let words come out of my mouth. Physically I was there, but another part of me was off roaming a place that was not of this world or dimension. Often, I got lost in it as I sat staring into space or looking wistfully out of a classroom window. In a strange way, I was merely a bystander to all that was going on around me – a sort of spirit in a surrogate body just here out of a duty imposed on me by an unknown force.

It was a state of being which left me out of sync with my surrounding environment. I found it harder than most to be a part of the world because my heart and soul was not truly in it. The places I went; the lessons I attended; the jobs I worked – it was just something I had to do to be a part of everything, but deep down my soul was relentlessly wandering through some nameless wilderness. In the meanwhile, I looked into the eyes of the others and beheld a look I just simply couldn’t relate to. They all seemed to be really there – as if they were part of the world and fundamentally belonged to it. Sometimes I wondered how obvious it was to them that the same look wasn’t in my eyes, and what they would do exactly if they knew how much of an imposter I was. 

Though the vast majority of people looked like they belonged to this world, I knew there were a few others out there who felt what I felt inside. Sometimes I thought I spotted them while out there roaming the streets. They had a specific look in their eyes – a subtle one that was often confused for someone daydreaming. They wore that look because deep within they also felt that they just didn’t belong. In their flesh and bones, they could feel a strange yearning; an inner tugging to some ineffable place far away in space and time. Since the very start of their lives, they had experienced this homesickness for a place they’d never seen or been – a place they couldn’t even describe, but somehow knew existed out there somewhere beyond the ether. Like me, they would have to speak the sentences that kept them functioning and do the things that kept them alive, but they also needed those moments of solitude and silence in which they could try to feel a connection to the home that had eluded them since birth. 

There were times when that solitude gave me moments when it felt like I was almost there. They came out of nowhere: a moment’s hiking in nature when the sunlight shone through the trees; standing on a dusk shoreline without another soul in sight; the moments when I had been writing my thoughts down in a silent room late at night. They were moments of completeness with the surrounding environment when some things at least started to connect and make sense – when I was somewhat in the right direction to heading home. But always they were short-lived and I was soon left feeling like a foreigner stranded in alien lands once again.

I read about this theory one day that we are all spirits here in human bodies, but some of us have mistakenly arrived here from another place. I think that maybe it’s true. It’s clear to me some people have crash-landed on the wrong planet, existing in the wrong age or world. Those ‘old souls’ or ‘wayward spirits’ – destined to always wander on and never feel a true attachment to the places they reside in. I dunno, it’s getting hard pretending I belong here. I guess I will keep opening those doors, walking through those rooms, speaking those words and doing those things that keep me a part of this world, but know that a part of me has all but left it a long time ago. If you ever see me staring into space with a look of longing in my eyes, know that I am man lost in the spaces of my own being – a sort of sailor out on the ocean of existence, steering my way through the storm, setting my eyes to the horizon – searching for the sight of a shore that will one day let me know what it’s like to finally walk the lands of home.

short stories

~ Things They’d Never Understand ~

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~ Things They’d Never Understand ~

“So, how’s the job going?”

“I quit,” I told him.

“You quit? why?”

 “I wasn’t able to write.”

“What do you mean you weren’t able to write?”

“I wasn’t able to write, like when I went home. I had used up all my mental energy at work.”

“So?” he said. “The job was a good opportunity for you. Who cares about the writing?”

“I do,” I said.

“But you don’t even make money off your writing. Your job had a lot of opportunities.”

“It doesn’t matter about the opportunities,” I told him. “If I’m not able to write then there’s no point to any of it.”

“I don’t understand you really. Your writing is just a hobby. You had room for progression at that place.”

“Look,” I said. “It doesn’t matter about the job or the money or the room for progression. None of that stuff fulfils me like my writing does. If the job stops me from doing that then I’ll happily leave it and struggle to get by another way. As long as I can write. That’s all that matters. As long as I can write.”

He stared at me with a confused look. I could see the cogs in his head turning as he tried to grasp my view, but after twenty seconds I could see that he had given up and dismissed me as a madman. I thought of a load of other ways I could try to explain it to him, but knowing that he was a career-focused guy whose reality and sense of self were determined by his employment and bank balance, I knew it was like trying to speak English to a goldfish. There was simply no way to convey how my happiness or value system worked. There was no way to explain how just putting some words down on a page kept me from going insane completely. After ten seconds of awkward silence, he shook his head in disbelief and walked off.

A part of me understood his confusion in all reality. I had been working the ‘proper job’ for over four weeks now. It was my first ever nine-to-five role that paid better than anything I had ever had before. My parents were happy I had finally got something stable; my friends thought that I was finally preparing to conform to the norms of society. In all honesty, I was quite happy to have some sort of stability after surviving on agency temp jobs and medical trials for a while, but I knew straight away that the job was going to twist and tear me up. Besides the main problem of losing my energy to write, a lot of the job involved speaking on the phone which was a pet hate of mine, and it also involved being concentrated and engaged for the majority of the day. I was a chronic daydreamer and didn’t want to be deprived of my daydreaming. Having to advise someone on the phone for forty minutes meant there was no way for me to go sailing off through the galaxies of my mind on my latest introspective adventure. Besides that, the whole sitting behind a desk all day in artificial lighting in an office was something that was spiritually suffocating to me. 

Typically I got accused of being depressed or anxious or something like that. But in reality, it simply wasn’t true. I actually felt amazing once I quit. I mean, I was back to being poor, but every day I woke up happy and went to sleep happy. In between, I meditated, napped, read, went for long walks and spent hours working on my writing. To be honest, I could imagine myself doing that until the day I died. I just wanted to work an easy stress-free job and have time to do the things I cared about. Naturally, to many I seemed to lack ambition, but my ambition was simply to be healthy and happy and live a simple life where I had time to explore my passions. To me it was just basic common sense, but apparently such notions were some of the things they would never understand. And of those, there had been quite a few…

“Why do you keep travelling all the time? What are you trying to prove?”

“You’re so smart. Why can’t you get a proper job?”

“Why would you rather be alone than join us at the party?”

There was only so much of being misunderstood a person could take before they went insane completely. I was a complicated person I suppose. A person guided completely by the heart with no logic. A feeler not a thinker. An idealist not a pragmatist. Turbulent and temperamental. Slightly schizophrenic to a degree; able to switch my personality and perspective as I had pleased. Someone who had no set place in society that I could easily slot myself into. Someone that even the therapists and shamans stared at with confused eyes.

Those looks of confusion struck me relentlessly as I went about life. Sometimes they struck me in social environments, sometimes at work, sometimes at family dinners. I think the one that stuck in my memory the most was when I was asked why I was so open about how I felt about life. I had been ridiculed and called weird for expressing myself so openly in the writings I published on my blog.

“Don’t you think it’s a bit strange all of the things you tell people? Don’t you think there are some things you should keep to yourself?”

“No, not really,” I said. “It makes sense to speak from the heart. If everyone did that, the world might not be as complicated as it is.”

“But it just makes things awkward. You’ll scare people off. Can’t you just act normal for once?”

“I don’t like to wear a mask. I think it leads to a world of people hiding who they really are.”

“Not everyone thinks like you do.”

“Sure they do. Everyone thinks deep about stuff, yet we just sit around talking about the weather and football and television. No one has the guts to speak about how they feel deep down. People are afraid, and so they should be. Speaking from the heart all the time automatically makes people put up barriers against you. They keep you at a distance. They don’t accept you. Humanity isn’t ready for a world of people not wearing their masks and speaking straight from the heart. Because I do this, I am cast out and categorised as the insane one. Don’t you realise how absolutely stupid that is? That I am the outsider because I just speak up about how I feel? In the meanwhile, the people who are fake and insincere attract the most people toward them…”

They looked at me in total silence. As usual, I could see the cogs turning in their heads. I thought maybe my luck was in and they would understand my perspective for once, but a few more seconds passed and I was dismissed as a madman once again. My view was simply the comical ranting of a lunatic to them – something that belonged to another time or place or universe. It was something that I found frustrating and damaging beyond words. When you pour out your truth and your heart and it appears as incoherent nonsense to another, then that is the moment when the loneliness strikes you greater than ever. I didn’t even think what I was saying was difficult to comprehend and understand. I just wanted a world where people were authentic and genuine; where people didn’t sell off parts of themselves to fit into the crowd. I tried to explain this to them but they just didn’t want to hear it. My values were so horrifically different from those of society that I knew I was doomed and destined to be an outcast until the end of my days. Deep down, I knew that I was never to be understood totally, but I had this vision – this dream if you will – that one day if I could write down everything correctly, and become good enough at the art of arranging words into sentences and stories, that people may be able to get a glimpse into my reality. Perhaps then there would be some level of understanding of the world I lived in; perhaps then those looks of dismissal could turn into looks of understanding. Ultimately, it was this reason why I sat alone at a keyboard for hours every day. The pain of being so misunderstood made my heart scream out, and I guess fundamentally that was the reason why writing was the most important thing in my life. The reason my fingertips fought relentlessly for freedom. The reason I stayed up late pouring my heart onto a page. The reason you’re reading these words right now.

To try and make them understand,

the things they’d never understand.

 

thoughts

~ Hardened by Pain ~

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“I looked at the eyes of people around me and saw inner worlds of sunlight and peace. Meanwhile, inside my skull the ceilings dripped, the rats scurried. The world inside my mind was a scary place and I knew it was one that no other person should have had the misfortune of visiting. The darknesses I had descended to and the demons I had faced were not for the faint of heart. Still, sometimes when their non-understanding eyes stared at me once again, a part of me wanted to imprison them inside for just a day. I wanted to see the looks on their faces when they had seen the world behind my eyes; the looks on their faces when they came out screaming and crying. Never again would their ignorant sentences fall my way; never again would they think that their troubles were troubles. Of course, I wouldn’t have done this to my worst enemy. This prison inside was reserved for me and for me only. Only by some strange miracle had I managed to endure it all these years. By all rights, I should have been destroyed, but I had survived and now had this strange sense of invincibility flow through me. Words of hate did nothing; fear was laughable; storms were easily weathered. In the meanwhile, the others cracked and crumbled at the slightest exposure to such things. Their vulnerability made me reflect and come to appreciate my past sufferings. I had been hardened by pain and toughened by madness. I was able to walk through the fire without flinching. A strange courage filled my heart and I went through life no longer fearing the shadows or any monsters. Having lived in the darkness for so long, the demons were only companions to me.”

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short stories

~ The Barriers ~

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~ The Barriers ~

It was date number seven and she sat across the table as I prepared to finally reveal who I really was. We had been dating for a couple of weeks and on each date I had put on a mask and played up to the image of a regular guy. She was a girl who wanted the normal life; whose principles were founded on what was established and trusted by the majority. Because of this, on previous dates I had hidden my true face. I had pretended that I was a straightforward guy, a follower of mainstream culture who wanted the quiet suburban life complete with the steady career, nice car and a few miniature humans running around on a rug in the front room. In reality I was none of those things, but I had come up with a plan to get close to her and see if I could be accepted by slowly revealing my true nature. So far it had worked well; in just a couple of weeks, we had already formed a close bond. Beds and kisses had been shared, hands had been held and eyes stared into. Now, finally feeling free enough to reveal who I was, I let go and spoke from the heart about how I really felt about life. I spoke about my desire to create art and live a life that was true to my own values and not those of society’s. As my mask lay on the table and my truth poured out of me, I could see a look in her eyes which I had not seen previously. It was not a positive one. It was a look of disappointment; a striking look of sudden distance. In those eyes, I watched her mentally pack her bags and sprint off over the horizon like some sort of scared deer. Clearly the truth of me was enough to make her distance herself immediately and leave me alone with my heart in my hands. It didn’t matter about the bond we had made in the previous meetings. It didn’t matter about the kisses and the laughs and the tender moments of connection. I was not compatible with her reality and everything from our previous meetings had suddenly been thrown out the window. Everything had changed in an instant.

Following that conversation, we got up and left the bar. We kissed and said goodbye and I said I’d see her soon, but we both knew there and then that something had changed beyond repair. I watched her turn to leave and head home up the road as I stood alone in the winter night. I then walked home in that chilling cold, my breath in front of me, the flickering street lights illuminating the vapour of my lungs – the twisted tree branches hanging above like the sinister hands of madness snaking their way down to finally snatch me away for good. By the time I was back in my room, I knew for certain that it was all over. There was no way I’d see her again. Her ship had set sail and I lay there on the bed sinking into the depths of the earth. My heart ached and I stared up at the ceiling thinking about all those other souls out there lying on beds alone, losing their minds and aching in their bones for some basic form of human connection, but never being able to find it because of who they really were on the inside. The pain I felt was strong but not completely foreign. From a young age all I had wanted to feel some basic human connection, but never once had I been able to find it completely. Yes, I knew I was a little odd and perhaps even a little crazy, but I thought if I could try to be one of them for a while, make a connection with someone and then slowly reveal who I really was from beneath their radar, that there just might be a chance that there would be a home for me inside the heart of another. This crazy little experiment of mine had predictably proved that wrong. I was back in my room of isolation facing those walls yet again. Those walls that closed in year by year. Those walls that would eventually be my tomb.

The next day the text arrived in my inbox. “I’m sorry; I think you’re great. I’ve had a really good time together, but I don’t think we should see each other any more.” It came as no surprise at that point. I had seen the rejection in her eyes the night before at the bar; the text just told me in words what that look had already shown me. It was a depressing thought but when I really thought about it, it wasn’t just the rejection of her that killed me inside; it was the rejection of myself from humanity in general. This wasn’t the first time I had been cast out after taking off my social mask. Every time I had opened up and tried to connect to another person from the level of who I really was, I had been looked at strangely and kept at a distance like some sort of diseased animal. There was a criteria that most people seemed to stick to when selecting who would enter their lives – a criteria I simply did not fit. Those cold looks of dismissal always left me feeling like I would always be walking those cold streets alone, returning to those dark rooms of isolation and staring up at ceilings until I eventually lost my mind completely. 

The most painful thing was that in her eyes that night in the bar I could see a level of understanding. Like she recognised and understood where I was coming from, perhaps even an element of respect for choosing to walk my own path, but she could not let someone like that be a part of her life. In her eyes I saw the barriers that kept the outsiders at bay. I knew that there were others out there who felt that a life of following a set path was a suppressed form of existence; that life was meant to be lived and not to driftly through following safe and established cultural patterns. I think everyone knows it deep somewhere inside. Our hearts all scream out for true freedom from the system at some point. But for the safety of their own social sanity and acceptance of the crowd, people raise the barrier and don’t let anyone different from the tribe in. The social validation was simply too gratifying; the place among the crowd too comfortable. It was the same in the books I had written. People said they understood my pain and where I was coming from. They told me how it made them feel free and good inside to hear a voice scream out from the wild. Yet, no one ever thought to do the same and stand apart from the crowd and follow their own path. There was something in the way that stopped people from coming to my side of the fence. Everybody wished to be themselves and posted Instagram quotes of it, but so very few were truly willing to walk the walk.

As always I didn’t understand the complexities of human nature and for the next few days I walked the streets again scanning for someone or something. A part of me had resided myself to a life of isolation but the loneliness soon made me search for a look in the eye of someone who might have a place for me in their own story. I couldn’t find anyone I could bring myself to talk to so I ventured back to the dating apps, scrolling, swiping and searching for someone that might understand. Eventually I got speaking to one girl who shared some mutual interests. We started dating and again everything was going well for a while. It was about one month in and again I opened up and started to show her a bit of my real character. I expressed myself from the soul and shared my truth with her. I thought this was it; someone who would let me in and unite under the same banner of freedom. But slowly her eyes dimmed out of interest and attraction. I only saw the same look in her eyes that I had seen from the other girl that night in the bar. It was a look that would haunt me until the day I died. A look that showed the barriers that would make my life one of loneliness and isolation. The barriers that people raised to keep the outsiders in the darkness. The barriers that kept the wilderness at bay. 

The barriers that would just not let me in.

thoughts

~ A Sad Silence ~

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girl alone

~ A Sad Silence ~

“In this life not many things hurt more than the feeling of being totally misunderstood. Being constantly surrounded by people who don’t really understand you leads to a form of loneliness that is far worse than that of being alone. You linger in crowds and act out their script, but in the meanwhile you feel distant and detached from what is going on. People think they know you but just a few seconds inside your head would cause them to never see you in the same light. Those words and feelings you just keep to yourself, because you know that they just wouldn’t understand. And when you hold so much inside yourself for so long, it’s only a matter of time until the burden of it all begins to weigh you down. Those words you carry heavy in your heart as you wander through life, letting empty sentences leave your mouth, putting on a normal face and just going along with it all. In the meanwhile you daydream about sharing your secrets with a stranger. You scribble sentences into notebooks that nobody will ever read. As the years drift by and your truth remains unvoiced, gradually you feel something inside of you begin to scream out under the pressure of it all. You just want more than anything to open the gate and show others your inner world, but there just seems to be no way to open up. And so alone in that world you continue to dwell: separated from everyone around you as the years drift by. One day you imagine you’ll find the right words and the others will understand. Their eyes will fall on you as they finally see you for who you really are, but until then it was the situation of being locked away with the words that are never spoken; the songs that are never sung; the scars that are never seen. It’s only a matter of time before that isolation leads to you losing your mind completely. I guess I’ve been crazy for a few years now.”

thoughts

An Inner Wealth

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~ An Inner Wealth ~

“It’s that space inside yourself you can’t quite seem to fill. No matter what clothes you buy, what lovers you kiss or beers you drink, there is that space – that void – which cannot be filled by your surrounding society. Money won’t fill it. Sex won’t fill it. That self-help book won’t fill it. It is a space which only gets filled from within, and the longer your eyes look for external coordinates and things, the more that internal abyss will continue to grow. Eventually you become bitter and twisted, a foreigner out on the streets of life, wandering further and further from the essence of yourself. If you feel this happening then take a step back and reassess the situation. Disregard everything that makes you feel incomplete. Follow your inner compass. Trust in your own voice. Every person who awakened and found their personal treasure did it by looking inside and not outside of themselves. It’s all in there waiting for you: your happiness, your contentment, your peace and everything you’ve ever needed. Stop looking in the wrong places and chasing what cannot be caught. Turn your gaze inward and walk into the inner domain of your own soul. It’s time to go home to the place where the greatest gold is found.”

man backpack

thoughts

~ Being Yourself ~

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~ Being Yourself ~

“I guess when it comes down to it, no one else is going to make you truly happy but yourself. When all is said and done at the end of the day, it’s you and that mirror reflection. It’s you and the solitude and silence. It’s you and that voice inside your head. And if you can’t be happy in those environments, then you are always going to be a slave of another person or system. We think of loneliness as being alone but often the greatest loneliness is felt by those dwelling in crowds to which they do not belong, who depend on others’ validation for their happiness – who speak words that they do not feel and follow paths which are not their own. These are the people who have wandered so far from the essence of themselves that they see only strangers in their reflection. These are the people whose true selves are locked away in forgotten places of spiritual isolation. Each year that neglect slowly tears away pieces of themselves. Learning to be happy on your own is what is necessary to keep your true self intact. Not dependent on the crowd, you will retain your individuality; not defined by the system, you will retain your unique shape. And from there blossoms the beauty of the individual. The strength of a person who is at home in their own inner world, rather than that which is constructed and dictated by others. Self-actualized, empowered – the one who looks into that mirror knowing that their life is their completely their own. The life of personal truth. The life of substance and authenticity. The life of someone who isn’t afraid to be totally and completely: 

themselves.”

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thoughts

~ A Hidden World ~

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~ A Hidden World ~

There is a world inside you that remains hidden. No matter how much they stare or try to understand you, no matter how many words leave your mouth, no matter how often your eyes meet their eyes – there is a place beneath the surface that they just never see. And even with all those drawings you sketch and words you write down, there isn’t enough ink in this world to truly show another the space in which you reside. That expression sometimes helps, but ultimately you know you’ll find yourself standing again before eyes that remain blind to your nature. Because there is a world inside you that remains hidden. And as the days drift by and you sit in the crowd listening to those foreign conversations, as you observe the human race like you are on safari – as you retreat again and again back into the depths of yourself because you know that they just wouldn’t understand – you learn to bare that private burden of isolation and separation. Being alone in the crowd becomes commonplace; biting your tongue becomes commonplace; staring longingly into skies above becomes commonplace. As those years go by, you learn to exist in the solitary spaces and sink deep into the ocean of your own inner being.

Make no mistake about it: it can be scary and isolating to feel like you’re a stranger amongst your own species. Not everyone has a way of being that can be so easily understood by others, and consequently there are certain people who choose to instead exist alone within the private world of themselves. If such is your fate then do not despair but learn instead to inhabit that world fully. Find inner peace and nurture that space within. Let the flowers grow in your heart; let the sun shine in your soul; let the doves fly in your mind. Raise the flag of joy within and rule that kingdom proudly. And if you ever meet someone who ever fully does understand, when they finally venture in and tread those first footsteps, they will see a world so beautiful that they will look at you in the crowd and smile, knowing that there is a heaven on earth hidden behind the eyes of an angel.

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thoughts

~ Some Way ~

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~ Some Way ~

“At times I wonder how much longer I can linger inside this brain of mine. This burning room, untouched and unseen by those that have laid their eyes on me. I am hidden from view, a prisoner of sorts. Many times I have been overcome by the darkness. I have been down in the sewers with the rats and the madness, crawling on my hands and knees, searching for flickers of light and hope in the shadows. I have been beaten down, almost destroyed, somehow summoning the strength to stand up once more against the deluge of the storm. Yet through all these things, the smile remained on my face. The ‘fine thanks, you?’ came out of my mouth. Those people: they don’t see this secret prison of mine – and yes, for some of them, I don’t see theirs too. This is the absurdity of the human condition. So many of us are walking mysteries of sickness and sadness. So many of us inhabit private prisons that no one else will ever see or know. Out there on those streets I stare into passing eyes and wonder how many are also trying to not be consumed by the darkness. Getting up some days to face the world often takes enormous courage. These are the secret battles we fight again and again. These are the storms we endure in silence and solitude. And now as I sit at this keyboard and the sadness grips me one more time, I guess I’ll keep fighting on the only I know how to. What else, after all, is there to do but to keep on moving. To keep on surviving. Somehow. 

Some way.

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~ Moving Forth ~
short stories

~ Moving Forth ~

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~ Moving Forth ~

A dreadful silence filled the room. The surrounding walls looked at me with suffocating stares. I lay flat and still on my bed as the weight of the entire world pulled me down into the mattress. The dream had abruptly ended and I was back in my old bedroom, living at home with my parents after travelling around the world for one and a half years. From Brazil to New Zealand, the grand adventures had come and gone – all those soul-stirring experiences lost in the mist of mind and memory, and now I was back to where I grew up: penniless, alone and depressed, with no one close by who truly understood or cared how I felt.

On top of this, I had returned to my old job in the local supermarket. It was not something I had planned to do, but having been reckless enough to come home with no money and a considerable amount of debt, I immediately returned to a place I could walk into work straight away. This created some sort of time warp in my brain, as if the last one and a half years had all been nothing but some sort of surreal dream. As I walked down those aisles and stacked those shelves, I felt my heart being crushed slowly and surely by the old familiarity of it all. It really was true that absolutely nothing had changed. The same customers came in at the same times; the same scripted conversations were endured; the same items were stacked in the same places. As I worked, I stared emptily into space and let my mind wander off into the distance. How could so much have changed within me while everything here remained exactly the same? How could I live this other lifetime while people had stayed set in the same mode of existence? How could I go around the world and now feel so lost in my hometown?

Inevitably, I felt as if everything I had done was for nothing; I felt that all the life I had gained had been stolen off me. A total pointless waste of time. What a foolish dreamer I was, thinking that my big, post-graduation journey actually meant something. It all suddenly felt meaningless. And not just for me, but those close to me. Besides the obligatory ‘how was it?’ question, no one really had an interest in what I had done.

“So, I guess it’s time you joined ‘the real world’ now hey.”

     “Welcome back to reality.”

     “Time to get a proper job.”

These were the comments people shared with me about my trip. Misunderstood and alienated, my heart soon raged against everything around me. Reverse culture shock set in and I began to feel more foreign than I had while on my trip. This just about peaked on a bank holiday Sunday evening where I stood in a pub listening to everyone talk about jobs, football and television shows. Suddenly, standing in silence at the bar, I was mocked for wearing casual clothing and working in a supermarket. It was right there and then that I realised I had become a stranger in my own town. This was supposed to be home, but now it was clear the bohemian madness had finally claimed me: I now had no home. I was an exiled alien, lost somewhere in the great cosmic ocean of existence, devoid of a place of any real human belonging.

As I experienced this conflicting state of affairs, I thought of my companions I had shared my adventure with. Where were they now? What were they doing? Were they also back home, beset by the same doom and gloom as me? I racked my brain and remembered the moments of getting drunk on Copacabana beach on New Year’s Eve with Ana. I remembered partying on a balcony overlooking a beautiful lake in New Zealand with my twenty housemates. Hiking to Machu Picchu with new friends. Climbing mountains in Bolivia. Cycling around wineries in Argentina. Yes, yes – all of those things! All those beautiful things swept away by the merciless waves of transience which eventually enveloped us all. The tides had turned, the fleeting friendships over and I now stood alone in what might as well have been another world altogether. Thinking about it all, I felt a strange feeling start to stir in my stomach. It was going to be a tough time, I knew.

The weeks and months continued to go by in tremendous solitude. I soon avoided going out as I couldn’t face the others. Consequently, those bedroom walls gradually suffocated me more and more. It wasn’t long until felt like a prisoner of some sort. In times of desperation, I let society’s influence set in; I went online and applied for those career jobs that I wasn’t interested in. This was the script I had told myself – that this big solo trip around the world after graduating university was my final blowout before retreating back to the world of normality to begin a steady career. It wasn’t until I went to an interview that I realised my delusion. As I sat there lying and pretending to be someone I wasn’t, I felt tremendous inner conflict burn inside my blood. Within me, a great fire roared and raged against it all. I quickly began to realise I was facing the music – that I was finally acknowledging that I wasn’t going to walk the straight path society wanted me to. I had been avoiding it for a long time it had seemed. From an early age, I knew in my gut that I didn’t belong to the world of careers and contracts – to sensibility and suburban sanity. I had suppressed the fact that I was incompatible with that world for many years and now it was time to accept that things in life weren’t going to be so straightforward for me. Acknowledging this, a personal crisis ensued. The dark clouds gathered inside my head and the rain poured down.

In the midst of this storm, I found myself visiting the nearby farm fields in the countryside daily. I guess it acted as a little bit of an escape from society. The allure of nature occasionally allowed some of the pain to momentarily reside, as if there was some whispering voice of wisdom in the wind and in the streams, trying to tell me something that would alleviate my suffering. Although it helped at times, it wasn’t enough to stop the terrible storm from raging inside my head. As the weeks and months went by, the thunderous noise increased in tune with my own despair and desolation. I gradually began to realise that these feelings were nothing new. It was true that I had felt out of place all of my life at home. From a young age, I knew deep down something inside of me was vastly different from the rest. Perhaps that was the source of past bouts of anxiety and depression, I considered. I had always known I didn’t fit into the world I grew up in, and it seemed I had subconsciously blocked out this fact to spare myself the pain of facing my isolation as the black sheep I undoubtedly was. But finally, at the age of twenty-four, the realisation had caught up with me. There was no denying it any longer: I was an abnormal outcast, a wretch not belonging to my place of birth.

Eventually one day I was walking in those fields and the weight of it all became too much. I couldn’t go on the way I was any longer. I stopped and stood alone in the middle of a field. I then looked up to the sky with tears of pain and rage, before collapsing down onto the ground. For a long time I just lay there motionless in the grass, feeling the wind whip against my skin and the pain and madness howl in my mind. I felt myself sinking deep into the earth beneath me, swallowed up whole by this world. It was true: I had been broken – the lowest I had ever sunk in my life. I was a destroyed man, shackled down by my demons, lying helpless and alone in the torture chamber, feeling myself disappearing into a state of non-existence.

Then something strange happened.

Somewhere deep inside of me, something changed – something was destroyed. I’m not sure what it was exactly, but at my lowest point I felt it implode on itself and dissipate into nothingness. In the wake of this, I then started to feel the pain gradually start to reside. I sat up and breathed in, wondering what the hell had just happened. Perhaps it was the sudden death of a demon within me that had been causing me all this pain? Perhaps it was the shackles of my mind which had finally split under the weight of all the pressure? Whatever it was, I felt its sudden destruction within me, followed by a feeling that was like coming up to the surface for a life-saving gasp of air. It was then that I realised a critical point had been reached; a peak of pain overcome. Feeling some strength start to return, I picked myself up from the hard ground. I then limped on home, knowing that something inside of me had changed forever.

In the months and years that followed that troubled time, I have still been limping on home. I wasn’t completely cured of my problems altogether. Something like that which brings you to the edge of destruction doesn’t just fade totally. But it was a moment that was pivotal for me – perhaps the most pivotal in my entire life. In that field that day was the moment I finally let go of a whole lifetime of suppressing my true self. In that field that day I allowed a persona I had been burdened with by society to be killed and faced up to the fact of who I really was. Since that turning point, I have gained mental clarity and been able to overcome my inner conflicts and struggles; I have been able to summon the courage to become the person I was born to be, and not the one society tried to mould me into. With a new profound faith in my own inner being, I have continued my adventures all over the world, I have summited the mountains, I have trekked the countries, I have written the words – I have stopped caring what other people think of me and come to terms with the fact that I am a born outsider. With myself adjusted to this new state of being, I have found my true calling and followed it fiercely with all my heart and might and passion. The tides have turned once again, and I now stare into those morning mirrors, proud to see my authentic self gazing back at me, ready for whatever’s next upon the great beautiful journey of life.

You know, it is true that many times in this life an individual suffers tremendously with coming to terms with who they really are. Human society and the cultures we exist in are enough to send any man or woman into isolated states of despair and depression and desolation. With everyone around you trying to mould and shape you from a young age, it’s easy to get confused and lose yourself in the madness of it all. It truly is a fight to be yourself in this world, especially if you are driven by a deep inner desire that leads you away from the herd. But if anything is worth fighting for, then it is the essence of yourself, and no good warrior ever won a great battle without having to go through some struggles. On the quest to your own destiny, you will undoubtedly face isolation. You will face discomfort and doubt. You will face the situation of being misunderstood by those around you. But please, if you feel that fire within you then have a little faith in your inner voice, don’t keel over to something which insults your soul, and don’t give up on yourself just because sometimes you may have to walk alone through haunted places. No, stand up tall and walk wide-eyed into the wilderness. Descend into the depths of yourself and meet your demons face to face. Fearlessly explore every ounce of your own being. After a certain amount of time exploring your inner self, you will go back out into the world as a warrior of the wild, and from that position on you will be stronger and more resilient than ever before. Your eyes will blaze with brightness. Your heart will ache with passion. Your gut will rumble with thunder. With a ferocious tenacity for life, you will live the life that sets your soul on fire – the life that your very heart screams out for. Your path will be thrilling and magical, and when you reach the end of your road, you will have no regrets about the life you lived. You will have a victory of personal authenticity. You will have a victory of individual courage. As you become the person you were born to be – and not the one they told you to be – you will have the greatest victory of all:

you will have the victory of yourself.

 

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