Defeat I have lived my life behind glass. A little boy with his hand pressed against the glass wondering how to join in with the life that he has been given. This is soundproof glass, it is relationship proof glass. It is a glass wall constructed of sheer terror, desperation and fear. It is a glass wall that has protected my heart from any further damage. My life has been driven by fear, the desperate fear of not being loved, of being rejected again. I was born adopted that means that the life that I have built could not have been anything but a reaction to the circumstances of my birth. A birth that I have never quite comes to term with. I am living but I am not living. My body is numb, my mind is far away. There are no connections with the here and now. Instead there is a constant dialogue with past, with that event in which all my nerve endings were severed from the real world, from my ancestors, leaving me bloody, bruised, on a cloud far away from here. I was not born into this world and I am yet to be born. To be born would mean accepting and coming terms with this violent wrench from my mother’s arms, from my ancestor’s tree. It would mean coming to terms with the terror inside, with the relentless anxiety and fear of being rejected and abandoned again. This fear formed the chemical soup in which my brain, my bones, my soul, my-self, my flesh and blood was coated. I had no choice but to build my foundation on this unsteady cocktail of emotions. Nothing was given to me in order to deal with this pain and so I invented my own potent cocktail called pleasing other people. This cocktail did not give me a place in a world. It did not allow me to be born. But it did give me a platform upon which I could year after year eek out an existence. An existence that was from the very beginning dependent on my terrifying fear that I would once again suffer rejection and abandonment if I put my needs first and by not pleasing others. I was you see born truly alone. I had to find a way to survive, my foundation was not like that of a person who is born into the arms of a family No I was born into the wide open arms of a terrifying eternity with nothing to hold me. Some people say well that was then but this is now, now you know that you were not abandoned by your mother, you can just move on. If only it was like truly like that. In reality for better or worse I had been abandoned by everybody that counted in my life and this abandonment led to my abandoning my-self over and over again as I desperately went in search of a new foundation. I came from a family with a long history of abandoning its own and I have paid a high price for my abandonment, a price that I am still paying to this very day. I had no choice in this matter but it did lead to choices that led to my constructing a life that has resulted in my abandoning my-self over and over again thereby reliving and recreating the programming of my birth. The problem as far I could see was that the losses kept piling up and the more I tried to fit in and move beyond them the worse they became. Nothing works and as a result my foundation keeps collapsing into a bottomless pit of pain at the centre of me that I do know how to heal. I have tried to forge a relationship with God and my ancestors but the but I always switch off in anger it is as if I am used to a life of total disconnection from all of creation. I am angry with the Universe and with my ancestors because I feel that I have been totally abandoned by them this means that every time I try to approach God and my ancestors I end up walking away. I want connection but it as if the lights that connect me to the source had all gone off one by one. I feel absolutely powerless, unable to construct a life except by pleasing other people because I feel so dreadfully alone and I never want to go back to that abandoning place inside me. My life is a constant dialogue with that place, a constant move away from that place, a constant attempt to not be rejected again, a free floating past based existence that is not based on the present. If I had a map of my life I would be able to show you how every move has been in response to that wound, my learning to read, my leaving home, my reuniting with my family, my relationships, my time at University and my Creative writing course. I spend my time wondering if other people live like this and I long to be wild and free but still that wound calls me back and time and time again my efforts to heal it crash. Before I left the Marae my teacher told me that I needed to go back and thank my adopted parents for raising me. It had been close to fifteen years since I last saw them and my heart was full of trepidation. We stopped outside the house and my teacher goaded me to knock at their door. I did only to find no one home. On our way back we stopped in at a woodworking shop and the man there, who just happened to know my adopted father, told me that my adopted parents had gone to see one of their daughters in England. Fast forward several months later and I am back at their door; I had since left the Marae but the thought of making peace with my adopted parent’s still appealed to me. They had spent years ignoring my Christmas cards but this they could not ignore; I am ushered into the house by my adopted mother and am told to sit on the sofa. My father is outside painting the house. She asks me why I am here and I tell her that I just wanted to thank them for raising me. At the sound of this he hurries inside and sits down in order to make fun of the letter that I sent them when my life was falling apart after my Masters. He tells me that I had failed; I inform him that I had in fact completed the Masters to which he can only say “well you could have used it to have a great job, that way you could have chauffeur driven in a car to our door”. I sit there silently thinking in response “all I ever wanted was to be loved, that was the only reason I did all that”. Their house is tiny. It is planted on a large section of land. My adopted father has not worked for years. Not since he went bankrupt. He now lives on a sickness benefit and there he stands in front of me going on about those Maori people who had found a sacred site on their land and wanted it protected. “I nearly died you now, a couple of years ago when using a drill, there is nothing there, nothing”. Here we go again, he is referring to my spiritual beliefs now, he always loved trashing my faith, my belief in God. There is no God he informs me before asking me what I am doing. He is gobsmacked when I tell him that I had been working on a PhD on adoption, how could I, of all people write this. Round and round he goes insulting me, I ignore his insults and keep repeating the mantra “thanks for bringing me up”. Even his wife gets sick of it and tells him to stop. Shortly afterwards it is time to go and my adopted mother feels ready to offer me some life advice “you need to move on with your life now, it did not work out, life is short, goodbye’. My adopted father drives me up to the main road. On the way he turnaround and says “you have to admit that you and I do not get on and it is best that we do not see each other again, would you agree?” I mumble my agreement and shortly afterwards exit the car stunned by the fact that in this life if you are not blood you can just be treated like disposable garbage by your adopted family and I wonder if they would ever, regardless of the circumstances, treat their daughters in the same way. I had hoped for some form of reconnection but leave defeated. I am leaving my friends behind. The only foundation that I know, the foundation that I was willing to leave behind when I had hoped that my reunion with my birth family would work out in Australia. Now I am heading down country to a creative writing course, I want to write about my life, I want people understand just what adoption has done to people like me. I hope that this will enable me to connect with life, with people because at long last I will have gained the recognition that I crave. I will no longer have to explain myself or hide who I truly am. But I am afraid, this is a new town, I know nobody here and it is pushing my abandonment buttons. This town is cold; the cold has always terrified me. As a child my brother and I cried in the snow and were told off for doing so. I cried because the coldness had made me feel so alone. I now understand why, I felt cold in the hospital, so cold and alone when her warmness left me. I am staying at a house that is lived in by a person who belongs to the Marae in Auckland, I had hoped to belong here, to have some standing but he is troubled by money and troubled by my arrival. I feel like a tumbleweed that is flying across the hills of this town desperately in search of somewhere to land, On the phone my brother is excited by my now living in a town that was so close to his town in the other island and hopes that I will visit him more often, I refrain from saying that this is the last thing that I want to do. One of my friends is on her way down with all my possessions, I don’t want them down this way because it is going to make me feel trapped in this cold windy place She on the other hand is convinced that the city that she loves so much is just the one for me. I do not feel that way. She introduces me to her friend who has completed the writing course that I am about to undertake. Her friend lives with her son, is the product of donated sperm, on top of a hill that overlooks the harbour. She offers to put me up for a while rent free and so I end up living in a bright blue room that is on the very first night shaken by an earthquake. I failed to see the irony of having come to live in a house where reproductive technology and legislation has led to a single mother having a child. My failure to do so is not surprising. I am slipping into old habits as I try to come to terms with my loneliness in this new town where I know no one. I go out of my way to please my flatmate. I clean the house, I shop, I cook, I am polite, I am perfect. I try to please at all times. The people at my course do not feel open or friendly but I am desperate for friendship and feel so lonely wandering around this cold, cold town that is full of strangers that is pushing all of my adoption buttons. My flatmate has decided to buy a house and has invited me, given my helpfulness to live with her and her son. Our newfound closeness is, short lived. It is shattered by her reading a short story that I have written that is called “Grandfathers Hands”. A fictional story that re-imagines what was going on inside my Grandfathers head when my mother turned up out of nowhere, it contained hard hitting scenes of his drinking in the pub and his wartime flashbacks. My flatmate looks white when she hands it back to me. She tells me if this is what I am going to be writing then I cannot live with her and her son. It is too disturbing and it reminds her too much of her own family. I am shattered by her rejection of what I have written. It feels like she has rejected who I am, my essence, my very core when I had dared to reveal the truth. In spite of how I feel I still help her move to her new home. Here we again, so powerless, so weak that I cannot draw a line in the sand or stick up for myself. In the few days before she moved I had to desperately search for somewhere to live and I managed to find a flat with a Maori woman who was living on a sickness benefit. She seemed a bit odd on the phone as the rain poured down but I only had one day left to find somewhere. On the day that I helped my old flatmate and her boy move into their lovely new home the phone rang, I was being offered the chance to check out another flat. I turned down out of loyalty to my new flatmate and to my lifelong habit of putting my needs last. The move does not go well; I have roped in one of my bemused classmates to help me move into a flat that is just not me. It dark, dank and depressed, I am, true to form, going out of my way to fail. I had spent my life giving myself second best, making myself look small so that I do not outshine other people. I have spent my life abandoning myself, making myself into an unlovable failure and refusing to love myself. I have spent my life being angry at myself, blaming myself for all that has happened and punishing myself over it I buy masses of food in a bid to make the flat more homely but my flatmate lives on junk food. I also suspect that there is more going on with her than I had imagined. The woman who lives underneath us spends her time screaming and knocking broom handle against her ceiling. She is a paranoid schizophrenic. Soon after the move my cousin comes to visit me, we have a beer down the road and she merely accepts what she sees, what she does not know is that I am coming apart at the seams. All that I have known has been left behind and I am not coping. I know that I need to forgive, that I need to let go of the past that somehow I have to move on but I can’t. I argue with God and keep saying over and over again that I cannot accept this. It is not just the loss of my family that I am angry about, I am angry about the fact that this life keeps chewing me up with more and more loses as I try to cope with my the loss of my mother, of my entire family. Loss has piled upon of loss and my entire life has been put on hold and I have struggled to deal the unacknowledged loss of my mother and as a result every other loss in my life. In order to cope I have lived in the past, trying not to repeat this loss by treading a narrow path that necessitated putting my needs to one side in search of love and belonging. I have not been able to have a normal life and the more I try to fit in and be normal in a desperate bid to find love the move abnormal my life has become. I have tried not to be myself, I have stuffed myself down, I have done everything that I can do in order to cope with this loss by not being true to myself. I have not been able to pursue a career, buy a house, go travelling, or simply just be in the here and now just living. This loss has cost me so much and I simply do not know who to deal with it so that I can live in the present. How can I forgive this? How can I forgive my family, my mother, any of them for what they have put me through? How can I forgive God and my ancestors? How can I forgive myself? We have a well known writer as our creative writing teacher but she does not seem to know what she is teaching. We only come in for one day a week and frankly she is confusing. I have managed to secure a local poet as a writing mentor but the course coordinator does not think that he is good enough or prestigious enough. I am feeling under pressure. The other day my mentor turned round to me after our second session and said “Daniel when are you going to be yourself?” He knows the pressure that I am under and is not surprised when I tell him that I will no longer have him as my writing mentor because I have decided to change to a well known female writer who is in her seventies. One of my fellow students is using her and she maintains that she is good. There is trouble in the classroom; discontent has openly broken out amongst the ranks in regards to our writing teacher. Our coordinator is infuriated and blames me. She pulls me out of he classroom and tells me so while yanking on her cigarette. She jumps up and down and spits out “it is even rumoured that you offered to give one of your fellow students a healing when he was upset in the toilet”. I had done no such thing but her allegation came as no surprise given the fact that the coordinators cousin had told me that she drank a bottle of wine a night,. Faith was for her, like it was for me, a bit of an issue, an issue that she covered up with drinking. Her faith, my faith and the faith of all my classmates was put fully to the test when my classmates and I were hauled in front of her and another creative writing teacher and told to explain ourselves. I could not believe how we were being treated; they would never do this to University students. One by one we explained how we felt about the course and its lack of structure. One by one we were sneered at and blamed. That did not stop our teacher from resigning. Before she had resigned she reassured me that I would make a terrific actor. Yes, this course was going swimmingly. The new teacher for the five revolutionaries happened to be my writing mentor She could best be classed as a short haired seventy five year old radical lesbian playwright and occasional novelist who was renowned for her no nonsense writing. She also happened to have firm views on writing and a very forceful personality. My weakened state was no match for her personality. Before long I found myself writing in her style, a life like non-poetic style in which you merely let the words do the speaking. There was to be no opinion inserted at all, it was the very opposite to how I write but I swallowed it hook, line and centre. I sold myself out to her; I sold out my creative essence in a bid to belong, in a bid to be loved and as a result I was well on my way to defeat.
Posted on: Mon, 13 Oct 2014 06:03:21 +0000
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