Dear Friend,
Home, is a perennial theme in art. In songs for instance.
When a song comes through and the theme is about finding a way home, the word ‘home’ can evoke strong feelings of longing. In my thirties in the flat I shared with my then girlfriend I recall dark afternoons in our living room, one wall oxblood red, through the window, the deep greens of the garden, singing to a cloud heavy, persian blue sky.
Those decades were the years where if you asked me about myself, I’d probably have used the word ‘seeker’. I was looking for something.
My girlfriend at the time, she’d comment that I seemed to be looking for something in her eyes, something I couldn’t find. It was a strange time for me. The outside image I presented to people took a lot of effort to maintain. Inside I was running away. I remember seeing a photo of the two of us taken around the turn of the millennium. I look perfectly happy, though I recall feeling conflicted and uncomfortable when it was taken.
I didn’t know it but I was looking for myself.
What a bizarre idea, to be looking for oneself. I had the vague notion that I would find myself through some kind of spectacular discovery or event. That this event was in the future someplace, tantalisingly just out of reach. Finger tips straining, just a fraction short of the target.
I thought peace would come through some form of success. When the images in my mind might match for a moment the incoming data. I had all these rules in my head about who I must be and what I must do. Who I could and couldn’t be. My false self was in the driver’s seat. I spent all day, every day believing every thought that crossed my mind as if it were true.
I had no idea that I was being driven by a made up picture of me. The false self doesn’t draw attention to its takeovers, it’s more of a stealth operation.
When you’re a kid and you couldn’t tell anyone much about yourself, you feel it. You know without knowing. It goes beyond the realm of language.
This inner knowing gets so buried and hidden you think it’s not there anymore. That’s why we get so transfixed with material things, we think we’ll find it in possessions and pleasures and being better or more important than others.
When we fail to find what we’re looking for, we can just as easily identify with being a victim.
Not to say people are not victimised or deny the trauma of it. Rather to notice this compulsion within to decide who I am. To project and protect a mentally constructed self. Even if it hurts. Especially so perhaps.
Freedom, no matter how fleeting from the false self is what I was craving.
Just to be me. The way I knew myself as a kid before the images started to network up into a montage of hope, failure, disappointment, shame and longing.
How odd it is.
When you discover the gap between you and your thoughts.
The stillness behind it all.
The kid.
Wiser now.
In a body that keeps changing.
An eternity to explore.
Till tomorrow.
With love
Mikey