Dear friend,
The light this morning woke us just after five. Despite the roller blinds. No need for the alarm on our phones to trill us back from our night time travels. We’re approaching the longest day of the year.
I have this thing where I prefer to be on the side of the equinox where the days are getting longer. I love the light evenings. That’s changed for me as the years roll on.
I used to prefer the dark.
I recall my first emotional collapse, I was in my early twenties. I couldn’t face the sunshine, so it wasn’t such a bad choice to live in South Yorkshire. The summers were tricky though. I went through periods where I felt like I was made of glass. A girlfriend had once said that of herself in our late teens, and I had no idea what she meant until I experienced it for myself.
It seemed to me like the people I noticed in the street could see into me and my tangled mess of faults and shortcomings. It looked to me like every one else had life down pat and I was the only one floundering and clueless.
I hid it as well as I could.
I’m not sure if anyone noticed.
Nobody said anything to me at any rate.
You just wake up and go through the motions.
Going to the park in the summer was deeply awkward. So many happy people. You don’t want to see that when you’re down, that’s why I tried my best to isolate myself.
I grew to depend on mind altering substances to take me out of the mundane. That worked while the effects lasted, but there’s always the come down to deal with. Thankfully it didn’t lead to a serious addiction. Somehow I had this sense that I was being protected and watched over by my Nana. I still do.
The ideas that helped me climb out of my isolation, they didn’t come from me, rather they came to or through me.
One day the idea arrived to start volunteering in my local community. My bandmate Martin was making what seemed like a fortune as a home help, doing the shopping and cooking breakfast for isolated elderly people. He was making a hundred pounds a week, which at the time made him rich in my eyes.
I figured I needed some experience so I could get on the home help gravy train. This is pre-internet so the local newsagents window was the place for community notices. Hand written post cards blue tacked in the window, offering services and stuff for sale or advertising for help wanted.
I ended up looking after Kim.
And Kim looked after me.
He was a young kid with a range of physical impairments. He couldn’t use standard speech and needed help to move around. I didn’t understand the names for his physical challenges, I just helped the best I could under the direction of his mum.
After a while me and Kim got on well enough his mum would trust me with taking him out in his wheelchair just the two of us. We’d go to the same park where I was having the trouble, except with Kim it was different.
All of the mess cleared up inside me when we were together.
He loved the ducks and it was like I was seeing them for the first time, the sunlight shiny molten discs on the surface of the duck pond. The trees suddenly alive and whispering hello. The sky leaning down to hug us. With Kim I experienced peace. He’d cock his head from side to side and look at you through one eye making these gurgling laughing sounds so that he’d slaver down his jacket and the loneliness melted away.
Kim didn’t need words.
A lot of the people we passed in the street and on the buses seemed scared of him. Or maybe it was me? I don’t know what we must’ve looked like from the outside, but on the inside we were happy. I guess it was an early experience of being with another human, soul to soul.
Being with Kim helped me to experience how it was to be free of the internal monologue of the false self, at least for a while.
His mum gave me a book called “The Celestine Prophecy” which I found cheesy but I liked a lot. It started an avalanche of spiritual and self help books jumping off the shelves of charity shops over subsequent years.
When I left Sheffield I didn’t keep in contact.
I wasn’t so good at that kind of thing back then, I mostly relied on others to keep a hold of me somehow, and I guess Kim was the only thing me and his mum had in common.
The really sad part that I couldn’t handle is I got the idea he might not be expected to live so long and I just couldn’t bear to think about it. He might be alive now, he’ll be in his forties if he is.
Just to say there’s a difference between solitude and isolation.
Maybe if you’re feeling lonely you can find time to volunteer to help someone out and let the universe guide you. The hardest part can be believing that we have something worthwhile to offer. It could even be that wanting the world to be different is getting in the way somehow - if we’re waiting for it?
The world doesn’t change until we do.
Till tomorrow
Love
Mikey