Isn’t it a crazy World right now?

How are you doing…How are you really doing?

Humanity is being tested at the minute; war, economic concerns, political change, climate change, loss of freedoms, loss of childhoods. It’s all being picked up by mass media and of course, social media magnified and spat out, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week to an apparent news hungry world population.

So I ask the question, How Are You Doing? In the hope of an opportunity to listen to you, human to human, irrespective of where you come from. How is life treating you? What does your life look like? I want to hear, I am an empath, I feel pain deeply, grief from childhood, the catalyst for my persona. I feel alone sometimes, in fact, a lot of the time. A stranger in this world, unable to identify with society today.

I think I’m a nice person, married to a beautiful human, who shows me she cares every day, I thank my lucky stars that she’s still alongside me, despite me trying my best to get her to leave me, which I mistakenly believed, was what I deserved. I share my DNA with another person to whom I am unrelated, having donated bone marrow in 2008, to a stranger. That is me, it’s what I do, I look after others, before I look after myself, a distraction from the pain and hatred I feel for myself, a feeling of not being worthy.

I earn a living, I have bounced around from job to job, doing just that, earning a living. I left work in 2019 and attended university, to study my passion for photography, particularly wanting to spend my three years in a darkroom, honing the art of handcrafted photographic prints, immersing myself in learning and perfecting the craft. Instead, in March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic had other ideas and I was locked out of production areas and forced to produce work by digital means only. It soured the whole experience for me but I somehow managed to graduate my Bachelor of the Arts degree with first class honours.

Then it was back into the world of work, so much had changed in those three years, although I had worked part time during my degree, in low paid roles, to supplement my student loans. My whole life, I have accepted roles, below what I am capable, largely due to a lack of education. Not because I was unintelligent, more a victim of circumstance, the reasons being a mental illness, brought on by loss in childhood of my mother, then compounded quickly by further loss of both paternal grandparents, all before I was ten years old. All remained unresolved in my mind, thanks to the current thinking of the time, that I wouldn’t remember anything. So the wall of silence was built, compounding my loss.

By the time my maternal grandfather lost his battle with Bowel Cancer in 1982, I had convinced myself that the losses I had experienced, were all my fault; it must be, as nobody is including me in their conversations. I was alone in that thought, and left alone with them; until I chose not to suffer any longer. I chose to end my life, at the very worst, I may be dead, or my Dad might choose to talk to me about my mother, giving me back some sense of who I was, as a person. I failed at that too.

My father died in 2018, losing a seven year battle with Multiple Myeloma, a blood cancer. Had we talked about Mam?…No. Did his death mean I would forget the many questions I had about my life?… No, of course not. That was the outcome though, condemned to the rest of my life, with a book of unanswered questions and unresolved childhood memories, trapped in my head.

In most avenues of life, I have failed. I have failed at marriage once, try to fail a second time but thankfully didn’t. I have failed at fatherhood, my youngest son doesn’t talk to me anymore and hasn’t for eleven years, I miss him greatly and hope every day he is okay, and life is good. My eldest is living two hundred miles away in Nottingham, his teenage years were blighted by the divorce and his need to feel loved. I was so preoccupied with anger and acrimony in divorce, to notice and try harder, I’m sorry Son.

I will leave it there for now, before I get to what’s going on today, but just want to say that whatever it is going on in the world… life is worth living and you are not alone, please reach out to the many organisations there are…if you need help.