When I was a kid I cried easily and being a boy growing up on a tough Council (social housing) estate, that set me up for a fair bit of bullying and I suppose early on, the walls started to go up.
I have always used to some degree. Tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, sex, masturbation you name it. Anything to keep me largely benumbed but still with the ability to function socially.
Cue the 9th September 2022 and suddenly I am forced to confront those demons. Placed on a ventilator, my penis catheterised, a tube in my neck by which fluids and nutrients were given. Unable to hold in my waste, from both ends.
All those years of running and hiding and here I was, ostensibly naked and having to face everything head on all at once.
I can remember still being in the ICU (Intensive Care Unit) and watching as a mother and son came onto the ward in search of a male relative. An ordinary event. As their eyes found one another in the room and even before they had embraced, I could feel my emotions stirring. When they came together physically, I wept. I couldn’t hold it in. It was a beautiful thing to witness.
And so it is, I am still finding my emotions raw for the most part, crying spontaneously. It’s scary to have so many raw feelings floating about within me however I am finding them greatly cleansing too.
I am that small boy again except this time, I am not going to build any walls or defences against my emotions. I’m simply going to let them flow free.
That was the day I presented to hospital with crippling abdominal pains and 2 days later, a crash call was made due to my being unresponsive with a significant bleed on the ward.
I underwent my first operation on the 11th to perform a laparoscopic small bowel resection.
My second operation was performed on the 13th and a further laparotomy was performed with another section of small bowel removed.
I was discharged this evening.
I am to be on blood thinners for life, which I’m not happy about as they quell sexual ardour – muted orgasms and the like.
I only came off blood thinning treatment a few months ago because of these issues – I had a Pulmonary Embolism in 2017 and that fateful decision has clearly led to this new medical event.
I’m not happy that I will likely now be single for life however having tasted my own demise and having just spent 11 days in Intensive Care, it’s not something I am keen on repeating.
I won’t bang on about Universal Healthcare which is free* at the point of service for all however I am ever so grateful I live in the UK where this treatment was provided for me at no expense other than an *incremental amount of tax taken from my wages throughout my life compulsorily up until this point.
I have taken my first blood thinning tablet this evening.
I have lost so much weight from my face and I have a pallid, grey listless type of look however I will rally. One week ago I was messing several pairs of diapers per day and now I am able to sit here, with full control once more of my bowels. Simple pleasures. I have recovered so quickly in terms of food as well. One week ago, I had a line in my neck and was being fed intravenously.
In time I will go back to see all the doctors and nurses who tended to me and thank them personally. They were magnificent. This has been an ordeal and very nearly a tragedy and it shows that life can change in a moment because on the 8th I felt perfectly well and healthy.
I am sat here listening to The Allman Brothers. My mum has been remarkable, walking nearly a mile through the hospital complex each day to come and visit me, at age 90. Both cats are close by and the garden hedgehogs have just been fed.
Things right now could be a whole lot worse. I’m alive and for that I am grateful.
In 2000, I had an emotional breakdown. It came out of nowhere and I cried for well over an hour. It was a torrent of emotions. I was at a church across town. I felt called to go there. I was chatting away outside and the next thing I knew, I was sobbing. The priest was informed and he came outside and held my hand while I cried. I couldn’t stop.
To this day, I have never known why that place and why I cried as I did. Just seconds before I was having a very normal and ordinary chat with some people there.
Today, I discovered from an online search that the person I spoke about in the previous post, the young gay lad who died tragically at just 19 had his funeral there 2 years previously. I didn’t know that until today. There must have been some sort of residual memory trace or psychic remnants hanging about or maybe I was on a track, which I was closely aligned to because of knowing him, albeit briefly, and this tied me to his energy. I don’t know.
Thinking about it today, I realise there was a feeling associated with the emotional event back in 2000 which mirrors exactly what I felt when I met him and what I feel now, all these years on, having thought about him again. I was crying for E even though he was no longer on the physical plane.
In all the time which has subsequently passed, I have probably only met a handful of people who have left such a deep impression upon me. I think these people, beacons, come along once in a while and although their physical presence is no longer around, their imprint remains for all time and is just as strong as when they were living alongside us. E was definitely one of those.
I have been thinking a lot lately about someone I knew only briefly in my early 20’s. He was a young gay lad. I met him through a mutual friend at the time.
He had been brought up within the Roman Catholic religion and his coming out was a difficult time for his nearest and dearest. I knew him for just a few short months back in the late 1990’s but I was always struck by his kindness, his gentle nature and his resolve to live life on his own terms, regardless of what the fallout might have been for others who perhaps weren’t quite as accepting of himself as he was. He wasn’t yet out of his teens but in many ways, a self actualised individual. I looked up to him. He was courageous and although his smile masked inner turmoil and pain, he always brought love to the table.
He was befriended by an older male (B) within the wider gay community. I can vividly recall the night I was told that B had been involved in an horrific accident. His car had veered off the road and shortly thereafter burst into flames, the occupant fully aware of the situation he had found himself in. I was friends with quite a few gay people at the time and one was an older male, same sort of age as B. He burst into tears when he heard. He told me what a lovely man B was. I was relieved it wasn’t E. A short while later, it was discovered B hadn’t been in the car at all but had let E borrow it.
E was a lovely person, inside and out. He had a smiling cheeky face and the thought he had left the world in that way, filled with yet more pain, his beauty being erased with each passing second, was just too horrible to contemplate. His story was featured in the local newspaper. His photograph there too. I got hold of a copy and took it home, putting it under my bed and taking it out once in a while to read it, to somehow keep him alive. My mother being a deeply homophobic person (still is, sadly) got rid of it. Threw it out and only told me after the dustbin men had taken it away.
I have been an addict for a very long time. Drink, food, cigarettes etc you name it. I have been battling inwardly for more time than I care to think about and this year having gone through yet another breakdown, realised my issues had begun in the serious way they have presented themselves within my life, since about 1998. That’s the year I pinpointed it to. So, I decided to once and for all get clean and discover who I am under all of this.
It was then E came to me in a dream. There he was. Just as when I knew him. I could hear his voice. I hadn’t thought about him in over 20 years so wasn’t sure at the time why I had dreamed of him. I now realise he was the catalyst for my self-destructive path, the straw which broke this camel’s back. Getting clean had created the insights needed to see that the pain of his loss was just too much for me to handle at the time and because I didn’t have anyone I could confide in about this, I instead tried to bury it and simultaneously began seriously self-medicating.
The day after the dream, I went looking online for him and for a long time couldn’t find him at all and wondered if I had made him up. Then there he was. Born 1978, died 1998 at just 19. I had found him. I was born in 1973 and my year of birth seems to get further away with time using the scroll bars on online forms but 1978 still seems fresh. I feel the pressure of time now at 48 but 43/44 is nothing. Young. It’s difficult to contemplate someone having had so much to offer the world and being gone in his early 40’s, let alone knowing that for 24 of those years he hasn’t graced the world at all with his presence and never will do so again.
This has been a bad year for me on many levels and a good one in some ways. I discovered how much of a survivor I am and how even when I have been up against it, I haven’t backed down against the howling mob of consensus reality. I have stood my ground and lost pretty much everything in the process.
I have had one spiritual awakening/download after another. I had another gigantic one a couple of days ago. An incredible one, filled with realisations and what I can only term ‘mind explosions’ as I came to realise and understand ‘God’ and the nature of reality, for me that is. It all made perfect sense as my mind and body become the unwitting cipher for these revelations.
And so here I am. No means to share these with others as they’re all so personal and tailored to my own experiences and no means to word them adequately anyhow to get across what I felt as they are in many ways ephemeral. So I am left with an inner knowing. Wisdom if you like, yet an emptiness alongside that. It’s the only word for it. A hollow feeling. A sense that I have been cleared out of all this inner detritus and although I am once more engaged with the world, everything looks and feels different to me now.
I have no need to delve anymore in deep matters. I’m just coasting along on the surface, like a piece of driftwood turning on the tide. That’s not to say I am now shallow or uncaring, just that I am tending to go with the flow and not seeking to control myself or the environment I happen to be in.
The world seems new to me, even things I have seen and known for what seems like a hundred lifetimes. I appear to be viewing the familiar, the mundane with new eyes. I am birdwatching, finding out about the plants, flowers and trees around me as well as noticing ones that I have passed every day yet seemingly never noticed before. It is an awakening. I don’t know where it will take me and I no longer need to. I want to touch leaves and blossoms and petals and as I do so I feel an interconnectedness with all things.
I haven’t spoken to anyone since I last checked in with you all. I haven’t looked at emails or text messages. I have just been floating really, a dandelion seed being carried on the gentlest of breezes. I think I am going to be away for a good while yet. Taking stock. I hope you are well. I am thinking of you all and wishing you are each blessed in every possible way you can be every single day.
I have a lot to be thankful for on a spiritual level and also personally as I have learned what it is to stand up for things I believe in even if it means losing massively along the way. I guess that’s what I meant by titling this I’ve Lost My Mojo. Mojo being a quality which attracts people to me and renders me successful in other people’s eyes.
I am happy to lose my mojo in this instance because what others think is no longer relevant to me nor does it imbue my life with any such meaning. I guess I have gone through a sort of inversion process whereby the qualities I always felt were important really aren’t and the things I took for granted are what really matter.
I’ve lost my mojo however I’ve regained my purpose. The Divine Spark.
I haven’t been around here very much and I haven’t sent emails to friends either and for that I would like to say “I’m sorry.”
Subsequent to my spiritual awakening or rather spiritual re-attuning, shedding the lies which built up that I was told was true when in essence I was being souled out by others with vested interests to keep me in darkness/lies, I have been left in a place of ——— (call it what you will, no words will ever fully define it).
I could call it a bliss state, a state of clearing out, an emptying out of all fabrications to reveal truth, the absence of fear-based teaching/preaching. Like I said, no terms are sufficient however this is a blog and just leaving this entry blank won’t suffice.
I’m going to call it a Clearing.
Subsequent to this, I have found myself ’empty’ of ‘self’ although in many respects, I have never felt as full. I haven’t wanted to write. In fact, I am forcing myself to connect here. I simply want to just ‘be.’ I have no more questions. I no longer seek because I know I am there. I always was however I placed things in the way (lower case values) because I believed that others could show me the truth however they simply took me away. I was always on The Way (upper case value) however now I see it in a pure light. The light of knowledge, which just is.
There have been a succession of downloads subsequent to the original breakthrough moment and I am Clearing, shedding all the time now and with each ‘revelation’ I find myself ‘in the world but not of it’ hence my absence from connecting however this is a process and in time I will be back and to the many I will outwardly appear the same but to the few, they will know something is different. They know that because they too are attuned.
I had a nice surprise the other day. A friend dropped by to say hello. A young dunnock.
She stayed with me for a good while, gripping my fingers like a branch and then sitting in my hand for a short time (see below) before flying off into a hedge.
My fine feathered friend.
A couple of days later, I was outside and she made herself known to me. She flew all around me, then sat across from me in a branch and looking directly at me, sang her beautiful little song. She had remembered me.
I had another MASSIVE download these past couple of days which again I cannot put into words that even I could understand, let alone you the reader coming to this.
All I know is, I know.
That may sound trite however I now have a knowing, an inner understanding. A deep resonating awareness at the centre of my being.
I know I am enough. In fact, I am more than enough.
I know that all of you are too.
I know that I am in exactly the right place and time and that everything that has ever happened to me was meant to have worked out that way, for me to have these realisations. I am now actively jettisoning, shedding old ways of being.
I feel alive in the newness of life and I am loving it.
Jonathan's Journal 