Demons

All my life, I second guessed myself, gave doubt free rein. I gave my demons power over my passion for self-expression, power over my desire to express my thoughts. Life is hard enough without imposing my own barriers and limits on a bubbling fountain, a muse that has a mind of its own; turns on when I am least able to capture its fluid ruminations and every once in a while flickers of inspiration that are like the red hot embers beneath a thin layer of ash, deceivingly fragile, tantalisingly tempting.

Do you ever get this feeling you want to put your hand out and touch these mesmerising embers? Put your hand in the flame?

But a muse is so fragile that the moment you even begin to think about reaching out, before having even moved a muscle, the genie has hidden itself back inside the lamp within the blink of an eye. It is a like a dream. Vivid and deceivingly real while you are in it, until the moment you try to consciously live that same dream. Then it becomes like a hermit crab who feels like it is about to be attacked, back inside its shell.

I would like to say time is up for my demons, but I am just starting out on my journey of rediscovery. What I can say for sure is: their time will come.

More than 35 years ago, I went to boarding school and learned the meaning of pure fear. I realised I was alone, stranded on a raft in the middle of a metaphorical ocean. Nothing prepared me for that moment.

I was barely seven years old when I spent my first night in a collective dormitory at an all-boy boarding school. As many of you know by now, because much has been written and talked about it in the public sphere, these dorms were run by slightly older kids, called monitors. Our dorm was small and cosy and appearances could have been deceiving. Aside from feeling homesick, I thought I was coping with it all. All of a sudden our dorm monitor, shortly before saying it was time for lights out, pointed to the psychedelic, multicoloured poster on his wall of a nasty looking cobra snake, and said, if you don’t do exactly what I say, I will feed you to the cobra.

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Action…Reaction

During class time we had a motley crew of teachers. Each one had his/her own style. One was infamous for punishing us by grabbing our sideburns tightly and slowly pulling upwards until the tears ran down our cheeks, by now red out of shame and throbbing pain. Another one ran his show by slapping a massive wooden ruler down on anyone’s desk to make sure we paid attention. This and more were the rule-by-fear boarding school tactics that we now experience at a distance in Harry Potter films or other such stories. I still remember vividly the large yellow pool gathering under the chair of my new boy chaperone, having chosen this rather than be humiliated by the teacher for asking to relieve himself during class.

For those of you with young kids, I’m sure you’ll understand exactly what I’m talking about. It’s the kind of irrational fear mechanism that suddenly sets in out of nowhere. Usually it’s sparked by some kind of traumatic event. That’s exactly what the cobra did for me. And that was only a sneak preview of what was to come.

For the next eleven years, I became that hermit crab. The difference was that I built my own shell, a titanium strength armour that was so strong it barely allowed anyone in. Inside the shell I decorated my new world with the most decadent and creative décor, oblivious to what anyone thought, a true den of iniquities, a luxurious garden of inspiration, intellectual peace and courage.

Throughout my time at school, I ran my own virtual five-star luxury hotel, a veritable palace of rich freedom, of opulent inspiration, a mere figment of my imagination. From time to time, I checked out of this imaginary hotel to re-enter the real world, usually at class time (though not all classes), but mostly when playing rugby (and other sports) and also at home during periodic holidays, but especially away from ‘the valley’ back in London, where my parents lived at the time.

When you’re that frog in a pan of cold water on the heat, you simply cannot predict what will happen to you, and by that time you have already exploded.

That’s a visual of what it was like to live at boarding school. When you’re there, you’re in constant survival mode, till the end. Then it usually takes you years to finally realise how removed that type of life was from real life. And I know many who simply continued that type of ‘living in la-la-land’ lifestyle until today. I could never do that. I always knew I would do whatever I could to get out of that place and find my moment to shine. I am an eternal optimist.

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Pain

I never lived a civil war, I never had to leave my home because of war or a natural disaster. But I have seen the excruciating pain in people’s eyes whose close family members went missing during war. I did my best to comfort young men who realised their lives had been destroyed in the blink of an eyelid because they took the wrong path. I sat with relatives who had to break news of a son’s mother’s death over the phone. I drank warm tea with a family whose son’s cold body was lying at the bottom of a wooden casket, never to come back again. Unfathomable. The tension palpable. All lost for words. Only the brief touch of our hands reminded us of our humanity, the wretched few left on this earth to pick up the pieces and move on.

I lived a very comfortable lifestyle thanks to everything my parents did for us. And I will always be grateful for that. I would even go so far as to say that experience was what made me what I am today, and I wouldn’t change it even if I had the chance. I never bore any bad feeling towards my parents for sending us to boarding school. But that’s the beauty of hindsight. And sometimes you can be quick to forget the suffering you went through, saying that it wasn’t as bad as you remembered it back then. But usually such thoughts are an illusion and part of ‘Stockholm syndrome’. Could it be that I somehow forgave those bullies after everything they did to me, even felt pity for them?

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Superpower

When I was four years old, living in Dubai, just a few years before the construction boom, and back in the days when my mum used to play golf in the sand, not on grass, I got my first pair of glasses from the optician. I had inherited my dad’s bad eyesight. Back in those early days there was no such thing as contact lenses, so I was stuck with my glasses, which I quickly got used to, as kids do. In fact, I always flipped these things around, using my individuality as a superpower.

My glasses were what made me different from others, and so I got used to wearing them. But my short-sightedness was bad enough to not allow me to be able to live without them. This was first and foremost a problem when I started to play rugby. I distinctly remember our amazing first coach, Mr Callaghan senior, who taught with his son. They used to line us up in two lines at right angles for tackling practice, to teach us not to flinch when tackling and keep running down the same line. The boy with the ball had to sprint straight down the line, and the other boy who was approaching him from a ninety-degree angle also ran straight down the line. He had to time his run perfectly to be able to tackle the other boy exactly on the corner. This kind of training was gruelling and weeded out the weak from the strong, and I’m not talking about physical strength.

Author’s photo

The Shell

In spite of my myopia, rugby is where I shone. Fearless from the very beginning. And that was one of my main psychological outlets; my ticket to freedom from my hermit crab shell, the antithesis of surviving daily life at boarding school. I count myself lucky that I did not really face the kind of physical bullying others did, both during my time or probably more so in the past. We now know that even much more serious incidents took place at both my secondary school and college, but both places were mysterious blackholes, where few from the outside actually knew what was going on.

This was my first life experience of an ‘institution’. Institutions are bright and shiny at the outset, tantalisingly attractive from the outside, but ultimately change your life, and mostly not in a good way. I will leave further discussion of ‘institutions’ for another post, because there is so much more to say about that.

In the early years, my hermit crab shell was quite weak, and the imaginary ‘security company’ I had hired to look after my well-being was ill-equipped to look after me.

Most days and nights I was intellectually and physically tormented. At night I lay in bed, my heart racing, imagining what would happen if I made the wrong move. During the day, I did all I could to make myself invisible, wishing I could disappear.

Do you know what it’s like for someone three times your size to choose you as his beanbag during breaktimes, to the point of suffocation?

Have you ever watched Zero Dark Thirty when they locked up that poor guy in a coffin-sized box to get him to talk? Or that scene in The Imitation Game when boys at boarding school tricked a young boy into hiding in a tight person-sized space under the floorboards, only to nail down the floorboards and put a heavy cupboard on top so there was no way he could escape. It was only when someone heard him screaming much later that they helped him get out. Now that’s the kind of trauma that I am talking about. No-one can prepare you for that and the psychological scars it leaves behind for your future life.

Scene from Zero Dark Thirty (see minute 22:00)

Boxed In

And by the way, I still remember that boy’s name. I looked him up online recently. I wonder if he is happy with his life. I always said that it is not for me to seek out revenge. I do believe that there is a God and give thanks every day for my blessings. But, as they say, you reap what you sew. And I will stop there about that.

So that was how it felt for me to be in such helpless situations. Still today, this is why I suffer from claustrophobia. Usually it is only triggered when I am put in a similarly physically constricting situation (going underground, swimming in narrow places underwater, climbing up to great heights, crowded situations). Since forever, I’ve remembered needing my ‘personal space’, and was even bullied at school because of that. That feeling hasn’t left me till today. You can call me crazy, obsessed, whatever you want, but don’t pretend to understand what I, and many others, went through.

Scene from The Imitation Game

Thick Skin

This is why I still suffer from panic attacks. Usually it is only when I am put in a similar physical situation, but it can also happen when I sustain long periods of stress, like in the days when I worked for the ICRC. Some of the places and circumstances in which we lived made me relive that fear all over again, without always being able to explain to those closest around me the causes of that extreme fear. It became an involuntary reflex.

This was only one example of how I was bullied, but there were many more, most of them psychological. It is a heavy burden to be systematically excluded from social life.

Despite all this, the fact that I managed to survive made me believe I had an extra thick skin, which I did. Later on in my life, it became my habit to force myself to do practically everything that scared the living daylights out of me. I climbed high buildings, went underwater diving and paragliding, volunteered to do public speaking and jumped off high cliffs into the sea. If I felt like it scared me, it pushed me to want to do it no matter the cost, just to prove to myself that I equalled my worth.

Back at school, because I allowed myself to be pushed around, I made myself promise that I would never let anything break me and that I would find a way to bounce back, whatever it took. That was what drove me to always strive to do the impossible. It probably also explains why I often voluntarily take the more difficult path when faced with a choice, to the surprise of many. It became a personal life challenge. In a way, the more I was able to achieve, the more I was able to prove my self-worth.

I only felt ready and open enough to write this piece after two very important people in my life passed away: firstly, my mother last year, and not so long before that, my former headmaster at school.

The former to avoid her feeling any unnecessary additional ill-feeling about me being in that situation and not being able to help; the latter because he was the light who inspired me to believe in myself, to have the courage to stand up to those bullies and take the position of Head Boy during my last year at secondary school at the age of 12, the same year the Iraq-Kuwait Gulf War took place, something I remember vividly well. In these and other similar moments, I stood tall, throwing off my shell to the wind without a care in the world.

The same happened when I played rugby. I was known for being fearless and a ‘bulldozer’ when it came to tackling the tallest and broadest opponents. With hindsight, it is probably also why I still have issues with my memory, having sustained all those blows to the head. If you ever watched Will Smith play in a film called Concussion, about the neurological consequences for American Football professional players, think about today’s (and yesterday’s) rugby players, the vast majority of whom barely have any head protection when they play.

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Oblivion

I constantly forget things. But I never regret for one moment playing rugby. In fact, I may have subconsciously thrown my head into the fray like a fearless boxer, taking blow after blow to the head, to find a way to escape and forget my miserable thoughts of my own worthlessness. It was also around this time when I started to self-mutilate myself, making small but repeated cuts on the upper side of my forearms with my Swiss knife, primarily to release the tension. God knows why I used to do that. I guess I must have been quite depressed. The good news is that I got through that phase and am none the less strong because of it. Having amazing nurses at school helped in a big way. Perhaps also growing up contributed as well. Doing that was definitely a cry for help. But there was no way I could leave school, and I loved the intellectual challenge.

And so the story continued.

Outside of classes and homework, I longed for the weekends when I jumped from being one of many useless psychological punching bags of my year to occupying a status of considerably more power, being well known for taking the hardest hits on the rugby pitch.

I threw myself into my schoolwork, which kept me occupied, but being at boarding school is like a 24/7 policing job. You cannot afford to take your eyes off the ball for one second. You constantly need to watch your back and make sure you blend in. The only way to be allowed to breathe was to make yourself indispensable, going out of your way to run errands for seniors, doing tuck runs (walking to buy sweets from the nearby school shop), buying stuff at the nearby village, giving away precious food items received in family parcels every once in a while.

Despite all of this, I surfaced after eleven years of ‘drowning’ and launched into giving, the next phase of my life, spending one year of volunteer work in Germany with homeless people, on minimum wage.

Photo by Li Yang on Unsplash

I am acutely aware of the privilege I had to attend this type of school and won’t ever forget the education and sport opportunities I had. But that does not for one moment diminish the actions of those cowards who likely picked up the habits of their own peers (cowardice), own parents/family (learn to swim or drown) or as a way of lashing out to create a smokescreen for their own uncertainties and insecurities.

I remember well, at secondary school, those who were bullied, including myself, used to hang out together, somehow to gain comfort in our collective solace and also because we understood each other. I remember distinctly feeling such an acute anger and simultaneous helplessness at such injustice, in the absence of full impunity, with no-one ever there to defend me or teach me.

Onwards and Upwards

This is exactly what made me want to work in a field where I could help others, and one of the other reasons I joined a humanitarian organisation, admittedly the first being able to travel and live in the Middle East, a region I loved from my youth experiences living abroad.

Whenever I was bullied, wronged, faced with pure and simple injustice, I took it on the chin; it almost became like a challenge for me, to show them that no matter how much they hurt me, they could never break me inside. I didn’t know how to defend myself but kept convincing myself that I didn’t want to reciprocate their violent methods. I always prided myself at having the thickest skin ever! It was only decades later that I finally learned how to stand up for myself, and I’m still learning.

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Expiation

As for the bullies, I did then and still now, feel such sadness and pity at their utter weakness that permitted themselves to want to actively hurt others. I also learned about forgiveness as part of my Christian upbringing. It is not for nothing that we were taught to “turn the other cheek”. And it was also why I remained non-confrontational and pacifist in the face of cruelty for so long.

I still believe violence is not the answer, but now learned a few tactics from my better half to obtain my rights without losing my temper.

I never regretted my youth. I only regretted not knowing how to stand up for myself or having someone teach me how to be assertive without being afraid.

On the contrary, such experiences, as harsh as they were, made me who I am today: hard on the outside, but soft on the inside.

I guess one reason I later chose to stay within the safety of ICRC, a relatively smaller organisation when I first joined, but by now a much larger bureaucratic institution, was because it allowed me to help those in extreme need to somehow do for others what I never managed to do for myself; a kind of psychological expiation; it was also because a vast majority of those who worked there were and in some ways will always be family to me, because of their integrity, strong belief in human beings and humanity. I will never feel guilty for trying my utmost to help those in need to keep their heads up high, to smile, to breathe, if only for a few moments, to give hope, to allow someone to be listened to. For those reasons I do still believe in the need for those who are ready to put aside their selfish lives to help those who are suffering.

It has taken me time to admit to myself that I may be better off serving outside the system than within. Nevertheless, I believe I did make a real difference when it mattered.

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Silence No More

But the price I paid was another twenty years of silence, this time for a different master. Admittedly, I knowingly signed up for this deal, but now enough is enough!

I now know that working for any institution means curtailing one’s intellectual freedom and in many ways capacity for critical thought. Now it is time for me to lose my hermit shell again for good. I may need to chip away at it a bit by bit, but more and more, I long to recapture the raw gutsiness I had after school, without losing the maturity I gained with age.

This comes right back at you weak, cold-hearted, feckless bullies. You will never silence me.

It took me the best part of my life to rediscover my voice, and now I have got it back, be sure that I am going to put it to good use.

Sticks and stones; sticks and stones.

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