Reflecting back to my childhood. It’s been a long harsh journey to a point in my life where I have actually found a measure of solace. I never realized while growing up as a foster child and then as an adoptee, the bizarre twists and turns that I would have take to get to my present state of being. I grew up as the adopted child of a cancer stricken housewife and a disabled World War II alcoholic veteran. I grew up in the Jamaica section of Queens, just north of JFK Airport. Growing up in a lower income white family. I am a child of the ’70s and ’80s. The 1970s was a very scary time in America and especially in New York City. Tensions were explosive and people had very short fuses. By the time I was 10 years old I had my first accounter with physical violence. I was chased after coming off a bus by an intoxicated knife wielding madman. Construction workers quickly came to my aid and restrained the man. That was my first of many encounters with physical violence growing up in Southeast Queens.
Throughout my grammar school and middle school years I spent an inordinate amount of time avoiding violence being perpetrated against me. Both by complete strangers and immediate family. I became a very angry and bitter young man. And I spent countless hours worrying how to defend myself in return. I studied a variety of martial arts and fostered a stoic mindset.
This mindset of always being on edge, always being on the alert was utterly exhausting. It drained me dry in mind, body, and spirit.
I sought answers to the deep existential questions that every teen. But the problem with answers is they can be right or wrong, answers are not always demonstrative. Answers answers are never facts in themselves.
Even though one desires them to be with all one’s heart. Solutions are demonstrative. There are some people who will believe that 2 + 2 = 5 because a book or group told him so.
When you are in an environment of utter dysfunction you become desperate to find a solutions out of that environment. I chose an uncommon path for many people my age in the hedonistic 1980s.
I got involved in Eastern religion. A yoga based religious group. I came in contact with people who seemed genuinely happy. People who offered easy solutions to problems that sounded attractive to me at that time and by the age of 16 I had became psychologically hooked.
What I did not realize at that specific time was that I simply did not have the life experiences to see that I was living someone else’s ideals and dogmas and not my own path. After a while I started to see that the supposed happy people were disappearing from the group in trickles. And then we had new happy people who also eventually left the group. This made me reconsider my place in group settings.
In reality what was happening was that it was a temporary reprieve from the ordinary. The ordinary for me was horrific. Eventually empiric reality eventually catches up with us.
You find yourself nearing 30 years old with absolutely no job skills. What your friends had recognized by their mid-twenties you are just now discovering in your thirties. I went back to school and my friends were having their first children.
In retrospect it feels like when you are falling in a dream but can’t wake up. Spiraling into an existential void with no light at the end of the tunnel. Then you realize what is really going on!
The whole time that we are suffering from our traumas and what we believe at the time is the remedy for our traumas. Is just the overwhelming chatter of memories. It’s like having every traumatic memory replaying your head repeatedly without stopping.
That’s when I realized that these intrusive thoughts were fabrications of my subconscious mind. I simply started seeing them as unwanted guests and visitors. I stopped opening the door. I stopped inviting them and picking up the proverbial phone.
Eventually, the chattering noise stopped because, I stopped feeding them completely. To borrow a Zen euphemism, I stopped feeding “hungry ghosts.”
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