The Belong Foundation.

[TiffanyyO]

WOW this is just amazing!!!

[Faustino]

The praying expanded to fill every second of my existence; while talking I’d be continuing some mantra or incantation internally and this got progressively worse during the following couple of years. A process of self-abnegation was set in motion and it was a brutal time for a developing child. I felt such fear and guilt about everything that I started disavowing anything even vaguely positive in my life. It started off quite innocuously, when I wasn’t allowed to win a race at school, for example, because that was ungodly and arrogant. Then I wasn’t allowed to proffer an opinion because, you guessed it, that wasn’t humble. I’d incorporate all of these oaths into my prayers (remember in an empty house at night or with my suffering father sighing about the damned nature of existence itself, my unhinged mind ran amok) and the proscriptions just kept proliferating at a cancerous rate of growth.
I soon couldn’t even open a book because that was something that would imply arrogance, and anyway all my former pleasures and interests had to be stripped out of my life. Then I couldn’t sit up straight because that was obnoxiously cocky, but I couldn’t slouch either because that was slovenly…I was inhabiting Dante’s inferno, constricting myself with every further thought as absolutely everything could be verboten on some spurious quasi-theological grounds and it wasn’t long before I was residing in Hell. My compulsive oaths lead me to having to stop speaking to other people, I couldn’t contribute anything to the external world as that would be standing out too much and therefore not humble, I wasn’t allowed a new shirt even though my old ones didn’t fit because that was vainglorious and on and on the oppressive oaths went…until I couldn’t breathe for fear of offending the punitive and omnipotent God who I hadn’t been able to shake off for even a nanosecond over the previous months and years.
Surprise, surprise, my mental health spiralled out of control and I developed something so terrifying that I truly believed I was possessed by the Devil himself; a relentless internal Tourette’s that would not release me from sacrilegious and profane thoughts. There was no respite, ever. Going to school and the voice would be roaring. At home, alone in the evening, it would not relent. I thought I had the devil inside me and with nobody to enquire as to my well-being or even to talk to, I just plummeted into increasing darkness. I was terrified and the only way to keep some order on the collapse I was suffering (at the age of 12, remember) was to pray more and more intensely.
Looking back now I see that I seemingly used my father as some form of archetype to be emulated. It was just damn bad luck that my dad was the antithesis of James Bond lol but seriously, I think it was precisely this fact that drove me to copy him knowing that it was an anti-human force, a rejection of all that is good and noble in life. On a profound level I knew that I was doing immense harm to myself but for some reason I felt I deserved it. What for, though? How did I end up believing that looking up at the world, shoulders back, smiling and laughing were heinous crimes? Why did I believe there to be virtue in eliminating all expressive and joyous parts of existence and myself?
I could only take this for so long before a psychological breakdown happened and it was just before my fifteenth birthday when things came to a head. I had an instinctive sense that all this was deeply wrong: the prayers, the injunctions to not live fully, to not do anything that might contribute to leading a meaningful life or create serotonin or dopamine or any of the other essential elixirs of life. In short, all spark had been extinguished in my soul. I wiped away the anguished tears for one last prayer that forsook all previous iterations of “virtue” and embarked on a life devoid of the safety mechanism of OCD praying, into a socio-economic underclass world of long-term unemployment, housing benefit, depression, alcohol and reckless irresponsibility (I had some serious catching up to do, don’t forget and I wasn’t prepared to sacrifice this dissolute lifestyle for anything, even if I could miraculously develop a mature character instantaneously, which of course, I couldn’t). The next decade and a half had its ups and downs during which, through sheer good fortune, I met some people who were to prove messianic in my life with their message of family, community, work, contribution to society and all those other things I had missed out on as a younger man…and that ultimately lead me to where I am today as an old fella trying to pay some generosity of spirit forward in a world that’s often lacking such things.