“My brain is wired in such a way that it likes to understand intent and
then it will analyse.” R.S. Email to CG. 13/05/2012
Intent of this mail.
a) To ponder your ‘needy or annoying’ comment. 🙂
Hi Lammas … Its Beach 🙂
Chris understands that Rebecca can feel pressurised by deadlines, work
commitments, long hours and a feeling that there is sometimes rare
chance to find peace in her day.
There was a time when he himself used to hear the smashing of crockery
when he found himself trying to spin too many plates on their poles.
He would admit that there was a certain pleasing addiction in pursuing
his own hectic lifestyle with or without any material, financial or
personal reward, simply because he knew he was doing a good thing, the
right thing … by striving to get on in the world.
After all, that is what society, our peers, our family and our friends
would expect or wish for us.
For the people who admired, shared or celebrated Chris’s drive and
vision for his business, he was a dynamic, charismatic role model …
but for those who had to take the heat while he pursued the burning
desires inside him, he became an aloof prima donna making them feel as
if they were mere distractions.
As the local, national and then international acclaim grew, the momentum
it generated, turned him into somebody else.
I’m naturally referring to The Gravity Venture. Blah, blah, blah :-/
And that set him on a collision course with the future he could never
have comprehended. A future that would eventually strip him of
everything.
And when the crash came, all that energy and momentum concertined into
his mind like a speeding car hitting a breezeblock wall.
First there was the heartbreak of the marriage failing … losing
Jackie.
[It was Chris who left her, not the other way around. He did it to throw
himself on the grenade … rather than let the shrapnel and
repurcussions of his boardroom battle hurt her and the children any
further by him being in the house .. in their lives].
Then the panic anxiety started.
Followed by the reactive depression.
Then came the thoughts of self harm, (suicide) … and then the physical
manifestation of the Deep Vein Thrombosis.
With this hellish set of events all happening at once, the only solace
and peace left for Chris, were those gained in slumber while he slept.
… until that last sanctuary was also violated and invaded by night
terror and incubus, a terrifying condition where there is the experience
of being asleep and dreaming but being paralysed in bed.
Incubus creates the disturbing condition of being semi-awake to
experience lucid nightmares as if they were actually real and tangible
in the room. (Google Incubus. Its nasty).
Remember when Chris wrote about not wishing to take pills, preferring to
fight his demons head on rather than just having drugs to make them fade
back into his psyche? It was because he knew he had to exorcise those
things rather than allow them to stay inside his head.
Although these symptoms came and went for a few years, the last
‘illness’ in this early phase involved something called Disassociation,
a wonderful mechanism that the brain will deploy as a last resort, as a
means of self preservation.
Dissassociation acts like the fuse in a 13 amp plug. It recognises a
device is under extreme load so it ‘blows’, breaking the circuit thereby
stopping the electricity from flowing … avoiding the device burning
out or catching fire.
All the adrenalin, all the anxieties, all the sickening thoughts about
losing Jackie, all the worries about the legal issues, (of Chris sueing
a company for breach of contract), everything, every thought just flew
out of his mind like swallows flying South.
Peace … and a calm, quite mind for the first time since he ever
thought of That Thing.
The disassociation only lasted a couple of hours but it did it’s job,
pulling him back from the brink and, thankfully, there is now a decade
distancing him from all that turmoil.
There’s no need to add much more.
I’m just saying …
Chris knows what it is like to be under duress, stressed, zonked, zoned
out and seemingly detached from stuff that should be special, important
… sacred. That’s the reason he refuses to be phased or fussed about
anything. It’s because he knows that getting stressed or wound up only
invites negativity or causes potential barriers to friends and folk who
might care for him.
It also explains his lifestyle these days …
Walking, hiking, cycling, fishing, metal detecting, photography,
gardening … tinkering with computers and gadgets, offering a little
tuition and happily living on less of a monthly income than he may have
claimed on expenses in another life.
Chris isn’t ‘needy’. Chris doesn’t need anything at all in this life …
apart from the joy of living it and learning more about it.
I think he adores you though 🙂
Beach
P.S
If this ‘Jeckyl and Hyde’ style of writing throws you, don’t take it
seriously. After all, like me … its just fiction … something that
somebody made up to tell a story. 🙂
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