My Abundant Life, Prologue: How It Could Have Been

Once upon a time, I had an unbearable nightmare about a life I lived where I was born into a family broken by grief and religion, where I had an older brother I never met who was born into suffering and only lived for a week.

My mother – the one ray of light that shined truly bright in this grim reality – was able to find within herself the strength and grace to process this loss, and as she began to recover, she put her whole being into loving not only her three children who lived but also as many other children as she could, helping those who were disadvantaged by special educational needs to have the same opportunities in life as all the rest.

But my father was a broken man, damaged beyond either his ability or his willingness to repair. Unable to let go, he instead took solace in religion – but rather than embracing and embodying the message of love and hope that it offered, it only served to enhance his sense of loss and grievance when he found that his wife and later his children did not share his faith and fervour for his newfound beliefs. Refusing to accept this, he attempted to use his religion as a cudgel to beat his family into submitting to the will of God as he saw it, causing nothing but rifts and resentment as he battered us with his twisted notions of what being a faithful Christian is all about, ultimately all but breaking the whole family apart.

And all through this push and pull between my parents, with my father trying to take away my choices and my mother fighting to give me the right to choose, I was there in the middle, the eldest yet not the firstborn, believing this must all be my fault somehow.

As I grew old enough to begin to question and indeed wilfully defy my father, his disapproval of me became very clear and I experienced my first taste of rejection, of not being accepted for who I am. And even though my mother loved and accepted me unconditionally and I never doubted that for one second, her boundless love was not enough to cushion or counterbalance the pain of feeling that although I knew on some level that my father loved me, I didn’t really feel it. What I felt, rather, was that I wasn’t really the son he wanted, that I was a disappointment and often an embarrassment to him, that I was guilty of making far too many mistakes and failing far too often and having far too many flaws. He expected me to be just like him, and when he found that I wasn’t, he saw me as somehow defective; he never really cared to get to know who I truly am or embrace the many ways in which I am so different from him. This rejection wounded me profoundly, causing a terrible deep pain within me that I carried through adolescence and into adulthood. I carry it with me still, despite truly wanting to just set it down and consign it to the grim bowels of my far less than perfect history. I just don’t know how.

To further compound matters, I found this pattern repeating at school, where my intelligence and love of reading and enjoyment of maths and science worked against me, and I was ripped apart by verbally abusive classmates, as well as being occasionally beaten. This carried on all through my childhood, and worsened in my teenage years. I was haunted by the humiliation of every gym class, my physical inferiority compared to almost all of the other boys overwhelmingly clear, my lack of confidence and hand-to-eye coordination, the fact that I had to wear glasses with lenses so thick they made milk bottles jealous (which would either be knocked off my face or I could take them off and then not be able to see anyone or anything at all), even the birthmark on my knee… those kids didn’t miss a trick when it came to taunting and humiliating me, and my gym teachers were basically just more schoolboy bullies who had physically matured but had never left school and never lost their taste for bullying.

That bullying became full-on torment after my blinkered, arrogant, critical, disapproving father – who I now clashed with greatly through the peak of my adolescence as I was more and more able to see and understand and challenge his flaws and weaknesses and hypocrisy and judgemental attitude – pushed me down completely the wrong path, away from the creative writing that my mother had always encouraged and into an electrical engineering apprenticeship that was, of course, just like the one he had done when he was my age. On some level I still wanted, I suppose, to try to please him and at last get the approval that I so fervently craved. I didn’t have any better ideas about what to do with my life (my father’s lack of belief in the merit and worth of creative pursuits of any kind – and, by extension, in me and my ability to succeed at whatever I put my mind to – had made clear that pursuing writing was not a viable option), so I allowed myself to be shoved into four years of hell, of being relentlessly bullied by my classmates during the first couple of years of college and being pushed around and abused by colleagues and managers alike in the workplace. I’m sure I brought some of it on myself due to all the insecurity and anger and sadness and frustration that was spilling out of me, but a lot of it was just cruel people seeing an easy target and taking me down to make themselves feel better about their own pathetic lives.

And even when I was able to escape from the torment of that horrendous company and its awful, small-minded, vicious, mediocre people, it wasn’t an escape at all, as I fled to university and continued along that wrong path, doing a degree that seemed like it would lead to a lucrative career (computing) even though I really didn’t want to do it and was still trying to make the best of a really awful situation.

I did what was expected of me when I met a woman and fell in love; we got married, even as I was still completely oblivious about my deepest romantic and sexual desires, locked away in a totally forbidden box that must never be opened lest I end up burning in the Hellfire of damnation for all eternity, as I had been successfully indoctrinated by my fanatical religious bigot of a father despite my loving and kind mother’s best efforts, while both of my parents had made sure – for their own different reasons – to raise me in the most secure bubble possible, one that kept me sheltered from as much world knowledge as possible, everything from drugs and alcohol to sex and sexuality.

And still I carried on down that path, lurching from one job I hated to the next slightly better paying job that I hated even more, feeling like I was shackled to my desk in each anonymous, pointless office, my soul being chipped away and irrevocably destroyed one little piece at a time as each day passed meaninglessly by, suffering setbacks and rejections and failures despite putting my heart and soul into every friendship, every business opportunity, every attempt I made to get out of this trap and free myself from the misery of the interminable mediocrity that my life choices – guided at every step by the completely wrong-headed advice of my at least partially well-intentioned but utterly misguided father – had led to, this prison from which I could not seem to escape and in which my wife was my only solace, even though she herself could not satisfy certain desires that could no longer be locked away and had begun to break free of that box, despite all the chains and locks and warning signs wrapped around it.

Of course this was all going to end in tears. Unquestionably a full mental breakdown and severe depression was inevitable. Looking back, it’s miraculous that I held on for as long as I did. I went down fighting until my last breath – but because I fought with everything I had, when I went down, I went down hard.

I had to stop working because I could no longer walk into the office – even drive halfway there – without collapsing into a sobbing heap. All of the debt I had accumulated from my terrible mismanagement of money (combined with the huge drain of both myself and my wife having recently attended university) meant that my wife and I had to move in with my parents, welcomed with unrestrained condemnation by a father who informed me that, despite my financial sins, I could still have the privilege of living under his roof again, as long as it didn’t cost him anything. My wife bailed out a few months later, plotting behind my back to start a new life in a distant country rather than ever telling me she was unhappy and giving me any kind of chance to save our marriage. And then a decade and a half just went by in a blur of misery, suffering, failed attempts to reboot myself and my life, more loss, more failure, more rejection… it all blurred together into unending torment. I didn’t need to be afraid of going to Hell any more. I was already here.

But then I awoke from that horrible nightmare, and realised that none of it had ever happened! That instead, miraculously, I had had the perfect life, the most wonderful upbringing that anyone could ever wish for, a childhood that was truly wealthy in every sense of the word. So draw nearer, dear reader, and let me tell you how it all really began…