Earlier this week I watched a beautiful film “The Fundamentals of Caring” which touched me deeply within my soul.

I was affected by the wounds which the care giver and the care recipient were trying to manage throughout their humorous and compassionate journey to see the worlds deepest pit.

I have noticed that when something beautiful touches my emotional state, my own wounds of the soul seem to ache all the more and the joy of this film, washed back over me in a second wave of the deepest agitation and pain.

It has been so bad, that my awareness of the physical manifestations of the anxiety which I have experienced has felt dangerous and intolerable.

Last night, sat in a relaxed state with a glass of beer in my hand, I was acutely aware that beneath the exterior appearance of calm, my inner emotions were out of control within me. I randomly announced to my wife that I needed to see a doctor for some medication to see me through this difficult period of severe agitation.

It lead to a conversation in wnich some issues were explored, peripheral issues in respect of financial, work and family worries, which compound the deepest wounds of my suppressed sexaulity which although acknowledged, these were not dealt with.

I hold back, to save my wife any further pain or worry. My choice to remain married is solid, but it comes at a price which sometimes feels too hard to bear.

Layered into the physical, emotional and mental pain, is the imagined pain of suspicion, perhaps even bordering on paranoia that I am being tracked in my movements or talked about by acquaintances who percieve my truth.

A toxic cocktail of anxiousness and fear is contributing to my current agitated state which I know will pass, just as the tide which ebbs ond flows on the shore sometimes arrives with the tumultuous crashing of waves on the sand, until subdued in calmer weather, it creeps in and out, bringing with it the gentlest breeze.

William Defoe

I have tried to remain positive in the cold, dark month of January because it has been a time for me in many past years of unhappiness, anxiety and inertia.

I have tried to keep active, ignoring the cold, or more particularly ignoring the perception of the cold which my mind wants to protect me from, and I have gone out early in the morning to run in the cold and dark streets before sunrise.

I have tried to sleep for longer, ignoring a perception in my mind that the cold and dark are my enemies, keeping me a prisoner within the walls of my home.

My sleep has not been due to a feeling of malaise, but rather it has been an active and positive attempt to rest, to notice the benefit of being rested, and to nurture a sense of gratitude that I am relaxed and calm enough to endure it.

I have tried to walk, particularly on sunny bright Sunday afternoons, feeling the cold on my face, but being wrapped up in winter clothes, overcoat, gloves and scarf to generate an internal furnace of warm blood to stir my sense of good health and wellbeing despite the elements.

My favourite walk, was on one evening in deep fresh fallen snow, as I circled my home on the roads which surround it, taking in with joy the solitude, the eeirness, the lights and shadows and the sound underfoot of fresh crushed snow.

I have tried to read, sat with tired eyes, after a long day at work, in front of the fire with a book and a cup of tea, trying to lose myself in the other worldliness of a novel, thinking how historic references to social and economic hardships have changed or adapted in the present day.

I have built a jigsaw and a picture emerged from the assembled pieces of a famous English city which I have never visited, its steeples and towers on the skyline and academic and scientific excellence calling on me to make a pilgrmage to it later in the year.

The imagined streets in my minds eye, unseen in the pieces of the jigsaw, where all the birds and people are fixed in inanimated suspension like the images on the Grecian Urn*.

I have immersed myself in deepening my commitment to my own development. I have taken time to understand the origins of my nervous system and I have discussed with my coach the events and circumstances in my life which trigger movement of my responses to threat and fear on the autonomic ladder.

So, January is at an end, there is hope of better weather and warmer temperatures and a growth in daylight as the days and weeks emerge into a Spring of new born lambs and daffodils.

This is mirrored by a strength and resilience nurtured with me on these January days to appreciate and to take notice of what is important to me in the life I am living.

William Defoe

*John Keats, Ode to a Grecian Urn

I am an English Catholic, a supporter of the benefits of a United Kingdom, but deeply respectful of the hopes and aspirations of my fellow citizens in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland who crave for independence.

I have been drawn recently to the Queen’s visit to Ireland in 2011 and how that visit sought to draw a line under the hurt caused by passed centuries of not treating our neighbours as our freinds.

My catholicism, held strongly in my consciousness, originates in my Irish ancestry, but I am English, I am a unionist, I am gay.

I have been drawn this week to the tragic early death of the Archbishop of Glasgow, Philip Tartaglia at the age of 70. It has been a shock for the cathoilic commnity in Scotland as his death had not been anticpated by ill health or age.

I have been drawn to his funeral rites, the words of his brother Fr Gerard Tartaglia at the vigil Mass, expressing his disbelief that his brother had died, and at the words of Bishop Hugh Gilbert at the funeral Mass in which he compared the loss of the archbishop to the uprooting of a strong and solid tree in a storm.

This uprooting of strength, this uprooting of goodness causes pain and as with an oak felled in a storm, the roots once torn up from the earth cannot be replanted, but in the shadow of the felled branches, the earth stirs with saplings and new growth which lie in the fertile ground of the previous incumbent of that space.

I have struggled to keep my roots in the ground, they have been at risk in recent years of tearing themselves up with the vain hope of being replanted into another space.

I have learned that whatever I have been, whatever I am, whatever I aspire to be in the future is already to be found in the roots from which my life is sprung.

The catholic roots within me from beautiful Ireland, the unionist roots within me from remarkable England, the gay roots within me from the biological genes I carry are intertwined in the solid ground under my feet, and it is from there that the foliage grows and makes me into the complex being that I have become.

William Defoe

I have been feeling into how incomplete my perspective is on my place in the world, and how this can change one day to the next, or at times, it can feel immovable in a place from which my capacity to move on is limited.

For many years, I have sat in the same pew in church, singing with the other choir members from the tenor row at the back.

In recent weeks, due to coronavirus, there has been no singing and so I have sat in a variety of places which are in the main, very unfamiliar.

The pillars, obscure the view from my seat in some places of the altar, or the giant crucifix, an outstrecthed arm missing some weeks or the head, or perhaps it is the priests chair, or the lectern which I cannot see.

I have to adapt, to these changes in my view, by either accepting it, or leaning my head to either side to give myself for a few moments a glimpse of a wider reality than I have in my sedentary partial view.

I have been consumed for a number of years with the partial view of my identity, it has unfolded within me into an acceptance and at times into a longing which has brought with it the deepest of pains.

My wife, has a partial view of my truth, knowing it, but not accepting it, wanting to control it and manage it, and unable to free herself from the times when my behaviour has caused her pain.

I don’t think that either of us in a combined sense, have a full view of our situation.

If we were to find the courage to try to join our partial views, we’d still have to negotiate our understanding, obscured by the pillar which is the mystery of my sexuality, but if each of us could move our heads from side to side, to get a better view, then it stands to reason that our combined view of the whole would be increased, if we shared our insight to fill the gaps.

I have learned in my coaching experience, which has enriched my life, that I can never take the moods or actions of one day and define my life by them.

Tomorrow, does not forget yesterday, but instead it has the capacity to bring something new which will change a perspective, soften a stance, turn into something or turn away, always grappling to find sure ground, solid ground, grounded ground, from which to alter the partial view.

William Defoe

During my summer holiday, I persevered with a book* which at its climax had an unhappy ending (in my opinion).

I had sensed this would be the case as I continued to read through the hundreds of pages of print.

At the end a catalogue of unfortunate circumstances, which conspired to work against a happy climax, and yet I had this overwhelming sense that a re-write from 5 or 10 pages back from its end could have delivered what I had most hoped for.

I sense this in the daily management of my self and the longings of my heart which are tearing me apart.

I have worked so hard to be happy, and yet the deeply unfulfilled aspect of self and the consequences of holding this anguish in my heart for so long makes my strength to maintain and nurture everything else which is good in my life unbearable.

I want there to be a happy ending to my story, but I fear that to succumb to the needs of self, would deliver the exact opposite.

I am trapped in a situation where having done everything in my power to live my life for others, the alternative in living my life for my self would be totally incompatible with my desire to be happy.

My gay self competes in my heart, body, mind and soul for recognition and fulfillment alongside my strong desire to be a loving and faithful husband to my wife.

As with the book with the unhappy ending, the author has to make a choice over the destiny of its main protagonists, and so with a sense of loss and a deep awareness of the alternative, I must also maintain my choice to put the needs of others first.

Apparently, I am destined for a reward in the afterlife – an afterlife which I struggle to believe in, and yet, its promise has a hold upon me because it too has a place within the complex psyche of my thinking which refuses to dismiss aspects of thought which i do not fully understand.

My story is not at its end, it has few more chapters to run, my feelings ebb and flow like the incoming and outgoing tide which attended to me whilst I was reading. The ending is unknown, and like the author of the book, I ultimately will decide on the upcoming pages of my life.

William Defoe

*Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig