In this open account, Grant speaks about what led him to advocacy services and why he deserves to live with a voice of expression.
A liquorice allsort life
An uneducated man.
In my later years I struggle to make what little sense I can, of a past life which once crucified me with rejection, isolation and addiction.
No longer is there a necessity to constantly regurgitate those years of negativity or immerse myself in the pain. I have slowly learned to embrace only love, compassion and positivity.
I reject all else.
This says I deserve to exist with a voice of expression. So hear me now.
In my own mind I hold a distorted and false picture of my birth, set within the deep confines of a decaying urine soaked service room of a south London hospital, on a hot and early summer morning way back in 1961.
Unworldly music seeps from the peeling paintwork; Carl Orffs 1936 cantata of Carmina Burana’s ‘O’Fontuna’. The rage of angels singing and crying.
The feeling of deep rooted worthlessness I have carried like an anvil into my adulthood is reflected in my thoughts that perhaps I should have been left to plummet down the cracked porcelain bowl, into the conduits of the sewer, towards an eternal holiday along the shore of the south coast. Maybe these lines indicate why I have sought my own obliteration for so long.
It would be impossible for me to write a time lined journal of my life, like Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’. It would be too long and far too painful.
The reality of my earlier days begins with me, aged seven years old, standing wet and freezing cold, as I seek shelter inside an old phone box on a dark winter morning. I am waiting for my light blue I.L.E.A bus to take me to my ‘special’ school. As I step onto the bus, ‘normal’ kids from other schools shout abuse and throw stones.
I do not react and I do not cry.
Already I understand which battles to fight and which ones to throw away.
Every child at my school had a disability. I loved that school and the people in it. This was my sanctuary and respite from trauma, pain and violence.
I don’t remember a time when my family lived as a whole unit. I only remember me and my very unwell mother, disintegration and then a void of time which was filled by being in other peoples care.
Some places I experienced real warmth and blissful happiness.
In most, all I found was an endless horizon of pitch black darkness which I do not want to return to.
Memories and nostalgia are bleak; an ill and unfit mother with all the violence of a ‘chinese burn’ upon my wrist, as my small frame is dragged along, then beaten with a splintering stick with all the force of Thors hammer. The rage of an overweight steam train out of control.
I know when morning comes; I will awake with blood soaked sheets mingling with urine, stuck to the fine lacerations on my back and legs.
A liquorice allsort of a life: suicide attempts, drug and alcohol addiction, mental illness, bankruptcy and homelessness combined with a rejection and denial of myself and others; an overwhelming inability to form long term relationships, always on the outside looking in rather than being a part of; a Jesus syndrome of self crucifixion along with self doubt and the all encompassing paranoia which has the ability to destroy everything; an exploding set of events gathering deafening reverberation across time, has contained many of the things that one might associate with the fragments of a childhood which was lost.
However, be left in no doubt … life also leaves me with an inner strength like that of the very finest Japanese steel. Proud of my independence and self reliance, I am mindful with positivity, driven with the velocity of a speeding bullet.
Over time I have attentively listened, arriving at an understanding of who I am and finding an acceptance in all things. I have a responsibility for myself and my own actions. Yes I am the consequence of an others actions but I proportion no blame. Ultimately I loved my mum regardless of anything because I believe love and compassion are unconditional.
It has taken that child well over fifty years to find a level of peace because what I didn’t understand as a child left me with fear.
I no longer search for answers, as I am no longer that child.
If you read in between the lines you will know my story.
I am not unique.
I am blessed.
I am humbled,
And I am thankful.
I have survived all.
I end this story as I began …I am an uneducated man; this is the only way I know how to write.
This says I deserve to exist with a voice of expression … so hear me now.
The sound of two feet 