Who and What the Fuck am I?

A Meditation on Self at the end of a Masters

Chronology

I began studying at a Tertiary level almost 8 years ago. I began my study understandably enough with an exploration of Bahasa Indonesia. The combination of an Indonesian heritage wife and hate mail from my in-laws almost obliged me to study the language. My journey began with Open Universities. Then as if by accident I received a second round offer from Monash University to study a Bachelor of Arts (Languages). This initial Bachelor changed into a straight up Bachelor of Arts when I realised the only thing language related that I was studying was Indonesian itself.

 It is hard to remember what I was like before I began studying. It seems like, and in many ways is, a different lifetime. I’m aware that once I was in awe of those with tertiary qualifications. There was an in-built deference derived from an inferiority complex that had me genuflecting whenever someone with a Bachelor degree or more offered an opinion…which by definition of their having the Bachelor etc., had to be completely correct. These people were, after all, tertiary educated and as such had to know what they were talking about.

Selina tells me that I used to mumble. The ability to articulate much of anything wasn’t there eight years ago. Monash has changed my mental operating system. I think the fact that I studied a language has helped my articulation. In order to be understood in Indonesian, I couldn’t mumble. So it is that I acquired an accent that has been described as “educated”. Also the literally almost a hundred essays of varying length that I’ve written where I had to explain what I was or wasn’t thinking, can’t have hurt my articulation. I’ve been explaining myself for the last 8 years.

Mark once remarked that he thought he could have completed a Bachelor since, in his opinion, he once had a great memory. I replied that a good memory was optional in regards to completing tertiary studies. A great memory is nice to have, but hardly a must have. I told him that tertiary education changed how we think. There is an active meddling in the software between our ears. The essays, of which, I must have completed over a 100, have rearranged how I think. There is a clarity and certainty in my thinking that simply wasn’t there before I began my Bachelor. My studies at Monash have taken me to a Bachelor of Arts, then Honours and so far a Masters of International Relations.

In the last eight years I have lost people who I have loved. In 2017 alone both of my Mum’s have died. I had someone I considered a friend, albeit hardly a close friend, suicide in 2016, and only found out about it by accident three months after he had done it. In December 2014, a much loved brother died. These are the people I loved, or at least thought kindly of. In July of 2015 my father died.

My brother dying, I am told changed me. Oh I was aware of his many faults. Still I loved him. Mark died too young and at what should have been the three-quarter point of a full life. These days 60 is still very much a prime of life age. Yet Mark died just six months after his 60^th birthday. With Mark there was, and still is, the sense that there was so very much that he could have done with his life. Mark to be honest was bone lazy. It wasn’t intellectual ability Mark lacked, it was a work ethic. In late 2013 Mark asked me what it took to do an Arts degree in middle age and with a young child in the house. My reply was telling: I told him it took Need and Passion. If you needed the degree badly enough and you were passionate about what you were doing, then you would do whatever it took to get the degree. Mark lacked both need and passion. He was also incredibly passive and wouldn’t fight back when people mistreated him. It was observed that whilst I have too much mongrel in me, and will quite readily bite back at people, Mark had too little.  With Mark dying two weeks before Christmas, there came the resolve in me to do everything that I believed Mark could and should have done…and hadn’t.   

So it was that I went from being content with Honours to needing a Doctorate. Mark dying was easy. I knew he wasn’t going to live given his lifestyle of heavy smoking, excessive consumption of sugar and a complete lack of fruit and vegetables in his diet. So when the first heart attack happened in March 2014, at the same time as Selina miscarried a baby we called Soraya, I knew the clock was ticking on Mark. He would die in mid-December 2014. Throughout 2014 the sense of when Mark’s death would occur was palpable. I returned after his first heart attack, but was unable to stay very long. It was Mark’s fourth heart attack that killed him. I made the determination to get myself in the best shape I could physically and proceeded to begin losing the weight I had regained following Salmonella. I dropped about 4 kg in the next year.

The suicide of the friend, Peter Alexander, in March 2016, kicked me around. I didn’t particularly mind not being told at the time…. I had long since lost touch with him in any meaningful way and left the Buddhist Society of Victoria where the friendship as it was had been was based. We had last spoken in November of 2015 and it was obvious that I had changed too much for him to deal with.  Like I said, we weren’t close. What kicked me around was Peter had put his mother into a nursing home and then gone home and killed himself. Peter, it turned out, had bipolar. All the times I thought he was being a patronising shit, were in fact the times when he was medicated to the gills. To have someone die so suddenly and by his own hand struck me like a punch to the face.

Mark with his life choices had a use-by date and effectively committed slow suicide by lifestyle. Peter’s death was sudden. I struggled. I struggled to accept that he had ended up in a place where the only logical thing for him to do was to kill himself. With Peter there was the profound sense of severance. Mark was physically ill for a long time as the smoking and shitty dietary habits slowly killed him. When you consume 150% of your 90 kg body weight in refined sugar in your last year of life, there has to be something that gives. With Mark it was his heart.  Peter was in mid-life, the life energy in him was physically strong and then he severed it. With Peter there was the shock of recoil as the emotional energy that comes with knowing someone rebounded. With Peter there was no outward sign that it was even possible that he would end his own life.  Mark wilted. I resolved to never inflict the grief, the pain, the sense of not knowing why that suicide brings to people on those I love.

In 2012 I called it quits on being Theravadin. Like so much of my first marriage it wasn’t a natural fit. Having lost 10 kg in the previous year or two I was wanting to incorporate fitness and sex into my meditation. Also there were remaining issues from the Buddhist Society of Victoria (BSV) and my new marriage. I created Metta Tantra. I still used Metta as my meditation, but now incorporated very clearly sexual acts into my concept of Dana. The way I dressed got an overhaul for the better and suddenly without the tension between what I wanted to be and what I was being told I could be, I was much happier. I went from dressing like I was homeless to suddenly wearing a lot of red. Fitness and diet became part of who I am. Without the nonsense from the BSV and their straight up and down discomfort with my marriage to Selina I was able to put so much into place. I see leaving the BSV as the beginning of my healing.

My biological Mother had Alzheimer’s. Like Mark’s death I knew it was coming. Mum was vegetative for the last three years of her life. I had visited her when Mark and my father had died. Mum was someone for whom I could have closure. It was so easy to forgive her for her racism and religious intolerance when I saw her for the last time just hours before she died. Becoming the father of twin boys has changed my perspective on my mother. I now know just how challenging being a parent can be….and I’m without the whack job husband with a propensity to use guns and use, if not outright  threat of violence to win arguments and dominate the marriage. So it was in February 2017 I kissed my mother for the last time, told her I loved her and that I had forgiven her for whatever she may or may not have been. With Frances Marie Carr I had closure by the truck load. My mother’s death marked the ending of all contact with the Bowater family. Any future contact such as the meeting of my brother Wayne at the Mirani High School anniversary will be accidental. I have nothing in common with them and haven’t at all liked what I’ve seen and heard over the years.

My Mum, Yew May Yong, was someone I had not seen since I ended the marriage to her silly daughter nine years before. Whilst I had stopped being a fan of her daughter, I still very much loved Mum. Not being able to visit her and say my goodbyes hurt.

My father had the good sense to die three weeks after his 84^th birthday in July 2015. I was in Mackay at the time, but didn’t attend the funeral. I was one of the very few people to view his body. I needed to see him dead. In order to begin my own healing I needed proof that my father couldn’t hurt myself or anyone else anymore. I visited my father’s grave the night of the day he was buried. I kept asking out loud: Did you get what you wanted from the lifetime? On that late July night and in the many nights since, I have been unable to escape arriving at the conclusion that toxic behaviour over at least 64 of my father’s 84 year life was a considered thing. My father was just toxic as a person. The way he was with the relentless inferiority complex, the racism, the meddling and game playing with people’s lives, was who my father was as a person. I have met very few people who considered him anything other than a fool. His relentless bullying, criticism and mind games had helped undermine Mark as a person…and contributed to Mark’s own line of complete stupidity and being a total tool. Finally on that July day my father’s toxicity was in a hole. Raymond Bowater in dying gave me catharsis. I felt liberated.  The joy at knowing one of the most godawful people I’d ever had the displeasure of knowing, let alone being the progeny of, was finally dead was deep. I could almost hear the sound of the door slamming on a chapter of my life. Anyone who thinks Ray Bowater was someone to like or respect is neither friend nor family to me.

The twins arrived at the end of March 2015. They plunged Selina and I into a world of sleep deprivation. Studying for Honours and caring for infant twins was just hard. Still I found that as exhausted as I was, I could still function, could still be a student. The twins redefined my concept of what I was capable of doing. I know that I can function on 2 hours sleep a night for a long time, I’m not wild about being able to do it, but I know that I can. I know that when push comes to shove that I have the ability to shove back. This knowledge is important to me.                                                                                                                                                                                                              

In May 2013 I came down with Salmonella. In three weeks I went from a lean, fit 100 kg to barely being able to walk 100 metres. Salmonella took me down to 88 kg and into the front yard of death. Death doesn’t hurt. Being knocked down and then kicked repeatedly by something that nasty it doesn’t bother with metabolising oxygen however did hurt.  Reiter’s Syndrome followed Salmonella. My ankles swelled first, then the elbow and shoulder joints on my left side, then came pressure and temperature sensitive lesions. Standing in a hot shower was like standing in fire. I cried with pain. Salmonella has and continues to oblige me to live cleanly. There is a list of MSG variants, plus food colourings that have the ability to put me in bed. After 5 ½ years I am still being ambushed on average once a month by something in my food. I suffer headaches, body aches and generally feeling like shit as a result of eating some chemical my body doesn’t like. I take 180Mg of antihistamine a day or I itch in a way that has me wanting to rip the flesh from my bones.

Over the course of the last 8 years I have managed to lose and keep off 10 kg. I have developed an abiding interest in very long walks and by December 2017 I have completed three rail trails over 50 km and made five attempts at the 250 km Great South West Walk near Portland. Once the GSWW is completed there are plans for progressively longer walks.

In 2011 Selina and I connected the dots on why I was different and experiencing social challenges that in a lot of ways I shouldn’t have been experiencing, the answer was simple: Asperger’s Syndrome. We had the acceptance of Asperger’s informally confirmed via a PhD student who was studying Asperger’s. This sudden understanding of what I am had profound outcomes. I have always said that it wasn’t so much as the penny dropped as it has been a shitload of small change hitting the floor. As we read about Asperger’s and mapped where I appear to be on the spectrum, peace and understanding resulted. I stopped trying to fit in, I began to work on areas that I knew I could improve in and abandon those I knew I had little or no hope with….decades of trying being the indicator that it wasn’t about to suddenly work. 

In October 2015 after a 10 – 15 year hiatus I returned to indoor rock climbing. The addiction was still there. I also recovered bicycles for Selina and myself from hard rubbish. Cycling makes me feel free.

Analysis

The combination of Mark’s death and Salmonella has made me very self-aware of food and diet. I have become almost obsessive about weight loss. I may not be achieving my goals, but it is a deep interest of mine. Daily exercise is now part of who I am as a person.

I have lost the inferiority complex. Perhaps because I have ended up better educated than 95% of those who used to pat me on the head. These days I know I am the intellectual equal of anyone and the intellectual superior of most people I meet. The only people who are paid intellectual deference are those with Doctorates. The question as to whether I am intelligent has been answered.

I am completely unwilling to be spoken down to. Anyone who tries to be patronising is very quickly put in their place. I worked very hard to get my tertiary qualification and demand that the qualification and the effort required to get it be respected. You can think I’m the biggest arsehole on the planet…and by all means join the queue…but the qualification will be respected.

A friend told me that I’m more selectively cynical these days. There are some things such as cyber issues that I’m more informed and more cynical about, but over all I’m nowhere near as cynical as I was two years ago.

I have discovered a deep love of research. My happiest moments academically have been whilst in the depths of researching something.

With both of my parents now dead I have been able to move beyond my childhood. When my mother died in February I was able to completely heal as a person. My mother’s death marked the closing of a chapter in this life. I’m happier now that I am free of my past.

Conclusion

1. I’m confident. Monash Uni has certainly given me that.
2. The point that I'm in no way shape or form dumb has been more than made.
3. I am now, at 52, at the point where I can engage in further research whether as part of a formal study or by myself. Research is part of my future either as straight up paid work or as something I can write and then publish. I can see a couple of books being written.
4. I will continue to devote myself to physical fitness. Having made myself undeniably part of the intellectual elite, I will now devote the same energy and discipline to my fitness. I intend to be exercising vigorously until the very end of this lifetime. I will be the 70 year old rock climber and the one in the trampoline gym. I will be the 70 year old you encounter at the top of the mountain you have just struggled up.
5.  I am now completely happy being an Autistic. I see it as a strength and not a weakness. My way of viewing the universe is the best way I can view the universe. My special talents and abilities are what define me and will give me the life I want.
6. With traditional forms of employment denied to me by a combination of autism and age, I will after the new year has begun search for alternative ways and means of being employed. My own wisdom comes back to me: if you want to follow the herd, expect to walk in an awful lot of shit.