My husband Andrew, who began this blog in October 2007, died peacefully on September 3rd 2012, at the age of 83, after long and well-controlled illness culminating in a sudden, brief decline. He worked on his autobiography for years but never completed it. Instead he left behind various pieces of life writing which would have formed part of it. I will gradually include this material here, giving the dates on which the pieces were written. I'll also add some of my own reminiscences and items of information I have about him. At some point this blog will become an archive, without further additions. — Rosemary Nissen-Wade

Monday, May 14, 2007

SUPPRESSION

This morning the world is different. It's different for me because I am seeing it differently. From a new perspective. I've been shown that I am wrong. For years I've been searching, trying to discover who I am. What am I doing here? Whatis my purpose? I expect most of us have these questions. And most people seem to brush them side and stumble on through life. My dad did that. But then my dad was very confused. He didn't know who he was.

Not that he didn't try hard enough. But life was against him. He was born at a time when it was almost impossible to be yourself. When everyone, in his country at least, was suppressed. It was the Victorian era.  Ask any psychologist about that and they'll tell you it was a time of rigid thinking, that stultified creative thinking and eventually led to the most horrific conflicts the world had ever seen — World War I where millions of men died needlessly because the world had lost asight of its humanity. And we're still suffering from that stupidity.

That conflict, of course, had its effect on me, through my dad.

For most of my life I too was very suppressed and couldn't relate to the opposite sex. When I finally did it was after a two-year stint seeing a psychologist.

But that as only the beginning of a long journey full of bumps and ravines and high mountains including divorce and a 19-year period in which I became a seminar junkie and began turn my life around.