I think i was 18, but for some reason i feel like i was 17. Maybe it was a mental hybrid of the two merged through 2 memories of feelings whilst in the same location. On the stone steps of the front porch of the house in Goldenfields we lived at until i finished my A levels. An ironically-named cul-de-sac as i remember it more as a living hell. Perhaps you knew my familiar smile with a trademark Marlboro red in the side of it, musing about the world. Maybe every so often you saw it crack to reveal the depth of darkness on the inside.

At the time the band that got to me somehow was Brooklyn’s own, BioHazard. Their callous outside skin but bleeding heart was something i emphasised with and the lyrics stayed with me throughout the day. Hate. Just pure, unrestrained, nullifying hatred. A protective coat of it. Quite a few thought they could empathise or knew the real me, so they talk to me that way or talk to our friends about it. Sweet, but laughable. They’d theorise about the effects our home life had on my character, but no-one could ever claim to have understood no matter how close they got to it. I never asked for pity, never felt any for myself. I was already beyond that when i first went to preparatory school.

That day I was feeling something i’d felt for a long time. I felt it again a few weeks ago, which is why my mind found its way back to the same place. That day i was wondering where i was going to live, as my parents had already made their arrangements as to where they were going to be after their divorce, none of which included me. My sister was of paramount importance, but neither of them wanted me. They kept dropping me like a hot coal, and they disowned the problem – blaming my behaviour.

For the asinine idiots amongst us (including my own mother and father if you’re reading this), kids who are behaving badly are reacting to their parents and the environment, and they are lashing out because they are hurting. That’s it. No further explanation needed. They don’t need discipline or psychiatric help, they need love, warmth, kindness and compassion. A touch of the hand can pull down the barrier of a fist faster than your authoritarian talk could ever do. Forgot your silly excuses or ideas, you’re wrong. Stop the internal dialogue, you’re wrong. They behave badly because they’re hurting. That is it.

If you think kids are somehow born bad or “know” what they are doing (as my parents do), then you don’t deserve them full stop. Kids can’t express themselves in an adult manner – that’s why they’re kids.

For the first time in my life i wasn’t sure what i was going to do or where i was going to sleep as i was trapped every way i tried to go. I had literally no-one in my life to guide me. They would “guide” you, but to what they wanted – not discovering who you were, where your gifts lay and what was right for you. Nobody truly invested in me, and by that i mean taking the time to find me, know me, discover me, encourage me and guide me. That’s why i write this blog – i needed the map, so became the map that i needed, and everyone needs. You have to become the change you want to see in this world.

What i was feeling was echoing something the same incident happening in my school years, just like groundhog day. My Nan had come to my rescue as my parents did want me there and didn’t know what to do with me, as would tend to happen every 3-4 days. We would sit together in the evenings in her lounge eating chocolates together whilst i told her about all the new things i had found in the encyclopaedia. What my Nan saw was that i was actually quite a nerd – a very quiet and unassuming kid who was no trouble to anyone. If you know me, you’ll understand now why i love chocolate, and just talking – they are comforts to me.

This one time in her lounge with the blanket on my lap was a haunting moment for as we talked about home. I was only small but i had a gift of being very perceptive and occasionally very ethereal and adult-like in our conversations. I simply said:

“I have a mother and a father, but i am an orphan.”

I remember her face so clearly, and it was one of horror, because it was the simple truth from the lips of a child. I had parents, but i was alone. That pattern continued again and again even into my twenties, and is still the ugly truth now. It was the elephant in the room that nobody really wanted to mention and tried to avoid by being diplomatic. My parents would rubbish the very idea of it, but that’s the thing – what they think is irrelevant. As my mum finds out each time she demands i take things off my blog so she doesn’t look bad.

That’s a pretty dramatic statement. Those who know me and knew my years will innately understand it and recognise it. It can be the last resort of the petty emotional scrounger to lay the blame at the door of their parents for their woes when they should be driving the coach themselves from adulthood onwards.

I have no idea who these people are. They have no idea who i am – literally no idea (they think they do, of course). I don’t have anything in common with them. They’ve never treated me like family (as i see family behaves), and i can’t see i’ve ever seen them as family. Close individuals maybe, but not family. I don’t recognise them. I am a completely different person – not just my own person, but a completely different one with a radically different value and belief system that i built myself and shares no similarities or influence with them. They don’t get my drive, vision or ambition and just want to drift along to perpetuate themselves. They don’t do anything like i do it.

My family’s attitude to me is that i am, and always have been, a problem they just have to get out of the way.

Unfortunately it’s just not that easy, and as my 30th birthday arrives it is silently becoming more and more about a very unexpected theme – relief from 30 years of oppression. As the day draws closer i feel the cell doors swinging open and the cold fresh air sweeping across the broken floor across my body. Something is happening inside me that is out of my control. 30 is a landmark for me that is not the same for others and that’s why i don’t see it the same way with the same eyes.

This orphan has declared that the oppression is over.

Oppression? What? But we’re not living in communist Russia or North Korea? If only it was as simple as that. We have become so comfy in this country that we have forgotten what oppression is, because we think we’re so free. But the truth is we live in a prison without bars, where the cells are decked in plasma TVs, Swedish furniture and health insurance documentation. It is alien to us even though our grandparents suffered it and billions undergo it every day on this planet. It’s a distasteful and rather time-consuming thing other people go through we don’t want to know about. Something medieval that is melodramatic and doesn’t happen in our little world these days.

Or as Carl T. Rowan put it: “It is often easier to become outraged by injustice half a world away than by oppression and discrimination half a block from home.”

Let’s start as we always do. What does the word mean?

Oppression is the state of being kept down by unjust use of force or authority; being kept down by unfair use of authority or force or leaving a place willingly because of disagreement, or the act of using power to empower and/or privilege a group at the expense of disempowering, marginalizing, silencing, and subordinating another. It is a sense of heaviness or obstruction in the body or mind; depression; dullness; lassitude; as, an oppression of spirits; an oppression of the lungs. A feeling of being heavily weighed down in mind or body.

Anna Sewell infamously said “Now I say that with cruelty and oppression it is everybody’s business to interfere when they see it” and Desiderius Erasmus rightly damned us all by stating “He who allows oppression shares the crime.” Simone de Beauvoir’s truth was “All oppression creates a state of war” and Florynce R. Kennedy aligns with Ghandi’s struggle by reflecting “There can be no really pervasive system of oppression . . . without the consent of the oppressed”.

But the most profound thing about oppression that gives it its immense power and overwhelming destructive force is that it is usually *hidden* or disguised. My favourite thought on it is the unattributed reasoning that “oppression can only survive through silence”. As with paedophiles and abusers, failure to speak about them, discuss it or do something other than thinking and worrying gives it shelter. Silence is protection and camouflage. As long as it is undeclared, it is all-powerful and allowed to carry on smothering and suffocating like the revolting blanket it appears as. As long as you don’t think it’s there, don’t want to face it, talk about it or expose it, or just think it’s something else and not as bad as it is, it is hidden and protected. It grows endemically under the skin like a vine silently and smoothly wrapping itself around the arteries in your neck so it can give them a microscopic squeeze if you get too close.

Oppression in third world dictatorships or demon possessions is very dramatic and obvious, and in those circumstances is maintained through outright fear and military force. This type of plan, spoken by General Iberico Saint Jean (the governor of the province of Buenos Aires during the military rule in Argentina) in 1985 just might ring a few bells as a textbook strategy:

“First we kill all the subversives; then, their collaborators; later, those who sympathize with them; afterward, those who remain indifferent; and finally, the undecided.”

That type of thing is easy to spot, as you have no choice. What i want to talk about is the oppression in your life right now, just as i have discovered the oppression in mine that has been there for 30 years and is leaving this week. The type of oppression i mean is from ordinary people in your life who keep you down by unfair and/or unjust use of their emotional influence in your life. The converse is also just as bad – withholding things to keep you where you are so you can’t move on. Oppression is a long-term campaign and its subtle because these people tell you they love you and are supposed to love you. But the scary thing is they can love you and actively go out to oppress you.

I learnt that when my stepfather remarked “It’s almost as if Keith doesn’t want Alex to succeed.” I looked back through the catalogue of harm, horror and neglect and realised he’s opposed me at every step in every moment of my life. He has conducted a campaign of oppression for 30 years that has been overt and manipulatively subtle. That might be obvious to you, but it’s still a shock when you’d think that just once in 3 decades he would have been behind you. But one thing you can be certain of is the human need to remain internally consistent, so no. Abject opposition.

Some people take up trench positions against you from behind lovely presents, gestures of love and supposed “guidance” about what is right for you. I wish someone had just said this to me when i was 16:

“Alex, school is bullshit. Your parents are full of shit. The world is so much bigger than the fucking idiots you’ve been surrounded with. 95% of advice is bullshit. Just follow your own heart and go your own way. Don’t look back as they’re all full of shit.”

What makes me angry is that my family love to take credit for my successes, as success of course has a thousand parents whereas failure is an orphan. An ironic saying for me really, as there is no-one i know who can actually believe that my father spends every moment he sees me trying to assert what a failure he thinks i am for not adopting his will over my own, and has done it since i was born all because i simply pointed out the obvious fact that i would not respect authority that was not earned and trustworthy. The truth is that everything i am, and everything i have achieved, has been done in *spite* of them, not because of them.

Perhaps if i explain some of that oppression in my own life you might see it in your own. Once you see it, declare it for what it is and banish the demon for the pustulous growth layer of brick grime that it resembles.

Both my mother and father are extremely controlling. Now most people have a degree of needing to be in charge, but mine are pathologically and emotionally violent with their controlling behaviour. My mum uses guilt – if i disagree with her and refuse to back down, she will declare me a “bully”. Her favourite game is to play “victim” and “offended little girl”, when she is having a period of self-obsession. Her life circulates around periods of intense focus on her husband, and then crisis from the inevitable arguments and breakdown when she’s got to the point of micro-managing him like a 4 year old and he’s walked out. One evening i actually lost it in a big way when she openly questioned him in front of everyone about whether he should be drinking beer, and then demanded to know the alcohol content before her “princess” routine kicked in and the poor bastard had to remove a piece of wet paper from in front of her because she didn’t want to do it.

Both of them like to keep people sick so they can take care of them (co-dependence), as feeling superior in some way gives a strange sense of safety in relationships where you nurse someone else’s vulnerabilities so you avoid showing your own. My mum will never see her husband as a man, but as a invalid. My father needs to be the big CEO who signs everything off and impatiently has to help everyone as the grandiose source of all wisdom, authority and advice (which is absurd, as he’s none of those and desperately needs the humility to see it). That means there has to be something wrong with you for the whole endemic psychological scheme to work – you have to have a problem or be a problem that always needs fixing but never gets fixed.

But most of all, they really hate it when you point out they’re being controlling. The first thing is they scramble to explain how they’re not, and it’s all your imagination – or better still, that it’s actually you being controlling. The big problem with co-dependence is that relationships are fundamentally unequal and both parties lose all respect for the other, if they started with any.

My father’s primary weapon of oppression is refusing to have any interest in me as a human being or anything i’m doing. He will always stubbornly resist doing or saying anything that might give me or anyone else the impression he cares, is interested or has been influenced or affected by anything in my existence. If you think that’s extreme, ask anyone who knows him. It spreads to his church friends, as his helpless “victim” routine where he has represented me as a “problem” to “Saint Keith” is grossly inaccurate. For the middle class self-appointees of Liphook, i have been an angry defiant teenager for most of my twenties and presumably will be for my thirties.

His most biting however, is his blatant and unreserved favouritism of my sister in every regard. You’d have to see it to believe it, but as everyone near my family knows, my sister is effectively my dad’s girlfriend. I’m not joking, it’s emotionally sick. His own need and emptiness looms over her as he keeps her dependent on him and refuses to enforce or maintain any semblance of boundaries in their relationship. That is now spreading to my nephew as my sister drifts around not wanting to be lonely picking up his baited “support” that confuses and blurs the lines as to what is acceptable, what’s not, whose role is what, where home is, whether mummy’s marriage is 3 people with granddad in and more. Of course it’s never overt – it’s always disguised as “support” and deniable as something else.

You only get a relationship with my dad under his terms. They’re straightforward - he’s the boss (the superior) and you unreservedly honour him as the big authority and should always be seeking his wisdom and worldy advice. Offend him and he withdraws any love or support. Just ask my sister, as she is one of the many who have to “manage” the way they relate to him so he doesn’t stop asking how she is.

You could go on to so many other tactics. He physically attacked me and violently “restrained” me as a kid (i.e. cut my skin open against a short carpet by pushing his 18st weight on the side of my neck for 30mins at a time), physically attacked my girlfriends and friends, told me i was “some kind of emotional cripple” when i was diagnosed with depression, told me to “give up” when i wanted to live my own way, to “get a job” when he found out i wanted to run a company – the list just goes on. An absolute blustering lifelong campaign of oppression conducted on your own son.

And now, my 30th birthday has come to be about all the things he thinks i should have achieved by now, not me. His disapproval of where i am in my life on this anniversary. He now believes he has carte blanche with the “you’re 30, you should….” collection for the next 10 years. Not anymore, father. You’re getting thrown off the side of boat to drown whilst you carry on shouting about it and flap around.

My parents’ decisions in life were shockingly bad. When i think about what utter clueless idiots they are in so many ways i get angrier they were ever allowed custody of me. My sister regularly muses how she feels older than both of them, as do i. These people have tried to force their will on me relentlessly when i’ve known its wrong and it’s been proven to be wrong – and then damned me for being right about it. A constant but subtle emotional barrage of grey skies – rejection, invalidation and an abject lack of any personal nurturing that would have pushed me along. I spend every minute doing things that will help develop and mature Zair as that is a true expression of love – our commitment to the spiritual development of another.

That net of oppression in my family started as their silent disapproval, went through seething passive aggressive bullshit, avoidance of doing anything to help or care for me, them siding with my teachers over me, and being more involved in their own issues than having any time to be there if i needed as much as a pat on the back. They put me in an oppressive school that was totally wrong for me but blamed me for it, again, as they also did for their divorce. I was wrong, conceited, immoral, born damaged, spiritually possessed, wickedly wanting to make others unhappy, you name it. What was given with one hand (maybe a little pious “proud of you”) would always be taken away quickly with the other. If it wasn’t the music or films i liked, it was my love of staying up through the night (which i discovered is shared by 1 in every 2 people).

The message was continuing and clear – and the criminal thing is no-one saw it, and no-one bothered to correct me and tell me i was actually OK. You certainly didn’t. I went through all of it whilst you sat there and did nothing – you saw the suffering and did nothing to help. That’s what made me the man who always wants to help – never being helped myself. Being the change you want to see, and so desperately needed.

Come to think about it, what my mum and dad needed more than anything when they were in their 20s and 30s was this fucking blog.

Since then i’ve been oppressed by whole groups of people at once, and just by the vicious criticism of others who have wanted me to know they think i’m not all the good things i believe i am. I’ve lived with the fear of being hurt again by the wild lives of ex-girlfriends whose betrayal and unthinkable hurtfulness has kept me from letting love in elsewhere. I’ve listened to the “advice” and “guidance” of others which has generally been absolutely fucking useless. Journalists, critics and debaters i can do, slow-burning campaigns of disbelief, disapproval or emotional starvation i have been guilty of being enslaved to.

The first and most obvious voice of oppression in all of our lives is the one telling you who you “should” be and what you “should” do. It’s the attitudes, opinions, beliefs, ideas and morally righteous judgement of everyone else around you that you carry with you everywhere you go in your mind and heart. It’s everyone else’s will for your life and what they believe you should be doing and how you should be living and approach situations. It’s their acceptance, validation and sense of your worth to them.

Or more importantly, their LACK of it you are reminded of every time they are near.

Oppression, as we said, is long-term, not just something that happened the other day. It’s a pattern of negative bullshit that flows into your life and disrupts it or inhibits like, like how plants stay small and stunted when sunlight is blocked from them. You can block the window with a giant slice of cardboard or use a blind, or you can just arrange the trees behind the window so they grow just out of control enough to overshadow the window and grey out 60% the light from shining onto the windowsill. The most virulent campaigners are “job’s comforters” – if you don’t know what one of those is, look it up.

Oppression is the subtle campaign more than one person has been mounting in your life for a long time – to undermine you, keep you in a desert without encouragement, or just nourish the doubts inside you so they are always healthy enough to keep you right where you are. Its tell-tale smoke signal trace is the *message* that comes from the invisible campaign they conduct. Look for that, and you will find it. It will be negative, or cause you trouble in your soul. The best detector, or emotional Geiger counter, is your spirit. You use your spirit to sniff it out.

The message will be along these lines and reinforce these types of nagging doubts and gentle uncertainties (as well as the overbearing expectations of other people) – just enough to keep you there, but not enough to alert you to the presence of oppression:

• You’re not good enough – attractive enough, clever enough, talented enough (goes on forever)
• Someone else would…
• The world is pretty bad and a lot of lies and exaggerations get told….
• Everyone else would…
• You should…
• You shouldn’t….
• It’s probably not possible because…
• You might not be able to do it or something might happen – or you might not know what will happen
• You probably couldn’t do it because…

See the inclusion of “probably” in those types of statements and nagging doubts? Never enough to be certain, just to make you question or not get what you need. Eat enough not to starve but just below the line needed to fill you up.

People “empathise” with you and explain it in terms of how they feel they couldn’t do it. All your choices are wrong or uncertain of being right. They gently undermine you through their own attitudes and lack of faith so often and so consistently that over years it completely erodes any positivity, ambition or faith you have – sometimes they just openly undermine you as a person, your situation or your feelings and beliefs. Nice, caring and responsible people you know and trust, and believe love you, are often the very source of that almost-unnoticeable fog that keeps you from the clarity you need to be truly happy inside, to move on or make that jump.

A river doesn’t cut into hills to form estuaries through a sudden splash but a concerted constant abrasion that takes months and decades. Damage you can’t see happening in the moment but that is visible over time. Deserts are created and become barren over centuries, not days. It takes the oppression of the sun and the lack of water to destroy what lies there, and neither announce their arrival or departure dramatically. Nobody standing in the former riverbed believed it would ever become a desert. That’s how it works.

So how do you tell the difference between the evil of emotional oppression and realism, being challenged and healthy feedback/criticism? The net negative effect of oppression is that it leads to your growth being stunted, and by its very nature tries to remain hidden. Love is concerned with the spiritual development of someone else, so words and actions in that spirit will lead to you being liberated, nourished, encouraged, at peace, and ultimately to a wider and broader person. Oppression will only seek to keep you where you are in your cage, or back you into it if you aren’t in it already.

If you are afraid of going out for being attacked (e.g. from the increase in stabbing stories), you are suffering oppression. As you are if you just can’t seem to get anywhere in life or find any opportunities – as coincidentally everyone around you’s not going anywhere either and doesn’t think you can or should. You’re oppressed if you are in a relationship where you don’t feel free to be yourself, or constantly feel “not enough” but can’t work out why. You can be feeling a whole myriad of negative things and have scores of life frustrations but have no idea what’s going on or why you feel like it because you don’t consciously think that way from moment to moment. If you’re deeply unsettled and unhappy but can’t find an obvious source, the chances are that it’s because of a multitude of sources spread thinly and quietly into a mire of smog blinding you.

But there is GOOD news. Not just good news, but excellent news.

All this talk of the evil of oppression makes it sound like it’s the force that brought the universe into being. Not quite so. Oppression is astonishingly weak as it needs the cover of silence to operate. Remove that, and call it out for what it is, and it flees. It’s that simple. Chaos takes over as it struggles to retain its grip, but simply declaring it openly for what it is makes it crumble and slip away once it starts to immediately break apart. Imagine a foul stench of dark grey gas that is flushed out by fresh air. That’s how oppression dies. Think of stripping off a thin mouldy blanket in tropical heat that’s been keeping you boiling, but now comes apart in ragged patches.

The human spirit is naturally pre-programmed to resist oppression violently so you need no extra effort to banish it other than to unmask it as your mind and soul will take care of the rest for you automatically. Your spirit is your in-built super-detector that can sniff out 1 part in a million. But here’s the key: you have to have someone show you what it is and point out examples to kick start your natural detection engine. Once you come to see it and know it for what it is, you spot it easily and are disgusted by it. You can reject it outright for the negative unwanted bullshit it is.

So goes the battle that rages in my soul. The canopy of grey mist that has hung around me, blinded my vision, blunted my heart and brought uncertainty into my choices and decisions to steer them off course is leaving simply as i’m exorcising the demon by calling it what it is. My birthday has become symbolic as an end to 30 years of oppression. For me it’s an event of relief rather than one of commemoration or celebration. As the age of adulthood, it was going to be a verdict on who i was not, what i’d achieved. Whether i was the things they’d said i was. Because after this, it was permanent and true.

Thankfully, the verdict is on their head – on who and what *they* are. That is why 30 is an important birthday for me. Not for your typically silly material reasons about jobs, salary, family and riches. I’ve done all that. I’ve had huge amounts of money and had nothing at all.

Once you see the Devil for what it is, you can demand it to leave as the unwanted vagrant it is in your life. I don’t want it there, it has no right to stay and the eviction was 1 second after i had the realisation. It’s an ongoing one as any tiny attempt at oppressing me recently has been met with some extreme violence. You have to declare its end over your own life, and your supremacy and sovereignty over who you are. It may sound like a silly thing, but unless you stake your claim and fight for yourself, that mist will always try to surround and suffocate you by eating up and lowering the oxygen level so you gasp for air.

It goes without saying that it’s time to explore whether you are a force of oppression in someone else’s life somehow. If you are, you’re going to stop. If you produce it, you will attract it. The more you oppress, the more you will be oppressed yourself.

You can’t fight or change 20 or 30 people undermining you, putting you down and subtly trying to hold you back. All you can do is cut off their source of fuel and air inside you. You can’t move them, so you to have to move you instead, as the only thing you have control of. Let them keep their opinions and rot in their own misery and negative self-destructive pitying trap. You had to figure it out unassisted, so they have to take responsibility for the same. It’s even worse for them as you can help, so they have even less excuse. If they still don’t want to change theirs and their loves ones’ world for the better after that, let them decay where they are. Leave them behind.

In less than a week, i will mark a day where it’s certified all the people who told me they were right and i was wrong (not just on the point, but as a person) will be wrong, as they were then and still are now. It’s my reckoning day, and my victory. I had both back then too, but now i have my symbol and my marker. 30 is no longer about the oppressive force that is my father, but about me – who i am, who i was, and who i grew to be despite people looking over me in a hospital bed in my teens saying i wouldn’t get into my twenties, the nine year old child soldier who mock executed me and several friends in Rwanda, or the long queue of people who tried to stop me.

Victor Frankl found meaning in the gas camps, and that gave me hope in the very darkest of moments on those cold stone steps. If i had known what it is to be lost, i would become a map. If i was vulnerable, i would become a leader. If i had questions, i would be an answer. I knew that for every time i was forsaken, i would honour my commitments, breathe out and be the one who stayed there loyally without failing. For every time i was betrayed, i would find a way to love and light the way of the ones who needed it the most. For every dark chasm of empty loneliness where i reached out and no-one was there, i would hold out my hand and catch those who were falling. If i was an orphan, i would become the most loving of fathers.

Why?

Because you, the person who loves me now, were with me back then on that cold dark night and held my hand because you knew it wasn’t going to be long before i would meet you.