I am a 30 year old, husband and father of one, who has been placed under the Queensland Mental Health Act. Recently I have taken to writing and posting on Facebook. I find it to be both therapeutic to write out my thoughts, as well as a fun interactive outlet with my mates. Some of my ramblings have been quite personal, and have probably left the majority of my Facebook friends wondering what the hell I am on about.

In this post I seek to provide a bit of a personal account, which I hope fills in some of the blanks for those reading.

At a young age I was identified as gifted in the disciplines of logic and problem solving, while somewhat stunted in reading and writing. The assessor was of the opinion that I needed to be challenged or else I would either become a “good boy” scared to make mistakes, or a “problem student” who would challenge authority.

In my first three years attending school I had compressed four years of learning, but I continued to be a problem student. I never graduated primary school, I ended up receiving a three week suspension while there were only eighteen days left of school. Yet, by the time it came for high school I had attended eight different schools in six years. If I wasn’t challenging the teacher directly, I was a year younger, new, and therefore often the target of bullying.

The final three years of primary school were the most stable for me, they were all at the one school. But they weren’t without trial.

Within a couple of months in year seven:
My father fell of his motorbike and had to be in traction for six weeks, unable to move from his hospital bed.
While he was in hospital my dog of about ten years died.
Then a close mate and peer Jerry died of meningococcal – I still remember breaking the news of his death to my father, I said it very matter of factly. It was the first time I had ever seen my father break down crying, I was then taught the importance of breaking hard news softly.
A few months later my mother’s father died in Canada.

High School was more stable for me, although during the first years of high school, very little in life mattered to me. For whatever reason my parents started forcing me to go to church, I continued to be a problem student, but managed to stay at the same school for four years, eventually I took the Christian faith on as my own. By the time the final year of school came along, a decision was made to have me repeat the penultimate year and go to a local state school. During this summer my mother, who had been facing her own demons attempted suicide (at the time I don’t think it had much of an affect on me, but looking at the mother-son relationship I have had since then, I must admit it caused some damage). So after about ten years I once again re-entered my age group, nothing I studied was new, but I had to navigate a new social scene and it gave me time to socially mature and start afresh.

I have always enjoyed philosophical and theological writings. The first ever philosophical morsel I picked up was as a young child, when my father read to me “Reach for the Sky” which is the story of a British WW2 pilot – Sir Douglas Bader. In it Sir Bader says “Rules are made for the guidance of wise men and the obedience of fools”.

As mentioned I became a Christian during the high school years, which for me meant no sex before marriage. At around the same time as I turned eighteen, my church dissolved through a messy democratic process. I have never found another that can compare, despite doing some searching.

I had never been drunk until I turned 18, which is the legal drinking age in Australia. I had tasted alcoholic drinks along the way just to understand the flavor, but had never indulged in the drug alcohol.

So over time, I lost my religion and became part of the world, but I never lost my faith. When you have experienced spirituality in such a real manner as I had, I don’t think you ever really can, you’re just conflicted.

So I continued to live a secular life, knowing these few things: I am a sinner, Christ died for my sins and I am forgiven, everything is permissible, but not everything is beneficial, that faith without deeds is dead, God is love, and that we should fear God.

I also had personal beliefs taken from other philosophers outside of the Bible, like “whatever doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger” which is similar to “pain is just weakness leaving the body”, “truth is mighty above all things”, and “to truly know one’s self, you must know yourself within the other”. I also developed my own personal philosophy which I have come to believe along the way, “that people will be as weak as you allow/expect/believe them to be”.

My church was reluctantly an organised religion, we hated the term religious, because as you can see through out the progression of the Christian faith and all the reforming and division. Religion turns into dogma, an interpretation of God’s word proven at the time to be applicable by the fact that it received a large and persistent following (the purest form of a democratic vote), but at some point lost it’s way in routine or worse potentially became a version of thought control. We would rather use the term spiritual. We testified that we followed the One true God, believed in Christ the Savior, and were inspired by a personal Holy Spirit. And while all this was true, we still couldn’t get away from the fact that we were an organised religion.

What I have come to learn and respect about religion is that it values discipline. While I participated in a church I was extremely disciplined. I always sought God and strove for Christ’s perfection and managed to keep the dogma out of it.

So while at school, I never studied for tests – I didn’t actually understand what studying for a test was until, due to unfortunate circumstances within the family, I had to stay with another family for a while that forced me to sit down and study – and did not care about assignments only doing what was needed to get by, this is with the exception for a precious few that were inspired, most often by a mutual love and respect for the teacher. Despite this, I read and studied the Bible almost daily. I would commonly wake up early and ride a reasonable distance for a kid my age, on a fixed gear BMX, mostly uphill, to arrive at the church at 6 am to pray and seek God for an hour. Praying and seeking God meant several things to me: seeking forgiveness through Christ from God; expressing a desire for those we love to receive what they need from God; expressing a desire that God will help us understand our foes so that we can reach reconciliation; and, knowing God and ourselves better through revelation through meditating on what we have learnt through experience and study.

In my final two years of high school I was extremely privileged to be bestowed with the nickname Jesus. It didn’t sit right with me, however I came to accept it. I was like any Christian seeking personal perfection while trying to reduce evil. I also had a faith that God would provide me a wife, and therefore didn’t really seek to impress women, meanwhile I had been so hurt by the world and rejected by people within it, that I cared little for the aspirations the world commonly provided the individual. I also understood that no one is perfect and I sought to love the individual for their own uniqueness, always seeking the positive in everyone. Sometimes I couldn’t quickly identify any outstanding qualities, but as life moved on, these few people have impressed me the most.

I was blessed with an intellect that allowed me to cruise through school and most of University with little to no effort. This allowed me to pursue other activities.
I was blessed with a physical prowess that allowed me to perform physically amongst my peers with no extra curricular training, this allowed me to enjoy the fraternity and vent all my rage and practice violence in a socially accepted and controlled manner.
I was blessed to have music and be brought up with the internet where I could access it for free, whilst downloading it took long enough that you could form, appreciate and share your own curated collection.
I was blessed with a unique physical appearance (dreadlocks) that made me a general curiosity, despised by people that would hurt me at the time, and loved by people that would heal me and taught me the importance of personal presentation.
I was blessed to have a religion that was forced upon me which after much resistance at first, in time began to make sense to me both personally and logically.
I was also blessed to undergo incredibly harsh trials by today’s western standards at a very young age.

With these blessing I cruised through my Bachelors of Engineering, focusing more on partying and socialising than I did, on my studies or anything else. While my church had dissolved, I still maintained my faith. Yet overtime I made very deliberate choices to enter the secular world, based on the assumption, that if I must have a personal understanding of sin if I am going to be able to reduce it in anyway.

Like all of my pursuits so far in life, I have been unable to stay in an institution for any length of time. University was no different, with my Bachelors split up, by work experience and the Vancouver Olympics.

The discipline I had learnt in my youth however, has always persisted. Although for anyone who knows me it would be quite difficult to see. My discipline has always been a commitment to living a life worthy of Christ’s salvation. In my first year as a graduate, I was working full-time as a consultant engineer for a top tier consultancy, part-time within the Australian Army, studying part-time Masters course work in International Relations, while being a part of a corporate touch team, and volunteer chapters for Engineers Without Borders and Young Engineers Australia.

I didn’t have enough commitment to any one endeavor to excel at anything individually. But I was an active participant nonetheless. Eventually though, after burning the candle far too much at both ends, and working through a corporate atmosphere that was downsizing rapidly, I started to struggle.

In May 2013 I took myself to hospital, and my mental health career began.

Originally posted on facebook.com on 8 January 2019.