Birak

I’m tired. 

 

The age-old feeling of being inadequate, incapable, that my sand is escaping down the doomsday hourglass without being put to any meaningful or worthwhile use..

Therefore translating my present life and its composites, as teflon-wrapped, ironclad, proof of said inferiority, because I have yet to blossom into a brand new, glamorous career, teeming with financial security, quarterly growth and parental pride..

 

Whatever it is that I AM spending my time doing..

As it is not visible to the outside world nor baring any immediate currency shaped fruit..

 

It is conclusive proof, 

that, 

I am,

 

A shithouse.

--

Time for a cigarette..

 

You know..

I sway between writing personal things like this, a summarised venting of built up internal dialogue that more often than not gestates a day or so in draft format before being blasted through the recycle bin, and writing something that has a moral purpose or metaphor infused with a life experience, a bit of biography embedded with a jewel, to give something to whomever has taken the time out of their day, to read..

 

However..

 

The venting is also helpful.

That's how this blog started, or, at least what it became, a procedure that extracted whatever topic or issue was causing me discomfort, stress or anxiety. A ritual of dissection, slowly down the tumble-dryer of spinning information and imaginative outcomes, an opportunity to pluck one topic at a time to be inspected, analysed and ultimately abandoned. 

I think a lot.

Sometimes I feel my brain is hard wired, to invest thought into vast, elaborate, intricate tapestries of imagined outcomes, the why's and why not’ of others choosing. I like to know how something has come to be, how behaviour is governed, patterns, root causes, ripple effects, however it is also a behavioral trait of mine that keeps me up at night and loses me an incalculable amount of sleep.. 

 

Writing is a way to deal with this. 

 

Once I write down whatever is bothering me, it tends to stay there. 

 

I don’t need to remind myself of anything, I don’t need to rerun the hypothetical possibilities of all these outcomes that have yet to be..

I don't even need to read what I have written..

 

It’s there.

Here.

 

I can leave it.

 

   

Not today.

It’s quite a gloomy day today.

 

Waking up to the morning sun streaming through my window seems to be long gone, in its place are charcoal clouds, slowly tumbling down the mountains that surround my tiled, quite cold, temporary place of residence..

 

I am not going for a run.

 

No.

Today, I am grappling with the age old human dilemma of purpose.

My purpose.

I can, at least to make myself feel better/more connected, make somewhat of an educated guess and say that a notable proportion of people will, at some point in their life, feel this ominous question arise..

As I am laying foundations right now for my foreseeable future, it is proving quite the challenge.

Seven years ago, however, it didn't seem quite so important.

My mind was elsewhere..

You see..

After my compulsory forty-four month enclosure had come to its long-awaited expiration, it was, as is now, a time to regroup and rebuild. However, as I had been excluded from society (coupled with the forced insertion and detainment in another not so welcome one)I yearned to simply return to what I had lost.

The coping mechanism I had employed for the first few years inside, was mentally shutting myself off from everything exterior to my dwelling. From my point of view, what I saw in front of me was all there was. I didn't want to hear about what was happening beyond the concrete walls of the 9th floor of the Manhattan Correctional Center, as it didn't apply to me, I had no stake in it, so did not want to be tortured by stories of a world full of colours, sights, sounds and opportunities that I could not play a part in.

Yet once sentencing had finally commenced (after thirty bloody months I might add) and a light had in fact been lit at what could only be described as, until now,  a telescopic funhouse tunnel that seemed to stretch and skew depending on which clown-faced lawyer was sat opposite me on the fifth floor attorney conference section of the jail, I had a date..

Which changed everything.

I could now dream..

I could fantasise..

(not like that you dirty bastard)

I could actually start to paint a picture of what may lie for me, what my kind of future I was returning to and what I wanted from my upcoming return..

Unless you are in for some kind of heinous crime worthy of jailhouse retribution, it is unlikely you will spend whatever period of time you have been kindly sentenced to, alone, without company. Great hardship can be forged into unbreakable bonds between human beings, bringing us closer and allowing one another to share burden and alleviate each others suffering..

Once the dial on my personal prison time had hit zero and I was whisked back to the shores of the United Kingdom, physically, I had left and it was time to start again..

Besides the constant Sepia filtered scenes of my New York,  repetitiously showing up in my dreams like an unobtainable internal montage more than likely distorted and exaggerated greatest hits, I was focused on what I wanted to do.

It was time to move on..

 

This is what I wanted to do.

To move on..

And normality was my answer.

I yearned for the normality of the life that I assumed was waiting for me.. 

The life that I had spent thousands of hours mentally piecing together, like a patchwork quilt, made of memories, photos and highly likely upon reflection, fabricated (but well wished) assumptions of how I would feel upon my return.

After all..

I would be back.

Surely that would be enough.

Even if it wasn't, if I managed to get through the previous four years, how hard could it be. Plus everyone knows that in society, you can always find people who have shared life experiences similar to your own, enabling you to find a sense of normality and belonging..

--

As i sit here..

On this dark, damp, soggy morning, peering out the window onto a khaki green coastal hillside..

Speckled with white stones, nestled in-between a vast miss-matched assortment of weathered trees and potentially paintable half-built, abandoned houses, serenaded by the traditional Turkish guitar or "bağlama"..

I am looking for answers.

başlangıç

It has been a good week..

So.

After a week (or so) off the wagon, I ran for the last six days. It was only supposed to be five, but the weather spoke to me. Putting my trainers in the wash was my idea of forcing myself to take Saturday off, but the urge came (along with the ol' No Excuses mantra haunting my almost constant internal monologue) so I strapped on a pair of "gEnUiNe FaKe" Nike's that I acquired early on in my English Exodus, however, I'm now paying for it, in the form of huge blisters along the side of each foot..

What else..

Finally managed to sift through thousands of photos taken over the past five years or so, quite a few tasty gems in there if I do say so myself. Laptop isn't sharing the enthusiasm, flooding the screen with an almost constant cry of low disk space. Not much I can do about that m8.

Sketching..

With a limited fund, comes prioritisation. The days of getting paint on dizzy are long gone, so after about six months of almost exclusively sketching in cheap as chips highlighters, I have now decided to crack out the paint pens. Definitely cheaper than dropping X amount of foreign currency on "sprey boya", especially when I'm (or at least i'd like to think i'm) trying out new ideas, that have a high chance of flopping on a wall..

I think I'm also over the hump on today's 24 hour fast. 

Yeah, I've started that again too..

Is this routine starting to sound familiar?

It should.

Friday 20th August 2021

I am sat in an attic, eating a bowl of noobishly chopped watermelon, hiding from the blistering (38 degree) Mediterranean heat..

I got up at six today.

 

Admittedly, I DID go back to sleep for an hour, but never the less I managed to make it out the door and go for a decent workout before the sun becomes too unbearable.. 

 

Not a bad start to the day at all. 

 

However I am now at the witching hour, the time of the afternoon when I am not quite sure what to do with myself, hence why I am writing this, to see if I can get some form of clarity or guidance on what’s going on in right now in my life..

 

As this is an odd period for me. 

 

After seven years of being back in England, I made the decision that it was time for a new chapter. It didn’t happen overnight, a lot of different factors where in play, which led to me packing up and heading in a different direction. Since making that decision, which I do not regret, a lot has happened. Good and..not bad, per say, however I am definitely at a place that feels eerily similar to my former surroundings. That feeling of uncertainty, a lack of control, no clarity on what is ahead of me or what I can do to navigate these quite unclear waters I have dived into..

 

..

 

There is a part of me that tells myself, look, you’ve been here before, do what you did then. That place was (FAR) worse, as was the challenges you faced, and you did just fine. However there’s also a part of me that doesn’t want to have to revert back to that time anymore. I don’t want to have to bring that up every time things get hard in the outside world.

 

It’s draining.

 

Time has passed and with it, so has my need to constantly remind myself of what I did under those circumstances and because I did, that I don’t have an excuse to feel a certain way when things get difficult, now that I’m back..

 

Anyway..

 

..

 

Shortly upon my arrival, I imagine as a reaction to my somewhat disheveled and quite exhausted appearance, my father imparted me with some advice as to how I should cope with the coming challenges ahead..

“In Italy, they say un passo alla volta”

 

What does that mean.

 

“one step at a time..”

 

It doesn’t.

 

But it's close enough..

One year on..

On May the 6th 2014 I was released from federal custody. 

After a few days of working out, watching people tattoo each other with staples, accidentally going to a meeting of the Nation of Islam instead of Jummah, sketching and assuring people that the nine month maximum sentencing they where facing was really, really, not a big deal, i was tipped off that ICE (immigration and Customs Enforcement) where coming to put me on my plane home back to the United Kingdom.

I shaved, said my goodbyes, gave away the few remaining items of clothing, bags of coffee and sugar, changed into the pair of jeans, shirt and jacket i had kindly been sent to come home in and shackled, given a bottle of water and plonked in the back of a plastic coated squad car with a VERY hard plastic seat, to be whisked five hours through picturesque American countryside into the hustling busy streets of New York City..

During the drive i remember looking out the window and hearing the faint rustling on the radio of a Metallica tune playing in the distance. My two cuffed hands swiftly knocked on the plastic divider and asked the two incredibly unfriendly agents to turn the music up, which they did, to a deafening level, then refused to turn it down for the rest of the journey despite the fact that we had no reception and where listening to white noise.

Nice..

At first it was really nice to just sit outside the airport, albeit cuffed in a squad car being looked at like a bloody murderer, just because i was actually, kind of, in the street in New York and could just see normal people walking around doing whatever normal people do everyday. Might seem a bit weird but considering i'd only been able to see the random passers by from my window in MCC for 30 months, no one while in Brooklyn's MDC and rabbits and cows through the chain link double razor wire fence in MVCC, this was quite an experience for me.

Despite the unfavourable looks..

Two hours in though i was started to get worried, especially as the ass hole agents in the front kept looking at their watches, tutting then asking each other what they should do. What started as me enjoying watching the world go by rapidly escalated to me praying that the other agents who had come to escort me to the plane would just hurry up and get me the fuck out of here as, if they didn't, i knew it would be another couple of days until the next flight and worse than that, five more hours sitting on a rock hard plastic car seat back to the county jail and back.

Luckily for me they showed up and in typical New York fashion (the agents in MY car where country folk) where sporting fitted caps, showing bubble gum and upon seeing me shackled and looking very tired, screamed at the two morons who drove me here for not taking off my hand cuffs or getting me anything to eat or drink. After my cuffs where begrudgingly taken off by the two idiots, i walked into the black people carrier and took a quick spin to the departures part of the airport where, after apologising for their colleagues behaviour and repeatedly calling them cock suckers and assholes, they escorted me past all security checks, shook my hand, wished me luck in the future and let me walk onto to the plane on my own to begin my journey home..

Soon after finding my seat i was greeted by Marco the Italian lawyer and an American business man.

Once we where up in the air i asked them to have a drink to celebrate a very special day, which they did, after an hour or so the business man asked what we where celebrating, which i didn't respond to but after a few questions of,

"new job?"

"getting married?"

He smiled, poured some more whisky out of his little plastic bottle and gave me another drink..

"So YOU'RE the guy the ICE agents where waiting for.." 

I just smiled back.

"Don't worry buddy it's not where you've been it's where you're going.."

Since then a lot has changed.

After a few months resting, recuperating and thinking about where exactly i was in my life, what i wanted to do and the all important task of weening out the plans i had made over my years in prison that where not realistic and those that where in my grasp, or where realistically achievable, i was blessed with a couple hundred pounds and made my way back to London to start life again..

A lot has changed since then..

I'm currently at the end of my first year studying, have moved to a new city, live in my own apartment and with a lot of hard work and planning the vast majority of goals have been reached and new experiences seem to come every day, but the experiences I had in America haven't been as easy to move on from as I had hoped. 

Due to it being a year to the day of my release, I had taken some time to think about the past twelve months, what I had hoped to achieve and whether I am happy having now achieved it and just how well i am in general being back, outside, doing the things i had wished to do over the forty four months i was incarcerated.

My experiences in America, the behavior i witnessed, what i had to do mentally and physically to get through that part of my life is not something that i have really had time to deal with. 

I often think about not only my treatment by the government but also others experiences, how easily their lives where destroyed by people that knew exactly what these people had done or, more importantly, not done. 

It troubles me. 

A lot..

It's not as easy as you might think. 

You can't just keep busy, leave it all behind you and pretend it all doesn't matter anymore just because you're home.

Text

It's good that as you grow up you progressively come to understand and accept your individuality. I've seen and learnt over the years the important, soul enriching parts of life cannot be rushed or sought out. They come. You do and they come. You do what you know is right for you. Everything else falls into place as and when it should. Having comfort in abilities is also key. You know deep down what you are good at and which qualities you have at your core, each pursuit that enriches your life. Follow them. Ignore external pressure to conform. There is no better feeling than following your own personal path through life and reflecting on the inevitable progress that comes with focussing on you and your own inner peace.

A better choice.

Early on into my incarceration i was still an individual who's behaviour
and reactions where highly influenced by my emotional state and i would
allow this to dictate how i interpreted the world and what was happening.

Being in a situation where you are buried up to your neck and attempting
to dig yourself out with BOTH hands tied behind your back is one that requires
a change in tactics to your usual operating system and this came in the form of
conducting myself in a manner that was very calm, emotionless, factual and almost
robotic and was shaped not only by the guidance of my big brother Sha but in the
trial and error efforts of running through five lawyers.

Initial conversing with these people was based heavily on my frustration with the situation i had ended up in but also on my rage at how little anyone seemed to be listening to me which, combined, did not form the most productive way to actually get me OUT of this mess and i noticed that the representation i had relished the reaction and were able to manipulate me and held an upper hand over me,

so over time i understood that this reactionary method was doing me no good,

my most comprehensive explanation that i would remind myself was that of being in a classroom taking a test and the likelihood of passing said test if in the emotional state of being angry or upset compared with a calm demeanour and efficient preparation..

Going from an angry young man, bearded and smelling of cigarettes, who would scream, throw paperwork, hurl insults and generally be on the constant brink of leaping over the table and strangling them with a tie to a composed, clean shaven, well groomed inmate wearing an ironed jumpsuit, glasses, sitting upright in my chair speaking in a monotone voice, responding to incorrect information with direct references to legal motions and statutory facts was something that had quite a direct effect on my representation..

One of them actually quit.

But that's not the point..

The point is that this change of getting things done and dealing with a challenging situation had a huge impact on the movement of my case, my own self of well being and feeling of power over my life, it was a radical step for me and one that no one really witnessed while i was inside apart from other inmates who just happen to be on a legal visit, their usual reaction being, when seeing me calmly breaking down an attorneys attempts at convincing me to do something that was of no benefit to me in any way shape or form and the usual conclusion of THEM now getting infuriated and storming out the room,

They respected me for how i conducted my business.

Although i am now, thankfully, not fighting any kind of legal proceedings
or having to deal with men in suits representing government bodies i think
this is an important reminder for me, of this period of my life and how i dealt
with a stressful situation that i did not like, in how i go about my dealings in
the outside world and the people i come into contact within the future..