shedding karma

I somehow knew my computer was going to let me write a post today.

I saw the most fabulous documentary film on SBS last night, ‘Unknown White Male’, just came across it by chance. It was about a 35-year-old man who found himself on a train one day with no idea where he was or who he was. He had no identification on him except for a note with a woman’s name and phone number. When the police rang her she didn’t recognise their description of him and couldn’t come and look because she was looking after her invalid mother.

Eventually he was in a psychiatric hospital and they told him they could not let him go until they had found some contact who could look after him. He rang the woman’s number again in desperation and she had a feeling the voice was familiar and asked her daughter. It turned out this man had dated the daughter a few times and this woman had met him once. The daughter rang him and said, ‘I will be there to pick you up in half an hour. You have a fantastic life. You’ll love it.’

As he recounted this part of the story he was crying. ‘Suddenly I belonged,’ he said.

His name is Doug Bruce. He had an apartment in New York but is English. He had been a merchant banker but retired at 30 and became a photographer. The fact that he is beautiful made the film just that little bit more poignant.

His sister told him, ‘You hated working. Money was important to you but you wanted to retire young. You used to come home from work and pace around the kitchen for half an hour before you could calm down.’ And his mother had died of cancer a couple of years earlier. He had been very close to her and had, apparently, taken it hard.

The man who made the film was one of his close group of English friends. Judging by the quality, he is a professional film-maker. There were odd bits of footage of Doug Bruce pre-amnesia and I was struck by the cynicism there. They all said he had had a sharp, witty tongue, was fun, was the life of the party. Now he was completely without ego, without guile, and filled with wonder. He was like a child with an adult’s mind. He had no pre-conceived ideas about the world, he just watched and learned and loved. He filmed his own ‘first’ experience of snow (something that many Australians experience for the first time as an adult too), he filmed himself entering his apartment for the ‘first’ time and discovering the external trappings of who he was, filmed his ‘first’ meeting with his father and sister. He described wandering the streets just watching how things happen, the body language of lovers or friends. He talked about the ‘first’ time he went to the beach and the awe of the enormous power of the sea washing against his legs. He talked about his ‘first’ experience of falling in love and how wonderful was that feeling to be fully immersed in someone and to love only to be with them.

He got to the point of not specially wanting his memory back. So did we, the audience. He found it harder to meet people he had known before because of some anxiety about their expectations of him. For many of them he had, in a sense, died. The Doug they had known and shared experiences with was no longer there. But he rued having no memory of being a child, or of his mother.

Apparently people with amnesia involving no physical brain damage have a 95% chance of getting their memory back at some point. I hope it’s a long time for him.

My daughter Sarah used to say she felt she had a black hole in her solar plexus. This was as a child and probably in adolescence. Jasmine has never had what you might call karma, but Sarah has always been the Karma Queen. It was clear she had brought a lot of baggage into this life and, you know, as a mother you want to be able to fix it all, but you can only give unconditional love and stand and watch.

She has made a lot of progress over the last 7 or 8 years with all the self-help healing modalities she knows, and the changes were quite profound. She went from being often depressed, anxious and flighty to being ca-a-alm, mostly and happy, usually. But she and I still knew there was a fundamental flaw, the central problem had not been fixed.

She felt unlovable. There was no doubt for her that her father and sister and I loved her but that was, perhaps, because we were so loving rather than because of her lovable-ness. She has been on a mission her whole life to find the person or circumstance that could give her the kind of proof-of-love that she needed. She has been looking outwards all her life for some kind of saviour.

She has had a relentless theme in the last few months of abandonment. Every single man she gets involved with stands her up, doesn’t answer his phone, her best friend came down from Queensland and stayed with someone else and didn’t contact her. She was here a few days ago, angry that this thing would never be resolved. She just didn’t want to save another free night for a boyfriend who stayed out with his mates and left her at home all dressed up and watching her recreation time slipping away unused. She shouted at me for lack of anyone/thing else to shout at. Eventually Jas and I tried humour when we ran out of things to say. Then she was angry because she didn’t want to smile, damn it, when everything was so hopeless, and she left. We had kind of abandoned her in her hour of need too.

Yesterday she said it has all changed. It is all over. She gets it now, and she is it now. Karma-free. Not looking for anyone to prove her lovability, she just is. Lovable. After she left our place that day she was so frustrated that she had gone through all this and that she understood intellectually what it was telling her but she still seemed to be emotionally in the same place. And she saw a picture of herself, as she had been, in a desolate place and drowning in quicksand, and that now the quicksand was gone. She was healed. She was still standing in the same hole in that same desolate place only now there was nothing keeping her there.

Now she knows who she is. She has a date next Friday with the stand-up boyfriend who is begging to be allowed to make it up to her. She has agreed to the date (assuming nothing better comes up), it might be fun, and if it turns out to be the same as all the other ‘dates’, she doesn’t care. He doesn’t have to prove her lovable. It doesn’t matter what his behaviour might say, she knows who she is.

Now she’s bemused about what life and love are for when you don’t need anything from anyone. I remember that same question.

For fun, mostly, and other wonderful things.