Breaking Free: A Journey of Self Discovery

by Chett Vosloo

  “I thought the worst, Jed,” my mother sobbed, wiping the tears from her eyes. “I thought the worst.”

  “Everything’s going to be okay,” I choked back at her, fighting back the tears. “I’m fine. Everything’s going to be okay, mom.” Before letting go of her, I again vowed to myself to change my ways. Of all the grey hairs that I had given my mother over the years, this was the most painful for me.

  CHAPTER 8

  Coming back home to settle down was not an easy thing for me to do at all. The excitement didn’t last long and in no time reality had sunk in. Over the past three and a half years, I had travelled through almost 40 countries and had experienced so many incredible things during that time. As free as a bird, hardly a worry in the world – all of that now seemed like a distant dream away as all I had to think about was to find a job and start a career, which didn’t really interest me at all. If I had been completely honest with myself, I would have known that I was only doing this because everyone around me – my family, friends, society – were telling me that I was now 26 years old and that it was time to get a real job and to be in one place. If this was really what I wanted - to settle down and start a career - then coming back home wouldn’t have been such a big deal. It would have been easy, but it wasn’t easy at all. It felt as though a noose had been put around my neck and day by day, it was being pulled tighter.

  The first job I found was as a salesman at a medical company. I had to sit there all day long at my desk making cold calls. What a complete waste of time. Although I did have a great amount of drive and perseverance when it came to certain things in my life, when it came to being motivated in the work place, I was just one of those people who had to enjoy and find meaning in what I did. If I didn’t, no matter how much money I was being paid at the time, it would only be a matter of time before I quit. I hung around for only two months before telling them that the job wasn’t for me.

  My next job was at a project management company. It sounded fun and exciting and I thought that it was surely going to be a lot better than my first job, but it wasn’t. It was just as awful. By now, I was becoming painfully more aware of the fact that I just wasn’t cut out for the corporate world. If others enjoyed it, good for them, but it meant nothing to me and didn’t give me any job satisfaction whatsoever. I hung in there, but barely. As the weeks passed I found myself slipping more and more into a mild depression. Sadly, my shitty job and trying to settle back into normal life wasn’t the only thing that was bothering me at the time. The skin problem that I’d lived with for a few years was also getting me down.

  ***

  University had no doubt been a crazy time for me. I look back on those years as not only some of the best times of my life, but some of my worst too. My four years at university had sent my parents over the edge many times. For someone who had never broken a bone before arriving at university, there seemed to be way too many accidents happening to me, most of which involved alcohol in one way or another. A cut lip, 20 stitches above my right eye, a broken nose – this was just the start of it. In my second year I fell off a moving car, dressed in only my underpants and T-shirt at the time, and landed up in the hospital with a broken thumb and a deep gash on my hip. A few months later I jumped off a pier into the ocean in the early hours of the morning and arrived at hospital with my ankle broken in three places, once again wearing nothing but my underpants and a T-shirt. When my parents found out that I was in hospital with a broken ankle they completely flipped out. I tried to play it down and told them that I had accidentally fallen off a three foot wall and that it was just one of those freak accidents in which I had landed badly, but they didn’t fall for my bullshit for even one second. When the full story came out about what had happened, they swore that if there was one more accident – just one more – they were going to pull me out of university. Their threats, however, fell on deaf ears. It’s not that I intentionally wanted to hurt them, but rather that I just seemed to lose all control when I was out drinking with my friends. Yet despite all these accidents, my first three years at university had been one incredible ride for me. One party after the next, the girls, the sex; I had been living the student dream. This, however, all took a very sudden and drastic turn in my fourth year.

  ***

  The squash club at our university had a reputation for being more about the party than the squash itself, which is one of the reasons why I loved the squash club and the tours as much as I did. On one of the squash tours in my fourth year, I spent the first five nights drinking and partying as if there were no tomorrow. Then, as I sat around at the squash courts on the final day of the tour watching the last of the matches take place, I had a growing feeling of fear and anxiety building inside me. It was a feeling that I hadn’t experienced before. It was deeper, more penetrating. Exactly what had trigged it, I wasn’t sure. Maybe it was my body’s way of telling me that it couldn’t cope with all this excessive drinking that I was doing. Whatever it was, all I knew was that I was feeling incredibly fearful and anxious about something. The feeling became so intense that all I wanted to do was to get out of there and to be alone, but unfortunately, I had little choice other than to stay where I was and support the team. This didn’t make things any better.

  After the last game had been played we went back to our hotel to drop off our bags and to get ready for the end of tour party that evening. The last thing I felt like doing now was to go out and party, so I made a feeble excuse to the captain of our club and told him that I had a bad headache and that I was going to stay at home and sleep it off. In all the years that I’d been a member of the squash club, never once had I missed out on a night out on the town. He must have suspected that something was up, but he didn’t say anything.

  After the team left in the minivan, I took off my clothes and climbed into bed right away, hoping that I’d fall asleep and wake up in the morning feeling my old self again, but this didn’t happen. In the dead silence of the night, I lay on my back in the dark, staring up at the ceiling with my hands resting behind my head. My mind then started to race with thoughts and it wasn’t long before these thoughts had completely swallowed me up and taken possession of me. There was no longer any separation, or space, between me and the thoughts passing through my mind, as I had become completely absorbed in my thoughts. I was my thoughts. I was the madness going on in my head. Totally immersed and identified with my thoughts as I was, I wholeheartedly believed whatever my mind was saying to be true. It was like being brain washed and under the hypnotic spell of my mind, and yet feeling completely powerless to do anything about it. As I lay there in the dark, unsure of what was happening to me, my mind started to project what my life would be like after leaving the safety net and cushy lifestyle of student life. This led to only more panic as I became overwhelmed with a terrifying feeling of inadequacy. I wasn’t smart enough to make it in life, I had no real direction, and I was sexually inadequate as well. I had never experienced thoughts of this nature before, especially feelings of sexual inadequacy, yet they seemed very real now. I’m not going to make it. I’m not going to make it. I’m not going to make it, was the same thought repeating itself over and over in my mind. With these thoughts of not being good enough, which I imagined to be absolutely true, came a sickening and paralysing feeling of fear. Even my breathing seemed to have stopped. It was like being trapped in the middle of a never-ending nightmare. However, in this nightmare I wasn’t asleep. I was awake – wide awake – and yet there seemed no way out. I was in hell. Every way I looked, my mind was saying that I was doomed and that I wasn’t going to make it in life. As my mind continued to spin out of control, the thought of suicide then started to emerge. There was no way out and so I would have to kill myself. I was so stricken with fear at this point that I went through to the bathroom and tried to force myself to vomit, hoping that this would make whatever it was that was happening to me stop, but nothing came up. Nothing changed. I lay paralysed on the bathroom floor, thinking that I m
ust be having a mental breakdown.

  Sometime later I got up off the floor and went back to bed, desperate to fall asleep. Yet, sleep still eluded me. It was now well past midnight, and I lay staring up at the ceiling above as I had before. Now that I had decided that there was no way out for me and that I would have to kill myself, I then started to think of ways of how to do it. What about my family? I couldn’t bring any shame on them. My poor mother. Killing myself would forever break her heart. So how could I do it? How can I take my own life and make it look like an accident? After conjuring up many ways to end my life, I eventually decided that a drowning would be best. The haunting movie being played out in my head continued relentlessly with no end in sight. My saving grace came only in the late hours of the morning when my team returned from their party. Them coming home was a distraction and helped get my attention away from the madness going on in my mind. I eventually passed out, probably from sheer exhaustion more than anything else.

  CHAPTER 9

  When I woke up the next morning, I was in a daze and not quite sure whether it had all been a bad dream. But sadly it hadn’t. On our way back home, I sat quietly in the bus in a subdued mood trying to understand what had happened to me the night before. I guess that there were two ways I could go about handling the situation. The first was for me to go and see a doctor and to get to the bottom of it right away, and the second was for me to try to deal with it myself. How much pain and suffering I may have saved myself had I gone to get help and dealt with it right away, I will never know, but rather than admitting that there was a problem, I tried to cover it up and block out the memory of what had happened to me on the last night of the squash tour. I wanted to pretend that it had never happened, and to just carry on with life as it had been before. It would be my secret. Not even my family or my close friends would have to know. The ghosts would eventually catch up with me in the end, but for now I wanted to run. I wanted to run as far away from the memory as I could. Having been faced with hardly any problems in my life up until now, this was, without a doubt, the big turning point for me. From here on, and for many years to come, a feeling of anxiety would forever shadow me. Sometimes it would leave me alone for a while and give me the false sense of security that I’d overcome it, but then it would jump out of nowhere, as if to remind me that it hadn’t gone anywhere at all.

  ***

  A month passed by without me telling anybody about my panic attack. I put it down to both fear and pride. I was too scared to face up to it, and I was too proud to let anyone know, but then it happened again. However, this time it didn’t happen to me when I was alone in a hotel room. It happened in the car, stuck in rush hour traffic with my mother. In the beginning everything was just fine. We were driving back from my mother’s workplace, chatting casually, but then we hit a bumper to bumper traffic jam and, subconsciously, the thought, what am I going to do if whatever it was that happened to me on the squash tour happens to me now?, sprang up. There’d be no escape. I’d be stuck in this car with no way out. This was the beginning of the end. Within no time at all, what had started as a passing thought had magnified until I was completely consumed by it, and with these wild and restless thoughts I very quickly started to feel as if an explosion of fear and anxiety had erupted inside me. I was now left with no choice but to tell my mom what was happening to me, as I thought that I was losing my mind and going to have a break down at any second. When we got home, I put on my running shoes and ran around the block, hoping that this would help me to let off some steam and that the madness going on in my head would then stop, but it didn’t. The same terrifying thoughts and sickly feelings continued. It seemed as if there was no way out and nothing I could do. My mother waited for my father to get home and together they decided to take me to a hospital to see a doctor. My mom tried to hide it, but I could see that she was sitting in the front seat with tears rolling down her cheeks. I’m sure that the memory of what had happened to her younger brother made it all that much more painful for her to see me in the state that I was in.

  When John, my uncle, finished high school his dream had always been to work for the airlines, but my grandfather, however, had something different in mind. He wanted his son to become a lawyer. From all the strain and stress that came along with studying law, it wasn’t long before John suffered a mental breakdown. When he was released from hospital my grandfather then did the worst possible thing by sending John back to law school. The second breakdown that followed soon after was a lot worse than the first. My uncle was diagnosed as being schizophrenic and has, ever since, been living in a special home.

  We drove most of the way to the hospital in silence. Then, out of the blue, I started to speak, and once I started to speak I couldn’t stop. I told them the full story of what had happened to me on the last night of the squash tour, and how I had been haunted by thoughts of inadequacy and that I wasn’t going to make it in life. At that moment, miraculously, all the fear and anxiety that had taken possession of me completely and immediately dissolved and disappeared. It was there one minute and gone the next, like a ghost that had caused a lot of panic and fear, then left without a trace. I had hoped that going for a run would have been the release to all the negative feelings that were festering inside of me, but what I really needed to be able to let go, was to speak about it and get it all out. Once I had told my parents the truth about what was really bothering me, the thoughts playing over and over in my mind and the subsequent feelings of fear and anxiety that followed had no way to sustain themselves. Speaking about it was like taking the lid off a steam cooker that had been left on the boil for several hours.

  The doctor I went to see that evening told me that I was experiencing panic attacks. He gave me some medicine to take, should it happen again, but he also suggested that I go and see someone to get to the bottom of what had triggered the panic attack in the first place. Even then, having just had my second panic attack, I still wasn’t ready to face up to it. I was sure that whatever it was that had brought it on would go away with time. Time was the answer. Time would make everything go back to how it was before. When I got back to university after our semester break, my father insisted that I go and see a therapist. Although reluctant to go, I promised him that I would. Terrified at the thought that someone I knew would see my car parked outside the therapist’s room, I parked two blocks away and walked the rest of the way. The therapist seemed like a decent guy and did his best to probe and find out what it was that was bothering me, but I was like a cold fish and didn’t want to give anything away.

  I went back for two more sessions without even the slightest hint of progress being made. Frustrated with my lack of cooperation, my father then did something that surprised me. He said that it was now up to me to decide how I was going to handle the situation. He gave me a few hundred bucks to see the therapist – if that was, in fact, what I wanted to do - and told me that the ball was now in my court. I took the money and said, “Yes, yes, yes,” to my father. However, inside, I was saying no, no, no. I knew full well that I was done with seeing a therapist. Therapists were for people with issues, and I didn’t have issues. Denial! Denial! Denial! With the extra pocket money that I had, I went out and blew it all on booze and parties. When I was out with my mates and on the bottle, I felt my old self again and forgot all about my troubles. This was, of course, no solution, but for now I had no intention of looking anywhere else. Alcohol would serve me just fine.

  ***

  The weeks passed by and I did my best to carry on with my life as per normal, but then it happened again. Sitting at home one evening in our student apartment, I could feel a lot of anxiety building up inside me. My mind started to race with the same fearful thoughts that I’d had on the night of my first panic attack, that I wouldn’t make it in life and that suicide would be my only way out. I went to my room to be alone, but this only made things worse. Terrified, the idea then came to me that I must go and see a priest at one of the local churches in our town. I h
ad absolutely no interest in religion whatsoever, but in the bad shape I was in, I was desperate and going to see a priest seemed like the best thing for me to do. I got into my car and drove there right away. The clock had just struck ten o’ clock.

  “I’ll be with you in a moment,” the priest said when he opened the door and saw me standing in the entrance. He told me that he was just busy on a phone call and that I should wait for him outside. As I stood on the street corner looking up at the stars above, the walls that had been guarding over me these past few months came crashing down and I broke down in tears. I cried for a long time, continually looking up at the sky and wondering what was happening to me and why my life was falling apart. Crying was a good release and made me feel a whole lot better, but no sooner had I wiped away the tears than the walls were back up, and this time even stronger than before. Several years would pass by before I’d cry again. When I told the priest about what had happened to me and all the horrible thoughts that I was having, the only thing I remember him saying was that it was a sin to take one’s own life. He did his best to help, but there really wasn’t much that he could do for me as the problem was in my mind, and the solution, although incredibly simple in theory, would take me a lot of pain and many years of struggle to figure out. All I had to do was to stop identifying with my thoughts. That was it. It was as simple as that. If I would only stop paying so much attention to what my mind was telling me to be true, my problems would instantly disappear.