Selected Writings of a Trauma Survivor

As I look back on my disastrous experiences of romance in my younger days, it is hard to identify the relationship that was most toxic, toxic for me, not the man. But el polaco has to be up there amongst the front runners. El polaco was not Polish as the name (in Spanish) suggests. It was his nom de guerre in the FMLN, the one he had used while fighting in the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front in El Salvador during the many years of civil war. From the moment I set eyes on him, I desired him. The combination of his exoticness and virility, as well as his track record as a left-wing guerrilla fighter during the civil war, made him irresistible to me. We met in Havana on a team working to set up a youth project that could actively embrace young people from Ireland, El Salvador and Cuba. This part of the project lasted two weeks and despite my insinuations and overtures, el Polaco and I parted only as colleagues, each of us going our own way. I felt that he was interested in...

  How did I transition from being a starving teenager ready to eat anything in sight to imposing a strict diet on myself, being famished and not allowing any food to cross my lips? I´m not sure. But I do know that it happened sometime when I was 17 or 18 years old. Although it probably wasn’t a single event that served as the catalyst for the decision I took to starve myself. It was more like a process, a process that evolved around my need for control. I wanted more control over my life and yet it was the diet that came to control me, to terrify me, because I did not know how to escape it. Anorexia is a mindset in which the tentacles of the condition gradually tighten their control over your intake of food, and from there it metastasises on to your whole life, or at least that is the way it was for me. If there was a moment that signalled the onset of the condition, it could have been the day when my civil service colleague, Kay, spoke with a sense of achievement about the succe...

A bundle of chocolate-point Siamese kittens tumbled out of the cat carrier onto the carpet. My heart melted; there were five and I wanted all of them but couldn’t afford more than one. So I chose the kitten being strangled by her sister because I wanted to protect the tiny creature. My goodwill was scoffed at by the breeder, a matronly woman full of affection for her darlings, who urged me to take the strongest, the most playful one in the litter, the one less likely to fall victim to illness. That was Thelma, as I named her, and she was to change my life profoundly in so many ways. The love that grew between us was both beautiful and terrifying. Terrifying because my mother’s untimely death had left me traumatised as a child and unable to commit to any adult relationship that could potentially end, leaving me sunk in grief and fear again. Very quickly, Thelma helped me overcome that fear by rewarding me with the joy and fulfilment that love gives. She draped herself over my left arm...

I’ve been offered a job as a translator on the staff of the English language department at Granma International, a government newspaper in Havana. It is a one-year position in a large establishment which is directly responsible to the Central Committee of the Communist Party. After a few moments hesitation I accept. I’m in my late thirties and I know that I may never get this opportunity again. I may not even want it. For now, though, I do. I really do. Living and working in Cuba is guaranteed to radically transform the dull predictable routine that my life has fallen into under these dreary Irish skies in Belfast. But I don’t delude myself that no matter how desperate I am for change, leaving my home, my job and my friends is a huge challenge for me. When I accept the challenge, I feel like I’m stepping off the edge of a cliff.   I am still free falling as I sit on the crowded Iberia flight bound for Havana on 12 th November 1999. I’ve been travelling since early morning - ...

Standing on the Mediterranean Balcony staring out at the vast expanse of blue it is easy to understand why the Romans chose Tarragona as the capital of their expanding empire in Spain . A single turn of the head gives sweeping views of all approaching ships and, gazing eastward, a homesick centurion might allow himself to imagine Rome on the distant horizon. The view from the Balcón invites both grand plans and sober introspection. Directly below, goods and passenger trains roll into the station. The evening breeze wafts up words from the tanoy, a long-distance train is leaving shortly for Granada. Twenty years ago I got on that train with my bike and my Catalan friends. Now I’m back in the city where I spent some of the best years of my life. Walking away from the Balcón , down the pedestrianised Rambla Nova , I’m delighted to see that little has changed since my departure. Classy boutiques, cafés and ice cream parlours line the street hosting the central walkway, the rambla, whe...

Saturday morning at 6am finds me awake, dressed and enthusiastically  scaling the fence of my favourite place in Belfast: the City Cemetery. I’ve been thinking about this expedition all week, delighting in the thought that if I’m early enough I will have the cemetery all for myself. Who else could be wandering its ancient paths just after sunrise on a weekend? I live only about 20 meters away from the gates of the cemetery, which I can see clearly from my bedroom window. The cemetery is the main reason I was attracted to this location when I was searching for a house over twenty years ago. I fell in love with its stillness, its Celtic crosses, cracked tombstones, gnarled holly bushes, cypress trees, moss covered pathways and earthy aromas soon after moving back to Belfast in the 1990s, a time when “the troubles” were still blighting people’s lives. Many of those who died in the violence have been buried here, resting in a silence that remains long after the sound of rioting, gunf...

W hite hot pain is corkscrewing my hips. My joints alternate between screeching fire at me and whimpering piteously. Severe sleep deprivation makes me hallucinate about pouring iced coffee into my eyes and inserting frozen Ibuprofen pills into my knees. This is Day 1 of my quest for a Whole New Way of Being. I’m sitting cross-legged with thirty-nine others in the meditation hall at Benburb Priory in County Tyrone, on a Zen Buddhist retreat, on sesshin . Up ahead of me are marathon meditation sessions of around eight hours daily, mercifully with breaks in between. This retreat lasts five days, a sort of taster, it could be said, for mega sesshins that last up to three months. All I have to do is focus on the breath and keep bringing my attention back to it every time the mind wanders. Try it for two minutes and you’ll see how formidable a task that is. After tens of thousands of attempts to do just this, an image, a vividly coloured image forms in response to my exasperation. I see...

  A car door slams beside me and I blanch as if a grenade has exploded. A bus roars past with an engine designed to power a jumbo jet at take-off. A wall clock whispers tick, tick, tick in the silence of the mid-winter afternoon. My world has suddenly become louder, a torrent of sounds, the nuances of which I’d forgotten... I’ve had a stapedotomy.   Two and a half years ago a hospital doctor informed me that I would gradually lose my hearing because I had a condition known as otosclerosis. His tone was deadpan and he did not look up from the report he was completing while he gave the diagnosis. There was nobody else in the consulting room, just me and the “bearer of bad news”. Something about a hearing aid was mentioned on that morning but I wasn’t listening, I was numb. At home I undertook a swift search of the Internet to educate myself about this “otosclerosis” thing. In layperson’s language the said sclerosis refers to the ossification (thickening) of the stapes bone (...

A week ago, my holiday ended. My flight left Barcelona at 6.00 in the afternoon in bright sunshine and temperatures of 27º. Just over two hours later our flight attendant opened the aircraft doors on to darkness, wind and rain. Passenger after passenger descended the steps, many of them in flip flops, complaining about “Norn Iron” weather. Not me. I was elated, relieved to be home after an absence of three months. My spirits continued to soar even as I wheeled my suitcase through puddles in the deserted streets of Belfast city centre. Last Saturday morning the balloon burst and I came tumbling back down to earth. While on my way to the market in the city centre I crossed paths with one of the biggest marches by Orangemen in recent years. Around thirty thousand of them were commemorating the centenary of the Ulster Covenant, signed in 1912 by Protestants opposing Home Rule for Ireland. I halted at the kerbside while lines of marching men filed by to the sound of brass bands and milit...

Once upon a time, people in the Kazakh city of Atyrau caught sturgeon from the Ural River with their hands. There were so many migrating fish in those days that nets weren’t needed; a quick eye and dexterous hands was enough. “That’s what my uncle tells me, that’s the way it was back then,” says Miras, one of my Kazakh students. We stare into the depths of the Ural, into waters that travel  2,500 kilometres , sweeping down from Russia, across the plains and through this city. There is no movement, no sign of life at all, even though this is the principal route to the Caspian Sea and now is the time of migration for sturgeon.   “These days, if you catch a sturgeon, you’d be a very rich man,” Miras remarks. That is highly unlikely. There has been an 80 per cent decline in the sturgeon population of the Caspian Sea. Sturgeon rarely make it to their spawning grounds because of over fishing. And now they are on the verge of extinction, one of many species that feature on the IUCN* ...