Perhaps the hardest thing, most beautiful to be, is in our skin with reality

The Designated Patient

This website is my response to bigotry. It is a creative space to explore what arises and to trust that the process of creativity has my back. It is a celebration of the growth and understanding that can come from our lived experience, moving us beyond distress that invisibility and trauma burns into our neuro pathways. It is an opportunity to explore what lies beyond the impact of dehumanisation and the revolving door of bystanders. Where every time the bystanders choose to do nothing, they do so within a pantomime while simultaneously protecting themselves. 

The closer the relationship the deeper the betrayal. Simply because bystanders have the potential to be incredible catalysts of healing on the most humane plane that exists, relationship. So the comparison of their choice with the choice not chosen, is breathtakingly sad. The bystander’s choice to deny the undeniable solidifies our invisibility and  maintains our role as the projection dump site. We are the designated patient, we always have been. This gaslighting was for sometime immobilising with the capacity to bend the mind beyond words.

As a child I first used creativity to try and find those hidden words and thoughts, believing that if I found them within the combination of lyrics and chords, they might articulate the felt sensations that land heavily and provide some relief. I am grateful for the need to create and subsequently think more and more thoughts. I am thankful for the increasing distance that critical thinking gives me from the constructs that try to control and dilute this opportunity to live. This, for me, started with rejecting the false sectarian definitions of who I am, and the absurdity that it is sacrilegious to have the curiosity to find out, when to find who we are is why we are here.

Long may the distance travelled from the militant brainwashing of fundamentalism be exponential. But it is a brutal highway, particularly on the central nervous system. You lose everything you never had. But the loss is still great because you were once naive enough to hope that you would be seen by those who could not. In addition, amongst the chaos is a wave of external incongruence that disturbs you so much it ultimately frees you in your search for congruence and truth. Ironically, all of that becomes possible by simultaneously not being reflected in the world and not being seen by those around you. So our invisibility can become our doorway to living.

What we do, we do in the understanding that there is no magical escape from mental distress and that respite and creativity can actually come with moving gently towards, not away from our pain. But this is done within the safety of kindness and the knowledge of skilfulness. The work we do is like an iceberg, extraordinary in its depth below the surface. But it is not a badge of honour. What other choice did we have? The alternative is without hope, at its best it is the dullness of living-dead, and at its worst a premature death.

Perhaps we have invisibility to thank for the need to actively use creativity to make sense of experiences, to lean into, and then move out of, distress. We try to do this with the depth that creativity gives and the container that humour provides.

This website is a vehicle for that process, a 1971 Transam if you like.

Below are lyrics of a song currently in production that seem relevant at the time of writing this.

That’s Living

It feels like becoming human, growing pains of the heart and mind.

Spreading awkward wings, flying short burst with heavy landings.

Endless apologies to those that cared to not reject the duckling trapped,

All those years, mind bending torturous, less than elegant survival,

Of our persistently naive and unconsciously dissociated being.

Conditioned invisibility.

It’s not living, It’s not living.

My heart stopped each time you bullied me out of my skin.

I fell slowly backwards into my bones with nowhere to run, trapped,

I started to stop moving.

It’s not living, it’s not living.

Numb agitation we yearn to articulate,

And then, after some time of pain and our heart breaking

We fall open and terrified.

Like a miracle we never anticipate happening

It is safe enough to have the thought and the beginning has begun

The air opens and we can feel.

Arriving and landing inconveniently for some,

Arriving and landing in search of our skin,

Earnestly beating, rising and falling beyond their pretence,

We did not land here to live underground.

Cos we are living

Thats living.

Sam RB 2024