Free-falling

After having just seen my chilhood piano teacher in the supermarket, my hands are still shaking.
From the ages of about 5 to 11, I was under the reign of this man, whose dissatisfaction with anything less than perfection, from the beginning of training onwards, was enough to solidify any obsessive compulsive potential in me into a concrete reality slab.

After a month, he had me playing 4th grade pieces. If I paused to find the notes (often forgotten as a result of nerves), he would punch me. This alone may have made me the underlying wreck I am today.

Initially, by description I may seem lucky;- even hateful; I am an only (lonely) child cultivated to impress. I endured a barrage of elocution, piano, tennis and ballet lessons. I was always shown to adults and expected to impress. Yeah- sure I had all the fucking attention in the world, but who needs it?! Who needs to live in a petrie dish shivering under the intense eye of constant assessment?!
And boarding school- jail for innocent kids who've done nothing but knock themselves out to impress. On the outside, dear reader, you may be thinking "poor diddums"- but believe me- you wouldn't want it if you had it!

Decades later I can't sleep at night and it's only my illegal pleasures which may dull the arrow's point, despite the feelings of inherent guilt in doing so. Surely the few inches of flesh surrounding ones bones should be the one thing in life you really can own- especially the lump of grey flesh residing behind ones own eyes, between ones ears and mouth...!

As my piano teacher and I passed alone in the supermarket aisle I turned and looked daggers and turned away. He must have felt it because when I turned again, he was turning away from me.

How do you justify the hatred felt for someone who has made your every waking moment feel like a highly-pointed tattoo needle striking again and again into your soul? And at the end of the day, did that once fierce Beethovenesque head really deserve the torrent of poisonous energy I sent out today?

The other day I went to Canberra with my friends. It was the setting of my boarding school years and even coming within the school limits sets my heart into a nervous frenzy.

Imagine dropping from a horizontal pipe about six metres down... This is way scarier than it looks...!

I wanted to return to my past, with my present to protect me.
I wanted to park in front of that boarding house and to laugh and blow raspberries and even egg the place. We went to Canberra to visit Questacon (science museum) and in the exhibition was a free-fall slide- it was terryfying and my heart (already in a nervous state by sheer geography) felt like it could explode after that leap.

When we went to leave, it was bucketing with rain and my friends didn't want to drive much aroundthe city so I said not to worry. We found a new Irish pub (-an anomally in that public servant anthill), and had a lovely time and at the end of the day, it was so much better to invest in positivity and newness than to dwell on old wounds.

My piano teacher had been my theatre critic in recent years- never an easy feeling, but somehow that now white-haired little man looked a lot less the fearsome than the diabolical beast I knew and more like a petty little man who I believe was, at the time, just lonely and sad.

Find a little understanding for your magnificent demons and they wither to helpless, pitiful rats scurrying out of the now blinding light of your mind, while you grow to be ten-thousand stories tall.