The Monk
Your religious view is, on some level, a political view. Belief a religious institution is on the whole a force for good is like belief a political party is on the whole a force for good; as with party allegiance, whether religious spokespeople under questioning are discovered to “believe” something becomes complicated, since under the strain of questioning their definition of believe is often discreetly flattened into “believe” in the very weak sense of “be on board with”. “I am on board with- sorry, I mean, I believe in- my church’s policy.”
One of the names for Buddhism is “dharma”- which means “law”. I am, though, no lawyer. I am “on board with” productive criticism of religion- and Buddha was such a productive critic himself. Rather than being made from whole cloth, Buddha’s ideas were pragmatic ideas that were a constructive response to ideas in his time. Buddha taught reincarnation, though it was clearly not reincarnation in the Hindu sense, according to which souls of merit are born as members of the higher Indian castes; he rejected the caste system and said any human birth was valuable. He said a true Brahmana (person of the highest caste) was anyone of truth and righteousness. Rather than being a religion based on speculations of what eternity would be like if it were real, Buddhism is a humanism based on impermanence. Rather than the Hindu belief in atman or soul, Buddha taught the idea of anatta - that people and things have no permanent soul or essence. In his relationship to the ideas of his day, Buddha was almost like a satirist, taking current ideas and subverting them.
Most religions claim to be true to the letter, but Buddha was more restrained. After his enlightenment, Buddha was unsure whether what he had discovered could be taught, and so had to be persuaded to teach through the Indian deities Indra and Brahma appearing to him. And rather than proclaiming Buddhism as eternal, at the end of his life Buddha prophesied Buddhism in the future would degenerate. I find something haunting in these bookends of Buddha’s period of teaching, at the beginning Buddha’s very human tentativeness at his ability to get across what he had learned and at the end his tentativeness at the teaching’s survival.
I became interested in Buddhism at age 12 since in the UK learning about the 6 world religions is compulsory in schools. To introduce the module on Buddhism our RE- Religious Education- teacher showed an animation that dramatised Buddha’s struggle with Mara- the personification of unhelpful mental states- before Buddha’s enlightenment. In the animation, Mara told Buddha that he was not worthy of enlightenment. So Buddha woke the earth with his hand to ask if he was worthy. Goddess Earth as Buddha touched it rumbled and spoke in a feminine voice, saying, “yes, he is worthy.” Watching this not very high quality cartoon of Buddha’s life, I felt tearful the way you feel tearful after a great movie. I felt this was a thing I had been, without knowing it, looking for all my life.
In the next class the teacher screened a documentary on western men who had become Buddhist monks. A class heckler asked what they did that for and said that the monks were gay (the teacher explained that monks were not gay.) I was taken with the genuine humility with which one monk said he thought he’d made a mess of his life as a married man and so thought becoming a monk had made him a better person. The documentary showed the monks in meditation; the teacher explained monks sometimes meditated for many days on end. Meditation looked like a ritual created more by nature than by man. The test on Buddhism was one of the few tests at school in which I scored 100 per cent.
Outside the RE class I began my own research. I found and hid in my schoolbag a children’s book about Buddhism. The first quote of Buddha I memorised was Buddha’s saying that if you do not accept an insult, the insult is like a gift that you do not accept that is then returned to the giver.
It is obvious to me looking back that such a saying leapt out at me because I did not have a lot of self-respect. My home life had some disturbing dynamics. I was bullied by my brother, who was controlling in every way possible. For example, he used the then newish invention the mobile phone to make me his butler; If I had come home from school before him, he used his mobile to call ahead to me at the landline, ordering me to turn up the heating and take some lager out of the fridge for him before hanging up without saying goodbye.
To get away from him, I stayed late in the town library after school at least a few nights a week. At the library, my studies of Buddhism continued. The Dhammapada was an early text. I read,
The virtuous man is happy in this world, and he is happy in the next; he is happy in both. He is happy when he thinks of the good he has done; he is still more happy when going on the good path.
Although “being happy when thinking of the good you have done” could sound banal, it did not sound banal to me but amazing. I had somehow received the idea that it was egotism to be happy with having done something good. Maybe this came from my brother’s bullying of me, although even outside home- though this is my opinion- there is I believe a strain of fondness for humiliation ambient in Britishness. (People being humiliated- that is, stepped on by their betters, shown their feelings are unimportant, and returned to their rightful social places- is good, remember). For whatever reason, coming from where I came from, notions that you could just do things like this, just not receive others’ insults and just feel good about good things you had done, were upside-down ideas.
Another book in the library was the book of photography Living Buddhism by Andrew Powell. I saw photos in which, to understand impermanence, monks and nuns spent hundreds of hours creating mandalas in coloured sand that they then blew away, or made ripples with rakes in austere gardens made of gravel. One photo showed a monk cross-legged on the floor with a tray that held a skull and a few bones inside it. Though macabre, I thought even this was beautiful: the monk was living trying to understand the nature of life before he passed away like the person the skull had once been. When I later read the famous passage in Walden by Henry David Thoreau, in which Thoreau explains why he went away into the woods, Thoreau’s words to me described not only the reasons for Thoreau’s retreat but also my idea of the reasons for what the monk was doing:
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
I intuited that living trying to understand life, almost as if you were trying to cup the air with your hands, was what monks did. Of course, this desire to cup life in your hands is a difficult feeling to explain.
I started to meditate with the help of the classic Mindfulness in Plain English by Bhante Henepola Gunaratana. Once, after an hour meditating in my bedroom, I went downstairs to the kitchen and the objects in the kitchen had changed size- the saucepans had shrunk in my vision to the size of mugs. The meditation had given me what is called micropsia- seeing objects as much smaller than you usually see them. It was not a spiritual state exactly, but a start.
The first Buddhist event I attended- age 14 or so- was a talk by a monk on Shantideva’s Guide to the Bodhisattvas Way of Life. The monk said Shantideva was able to meditate while sleeping- this was the lucid dreaming “discovered” in the west decades ago- and wrote his famous book as disproof of other monks claiming he was lazy because he slept so much. Afterwards, walking the normal streets of my town, I felt I was walking on air; I had made contact with my people.
At another such event a monk gave a talk in which he read partly from a book his teacher had written. When he had finished reading from the book, he put the book down on the table slowly and carefully to show the respect he had for it. It sounds silly of course, but the way that he respectfully put the book down was moving to me; I can see it now.
My love of Buddhism was not based in a creed exactly, but a string of emotional impressions such as these. Wanting to be a monk- someone who made trying to understand life his livelihood- seemed natural. Though here of course- and I had no illusions about this- appeared an obvious problem. If you tell some teenagers- or even most of anyone older, let’s face it- you want to be a monk, their likely response is... not going to be kind. Buddhism was what I saw as the way out of my life- a way to transcend the dysfunction of my background- but for the very reason that it was the way out of my life, I knew it would likely not be understood by the people in my life. I became Buddhist at age 12, but besides my mother I did not tell anyone about it until I was 17.
My brother’s controlling behaviour at home conditioned me to be passive, which outside home made it difficult to socialise. I did not know how to take initiative with others. My friends at any given time were most often as a result somewhat controlling people themselves who took heavy-handed initiative with me. By age 17 I had two main friends. One was a rather troubled boy who had been bullied so much he had had to change primary schools. By 16, he had gone on antidepressants; he sometimes spoke to me of wanting to know what it is like when you die. Mood depending, he sometimes bullied me- he once asked me to fight him for no reason- but as a result of my brother, being treated like this was so ambient in my life I took it as normal in relationships.
The other was a joker, though his jokes were always at others’ expense and sometimes racist and so on. As a boy I considered him one of the most naturally funny people I’d met, though I imagine- or hope- he would not be funny to me now. He knew all the British comedy shows- even ones not really known by our generation, like Steptoe- and I wonder if he discreetly wanted to be a comedy writer or something like that, not that he would likely have made it; they don’t let homophobes in the BBC, of course.
The former boy who was on antidepressants and I spent the most time together. We bonded over videogames at his house. Boys play games since they are a kind of modern hunting, where a distinct spare conversation happens over the common task. But besides, my father left home when I was 16, and his own father had never been in his life, and we had conversations about that; you never forget who the first person is that you have a talk about that sort of life stuff with. As time went on, conversational themes between us turned to jobs and university, and he even broached- jokingly- the idea that maybe he and I (ha, ha!) might be the friends who- who knows?- ended up going to university together.
We went to the movie Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, which this year just had its 20 year anniversary. As we waited on a bench beside the cinema- there was still some time before the film was going to start- the conversation started to be about what we wanted to do at university. I didn’t say, of course, because I didn’t want to go to university: I wanted to be a monk. But my usual evasiveness on this subject was somehow not enough today to deter him, and he insisted. He said I was a tosser. If I was his friend, what did I not want to tell him for? What sort of “friend” would do that? Tosser. It was still some time before the film was going to start.
I believe my friend’s insistence in getting this information was because he wanted to bully me into going to the same university as him- he was, I think, probably scared of going to university on his own. Getting me to just tell him what I wanted to do in life, first things first, was phase one of the plan of making me come with him. And as he bullied me to tell him, coercing with the usual British teen insults (tosser, knob, etc.,) I started to realise the double life I had cultivated, as Buddhist on one hand and as normal schoolboy on the other, was coming to an end. This was because I realised that, while the information I wanted to be a monk was not information I deserved to have bullied out of me exactly, I did not have any backup plan for when other than now I was going to reveal the information either; information which, after all, I would have to reveal at some point. With lurching emotional effect, the wall between my double lives collapsed and I told him that I wanted to be a Buddhist monk.
His questions to this surprise were more statements than questions. “So you’re a fanatical Buddhist, are you. When are you fucking off, then.” He was sullen in a way the undercurrents of which (his probable plan for me to go to the same university as him and so on) I only really understood years later.
I don’t remember all he said, but anyway, he verbally beat the shit out of me. We still had the film to see. The film was a relief from the talk. Though it meant I now had time to think about what I had done. I had spinelessly been coerced into revealing something which sounded silly yet was intimate to me, and it had gone as badly as it could have gone. In the dark of the cinema watching the bland fantasy film, I felt my locus of control was dollying away the way a camera dollies away from a movie character.
I hoped what I had said would be taken by him in confidence. This was something I hadn’t said in so many words, but which I hoped had been implied; of course- and it is pathetic to have to say this- this did not happen. When I came into school the next Monday, it was obvious the other boy of the duo had been told.
More: as the other boy said, smirking- “I told everyone, Berry.”
Over the next months my wanting to be a monk was the sole subject of conversation. Adopting the attitude of a “concerned” friend confronting me with hard yet necessary truths, the funny one said, “I think you’ve got some weird, fanatical idea in your head, and I think you’re going to waste your whole life.” The sullen other grunted agreement. Such preaching gave a patina of legitimacy to attacks: they were stopping me wasting my life.
Another line of attack was to say I was “obsessed” with monkhood and wanted monasticism for the “order” it provided (far from orderly, I’ve in my life been evicted for untidiness.) I knew where this talk of order and such things was going. They printed from the IT room a list titled “symptoms,” which they put in front of me and told me (as if this printout were proof they knew me better than I knew myself)- “we know what you’ve got. You don’t know.” It was an obvious list of autism symptoms.
A sort of New Atheism as was current at the time was tried; speaking back and forth in front of me, they pantomimed disdain of religion for my audience. “Religion is a bag of wank, isn’t it? And these Buddhist monks, they can’t even have sex? What’s with that? Aren’t monks supposed to be violent fanatics, defenders of the faith? That’s how they always were in the past, it’s just these days these fanatics don’t have the power to defend jack shit.” Although this was a pantomime to which I was expected to mostly just watch and listen, some response was expected to such critique; too much silence from me would result in claims I was sulking or- more creatively- “meditating”, or otherwise claims “Buddhist monks are up their own arses.” I could not bear to read the scathing new atheist books of the time because of how to me their words sounded a muted echo of my friends.
The suddenness of the events- my Buddhism going from being a secret I had kept for years to being common knowledge at the school- had paralysed me with shock. Shocked, I became noticeably slower. My concentration reading books thinned. My speech got slurred and I was slow to say the most basic thing. I was slow to give my order in a chip shop; angry at the delay in the line the man behind the counter clapped in my face, like he thought I was a stupid animal.
This sort of paralysis meant I was more biddable; paralysed, I was like a mannequin they could move into ridiculous joke positions. When they asked me to show them a Buddhist monastery’s website, I immediately complied. (Why do we just become mannequins like this and do the bidding of people who abuse us, even though we hate ourselves as we are doing it?) They read through the monastery’s rules and laughed (I, paralysed doing their bidding at their shoulders as they scrolled, had to explain to them what the word “chaste” meant, which of course created further amusement when it was understood.)
By now- and it is absurd to think I had denied this- I had accepted beyond denial the “friendship” was an abusive lie. Instead of obediently coming to our usual meeting place, I made a run for it and hid one breaktime at- of course- the town library. They hunted me down in my not very original hiding place, smirking and pretending to read at the same bookshelves as me. Then they escorted me like a prisoner back downhill to the school. It is humiliating to be escorted a “prisoner” like this- with chains that you fully know are imaginary.
However bad the duo’s harassment of me was, though, the mob- the “we told everyone, Berry” part- was worse.
I believe being mobbed is one of the worst (legal) things that can be done to you. It rewrites your relationship with people. There is an unwritten rule in society that if you act decently, you will be given friends and respect in return (mostly.) Being mobbed does away with this unwritten rule- or does so for you, anyway, as other people’s lives will go on as before. Conflicts with people normally have the sobriety of war; mobbing has the festivity of hunting, or rather, the festivity for others of you being hunted by them. I believe increasing awareness of mobbing- “thanks” to social media- is one of the defining changes of our day; Awareness of how prevalent and painful it is will not prevent mobbing from happening, because mobbing is too written into human nature for that; but awareness of it will be something.
Although it seems we have totally moved on from the days of Galileo, anyone on twitter will know this is not quite the case. Everybody knows, or kind of knows, that if you do or say something not pre-approved by your milieu, you may be punished by death or- far more likely in the west- by symbolic attempts (character assassination, ostracism) to kill your spirit. My expressing a view that being a monk might be OK, however “inoffensive” it was to me, was something that put me on one of the fault lines of the world, something I was too young to entirely get.
Every new smirk or snidely averted pair of eyes in the corridor meant a new person- perhaps formerly friendly- who knew my secret. Such participants seemed to think their newly found derogatory airs towards me were only irritating; rather than being miffed or in a huff, I was having one of the worst times of my life. The most common question I was asked by this slowly gathering group was an innocent question, though an innocent question asked with a sneer- why did I want to be a monk? Why?
I could not answer, since an answer would not really have involved arguments; it would have involved a long set of emotional impressions like those earlier. And explaining such impressions would hardly have gone well (turning the pages back to what I wrote: being moved by the way someone put a book down? What did such airy things add up to, really?) This being the case, responding to every “why?” thrown was impossible; my wanting to be a monk was, or seemed to be, too intimate to explain. It would have involved saying that Buddhism was beautiful, but also that, for me, it was a vehicle out of the dysfunction of my family; that it represented for me a way out of a world of shame, control, humiliation and inferiority. Any explanation of why to them would have not involved any recitation of a creed; it would have involved explaining things like this, things that I could not have wanted less to disclose to people with sneers who said I was crazy.
Fairly soon, I thought everyone in the school knew I wanted to be a monk. In recent years I have realised “everyone” was actually a small number of people; though big, the mob is never as big as you think. This consolation is, though, something you will only realise years later; at the time of being mobbed, you will feel- may even say aloud- that “everyone” is against you, something which if you do say it aloud the mob will be only too delighted about, since such shrillness on your part heightens the impression of your being “mad” the mob is delighted to create.
I had learned the lesson from my previous escape attempt; to hide from the friends (and “everyone” else), I now instead of going to the library spent breaktimes and lunchtimes going quickly from shop to shop in town so I could not be tracked. Hiding like this, however undignified to top all other indignities, worked. Inevitably, I did cross paths with the friends again. They pretended -”Why has Berry gone AWOL?”- to not even understand why I had gone.
I considered going to a teacher about everything, but this was the time of New Atheism and I feared teachers would have taken my mobbers’ side (”what is it lacking in you that gives you the need of religion?”- people get weird when ideology is on the table, and I- maybe unfairly- couldn’t envision more empathy than judgement.)
And, besides, were my mobbers totally wrong anyway?
The main game we play all through childhood is “let’s pretend”; and in adulthood this “lets pretend” carries on, in ways we don’t always realise, in quixotic activities, asking other adults (though not asking outright: “I won’t play with you” still hurts in adulthood) to participate in our myths. Wanting to be a monk certainly sounds a fantasy; were other 17 year olds then wrong to decline to play along with my monk fantasy? I hated the forcefulness of their refusal to play along with the myth I wanted to create, but I understood the nuances- indeed too well- even at the time.
Many famous people in the western Buddhism and meditation scene did what I wanted to do in their own youths. Sam Harris- the founder of the waking up app, the most well-known meditation app in the English speaking world- did not go as far as monasticism, but dropped out of Stanford when an undergraduate to meditate at far-flung monasteries. Other names I knew in my teens- Joseph Goldstein, Stephen bachelor, Sharon salzberg, Jack kornfield- had like records of when they were barely out of their teens themselves becoming monks or nuns or longstanding meditation lay practicioners. But someone like Sam Harris is a Californian from the solid privilege that gave him the security to go to the Ivy League and then drop out of it (and then, years later, drop in again). Wasn’t I, meanwhile... a little too From Lancashire for this? I was just someone silly who had just got some silly idea in his head. It was a fad that needed joshing out of me. A refrain commonly spoken was “You can’t be a monk” -this said with the rock-hard certainty of Billy Elliot’s dad telling Billy Elliott he can’t be a ballet dancer. Were the commonsense people not just “helping me”- yes, roughly- to “see sense?”
But while such nuances as these in others’ attitudes were painfully obvious to me, my own views meanwhile stewed away not represented, because they were based in things not easy to explain, and besides, because no one would have cared to hear anyway- my peers’ repeated “why?” to me was, after all, a rhetorical question pretending to be a question.
Then I had a seizure.
In the summer of when I was 17 years old, my brother bullied me until I had a non-epileptic seizure. Even when I was having the seizure- I was screaming and, as my mother later said, my tongue was shaking inside my mouth- my brother did not cease his fanatical diatribes against me- declining to address me directly but calling me “they” to my mother as I was flailing in the seizure, my brother said to my mother, “I think if someone is having a psychotic episode, they should have an ambulance called for them.”
The ambulance was not summoned, but I had never had a seizure before. The next Monday, my mother took me to the doctor.
My mother gave the story to the doctor: the bullying I was receiving for wanting to be a monk at school, the bullying of my brother at home now compacted by the bullying at school, the seizure at home.
“Oh, dear, what a terrible situation!” the doctor trilled. (The doctor did not sound like she thought it was a terrible situation, to be clear; she sounded like she thought my situation the half-pitiful, half-amusing, self-inflicted predicament of a fool.)
Since, after a seizure, my mental health was now seriously in question, conversation turned to diagnosis. Was I depressed? Yes. Suicidal? Yes. The first time these things had been spoken outside the family.
The doctor next made a conversational turn I did not really follow. “The deep thinker,” she mocked summarily. “I’m wondering whether you might belong to a certain type of people- mostly men- who live very much inside their own thoughts.”
After this appointment my mother switched me to a different doctor. I wondered for years about what the doctor had been getting at with this remark; what did that “mostly men” thing mean? In my teens the comment was above my head, and I only realised thinking back a decade later that this comment was her deciding to imply she thought I was autistic. The appointment had taken little more than ten minutes.
Since this doctor shared my 17 year old friends’ opinion of my having autism, my mother switching me to a different doctor meant a possible dodge of my being given an autism diagnosis- an extremely good dodge, since autism is something which there is nothing wrong with, but which I do not have, and which being given a diagnosis of would have been a further stumbling block in my life. The new doctor I had been switched over to then put me on antidepressants, and over the next 5 or so years I went through 4 different kinds of them. Taking the antidepressants, I had to push with my brain to speak; this meant I got a new accent. This is something that I have somewhat retained; I don’t sound English now (listening to a recent recording of my voice made me think I sounded like a James bond villain)- though by now being abroad for years, and having a largely non-English circle, has played a part.
By 18 my separation from the friends was clear- they didn’t bother to track me down where I was hiding any more- and I was obviously looking at leaving school without any friends. Other people talked- in a way so near and yet so far for me- about “beginning their lives.” I felt life was only sliding away. At the bus stop I felt the separation most. The other 18 year olds larked around, boys full of bravado and girls who were flourishes of satire and lipstick. While the 18 year olds larked, a row of old people sat silently on the wall that lined the bus stop, ignored by the standing youths whirling around; sitting on the wall friendless next to them, I felt so discarded I felt more like one of these obsolescent old people than one of the other 18 year olds. I spent my eighteenth birthday with my family since there was no one to invite.
Leaving school was an event I had even seen in my dreams. At school the mob had nicknamed me Berryhead, made babbling noises imitative of a “crazy” person, said “Berry is psychotic,” and so on. Such claims of my cognitive incapacity had always been a lie; with school over, I now wondered if the lie was coming true. Despite meditation- and I recommend meditation for anyone to stabilise adverse circumstances- the ostracism had got under my skin. I felt a repulsive freak, a 6 foot piece of faeces. From having been a boy who had been tagged socially as “gay” or a “geek” but regarded as basically OK, I had become a pariah. I had seizures even though I was not epileptic and a shaky accent (a friend of my brother’s joked behind my back, in a comment of course relayed back to me, “a Norwegian accent”) though I was English.
Free- at any rate physically- from school, I went to the monastery I was thinking of being a monk at. Living at the monastery gave me a chance to roadtest saying I wanted to be a monk to an audience that would be (surely?) more positive. Some reponded with kindness and interest; others not quite so- “wow, what a crazy idea!” a German man said, grinning in my face playfully, as if I were a little boy who was fantasising running away to join the circus. Such thoughtless people were not unkind exactly, but they did not understand that being a monk was something I had broken from everyone I had previously known to try to do- and such heavy, awkward information as this was information I was not inclined to give to them. The if anything underwhelmed response I received, though, was not a response saying that I was insane literally; I became more confident even from such muted remarks.
I had a long conversation with a monk about it. “I think it’s beautiful,” he said. “I think it is very beautiful that a young boy wants to do that. And I think you’d be a good monk.” I wrote his words- “it is very beautiful”- on a card I kept for years and took out and looked at again from time to time- on this card the size of a business card was one of the few positive things anyone had said about what I had wanted to do.
I believed people at the monastery were bitching and conspiring about me because that was my frame of reference; they were probably only saying concerned things about me at the worst. I came and went repeatedly to and from the monastery, but the longest I spent at the monastery in my late teens was a month. What I did not realise at the time, because it was too hard a thought to think, was that whether I was going to become a monk or not was now a moot question. It was moot because my mental health was now likely too low for me to have become a monk anyway, making the yes or no of it irrelevant. Really, I just had to move on and- the most boring task in the world- take care of my mental health now. I believe a lot of people’s lives and aspirations- maybe most people’s- are rendered moot in this sort of way, but this sort of being made a moot person is not a well-talked about phenonenon because such moot people do not amount to things, do not become successful or famous, for obvious reasons.
At home I joined Facebook, which I had been too isolated to know the importance of but which I quickly learned everyone was on. I sent a few friend requests to people from school I had liked and who had not participated in the mob, but pathetically unfriended them quickly after; reminders of the time via even such people were too painful. Assuming the people I friended and unfriended wouldn’t have cared anyway, I decided I was going to have no friends from before I was 20.
My young mind was still growing its higher faculties. I no longer felt the love for Buddhism that made me want to read books about Buddhism any more- again, it evoked too painful a time. So I had to read something else. I wasn’t smart-or disciplined?- enough to read Nietszhe or Schopenhauer fully, but I was drawn to the misanthropic sentiments in their books. The literature of misanthropy- Leopardi’s Thoughts was my favourite- was honey to me for its expression of my own feelings. Of course, there is a strand of misanthropy or at least praise of solitariness in Buddhism as well- see for instance the famous Buddhist poem “Fare Lonely as Rhinoceros” . A whole chapter of the Dhammapada is called “Fools”; Buddha was extremely clear that “there’s no true fellowship with fools,” and that “solitude, so difficult to like” is preferable. My misanthropic sentiments would have been heard by Buddhism, but I didn’t want to go there any more.
I went to university- or, anyway, to an art school attached to a fourth-rate university which was not even a real university the first year I was there. But I was putting the past behind me. I told no one about being bullied for wanting to be a monk. Speaking of my past, my line was “because I was bullied at school, I don’t have friends from before I was 20.” (In my decades-long experience using this line, saying this never results in further inquiries about the bullying, making the phrase great cover; whether I “recommend” such cover is another matter). I never told anyone about my experience of being bullied for wanting to be a monk until last year, when I told a support group. For 2 decades I never told anyone because I thought people would laugh at me.
A story of a young man who was so disengaged from the world that he considered retiring from the world to become a monk but who in the end was too disengaged to even do that is a story with a suggestion of Oblomov-style tragicomedy to it. But while others laughed at me- hard- it is not a story I am inclined to see the comic side of much in this life, since the tragic aspects of it could have brought my life to an end. Over the years there has been the tiniest trickle of contact from people from back then. They are not as brave in apologising as they were brave in bullying- who is?- but even so it is still surprising on a whole new level how much less brave in apologising they are. One of the participants in the mob was a “friend” who had known me since I was 5 years old; By the time we were at the big school he didn’t greet me in corridors when he was with others, though this did not stop him telling others I wanted to be a monk. A decade ago he sent me a friend request on Facebook with an accompanying message saying (I quote from memory) “Hullo long lost pal! I’ve been increasingly troubled by how governed by algorithms our friend suggestions on this platform are.” The reference to “algorithms” is the most veiled of references to our having no mutual friends; algorithms. The boy who I had confided that I wanted to be a monk to at the cinema sent me a friend request, without any message, a decade ago; I just blocked him without a thought (did he know what he had done to me?) I can’t be expected to do anything with such overtures at reconciliation delivered via smoke signals, semaphore, morse code, symbols drawn in chalk on trees, and so on. Such hedgings are as worthless to me as they would be to anyone else, and I am not inclined to be tactful about them; we may have been children at the time, but still, it was the most painful time of my life.
After years of not doing, I have started to meditate every day again. I haven’t wanted to be a monk in years and years now. I want to be a normal person- my version, anyway, of a normal person. These days, I go to nightclubs and really like nightclubs, but I don’t drink; I have never drunk alcohol in my life. This is not out of conviction in any principles exactly, but out of a feeling of loyalty- loyalty to the person I used to be. The person I was when I was 17 was the loneliest person I have ever known; if I am not loyal to him, who else will be?