{"id":1945,"date":"2011-05-20T12:58:04","date_gmt":"2011-05-20T11:58:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/integrationtraining.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1945"},"modified":"2011-05-20T12:58:04","modified_gmt":"2011-05-20T11:58:04","slug":"body-leadership-chapter-narrative-extracts-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.integrationtraining.co.uk\/blog\/2011\/05\/body-leadership-chapter-narrative-extracts-2\/","title":{"rendered":"The Body and Leadership – Chapter 4 Narrative Extracts"},"content":{"rendered":"

A deeply personal narrative extract from my upcoming book The Body and Leadership<\/a><\/p>\n

…………….<\/p>\n

Cambridge, 30<\/strong>th<\/sup><\/strong> August to 1<\/strong>st<\/sup><\/strong> September 1996<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Body Off Centre<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/p>\n

I storm out of the pub into a stormy Cambridge night. Rain hisses like angry vipers as it hits my skin. I\u2019m napalm. I\u2019m rage incarnate. I\u2019m hurt and I want to hurt. I could gouge out Buddha\u2019 eyes. I\u2019m not a violent man<\/p>\n

Everything is clenched; my eyes are daggers looking to taste blood. My mind is entangled trying to process what I\u2019ve just been accused of \u2013 I focus on the anger to block it out. I\u2019m dragon\u2019s breath; I\u2019m Satan\u2019s claws.<\/p>\n

Around me are the sounds of a Friday night in gentrified student land. I don\u2019t hear them. I know he\u2019s followed behind as I demanded, when I turned over the table inside like Jesus\u2019 evil brother. He \u2018s angry too. She also followed and is weeping not the first time I\u2019ve made the person I care most about cry. \u00a0 Her long dark hair is a mess, in the rain and tears but she\u2019s still beauty made flesh. If I was thinking now I\u2019d ask her to forgive me and walk away. I\u2019m not a violent man<\/p>\n

She pleads as her new boyfriend and I square up. We\u2019re not violent men.<\/p>\n

She runs off into the night, body collapsing and twisting. Everyone has a limit. When she left me for him – a friend – I wasn\u2019t at mine. I understood, in my head at least, that it sometimes happens and that you can\u2019t control people\u2019s hearts. Tonight though I\u2019d been pushed through that wall. Months of pain have just found an outlet. First-hate cuts deep. The alcohol and amphetamines don\u2019t help, but even without them I\u2019d still be a mindless, soulless and far from my centre.<\/p>\n

The \u201cfight\u201d if you can call it that, is over in a few seconds. It was a pathetic scuffle really – neither of us know how to fight yet, we\u2019re not violent men.<\/p>\n

Mutual friends pulled us off. The hardest punch of the night was landed on the back of my head by someone who claimed to know Adam, but was probably just pissed and wanted trouble.<\/p>\n

I went traveled home rocking and crying in the back of a friend\u2019s car.\u00a0 My balls were up near my throat and I won\u2019t sleep for days. I\u2019m not a violent man.<\/p>\n

The next day was my best friend James\u2019 birthday and he was having a party as eighteen year olds are inclined to. My own was a few days a ago – I am now officially a man violent or otherwise. I celebrated the arrival of adulthood – what a joke-\u00a0 with the handful of people who stubbornly care for me despite how I am behaving. I got unconsciously drunk like I did every night. A photo of the night shows me skinny, shaven headed with a mad self destructive look in my eye, while friends look on not knowing how to help.<\/p>\n

It had been a bad summer. While not working in the Victorian conditions of a bloody potato farm, I argued furiously with my parents as they with each other. Simply, I wasn\u2019t happy. I missed her like the sky misses the wind, and needed to get the hell out of inbred-Dodge. Life in rural East Anglia, and with my disintegrating family, was already over. I needed to escape<\/p>\n

Most of the people I\u2019d met at sixth-form college found it hard to be around me now. I hurt and only way I knew how to express it was anger. On my 18th<\/sup> I didn\u2019t want to remember the year before. We try and forget bad times, but sometimes it\u2019s also painful to remember good ones – paradise thrown away.<\/p>\n

A year before – my seventeenth birthday – had been the best day of my life.\u00a0 She and I had a had a beer with James, then we\u2019d gone across the road to mine, watched TV till my parents went to sleep, then made love clumsily but wonderfully. Nothing special: everything special.<\/p>\n

After that things had gone wrong.\u00a0 We were kids and didn\u2019t know how to stay together. I didn\u2019t know the value of what I had above all, and a million other excuses and after-the-event rationalizations.<\/p>\n

Now I was back at James\u2019. I\u2019d screamed at her new man the night before that I would finish things the next day, as I knew he\u2019d be there at the party.<\/p>\n

I talked to my dad before coming over,<\/p>\n

\u201cI might have to fight this evening dad.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAre you in some kind of trouble?\u201d
\n\u201cNo.\u201d I lied. \u201cIt\u2019s just a point of principle.<\/p>\n

\u201cWell\u2026just keep going forward. That\u2019s good advice my father gave me years ago for fighting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Keep going forward\u2026I wanted to tell him all about it. I wanted him to hold me and understand, to let my body give up, but we\u2019d never had that kind of relationship. We didn\u2019t even know a language to have the conversation we needed to have in. A few years later the roles will be reversed. He was hurting from loosing my mum and we still didn\u2019t know the language. It is so bloody stupid.<\/p>\n

That night he showed and I showed. Neither of us started trouble, we\u2019d calmed down, we\u2019re not violent men.<\/p>\n

Late at night I was walking across the road back to mine when I saw them arm in arm. They stopped for a moment in the moonlight, perhaps concerned as to what the staggering drunk wretch under the street lamp would do. I realized through the haze that there was nothing good I could do and I\u2019d done enough wrong to these friends already. I held my bottle in the air to salute them, and stumbled to bed. He had the most wonderful girl in the world and I had a bottle of cheap red wine.<\/p>\n

That night I didn\u2019t sleep.\u00a0 I\u2018d seen a side to myself that I couldn\u2019t bare to look at. I\u2019d also found despair, real black despair for the first time in my life. I knew I wouldn\u2019t be getting back together with her – ever. Loss only comes with acceptance for better and for worse. I\u2019d never felt this bad before.\u00a0 Blackness isn\u2019t a colour \u2013 it\u2019s a nothing you reach at 4am when you really don\u2019t want to live.<\/p>\n

I cried till the sun came up. The dawn looks different through tears, especially when you\u2019ve been up all night and you don\u2019t want to see it.<\/p>\n

I heard on the radio that Princess Diana had been killed in Paris. I went back to James\u2019 house as people were waking up. I told people the big important news about the person they\u2019d never met. I can only imagine how I looked, they must have thought I really liked \u2018ole lady Di. James knew the real reason I was upset and hugged me while I sobbed and cursed the world. Thanks James, I love you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A deeply personal narrative extract from my upcoming book The Body and Leadership ……………. Cambridge, 30th August to 1st September 1996 The Body Off Centre I storm out of the pub into a stormy Cambridge night. Rain hisses like angry vipers as it hits my skin. I\u2019m napalm. I\u2019m rage incarnate. I\u2019m hurt and I want to hurt. I could gouge out Buddha\u2019 eyes. I\u2019m not a violent man Everything is clenched; my eyes are daggers looking to taste blood. My mind is entangled trying to process what I\u2019ve just been accused of \u2013 I focus on the anger to <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[110],"tags":[1062,1071,1103,1432,1539],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9xvDN-vn","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.integrationtraining.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1945"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.integrationtraining.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.integrationtraining.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.integrationtraining.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.integrationtraining.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1945"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.integrationtraining.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1945\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.integrationtraining.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.integrationtraining.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.integrationtraining.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}