04 Half-Life

RADIOACTIVITY

In radioactivity. a half-life is the interval of time required for one-half of the atomic nuclei of a radioactive sample to decay and change spontaneously into other nuclear species through the emission of particle and energy; or equivalently: the time interval required for the number of disintegrations per second of a radioactive material to decrease by one-half. Half-Life is also the name of a 1998 first-person shooter video game developed by Valve studios, in which the player plays the roles of a MIT grad and Theoretical Physicist named Gordon Freeman, who works at a research facility called Black Mesa in the New Mexico desert. One day mum, noticing my facial stubble, asked me if I was growing a beard, and I said ‘Yes’. She mirthfully asked me why, and I went to my room to retrieve my XBOX copy of Half-Life that had a picture of Gordon on it, and I said, ‘I want to look like him’. Physics was also my thing. I was studying Engineering, but more than that I had scored the highest in my class in Physics back in year 12. I also had gone to MHS, and Gordon had gone to MIT. When I got really unwell this obsession took more epic proportions. I would spend big on tech items. At one point I was carrying around with me on my persons 1 Samsung Galaxy S21, a Google Nexus 5, an iPhone 6, an iPhone 12, an Omen HP Gaming Laptop, a Google Chromebook, 3 Microsoft Surface Gos, 4 Samsung tablets. Gordon would carry around with him a 9mm Pistol, .357 Magnum, Submachine Gun, Shotgun, Crossbow and Rocket-Propelled Grenade Launcher. To me, even now, identifying as a writer, tech were powerful tools that could be used as weapons. Gordan had a HEV suit, I went and got myself a Hugo BOSS suit to deal with any environmental hazards I had to deal with as part of prodding for societal change. Naturally all my friends were amused.

FAMILY VIOLENCE [00]

I was studying at my desk in the restaurant storage room on afternoon when suddenly mum, tears flowing, wearing her red kitchen apron, burst through the door and ran out the back door of the restaurant. I left my desk and caught up to her in the streets outside Caulfield station. She told me that dad had been disrespectful by violently slapping her with a dirty kitchen towel and that she wanted to get to a police station. I took in this tragic image of her and asked ‘Are you really planning to walk 5km to the station in your red kitchen apron?’ I asked this because she didn’t drive. Dad’s ego thrived on patriarchy, and although begrudgingly allowing her to take driving lessons, had been adamantly against her buying a vehicle, or even driving the family car; a 2002 black VW Bora that that both my parents hard work at the restaurant had afforded. Scared that she might run away completely on her way to the police station I pleaded with her to come back with me to the restaurant. She pondered me with her soft, watery eyes and after some contemplation, after registering my fear, took my hand and walked me back to my room. On the 7th of July 2022, the ABC published on iview a 59 minute episode of Q+A titled ‘The Choice: Violence or Poverty’ [02] that aimed to discuss the cruel choice facing many Australian women in abusive relationships. For me, watching it, augmented my suspicion that what my mum must have gone through was a horrid reality for many women. It dawned on me that the decision to leave can actually be the hardest choice of all for them. This was the decision to either stay in the abuse, or leave and face potential poverty or homelessness. The societal message can be, ‘Why doesn’t she just leave?’ I thought a thoughtful answer came from Anne, a guest on the panel who was a Labor minister and a domestic violence survivor:

‘The hardest thing I had to do in my life, to leave, and I’ve done some pretty hard stuff, alright…because I had two children. I had two boys. I didn’t want them to be without a father. And there is all these society expectations of children being raised with their father. I knew I was leaving to lead a life of povety, and the humiliation, of walking into that centerlink office, and saying, “I don’t know how I’m going to feed my kids, or myself,” still sits with me thirty years on. After everything that I went through, the hardest thing, was to leave. And that’s why woman don’t leave.‘


DECAY

With regard to radioactive half life, the disintegration of radioactive material could be mapped conceptually to my deterioration in mental health, and there was a point where I did break, and where the half-life threshold is reached. Past the half-life, my mental health decayed below a level that was required to live a happy, meaningful and productive life. Past half-life, my mental health decayed to levels that allowed a phenomenon of mental illness to take over. Mum had stayed with dad because she didn’t want to jeopardize my education. But it was by staying. and continuing to expose me to a radioactive, deteriorating family environment that had huge consequences for my mental health. I ended up living a ‘Half’ - ‘Life’. This was all changed by the Resonance Cascade.

RESONANCE CASCADE

In November 2006, during the Summer break between by first and second year at Monash, my parents decided to take me on a Buddhist pilgrimage to India. Although elated by my academic success in my first year, it had been a very emotionally turbulent and taxing time for me in that I was not speaking to my father. I was to feel much resentment towards him due to the great flux of abuse I felt he had directed towards my mother and myself over the many painful and protracted period we had been at the restaurant. Even now I find it difficult to shut out certain memories of him in his fits of rage, where he would scream, foam at the mouth, and hurl masochistic abuse at my poor mother in the unpublic, hidden arena of the kitchen; disparaging her family and blaming us both for luring him away from his earlier opportunities of being ordained as a Buddhist monk. And in the evenings, once the violent emotional storm had settled, he would go about his business as if nothing ever happened, without any element of remorse, and offer water and incense to the shrine of Buddha above the microwave, and I would sit at my desk on the verge of crying, trying to distract myself with a textbook. What I would have given to been able to reach out to anybody in all this. But it was very much a private affair, concealed and white-washed from everyone, especially family friends when they would visit. To have lived in a culture were it was taboo to openly discuss family violence and abuse was the throttling factor in me bottling up so much rage and resentment, and what ultimately fused at my core a crippling, despondent and persistent negative outlook on, well everything. I remember after a evening of experiencing my parents argue I went to school the next day to face a disparaging remark from another student that I rarely smile, and was therefore dysfunctional, and I felt what he said was unbearably cruel and alienating, since he made such a flippant remark without taking any real pain to investigate my circumstances [01].

My father’s behavior was most devasting to me as a child. One time whilst I was at primary school my parents had gotten into an argument about mum wanting to take more driving lessons, and I had returned home to experience a neighbor call out the police on a domestic call. Another occasion my father got into an explosive argument with a homework tutor about tuition fees, which escalated into this person being violently kicked out of the house. There was a time were, seeing my father angry, I innocently pleaded with him to calm down, but he only retreated to the toilet where he shut himself up and started screaming at the walls. Things like this completely ate me up inside as a child. Through my father I came to understand the real nature of arrogance and egocentrism. It was effectually pride that rendered him like this; thinking himself above the station of someone who needed to wear a kitchen apron. One time, when he was abusing mum, I got up from my desk and walked resolutely to the kitchen and pinned him against the wall. He would press me to hit him, which I almost did. He felt so startled by this show of defiance that later that evening he thought it proper to threaten and chide me into feeling regret for questioning his authority. Another time whilst we were in the car and on the way to pick up a friend of mine something little triggered him and he made mum cry, and when my friend inquired as to why she was upset, my father created a story of how I had done something to upset her, and then it became my fault. But he was so adamant that he was a good person, especially in the eyes of a divine power. And to provide the resources to pursue a good education was perhaps seen by him as a testament to good parenting, but I would have traded this at many points for a safe, caring, unabusive, non-toxic, nurturing family environment, one that didn’t lay the seeds of Schizophrenia. More on this later. I felt helpless and powerless. I would pray, to some unknown deity or power, to remove me from these circumstances. That deliverance came. But not in any form I would immediately recognize.

My father had grown up in the cold, misty mountain regions of Bandarawela in Sri Lanka. He had an older sister who was still residing there. She had been a magistrate up until her retirement. Lacking awareness into the festering dysfunction in our family, this auntie had accepted an invite from my parents to accompany us on this pilgrimage. My father had well anticipated the inevitable awkwardness and behavioral exposure that would surely arise when my auntie discovered we weren’t talking to each other, and having cornered her off pre-emptively, exerted himself in instilling in her a degree of disapproval for what he vouched was an outrageous and insolent display of disrespect and ingratitude. And it worked. For someone who had been a magistrate, I still have difficulty processing just how unquestioningly she absorbed his blatantly misconstrued story, simply on the premise that he was his brother. To completely negate and invalidate my own emotional perspective it was her decree that the onus should fall on me to made recompense; that in her vastly ignorant grasp of Buddhist dogma, I was undoubtably in the wrong for harboring even the slightest tint of anger for my experiences. But under her insistence I did eventually brake the silence, and I remember quite clearly I approached this by asking my father if I could play with the digital camera in his possession. And he grunted, handed it over, without any recompense of his own. When I reflect on this now, my mind is blown apart by the level of vanity this would have required to pull off, and it would not until much later that it registered just how abusive it is to have any proximity to such persons.

As part of the pilgrimage we visited Lumbini, Sarnath, Kushinagar and Bodh Gaya, all significant sites relating to the enlightenment of Shakyamuni Buddha. But something happened at Bodh Gaya. By something, I mean I had my first psychotic episode. At various parts of the temple I began hallucinating what felt like some very real and hostile interactions with complete strangers. The interactions were terse but had a threatening nature, and in experiencing them I developed a paranoia that all the strangers were plotting to kill me. The requirement to forfeit my life then and there did not happen, and when the last stranger left I told all of this to mum, but she was baffled because I had been with her the whole time, and she hadn’t seen me talk to anyone. When I left the temple I did not experience any further hallucinations. I returned to Australia after the pilgrimage a few weeks before the start of the semester for my second year of my double degree. This was when my mental health rapidly deteriorated. My thinking because very abstract. At the height of this I was collecting lightbulbs, spend all my money on electronic components, and be invested in the idea building a laser device that would popularize the phenomenon of light interference patterns; something that I had been fascinated about after studying and topping my class in physics in year 12. I become so distracted and time-invested in the building of this device that I began failing to concentrate on my second year subjects. But nearing the more serious end of the first semester I began to really struggle in keeping up with the workload, and locked in this pressure-cooker I totally panicked; realizing that I had to effectively catch up on 6 weeks worth of material was, for me, enough to drive me to thoughts of suicide, and before I knew it my parents took my to our GP, who arranged for me be assessed by a hospital psychiatric, who, after having the bright idea of telling her about all the lightbulbs and laser interference device, had me committed to an acute inpatient ward. The admission was my Resonance Cascade. The Plato’s Cave that was the education system I was born into, was also Black Mesa. I am now going to spend the next few posts talking about how I escaped the Black Mesa facility.