A Kugelblitz

Throughout my life I’ve struggled with ways to vent. I grew up being told that energy should always be positive, or at least as far was the perception other people held of me. So if angry or upset it was selfish and childish for me to show such feelings outwardly and I should repress them and switch on a stash of positive emotions that I had stored for just such an event.

The people who imposed these regulations, be it my mother or her peers or teachers at school were themselves people who did not adhere to such rules. They would lash out and make no attempt to disguise their unhappiness or anger if provoked beyond what they felt to be a boundary of tolerance. The justification for them losing their shit was that it wasn’t their fault. A myriad set of reasons and excuses were always forthcoming, usually something along the lines of “you don’t know how hard I work in my job” or “you shouldn’t have been being stupid”.

The era I grew up in was the 1970s and 1980s. I class my adulthood as beginning when I upped anchor and went to Lancashire Polytechnic to study Law in 1990. Until that point, and despite being two weeks from my 20^th birthday when I moved into Blakewater House halls of residence, I hadn’t evolved much in the nearly two decades I’d been at home. That era was one where the old ways of the Victorian age, the first and second worlds wars, and “do as you’re told” were slowly fading out to be replaced by a theoretically more tolerant and understanding culture. For generations the world had worked a certain way and it is still surprising to me just how much the world has adapted since the late 1980s.

When I was at school absolutely no one was gay except flamboyant TV or film personalities. Racism was wrong but people still made racist jokes and openly expressed racist views amongst each other. Back then it was only wrong to say it to someone’s face. Mouthing off about how “Hilter had a point” or “there ain’t no black in the Union Jack” was deemed by fuckwitted parish councillors and career cunts to be merely ‘a right to an opinion’. Transgender rights? That wasn’t even on the radar yet and the initials were LGB, not the 3.33 recurring-esque, tongue twister of alphabetty spaghetti we have today. While feminism was prominent and tomes like “The Women’s Room” or “The Female Eunuch” were read by many an armchair feminist, the world was still in a case of women cherry picking which bits of equality they wanted. I knew of and even experienced several instances of domestic abuse or violence perpetrated by women against men where the man didn’t dare hit back for fear of being accused of being a wife beater or getting a kicking off bystanders.

That time was, quite frankly, shit. It’s not better or worse now, just different but the world of that era was one of change, and societal shifts don’t happen overnight. The year after I left High school, corporal punishment was outlawed completely in the UK** and the ‘dark sarcasm’ that Pink Floyd had waxed lyrical about in their awesome anthem ‘Brick in the Wall’ was replaced by a more human approach to the diffusion of knowledge.

As I have got older (I turned 50 last October) I have realised that the vast majority of my unhappiness and unresolved bitter memories have come from the fact that I felt completely unable to express myself when I was upset, emotional or angry. In the last 2.5 years I have stopped drinking alcohol completely, quit smoking and, since the bastard Covid-19 lockdown began 11 months ago*** I have meditated at least once per day, reduced my processed sugar intake, and cut my social media usage to one visit per day, be it Facebook (which was like bad heroin) or Instagram (whose fucking videos of Karens being mean and casual cruelty did nothing but wind me up).

As a result of these changes (I thought giving up booze would be the philosopher’s stone but it turned out it was sugar that was the clincher) I have got to a point where my anxiety is 90% improved ( I still get it but I can step back, take a few deep breaths, and then move on); I hardly ever bite my nails any more (something I’ve done since early childhood) and sleep properly for the first time in a very long time.

A kugelblitz is a black hole but instead of being made of matter it is composed entirely of light. Human beings are made to co-habit, and to be happy. Negativity, sadness and grief are all fundamental parts of being human, but repressing those aspects for so long will cause your light to turn inwards. Becoming a kugelblitz is beyond dangerous. Your negativity will feed on itself and the more condensed it becomes the more its negativity impacts on other areas of your life. Stress, anxiety, nausea, even cancer can all be the result of simply repressing bad stuff for too long.

I was never able to find a way out of this until, ironically, a global pandemic forced all of us to turn inward a great deal. About four months into the misery that the corona virus has brought to the world I began to find ways to slowly release the energy that was threatening to overwhelm me and become a spiritual kugelblitz. Just as society cannot change overnight, I realised that neither could I. The changes I always wanted to make came gradually but now I feel they have actually taken effect in more than just a fleeting way. That horrible, depression-inducing energy that I kept back for so long has not come out in an explosion of wrath but has dissipated slowly, like the soil from a buried treasure as it is moved by the strokes of an archaeologist’s paint brush.

Finally, after half a century of life, I have found some peace and I believe there will be more. I no longer feel the kugelblitz in my stomach every time I get to experience sadness or pain. I’m also no longer so afraid to speak my mind. It isn’t something I feel I have to do for the sake of knowing that people won’t listen anyway.

Now it feels like the world is much more peaceful.

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**I used to wonder if they waited until I'd left before abolishing this.

*** Nearly a year in lockdown and wearing masks to buy groceries. Read that again slowly.