I Forget to Re-member

Throughout high school, I was known everywhere as the best looking boy about; Adidas model, rich parents, nice clothes, famous, popular.. despised.

Each party I went to, I’d ‘get’ the choice of girl I wanted. On nights out even at 16, I’d bring back 22 year olds and I even had scratch marks down my back one time to show ‘the boys’. There was so much popularity, but it was never enough. With it, of course, came the deep physical and emotional abuse in person and over social media from hundreds of other boys, some younger, many older. There were Facebook groups made about me such as ‘Henry Potts is a Twat’ and the older guys behind it made it so people, including my friends had to ‘like’ the page in order to see what was on it. That hurt. I remember at one point I was chatting with a hot girl on Blackberry messenger, and we were flirting and getting to know each other’s personality, and it progressed into her sending me nude photos until I sent one back and then ‘Jessica’ changed her name and photo back straight away to that of a bully’s called David in the year above at school and said something along the lines of “Thanks, this is going everywhere”. I was attacked viciously several times and received a handful of death threats from unknown numbers. I still have a (kinda cool) scar on my head, right by my temple from one attack which needed me to be escorted to accident and emergency in an ambulance. Looking back, that night did have me in stitches, to be honest 😉 .

Anyway yeah that’s a chunk of 'the stuff' that happened. To cope with this, I became addicted to getting muscly and I took up boxing to be a hard man, winning any and every fight. It was all deeply Fear-based. I also became even more addicted to the validity I felt at each very moment I got into another girl’s pants. Sex addiction without needing sex every day kinda thing, I guess.

I moved to Uni in 2013. Women were still dropping their knickers for my charm, looks and status. Fast forward a year and a half, on the 4th April, 2015, at about 7 in the morning, my life turned upside down. I had gone to a rave in London with my three mates from high school. We took MDMA and some ketamine in the club and had a fab night, but then we got back, took some more ketamine and I used a double canister of nitrous oxide in a balloon. It’s fair to say that since that traumatic drug trip, but starting about 5 months later, I didn’t come back from it for about 5/6 years. 95% of my waking and even dream-state experience was that of the darkest Fear, manifesting as PTSD, anxiety, OCD, and a 2.5 year depression. I’d never wish upon another soul those things I saw, experienced and thought in those apparently 2.5 hours on that morning. I remember the deepest sense of desperation, fighting against the compulsion to kill myself. I can still recall the moment I was by the sofa and hallucinated the newspapers saying ’19 year old man commits suicide during drug trip, from the guilt of going against his parents’ words about drug-taking’.

Oh, if only I had metaphorically killed my ‘self’ back then… I would have saved a lot of suffering.

After a couple of years of travelling to places like Marbella, Chicago and London to stay in clinics, seeing the top status psychiatrists, therapists, all whilst heavily medicated, I then became heavily addicted to Cocaine and the dreaded Benzos that I was in-sanely prescribed. With that came a lot of dangerous drinking, dangerous sex, debt, two post-night-out visits to a crack house, where I smoked crack and heroin. There were also times I participated in dangerous stranger ‘chem sex parties’. Is it really a celebration, indulging in the nastiest of things, including smoking Methamphetamine??

My friends called my parents again when I was a wreck. My poor Dad who has, with the best intent, always sacrificed his own happiness to try to help mine, came straight from the airport one time for another intervention, after I had a 2/3 night bender. I went to CA meetings, tried meditation for a while, started looking after myself better, but relapsed, tried again, relapsed and so on. In February time of 2020, I attempted suicide, but my Mum jumped on my back to drag me to the floor, damaging her hand, before the bus could hit me. After a handful of months of a healthier lifestyle, I randomly relapsed and this time I injected the Meth, which I got for free in exchange for my body. Of course, the next few days were fucked up and I was a mental mess, in the depths of that illusive funny friend, Fear. Enough was enough. I decided to check myself into a 4-week retreat/rehabilitation with the very wise therapist/teacher that I had started seeing not long before. I knew that I was going to die too young if I didn’t do this for myself. And although I didn’t want to keep on living, or should I say, surviving, I knew I was going to end up dead from a fatal overdose before long.

I asked Ben the therapist “Why can’t I stop abusing myself and my Loved ones?” He said: “Henry, I Love you, more than you Love you”. I burst into tears, because things had just started to make sense for me, for the first time. Not long after this, I figured out the main happening that triggered the drug addiction and the abusive gay sex.

I was grieving my identity.

Henry Potts, the guy who ALL girls want.

The only thing I had to hold onto. The only belief I had to feel a slither of worth. Gone.

I hadn’t been popular with girls for several years now; I had lost my charm, my good looks, my cheekiness, my sense of adventure, my confidence, pretty much my entire personality, that I identified with. I actually remember the tipping moment, thinking back; my friends and I had seemingly, randomly ended up at this hot girls house in London. We had all gone to school together and she said “Oh my God it’s Henry Potts, you used to be really hot at school”. My ‘friends’ all laughed and ripped me. The grieving process truly started then.

I spent 4 weeks at this wonderful retreat called Archangel, which Ben runs in the beautiful English Countryside. It was truly trans-form-ative. We didn’t just do in-depth therapy and presentations on the depths of our own personal guilt, but we were taught to cook and clean for ourselves, exercise, learn yoga, watch nice movies at the end of a tough day together, tidy up and to live in a functional family home where everyone helps out equally, with every-thing. Essentially, the theory of Codependence and how to start to transcend it, is to heal the hurting inner-child, by starting with investing in ourselves and learning to Love that hiding inner-child, who pops up when we identify as a victim, when we re-act something from our past, 1-up another Being, take without replenishing, and so on.

It’s about re-establishing the long-lost sense of worthiness for our own existence. Until we re-member Love, we are all just hurting children with adult bodies, stuck in the differing states of unconsciousness where many different traumas happened to us at different ages since the original birth Trauma. Let me ask you this: have you ever truly wondered why a baby is screaming in so much pain at birth? How traumatic is it, deep down, knowing that you are coming back into the illusion of Fear, suffering, pain, unworthiness and ultimately, the belief in separation?

There hasn’t been just one special moment in this coming of age story of mine, because throughout the day even now, I still forget Who I Really Am. That’s only when I’m identifying with my mind’s content of frequent fear-full thinking. But ok ok, If I am to choose THE moment where I knew everything would be just fine… actually no, Divine, is when I re-membered that, in my essence, I am the One-in-turn, experiencing itself. The Uni-verse experiencing itself. All That Is. The infinite space of no-thingness. Consciousness. God. It is not attached to the His(S)tory of this personal experience, nor is it attached to any outcome or event, because when the witness ‘I AM’ is here and is in the front seat of this experience, it/I know full-well that this is all a dream to re-experience the ineffable, all-mighty, absolute, perfection all over again… all simply for a bit of a cosmic giggle.

You see, Life is Play. Not work. In any sense. Sincerity, not seriousness. Even the seemingly seriousness and work is in actuality just play and more play, because remember how it gets boring for ‘us’, being inconceivably magnificent for eternity. It gets boring never being born and never dying. It’s the non-duality Truth of Life. Everything is One.

The One, we call Love.

Agapē Nowhere

♥️