A Bit About The Author..Raised and educated in England during the 1960s and 70s,
I succeeded in gross underachievement of my academic & artistic potential, and plodded compliantly into early career choices, mostly as a draughtsman, but rebelliously once as a car cleaner. I had a mortgage and ‘steady’ relationship by age 22 and pretty-well lived like everyone else I knew..... Read more below..... |
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Something first began to change though, when I moved out of backwater Somerset and entered corporate IT Yuppie-Britain in 1989. However, my imagined land of milk and honey never materialised; only intense frustration and a further stifling of raw expressive talent, until a relationship break-up in Canada ‘wiped my metaphorical hard-drive’. I returned to Britain a lost and broken man and started a path pursuing Buddhist philosophy, art, music, plus alternative and rather new-age ways of living outside the only world order I’d ever known.
Not surprisingly, but unknowingly at the time, many life challenges came along with such choices, and long term self-doubt, semi-depression, intense unfulfilment and dissatisfaction became dark and daily companions. But I also began to get insights into my psychology and over time developed a growing fascination with human behaviour: why do we do what we do? Now at age 50, through much personal self-discovery and a lot of wrong paths to back out of, life is suddenly looking so much more simple, clear, exciting and peaceful than I ever imagined: the result of all it has taken to now know, without a shadow of doubt, that my life is about Freedom of Expression. Whilst not an autobiography, this book tells some of those stories and what I eventually learned was going on inside me when I (as I’m sure do millions of others) lived suppressing and subjugating my true, natural talent and creative expression, in favour of the acceptance by others and fitting in with the established world way of living. Interestingly, even after a number of years as a backpacker-traveller and becoming very comfortable crossing into and communicating with other cultures (notably in S.E.Asia and Latin America) and making some in-roads into exploring my creative potential, I still found myself living mostly to gain the approval of others and society in general. I recall that as I squeezed myself into roles and identities which I felt uncomfortable about, as well as unmotivated or enthusiastic, I kept getting this picture of a dog pretending to be a cat: doing all the actions, the moves, the voice, the whole works: yet knowing the whole time that there was something bubbling underneath, like a suppressed volcano building pressure, that one day, I would ‘Bark’ in the wrong place, or cock my leg and someone who knew me as a cat would see, and, heaven forbid, the ‘Game’ would be up! |
Currently... |
Martin now lives in NZ (since 1999) and enjoys creating art, photography and living as multi-culturally as he can, including frequent visits to S.E.Asia and Central America, where he also sponsors 1-to-1 social projects with people he meets and befriends there.
Among other things. |