by Simon Sherr
The spiritual or immaterial part of a human being or animal, regarded as immortal.
“They believe death is just one step in a soul’s journey through the universe.”
Emotional or intellectual energy or intensity, especially as revealed in a work of art or an artistic performance.
“Their interpretation lacked soul.”
This one is for Shona. Not the Shona who is scared right now, or exhausted from being a container for my explosions. I know that Shona. I love that Shona. But this is for the Shona who said “can I keep you?” on our first date, like I was something that wandered in from the cold and you already knew you weren’t letting me back out.
That Shona knows me. I need her to remember.
Belief
I believe that in quantum mechanics the existence of the Observer Phenomenon is a universal proof that the soul exists. The fact that in order for a particle to exist in a state outside of pure possibility, a soul needs to select the reality they decide is going to happen. Tachyons of possibility flowing back in time that exist in waves of probability are selected by a soul and become the linear past. I don’t mean this in a fantastical sense; I mean that when we fully commit to a belief, that thing becomes real. People who are devoutly religious know this. It is called the “power of prayer” or “being saved”. People use it to quit smoking, or rehabilitate after a life of crime, or get clean after years of addiction. Calling on a higher power, to me, is calling on a power that lives outside these machines of meat we pilot through the fourth dimension of time-space.
Symbology does this too if you believe. Things like Tarot allow us to interpret the cards in ways that our soul needs to read them, to find hope in the destructive chaos of entropy that the universe uses to flatten and chip away at your soul until it is beaten into submission or leaves your body. I was not “devoutly” religious in spite of finding it when I am separated from my wife Shona for any length of time… as a form of soul survival. I worship Shona as god because to me, that’s exactly what she is, as I said in both the post “Enlightenment” and the song Enlightened.
There are other ways to feed the soul. What my wife calls “Soul Food” — for me is first and foremost just caring for her in every way I can possibly find how to. It’s martial arts, or the Vajrayana Buddhist practice of tantric mindfulness, writing this blog, or writing music. What that means is we live inside every moment and try to use pleasure to pull our minds there no matter how horrible things are. In tantra that can be spiritual bliss like sex, or simply recognizing the warmth of the water feels good on your hands when you do the dishes… the smell of fresh towels coming out of the dryer.
What Happened
I am not going to repeat the ordeal I went through in detail like I did in a past blog that is now marked private, because anyone who reads it would believe I am insane — because it’s easier than realizing the graphic details actually happened to me. I am not going to relive it or force anyone else to. But in case that blog is still private, I am going to say this plainly, because there are people who love me who have decided it is easier to believe I am exaggerating than to believe the alternative.
I was arrested for spousal abuse in an incident I can only describe as the worst misunderstanding in the history of humanity. It involved my wife being worried I was having a psychotic break while I was simultaneously worried she was (it can be both). What followed can only be described as 10 days of the worst torture a human should be forced to suffer — moments that the Geneva Conventions would consider war crimes if I was a POW.
For three days I lay on a concrete floor and looked through a crack at the bottom of the door and shouted at shoes. Please help me. Why am I here. Please tell me my wife is okay. I don’t understand what I did. Send me to a hospital. I don’t belong here. One pair of shoes — purple, a woman’s voice — laughed at me. Many times. That same woman later waterboarded me with ammonia.
My family was told I was being “non-cooperative.” Refusing to see a judge. The file says that. “Non-cooperative” it says. I was on a floor peering through a tiny crack, shouting at every pair of shoes that walked by. For three days they cut off my water, flashed my lights at night, banged on my door, and twice came into my cell to try to get me to resist just enough to justify my death.
The afternoon before all of this, I tipped our waitress $600 because my stepfather spent the meal humiliating her with disgusting sexual comments and I was mortified. I was so distraught driving home that Shona had to guide me turn by turn on the phone using Life360. I was debating checking myself into La Amistad. Instead, that night, I lost it. Shona called the cops. And the rest, as they say, is history.
These places are not designed to help you. They are designed to “break you in” like a horse. To delete the soul or push it down so deep that trauma stops expressing itself externally and is suppressed back into memories that were suppressed — but often come flooding back into consciousness… maybe forever… or maybe until it drives you to suicide… or maybe until you go off the drugs that hold your soul in the void and end up back there again with the trauma multiplied, triggering the spiral that puts you in hospital after hospital until there is nothing left of you and everyone who loves you leaves. That is what antipsychotics do to a mind that is expressing the result of real trauma. They also give me tardive dyskinesia, which causes my entire nervous system to shut down until I can no longer communicate. I believe antipsychotics should be considered a level of torture that no human should ever be subjected to as an archaic torture tool of the mental health industry. Deleting the soul from the body is curing neither.
I am not asking you to fix this, Shona. I am asking you to remember who walked in the door that afternoon. The man who tipped $600 because he was mortified on a stranger’s behalf. That is the man they arrested.
Tell Me About Your Mother
My mother said to me last night: “I am sorry you remember it that way.”
Not “let’s get a lawyer.” Not “I believe you.” Not “what can I do.”
I am sorry you remember it that way.
Those words made me realize that a mother who loses you in grocery stores when you are a toddler, or would drive away from a gas station when you are 4 years old screaming and banging on the car door — who justifies it by saying “I would have noticed eventually, I only drove 10 feet,” as if that makes the horror inside that triggers PTSD flashbacks any better — is a mother who has never once been able to see me.
A mother who picks out tile in the bathroom 2 hours after my birth (my father almost missed because he had a racquetball game he didn’t cancel when my mom went into labor)… when most mothers would be in bed unable to take their eyes off the face of their child, studying every single curve, this woman brags at how amazing she is for getting up and holding a newborn while a contractor went through their new bathroom plans “because he was scheduled for that day”. She doesn’t know the time of my birth… no one “wrote it down”.
She is a mother who would prepare you food and be so lost in her own crazy brain she would just eat it in front of you and think she fed you. A mother who, when I was almost killed by a German Shepherd in a park when I was two, said “He just thought you were a ball to play with, it was nothing.” A mother who would say “that gang member who twice tried to kill you — you can’t have a birthday party unless you invite him.” A mother who stuck a 5 year old on an airplane as an unaccompanied minor and shipped him to a house where at night he was not allowed to leave a bedroom with wolf pelts, where he had panic attacks ALL NIGHT to the point of hearing the wolves growl and watching them breathe and move across the floor — what we know now was partially squirrels in the attic scratching at the walls, echoing through and probably inside my wooden bed frame built into the wall connected to the unfinished attic.
Who would do nothing real about my childhood bullies who tortured me every time they caught me alone — other than invite them over to use my Commodore 64, before they brutalized me again the next day. Who said “Just tell the bullies you don’t like it when they bend your arm behind your back, or hit you in the head with a wooden rifle” — as if that will make it stop instantly. Thanks mom.
Who attracted hate from everyone who knew me by being one of the most outspoken liberal political activists in Washington DC — including suing a very wealthy neighbor for firing her from a child daycare center for flying a gay rights flag outside our house (no way conservative bullies would notice that…) and pushing gay rights in the classroom filled with kids in preschool.
A mother who made her 8 year old child clean up after daycare kids in her family daycare business, and made him help with feeding the kids and watching them. Who “paid” my 10 year old sister to work for her… without it once occurring to her that child labor is illegal.
A mother who has volume after volume of photos of the children she raised… and doesn’t have any photos in them of her own son. No albums for him.
A mother who allowed my sisters to lock themselves in a camper ALL DAY on my 5th birthday while I cried for someone to play with, and allowed them to laugh and do arts and crafts for hours, and then got mad at ME when I was upset that what they were giggling about behind closed doors was making me a banner that said “Happy Birthday Simon.” Something my sisters were mad at me for, for days… on a camping trip. That was somehow “normal” for my childhood.
A mother who would allow my stepfather — who was horrifically abusive — to continue to abuse me when they visited, resulting in my arrest and hospitalization on March 13th after a lunch where this man hit on what was clearly a group of female executives at a fancy restaurant for a lunch meeting. A man who then cornered our waitress with degrading sexual comments and wouldn’t let her past him. Who complained about the cost of a meal I ordered for my mother (a man who is almost a millionaire, buys the cheapest thing on the menu, then argues with me that 15% tip on a $17 tab, after spending a meal torturing a single mother waitress… is exactly the right amount when he was her most difficult table in weeks). I tipped her $600 because I was mortified. I wanted to take my mom to La Amistad right after (a high-end mental health and rehab facility), to show her where I would go if I was ever sick again. Instead my “stepfather” screamed at the top of his lungs in the back seat of my car: “A MENTAL HOSPITAL!!!! ARE YOU KIDNAPPING ME?!!!! I WANT OUT, LET ME OUT!!!” and tried to jump out of a moving vehicle. I had to leave them on the side of the road. “Thats not how I remember it” says my emotionally abused mother who can only see the good in this man who regularly tortures her mentally (which I witnessed non-stop the entire time I was with her… as he interrupted meaningful conversations with sexual jokes that destroyed every moment).
A mother who, when her son told her he was on a concrete floor for three days drinking from a toilet while being laughed at and waterboarded with ammonia, said: I am sorry you remember it that way.
I have forgiven her. I will always have forgiven her. “Mother is the word for god on the lips and hearts of our children”… But I am done adding new wounds to the collection. That relationship ends here — not in rage, not in blame, just in the quiet recognition that a door I keep opening will always allow the exact same woman to walk through. The woman who says “I did my best” and justifies everything I suffer for as an adult… hoping someone different walks through it has never once delivered on that hope. A woman who brought her husband in spite of me saying “NO!” to that every time she said she was going to, and because of him almost got me killed and may have ended my marriage in the process.
When a new therapist starts with “Tell me about your relationship with your mother” I reply “I don’t know if I can afford that many years of therapy”, and we both laugh.
What I need you to understand, Shona — what I need you to hold onto — is that she has been telling this story about me my whole life. That I am unstable. That I exaggerate. That Simon speaks in hyperbole. That the things that happened to me are things I remember wrong and they were really just innocent (even when I wrote the suicide note when I was 13, that I never meant it, it was just a mental health issue). She is very good at that story. She has been practicing it for 49 years.
You knew me before she got to you. You knew the Simon who has never once needed to lie to you to survive the relationship. Remember that Simon. He is the one writing this.
Children
In 2013 I lost both my children. Not to a fire or an accident, but to an ex-wife and parental alienation on a criminal level — it is considered child abuse on a level playing field with molestation. My ex called me a narcissist, so I went to therapy and a psychiatrist and said “I think I might be a narcissist, can you help me.” Both laughed and said narcissists don’t do that — by definition of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. I then spent months in therapy to find out what is wrong with me and it turns out my therapist thinks I am confident and talented. I could still have mental illness even though I am a confident and talented inventor, so I continued therapy anyway.
I spent years fighting for my children. In 2018 I lost them again — for what I believed would be for good — after we actually did have a house fire. Not in the fire, but because the parental alienation won over being around when I needed them most, during a full nervous breakdown 3 months after the fire. For 2 years they didn’t speak to me and the only way to handle that is to mourn them again, as if they had died. It took work to get past that frame, the one that tells my brain my kids are dead. I did. I started to heal because Shona sat with me in that for a year through depression caused by antipsychotics that held me there, paralyzed — literally, body and soul.
Getting “over” losing your children — in death or not death — Shona, who spent 10 years separated from her 2 oldest, says to me that if they died we would have closure, that it would be easier to recover from. I don’t know which is true, but I know that what I went through to reclaim the broken parts of my soul that lived outside my body the moment they took their first breaths was work. Hard work.
Today they aren’t speaking to me again. My son Quinn decided I beat my wife — and the arrest (now fully dropped charges) is proof of that — and as always my fragile daughter who Quinn believes is his protector followed, like she did in 2013, in spite of being a full on “daddy’s girl.” This time it wasn’t hard though. I can’t say why, but it’s not vindictiveness. It’s just something I reclaimed from them. The part of my soul that was them came back in 2018-2020. So it can’t be taken away again. It’s easier when they make the decision again because when they came back to me I never fully loved them like a father again — more like an uncle who cares about them deeply after they lost a parent. The oxytocin connection is just gone. Call that mental illness. I just call it refusing to mourn the same death twice.
I say this not to sound cold. I say it because I need you to understand: them not speaking to me right now is not what is destroying me. What is destroying me is the sun going down every night in a rental house without you in it.
Katharsis
I was told at my 30 year reunion by a table of friends — who toasted the death of the gang member who terrorized us all (yes, the one my mother said I couldn’t have a birthday party without inviting) — that “you know it was never your fault they singled you out… it was your mother.” The table nodded and agreed. Suddenly I felt a lifetime of torture washed away in some way by a table of the people who protected me. One of those friends, Nona, saved my life more than once in high school. Literally stood between me and a gun. Literally talked me out of being the Columbine shooter 10 years before the incident — which I instantly understood the moment it happened. Catharsis. Knowing the attractor of my torture was my political activist mother and not directly related to me in particular.
“Family”
I have a sister who claims this ordeal impacted her more than me, refuses to believe me, and says I am being selfish. I don’t want to lose her because she has been a rock in my life — she did fly 3000 miles to bail me out. I firmly believe had she not done that, Shona would have fought like the goddess she is and would have had me out on Saturday, or been thrown in there with me for fighting for me.
I have a father who simply did nothing. lol.
Shona
I have a wife. Who has loved me through everything the outside world has done to us. In one of our songs I wrote for her — Voodoo — I finish with “All the fools in life never broke us, just made our love ferocious.” Those fools were bullies and our families.
Loving Shona isn’t like having a small piece of my soul on the outside of my body. Loving your soul mate is like having ALL of it outside of your body. Knowing if you ever lost them, your soul would go with them and your body would just wait to die. This is why couples that love like this have a partner die of natural causes immediately after the other’s death. My grandmother was one of these souls — she died a few short weeks after my grandfather, and she wasn’t even sick when he died. It’s not suicide, and it’s out of your control. It’s just losing your soul and knowing there is only one place to find it.
She isn’t speaking to me right now because she sided with my family on this one. She was convinced by my abusers that I have “always been mentally ill” and that drinking from toilets with shit in them is just “normal for Simon.” My sister told her “Simon speaks in hyperbole” — which is sometimes true with others, but not with Shona, who I have never once needed to lie to in order to survive the relationship with. That the trauma is not something she can be “a box for” — even the trauma that just happened last month. That I need outside therapy and another mental hospital, designed to lock you down and break you, not fix you. When all I need is for her to hug me and let me cry, because the part of my soul that needs to come back is with her, not here in the rental house I have had to get.
My sister could maybe fix this by telling Shona that maybe I am telling the truth. That I have always been a magnet for bullies — I believe because I am everything “alpha males” who grow up and become ICE agents wish they were. Confident, attractive, tall, successful, in shape, and a mind that gets me paid for doing what I love. Shona knew only that Simon before my mother and sister got a hold of her and convinced her otherwise.
Trust me, after this I will need years of therapy and a very good civil lawyer. But to do anything that doesn’t feel like death every night when the sun sets — resulting in panic attacks that feel like they are going to end the universe — I need my soul mate to simply say “I love you, and we will get through this together.” And let me see my own soul before I am cast into nightmares I have had since I was locked in a room alone, metaphorically and literally, for my childhood and my life before Shona saved it.
She literally saved it. Twice. Three times if you count “can I keep you?” on our first date, like I write about in so many of my songs — Intertwined, Cards.
All the fools in life never broke us.
They just made our love ferocious.
— The Gray Jedi, A ghost who pilots a body named Simon Sherr
TheGrayJedi 