No Heart So Simple... No Mind So Complicated...

by Mitch Wyatt

There’s a feeling of emptiness in my head, a thought in the back of my mind, elusive because I cannot identify and hold onto this thought, but it’s very real, I can feel it. It drove me to seek out the abstract in life, and is the reason a simple piece of text changed my life forever. My Uncle George wrote it. I remember the day I first found it and started to read…

January 8, 1984

My name is George Hermann and I was born to Bill and Bettie Hermann of Wodongalonga, a medium sized country town in NSW, Australia. My upbringing was nothing spectacular, quite ordinary really. I never suffered unnecessarily. My parents worked hard to raise me and did a relatively good job of it. All in all I had a relatively normal, comfortable upbringing. My parents were middle-working class when I was born and by the time I was eighteen they owned several companies, including a multi-national multi-million dollar firm. This means I grew up seeing the struggles of a family with hardly any money to becoming a very rich family. Experiencing so many different viewpoints of the world because of this maybe helped shape my mind to the way it is today.

I first noticed I was different when I was in my late teens. I saw the world in ways I didn’t believe others could, especially those of my age. I had always been highly literate and read a great deal more then my peers. It got to a stage where I craved knowledge, I constantly needed to do something which fired my imagination, satisfied my intellectual curiosity and gave me some sense of understanding the mysteries surrounding life. It seemed that no matter how much I read, watched, thought and learned I still felt discontented. There was a fire inside me to absorb knowledge. I believe I was born with the capability of deep thought, and now I needed to absorb the knowledge to fuel this deep thought.

I could never settle down and accept the status quo of getting a job, marrying, having children and never really doing much different until retirement. I couldn’t bear to be a part of this continuing and vicious cycle. Conquering the traditional goals of life could never be a goal in itself for me. Even though I enjoy the luxuries money can buy, money could never give me satisfaction on it’s own. Material success could never be a strong motivation in making a decision when life sticks a fork in the road ahead of me. I want to feel as if somehow I am contributing something to the world, even if it’s small and I gain no recognition. I’m an extremely free spirited person and my life needs to be consistent with this or I will always feel discontented.

I am extremely sensitive to the emotional undercurrents around me. I respond openly and quickly to others’ pain and suffering. I am a compassionate person and am easily affected by the feelings and needs of people around me. But I need to be careful not to overestimate my capacity to tolerate too much endless misery in my life. This does not mean I am not sufficiently strong or compassionate but in my life I naturally seek beauty and goodness and too much exposure to human ugliness can put me into a depressed state. This is why I can never seem to hold a relationship, all the little problems compound and drag me down until I am forced to run away from it all.

My sensitivity became too much for my fragile mind at about the age of seventeen when I slipped into an ongoing and deeply dark depression, I needed something to ease my thoughts. That’s when my life turned into a roller coaster ride. I started drinking heavily, at first the drinking was part of the fun of going out, then it was the going out that was part of the fun of drinking, then I started drinking no matter the situation. I also started smoking cigarettes and experimenting with marijuana. I don’t doubt I would have tried other drugs but I was never much exposed to them. I also took to sex and it turned into a huge problem. I was sleeping around continuously and if no opportunities presented themselves I would pay for the service.

There would be times I would be so depressed all I could resort to was endless drinking. It soon alienated my friends and I was losing lifelong friends everyday. I knew I needed to get away from all this but it just seemed too hard. I started dwelling on the possibilities of suicide and the relief it would bring me, but somehow pulled through and am still here.

It is easy to write a chronological history of events in your life, however, no biographical tale that I will ever write will truly convey my thoughts. Although I seem to feel things strongly I find it hard to articulate what I really think and feel. You see, I do not think in a normal way. I think in a way which is not easy to communicate in words. Actually, even if I could describe my thoughts it wouldn’t help much. I can’t even identify my individual thoughts. Even I confuse myself! Maybe that’s why I wrote this, to somehow bring my completely random thinking patterns into perspective. Maybe it will help me to understand myself a little better, to gain an insight into how my mind works and create even more fuel for thought. I know something. What I know, I can't explain, but I nonetheless know it, I feel it. I've felt it my entire life, that there is something wrong. I don’t know what it is, but it’s like there’s a splinter in my mind, driving me mad. There's nothing I can say that will explain it for you. There’s a higher or deeper level of life that I seek and cannot find. I will search for it until I find it. My life has some kind of meaning, maybe that’s what I’m looking for, the meaning of life. The great question posed by society over the centuries. It’s just like being in love. No one can tell you that you're in love, you just know it. Through and through. Balls to bones. It’s why I hardly sleep, why I live alone, and why night after night I read like a machine. I’m looking for it. I’m looking for an answer. It's the question that drives me. It's the question that brought me to write this. I know the question, yet cannot explain it. The answer is out there, and I will find it. Before I die I want to make peace with these feelings, otherwise my life will have been incomplete.

My Uncle George was found in his isolated, slab hut at the age of thirty seven, sprawled on a rough hewn red gum cross. He had nailed one hand to the timber and then slit his wrists. I guess he never found what he yearned to find his whole life, dying a very discontented, deeply depressed and incomplete man. No man had a mind so complicated, nor a heart so simple. The little story my Uncle wrote came as a revelation to me. It frighteningly describes my life and thoughts almost exactly, I don’t know what to think, and fear for my future. I fear that the demons, which systematically hounded my Uncle to death, reside in me! I fear for my fate.