First sip: Bamboozled by Melinda Ferguson

  • 0

Like a good beverage, a good book holds promise from the first sip. This extract is used with the permission of NB Publishers.


About the author

Photo provided by the publisher

Melinda Ferguson is the bestselling author of her addiction trilogy Smacked, Hooked and Crashed. She is also an award-winning publisher. In 2016 her groundbreaking title, Rape: A South African Nightmare – Pumla Dineo Gqola, won the Alan Paton Award for non-fiction. In 2020 she joined NB Publishers under her imprint Melinda Ferguson Books.


Title: Bamboozled: In search of joy in a world gone mad
Author: Melinda Ferguson
Publisher: Melinda Ferguson Books
ISBN: 9781990973529

After a near fatal car accident, Ferguson finds herself shattered by PTSD. The meds she’s prescribed at the “Nervous Breakdown Clinic” don’t work. After reading that her hero Bill W, father of the AA 12 Step programme used psychedelics to heal, she decides to embark on a similar journey to address her extreme anxiety. Despite being terrified that she may relapse, what unfolds is a life-changing spiritual adventure assisted by psilocybin, commonly known as “magic mushrooms”. Over the following five years, layers of self destructive behaviour unravel. Deep wounds from two decades earlier, when she was a hopeless heroin and crack addict, begin to heal.

Then the world is hit by a global pandemic. To escape the dystopian madness, Ferguson finds her dream house, nestled in the remote Matroosberg mountains. But just as she feels safe, a week before it’s registered, a beautiful woman is brutally murdered two doors away. What sometimes looks like heaven can transform into hell in an instant. Now she’s forced to ask herself: what is freedom, truth and joy?

Underpinned by a quest to travel through the ordinary doors of perception, Bamboozled is a deep exploration of self, set in an age of false prophets and confusion. It’s her “coming home” from Smacked, in search of joy and freedom. Written in Ferguson’s no holds barred signature style, her latest memoir is about looking for patterns and uncovering answers in a world that’s crumbling. It’s also about loosening the grip of money and finding magic. Then she rescues a dog who ends up rescuing her.


First Sip

After just six months of living together, to kick-start our new life in Cape Town, Soul-Mat and I decide to buy a house. But being in partnership is a sure way to expose one’s deepest fears and rot. He and I come from polar-opposite financial worlds. He grew up in a safe and well-off family in a First World European country. His mind works in euros and abundance; mine in rands and lack.

Our pink-tinted, loved-up world is eventually rocked by these differences when we finally make an offer on a property. Whereas I am crunched over endless calculations, both on paper and in my head, in order to manage the purchase, he clearly comes from a much less neurotic space. It all seems so easy for him, while I crouch over my pained and panicked sums. He’s shocked by what appears to be my financial pettiness. I am frustrated that he can’t see my logic, that he doesn’t appear to understand my historical financial terror. I mean, in the name of disclosure, I gave him Smacked after our first weekend together. Doesn’t he fucking get it?

I have been in denial about how deep my disease of lack lies, but now I’m forced to confront it through another’s eyes. I thought things were relatively fine and dandy between us, but during this house-hunting process, we fight, we argue, we sulk, we accuse, we stand on opposite islands waving our respective banners. I am thrown back into a world of shame. I deny. I bargain. I blame. I revolt. After each argument that plays out in a mighty battle zone of wills, I am forced to look at my stuff. I hate what I see. Why can’t I share?

I want to run, leave, get away, be on my own again. Live in the solitary confinement of sweet denial where it’s just me: my money, my space, my decisions, no one else to please and appease.

But I can’t. I love this man. I have upped and moved my entire life in Joburg to be with him. And deep down, in clear moments, I know that what he keeps pointing out to me is true. But how do I change it?

I want to laser-cut the steel ropes that umbilical me to my past, to my childhood, to my mother. The mother I have resented all my life for her churchmouse approach to everything; the mother I once rejected in bitter anger, but whom I have now come to resemble. My fear that I should turn into her is manifesting. I, who screeched hatred at her for the way she saw the world in terror and lack, am my mother! I feel sick.

In Soul-Mat I have met my mirror, my hooter who blares each time I act without integrity. Which appears to be often. I twist, I turn, I scream denials. I’m a demented banshee, but deep down I know he is right. There are days that I hate-hate-hate this man. When we first meet at the airport in real life, the world slows down as I make my through Arrivals and angels chorus from the heavens. Never mind that we are literal strangers – we gently touch each other’s faces. We drink each other in. Time stops and, like two magnets, our souls meet. It’s every cheesy, romantic movie ever made.

Our first weekend is the stuff dreams are made of. We talk, we laugh, we make love over and over again. It’s as though we have walked a million miles in other lifetimes, only to have finally found each other.

So when we start bickering, it feels like a brutal betrayal of that loved-up “soulmate” dream. I struggle to reconcile the man I met at the airport with the one who is now breaking down all my illusions of self.

I remember reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love back in 2007, particularly what she’d said about soulmates, but back then I didn’t have the faintest clue what she was on about. Now I find my dog-eared copy in one of the boxes accumulating dust in the garage of our new house. In her book, which went on to sell a gazillion copies, she suggests that a soulmate’s purpose is to “shake up” and tear apart one’s ego. That a soulmate is there to “show you your obstacles and addictions”. She suggests that, to break one’s heart open to let the light in, one has to be driven to a point of desperation and lose control of the old illusion of self so that one can transform one’s life. In Gilbert’s world, your soulmate is therefore your spiritual teacher and master.

As I read these words, I know without a doubt that this man, whom I hate-love-hate-love, who at times drives me to the brink of insanity, who pushes all my buttons like a lift that refuses to budge when you desperately need it to, is indeed my fucking soul mate. If I have to break up with him, I will literally be abandoning the possibility of my better self. And, it appears, I do the same to him. Punch his buttons, drive him bonkers. If I have to trust Elizabeth G on this, Soul-Mat and I have been brought together to help each other transcend into a higher state of consciousness. Damn!

Whereas I am a talker, with far too many unprocessed words often tumbling from my supersonic-speed mouth, Soul-Mat’s approach to conflict is silence. He wants to be left alone, to regroup his emotions. He withdraws into what I perceive as passive-aggressive pockets of cemetery-silent sulks. It feels like I am being stonewalled. And this drives me beyond demented. His non-communication catapults me back into all my abject terrors of abandonment.

I experience his pleas of “leave me alone” as rejection, while he experiences my desperate need to “talk”, to fix, to lay it all out, as an onslaught, being caged in, stalked and attacked. We are total opposites in the way we argue. Words of anger, accusations and cheap shots tear from my lips in rage. I always end up regretting my bombs of verbal annihilation, but when my Uzi mouth gets going, there is no end to what it can destroy. And, as I get louder, his silence deepens. My uncontrollable explosions force him further into retreat mode. Like a drowning man gasping for air, he recoils into his cave as he desperately scrambles for a lifeboat that will bring him equilibrium. I am the tidal wave that crashes down. The more my shouts gather momentum, like a growing swarm of demented bees, the more he needs to escape me. Finally, my unbridled words cause him to pop and then he roars. Soon, it’s a cacophony of two mad lovers-turned-enemies, raging – the seed of the argument now long forgotten. We’re all over the place.

To calm down and disengage from the heat of emotion, he sometimes storms off to the adjoining room, slams the door and shuts me out. Bang! The aftermath of that slam, the silence that ensues, throws me into a mad panic. I question my move to Cape Town, our loved-up rush to buy a house. I am filled with a debilitating sense of shame, of regret and terror. I am back in my loveless land. I am four years old. My dad has just died and I am paralysed in solitary confinement. Our fights feel like the end of the world, the implosion of Planet Love.

Of course, on a greater soul-journey level, he is teaching me about abandonment, forcing me to deal with my deep childhood terror of facing the idea of “the end” – of mortality. Of sharing my life with another. He is also training me to be alone. I am teaching him about communication, trust and forgiveness. But that only becomes evident much later.

  • 0

Reageer

Jou e-posadres sal nie gepubliseer word nie. Kommentaar is onderhewig aan moderering.


 

Top