I began writing my story after my children got back in touch with me, following twelve years of complete alienation. I had been thrown out of my former chassidic (fundamentalist Jewish) community of Stamford Hill, London, and they had been turned against me. I had been forced to spend most of that time engaged in court battles, and once that ended, I set about building a new life for myself.
While it was healing to be back in contact with my children, it was also retraumatising. Very quickly I started to feel ungrounded. I was being told things about myself that didn’t reflect the full reality, and there were huge omissions about what had actually happened to me and the long, difficult journey I had been through. In fact, there was a striking lack of interest in what I would call ‘the truth’.
This led to me go back there, into the past, to re-find and tell my story as I experienced it. I built it into this website so that I could have flexibility in how I tell it, add notes and allow it to be the complex, non-linear thing that it is.
If you’re struggling with something similar yourself, I hope you find it helpful.
My perspective is shaped by my leaning towards spirituality, while being strongly grounded in reality. I like the mystical and ‘weird’, but only when it’s accompanied by living in the real world, and by an appreciation of science.
On a more philosophical note, I have no idea of what it means to be human beyond evolution, or what consciousness is about. I don’t need anything to be ‘true’, although I like the model of the Real Self because it’s so very helpful to explain my lived experience and give me a sense of what I’m doing and where I want to go.