The Stonewalls of My Mind refers to the walls I’ve been building since I was eleven years old.
In my childhood I erected psychological stonewalls, to protect my inner gay self from the hateful people surrounding me.
These walls were consciously built by me, knowing exactly what I was doing. They were just like my second kind in that, at the beginning, I was not very good at it.
Unfortunately, the wall I built before my first stress breakdown wasn’t strong enough to keep me hidden and safe. I learnt from experience to build my inner walls stronger.
The second kind of stonewalls are the over nine miles I’ve built as a professional dry stone waller based in the Lake District. It was the building of these walls that brought me the peace of mind I had been searching for since I was a teenager.
The third type of stonewall was a kind I didn’t fully discover until 2016. These were the unconscious stonewalls my mind erected to hide from me the truth of what happened to me as a teenager in a mental hospital in 1972.
It was only as these inner walls disintegrated, stone by stone at first, then in a tumult, I discovered what my mind had been hiding from me.
This sounds like a very interesting and harrowing read.