Previous Post A Policeman’s Nest (Part 2)

I was pretty happy at work for the next 8 years.  I moved around to different departments but essentially I just moved furniture from room to room, I never really left the house. Sure I had my days where I thought I would be better off mowing lawns but the thought of no human company and the smell of petrol didn’t really do it for me.  I was a company guy and I thrived on the security of the police.  As a good friend once said to me “Mike your biggest problem is getting your head around leaving the police, you have been in it too long”.  He maybe right but I’m not sure that is a bad thing, I’m just wired differently.

During those eight years working in South Auckland I had a great time and made some good mates.  I was involved in some good work and I enjoyed my time.  I had the luxury of going to Bali for two weeks and working with the AFP on the bombing.  In 2006 I then went to the Solomon Islands for 4 months.  Anybody looking at what was happening to me would have thought I had a great job…and I did.  What I was doing though was slowly continuing the drama in another sphere of my life.  It was like I was sabotaging something because I couldn’t have good things going on in my life, that’s not what is supposed to happen to me.  I’m a pessimist and its engrained into my subconscious so badly that it tends to dictate what happens to the point where I make every effort to de-rail the train when it’s heading in the right direction.

When I was in the Solomon Islands in 2006 I trained my arse off.  I use to run around the perimeter of our compound in the middle of the day in 35 degree heat so I could get fit and lose weight.  I lost a heap and at one stage I thought I could see what was left of my six-pack stomach.  I was in a good space…well so I thought….Four months into a 6 month stint I was playing mixed netball against the Australians and landed awkwardly after jumping for a ball.  Didn’t think anything of it at the time but at 1am the next morning I woke with excruciating pain down my right arm and I couldn’t move.  I spent the next 5 days in the compound hospital as they attempted to get control of the pain.  They couldn’t do anything for me and so I was evacuated back to New Zealand where I spent another 5 days in North Shore Hospital where I was told that I had slipped two discs in my neck and they were pushing on my nerves.  I opted against surgery and managed the pain for the next few months with copious amounts of drugs and a splattering of alcohol. My subconscious got the better of me over the next few months because it sent me back to a negative space…why….because I split from my first wife, left my family and ended up back in hospital having my neck fused and walking around in a neck brace for 10 weeks…..nothing like self-destruction !!!  

You see I’m a half empty kinda guy….I think I always have been.  I think it’s from  my up-bringing as I was always afraid to make a mistake because mistakes meant some form of punishment. As a young lad I never looked at mistakes as a learning,  it never crossed my mind that mistakes were lives way of teaching you lessons so that we learnt from them and developed as people.   I was always worried about the repercussions because those repercussions could be physical and mental…it dosn’t really matter what those repercussions were but the point is that my fear of them mean’t I was reluctant to take risks or challenge myself for fear of looking like an idiot or getting punished.  Those thought patterns followed me through my life to the point where if the glass was getting full of good things I would start drinking it and then spit it out through negative words and subconscious thoughts that eventually drove me back to where I thought my position in life should be.  I never did it intentionally but my background, up-bringing and lessons in life had left well-worn lines that were embedded in my brain to the point that getting out of those tram tracks never happened until I hit rock-bottom in 2016. (See Ouch….Finally).

Leaving my wife and family in 2007 was a pretty traumatic event for me.  My daughters were of an age where they knew what was going on but I didn’t really feel I offered them an explanation at the time.  I left in anger and stormed off and to this day still can’t remember if I ever sat down with them to explain my decision.  Things happen in life for a reason and I made that decision and I deserved everything I got as a result of it.  My life changed after that and for a few months everything was a bit of a blur as I tried to get some semblance of order back into my personal life.  That order came in the form of Katrina…..