Beset: A Desperate Search For Happiness
in Times of Crisis
by Lee Bullen
in Times of Crisis
by Lee Bullen
Description
After a turbulent
life-altering period, Lee Bullen embarks on a personal journey to find a
semblance of happiness and rediscover a love for life, but finds his every goal
hampered by the brutal effects of the Great Recession.
Besieged with
universal wallops and cosmic coshes, Lee tries to come to terms with his
autistic son’s worsening condition while finding himself knee-deep in divorce,
unemployment and financial disaster.
He's a man in
personal crisis, struggling on an island in economic crisis, during the Global
Financial Crisis – not an enviable position! However, despite the multitude of
omnipotent foes, he discovers that he himself may in fact be his own worst
enemy...
Beset – A humorous, touching and bittersweet account of one man and his state
of mind during the early 2010s.
Excerpt
Chapter 1
– Brand New Start
It's 3
o’clock in the morning on January 1st, 2012, and I'm euphorically urinating the
last remnants of the previous year into the inviting blackness of the Atlantic
Ocean. The balmy evening has thronged past like any memorable New Year's Eve
involving an array of soft drugs, a fireworks display and a free, open-air rock
concert held on a heaving plaza principal; but for me it has a more profound
significance: A clichéd belief that the calendar change, combined with a
physical cleansing of all things '2011', would coincidingly invoke a monumental
change of fortune...
Okay,
maybe I'm reaching. But I've decided I need to grasp at something. The previous
year had seen me divorced, made redundant, broke, discourteously dumped by my
girlfriend, and embark on a trying course of treatment for my
recently-diagnosed autistic son... and that was just October! One week in
October. My birthday week, in fact. The rest of the year had been as equally
unrelenting. To cap things off, I live on a foreign island with no family or
close friends to call upon. I'm a single dad to my two children half the week,
and completely at a loss as to who I am the other half.
As I stand
on the rocks, shaking dry what has recently become my closest friend, confidant
and only dependable source of feelgood therapy, I feel the clouds
metaphorically burst and heavens open.'A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall'... 'The Times They Are
A-Changin' – Dylan knew the score. Or at least his early hits with
'A-(Something)' in the title did, seamlessly parroting my current sensibility.
From nowhere, the ocean breeze develops a grandiose sense of being and douses
my lower legs in warm piss. “Fuck you, Universe!” I shout, and disturb a few
merrymakers also relieving themselves nearby. I inhale patiently. 'Okay. I'm
sure that was just a wind cycle from last year,' I rationalise, now wearing the
last remnants of 2011 for at least another hour or two.
I'm 38.
Some might say that my situation is a 'mid-life crisis', but to me that implies
an irrational compulsion by some middle-aged men to splash out on a sporty
coupé orgasmically lavished on an episode of Top Gear they'd seen, whilst simultaneously
test-driving a pretty young underling from the office. No, my crisis isn't one
of 'have I still got it'. I'd lost my hair at 30, and the drawn-look of
significant weight loss during a spirit-crushing two year period had aged me,
but I wear it well in a weather-beaten kind of way and I'd accepted and
embraced it – In my twenties, when sporting a thickly-lacquered comb-back, I
was often compared to pretty 90's boy-band types, like 'Bros'. Now I'm compared
to baldy action types and receiving more attention than before. Bruce Willis
may be a grandfather and nearly 20 years my senior, but it's something I'm
willing to put up with after previously being dubbed 'Vanilla Ice'! No, my
crisis is one of faith. Not in a religious sense, but of life and the basic
belief, will and zest we all need to feel to get us through our day. I've lost
my 'mojo', basically, and I can't even remember where I had it last.
Despite the relentless, year on year
besiegement of universal wallops and loss of nearly everything, I've never
seriously considered suicide as an out. I'm proper battered, and staring the
prospect of homelessness square in the eyeball – and with it, access to the
only joy left in my world, my two children – but I'd rather live life in limbo
as a crazy cave-hermit, mumbling to myself and biting the heads off rats rather
than biting the proverbial dust. I don't think it's in me. Still, I am,
however, numb. Utterly numb. To utterly everything. Combined with a cannabis
dependency Snoop Dogg would be proud of, I am – as Hugh Grant may say in a
Richard Curtis gush-fest – utterly, utterly, utterly numb!
I’m living
through a profound personal crisis during an interminable financial crisis.
There are so many crises going on in my life I'm beginning to feel like the
Middle East! My mindset is as conflicted as my need for coffee and cannabis,
yo-yoing up and down and double-looping around my subconscious, strangling my
very hopes and wishes. Consciously, I continue to pick myself up and follow the
path of self-discovery and attracting a love for life, but spiritual growth
feels more futile than ever. My two-year plan for harmonious happiness has been
beset with problems, both internally and externally. I'm at rock-bottom,
intricately spiralling down with the worsening economic and social gloom of the
time. I had identified five areas of my life as the nucleus for obtaining joy,
but each one continues to deteriorate in relation to every downturn of this
unrelenting world recession.
My
problems began in 2008, the same time as the Global Financial Crisis, however, unlike many
financial institutions around the world, I'm not to be rescued by 'quantitative
easing measures', or any other form of legal fraud for that matter. My mistakes
and misfortunes aren’t going to be swept under the carpet and never accounted
for; rescued by a distracted taxpaying public too full of fear to realise
they’re paying the price, not the corrupt and gluttonous 'powers that be' responsible.
Prospecting for scant nuggets in a mine of immeasurable shit alongside so many
others – that’s my path. And just as I find myself on a small island without
work for the fourth time in three years of international recession, I also find
that I have no fight left. I'm battle-weary from the umpteenth 'start over'.
And who can blame me? A summary of my life over the previous three New Year's
Days looks like this:
Jan 2010
Married
(albeit, for the last weeks). Father to two beautiful, healthy children (aged 3
and 1½). New job teaching English in a secondary school (after most of 2009
unemployed).
Jan 2011
Separated.
Making a new home for me and the kids, who stay with me half the week. Two year
old son diagnosed with Autism. Increasingly lonely and alone. Financially
strained.
Jan 2012
Divorced.
Unemployed. Financially broke. Recently dumped and heartbroken. Weak. Alone.
And firmly stuck in the untenable position of juggling all this with the
increasing difficulty of coming to terms with my son's worsening condition.
Okay, so
2012 hasn't exactly come with a dream start! However, these are the results of
previous years. It's all about what happens next, and all I have is hope that
I’ll find something to light a spark in the flooded engine of my soul – because
if not, that mumbly cave-hermit thing may become an all too true reality...
Review
By mellove31
The author shares
his personal struggles through the rough economic times felt all over the
world. While reading, I often felt like I could relate to him, and then I
remembered most of the world could relate to him in one way or another. The
only thing different he did was open up and share his life with us and tell his
story on how he overcame the hardships and changed his outlook on the future.
Highly recommend this book.
About the Author
Lee Bullen is a novelist and screenwriter who currently shares a Spanish
writing retreat with his two children and an army of cacti. Although he openly
admits preferring the company of his kids to any neighboring succulents, he
does, however, have a favorite palm tree.
Having been battered and bruised by the
indeterminable Global Financial Crisis (2008 till God-knows-when!), Lee finds
it hard to write about anything else! His debut novel, Beset: A Desperate Search for Happiness in Times of Crisis was
published in September 2012.
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