I am you. You are me.

When my partner Susie was still alive, we would have arguments from time to time.

Mostly we really enjoyed each others’ company, but stresses would build up and maybe once a year they would explode.

It was as if the argument was like a storm, somehow, and it simply had to run its course.

And I would shout at her, and she would shout at me, and it would be unbearably painful.

It was as if when I was hurting her, I was also hurting myself.

It was the same when I was a child. And if I think about where it came from, I guess it must have been something I learnt from my mum.

Today would have been her birthday. She died very suddenly when I was twelve, and the trauma of that death meant that for most of my life I haven’t really been able to remember her.

But over the past few years, memories have begun to come back to me, and so now I can look at that photo and really know, somehow, that this is her and that is me, and we were so happy together.

That feeling of it being absolutely safe and OK to be me is a gift she gave me and that I was so lucky to receive, because it enabled me to withstand all the prejudice and hatred that came later, and also enabled me to feel the same way with Susie and then with my daughters.

My schooling was about destroying that feeling. Boarding school separated me very traumatically from my mum when I was eight years old.

It was believed to be bad for a growing boy to be too close to his mother.

There was a boy at that school who hadn’t learnt to stop himself from crying. It was considered entertaining for the other boys to surround him and poke him and taunt him until he began to cry and lose his temper and lash out at everybody with his fists.

He was a weak boy, and easily overpowered, and this was known as “putting him into a paddy” and was considered very entertaining.

I found it horrible and thought there was something wrong with me.

At the same time I wasn’t strong enough or brave enough to intervene and help him, and so felt very guilty.

All of us, I think, have been through a version of this. And have ended up feeling isolated, and helpless, and in the wrong.

And estranged from perhaps the most important part of ourselves. Because that is what is needed in a capitalist society. In a society that values competition and aggression and the capacity to cheat and to exploit each other.

One reason why there is so much unhappiness in our society, such horrifying rates of suicide and addiction and mental illness, is because it demands of us something that is alien to our deep hearts.

Something that demands of us that we hurt our fellow human beings; and in doing so that we hurt ourselves.

So although Susie has been gone a long time now, and my mum even longer, I try to remember what they taught me. That other human beings are not separate from me; that we are, as Queen Jesus puts it,

“all of us in this together. All of us here to love and to be loved.”

Not just human beings, either, but every living thing in this amazing and wonderful living organism called mother earth.