Tales from the Other Side

Description Christopher Ejsmond has been diagnosed with schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder and Asperger’s Syndrome. He lives with the legacy of child sexual abuse, severe mental illness, alcoholism, poor physical health and caring for a severely disabled parent. Although he struggled in mainstream education, he later found his direction in life and won a scholarship to Magdalene College Cambridge where he graduated in History and Philosophy of Science. He also studied Slavonic languages and cultures at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at the University of London. He is a qualified Social Worker. This, his second published collection of poetry, reflects the ideas, world events and personal experiences which have shaped his thinking and style of expression. He has previously published a collection of poems, Reflections on Life (2008), with Chipmunkapublishing. The book is a collection of ninety poems focussing on the author’s experience of mental distress and his journey of self-awareness and recovery. The poems carry a message of hope and explore some of the subconscious and symbolic undercurrents which have shaped those experiences and have informed the thinking behind the words. Many of the poems explore philosophical and spiritual truths and address the existentialist struggle to acquire an authentic experience, poetic voice and personal identity through the written word and the image of the urban writer. The book is aimed at the informed general reader with an interest in mental health and spirituality through the medium of contemporary experimental creative writing. The issues raised in the work touch on stigma and social toleration of “otherness” by using complex philosophical imagery and an exploration of lived experience, emotions, identity and ideas of the self. The author makes frequent use of the concept of personal origins, the journey through life and its end, as well as tying up this journey with broader social and political world events within an overarching battle of the loss of faith and its recovery through the written word. About the Author The author was born on 22 October 1964 in London and, with few exceptions, has lived and worked in London all his life. He is the younger of two brothers born to Polish émigré parents who arrived in the UK in the late nineteen forties, after experiencing traumatic childhoods separated from their own parents and witnessing conflict and war in some of the major theatres of the Second World War. The author lives in Ealing, west London which has a vibrant Polish community and is educated to university level. The author’s childhood was spent in a family home with a number of lodgers which, by any means, was overcrowded. There were many people in his life from early on; each with different, sometimes difficult, personalities which did little to fuse the immediate family unit into a secure base from which a child could thrive. Soon after starting school, the author began to experience cognitive, behavioural and emotional problems. These went unrecognised for many years, during which the author suffered in silence and fell back on his own resourcefulness in developing coping strategies. The author has had obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) since about the age of five and this had a devastating impact on home life and school. At first it was an obsession with numbers and letters of the alphabet. There was much confusion and anxiety in the young child’s life. Soon the obsessions multiplied and mutated into more physical aspects of movement (going in and out of doorways, walking up and down pathways and stairs, opening and closing, repeating things aloud) which were accompanied by thoughts and feelings of doom. On many occasions, the stress was so great that the author’s young mind would switch off and become empty of thought and fixed in a void but with the recognition that things had to be put right, sorted out and put back in place. Chris was sexually...