May 14th. Battlefield.

“It’s easy, to fall in love. But it’s so hard, to break somebody’s heart. What seemed like a good idea, has turned in to a battlefield” 

I picked up the hammer once more, and took another hard swing at the wall. The vibrations reverberated through my entire skeleton as it made contact with the old victorian plaster . Exhausted tears of sweat trickled down in to the dust mask, my sore hands struggled to take one more swing. “Just half a wall left Jon, come on!” I tried to give myself an internal mental boost. “Don’t let this house break you!” The room was covered in a dusty haze as the rubble cascaded around me. I wondered to myself if this it what being in Syria would feel like. Maybe. Ok,  I am over playing the reality for dramatic effect, but that being said the room wouldn’t have looked out-of-place in a scene from lone survivor.

I took a few more powerful swings, and with the chink of the chisel, the plaster fell to the ground. Dust once more clouded the room. I was spent. “I Just want somewhere to fucking relax, I don’t want to be in this fucking shit hole anymore” I don’t want this dusty house, it was a fucking mistake!  I hate it”

I collapsed to the floor, and broke in down in tears. The tears weren’t just for the fact I had chosen to spend my saturday looking like an extra in Oliver Twist and that I was totally drained of energy. It was something else. I missed her. I really missed her. In that moment memories of starting this renovation project together flooded in.

I took a photo of the bomb site, caption below – “Babe! Look, I’m destroying shit! Come take your work anger out on this fucking wall! 🙂 .. Wish you were here.

Expect she wasn’t. She was a now a ghost of the romantic times gone by.

There was no sending that message, no delivery, no response and no contact. Strange isn’t it?  When someone is in your life for so long, then they are no more, what that does to you.

But they are not in your life anymore, and there is a reason why.

Lea Michele’s beautifully haunting song touched so true on the reality of it all.

It had become a battlefield. Loves battlefield. Finally I waved my white flag and I retreated back to camp. Shell shocked, cut, bruised, and in need of urgent care, I left her in agony on the frontline. I trampled fast through the mud in the opposite direction as she held her heart in her hands, fighting for her life. There was no turning back to stop the bleeding  and carry her back to safety.

I know of some of you may have been in this situation. When so wounded and almost out of blood yourself,  you make a life decision to keep on walking. Selfish as it is, you choose not to return to the battlefield and save your partner in crime. You know by turning your back, you will never be able to return to that place, ever.

When you’re finally safe in camp, and the doctors have stitched and stabilized those wounds. You found yourself surrounded by your comrades. They smile and pat you on the back for being a hero. And as you receive your bravery medal for standing strong in the face of adversity, You cant help but cry.

What if I had gone back? Could I of saved her? Would she still be there? Why didn’t I save her? How could it end this way? Will I ever see her again?

Was it my job to save her? No. We were fighting on different sides. She had to save herself, and if she couldn’t her team would hopefully come pull her from the trenches. It was once my job, but now no longer. Yet here it seemed, the rules of engagement were almost impossible to follow.

As gunfire whistled past us, in those final moments it was the need for love, the need for connection that took away the flags we were bearing and kept us fighting on. All we were was just two human beings, who were in love, who just wanted to be together. Despite bullets ripping us in pieces, that is all that mattered. Pure love, forsaking all else.

The dust settled around the room, and I removed my protective mask. I wiped the tears from my face with the gloves, and began to shovel the rubble in to black refuge sacks. Seven of them in total. I carried them down the stairs like a really shit Santa Claus visiting bad children on Xmas day. I slung the sacks over my back and dumped them one by one in the garden. Fuck you house.  With the final sweep up, I looked back at the room. It had been a battlefield. and the remains could be seen everywhere. Yet there was a beauty in taking the old away, and starting afresh, with a stronger sturdier wall.

I had survived another day without it breaking me. I smiled.

 

LDR

I wrote a little poem… 

Met you in a hot tub time machine, you took me back to feelin’ 17

You’d be drunk on my love if not for the “U” on your hand. Fast forward, Venice beach freaks, holding each other in the sand.

Your eyes could melt ice caps, you sank me like titanic. One more shot, fill me up, we got years girl don’t panic.

Intoxicated on Four Loko and gas station Chardonnay. We finally lost control, and took it all the way. But life needed us to calm down, and locked our love until we had our lives locked down.

In 2014 we hit that red button, Nuked the whole world around us, it was Putin’s Armageddon. We were the only 2 that mattered, we could build a universe on our love, until the whole thing was shattered.

I flip it in my head, but it was fate that we met. Destiny isn’t meant to be complex, but now see I am totally perplexed. How you could become my American History X?

I took you out of the mundane, to a world of anxiety and fame. A place of normality to a life of vitality. A different city every day, and no where we couldn’t use our AAA. Power couple in the making, but the ground beneath us was shaking, Love’s own VIP, building the final show right in front of me.

Face-time was our alone time, in separate beds we had our space time, our pillows on different times zones, beep beep I hear that phone go.

Beep beep call enabled, poor connection, user unavailable, my whole world mentally unstable. I pinned through pixels to make it able. To feel closer to you, to feel stable.

I Broke your heart like Novak’s serve, 118 miles an hour, impossible to swerve. The pain and the destruction from this addicts life dysfunction, caused an earthquake of epic proportion and opened wide the chasm of exhaustion.

You always said “I’m still here” but in reality you never appeared. A genie on summer vacation, I rubbed the lamp for your validation, smoke appeared from our nicotine sedation. Wanted the best for us we said. Lost in Trans-Atlantic translation.

Maybe one day our anti matter will re-collide, and I’ll strap myself in for another ride. Amy said love was a loosing game, but right now, I’d gamble my life to spin again. Never felt this empty-ness of loves lost adventure in the wild west, my heart thrown into cardiac arrest.

The question is now how do I start again? And re-ignite my flame, without the flame of your love keeping me sane. A I lie here alone and darkness circles like a drone, silent like an empty home, staring for signs of life at the phone. A black mirror staring back at me, searching for my identity.

 

It It Dangerous To Achieve Your Dreams? (Part 2)

Wow! Such a nice response to the first post on my blog! 🙂 Thank you. There was a lot of support out there, a lot of compassion and also a lot of interesting replies from people of all ages around the globe. Some of you find yourselves in the exact position I described in the first chapter. I am gonna get more in to detail about relationships as I progress through this blog. But for now,  I will say this. No matter where you find yourself on this wibbly wobbly ride called life, there is hope. So let’s see if we can make some sense of it. Together.

So yesterday I set the current scene in my dramatic play, and asked the question..

Is It Dangerous To Achieve Your Dreams? (If you haven’t read Part 1 of this, go now! )

Today was Bank Holiday Monday here in England and I was spending the time with my Mother. We were eating pies and I was learning about my childhood. Currently my days  seem to have this constant anxious, unsettled, not sure how to get through each day kind of feeling to them. It starts in the pit of my stomach when I wake and stays there till I to sleep. I presume they call this grieving. While I try to keep focus on the fact I just learnt my first words I ever spoke were “Spaghetti” and “Biscuit” (smart right?) I find my mind once again flitting between the past and the present. I slug another mouthful of house white down, hoping it will douse the omnipresent image of my no longer American Belle etched morning to-night in my brain. Visions of her brown eyes staring lovingly at me, and her never dyed perfect brunette hair blowing in the Long Island sea breeze. The waiter dangled the hot Porter’s pie under my nose and with the slam of the plate on the wooden table I snapped back in to reality. I had work to do, I had a blog to write and I had answers to give.

They say never let your audience down right…

I read through all your replies, and comments and took a lot from it. A lot of you suggested you should always follow your dreams. Of course you should! I was never telling you not to. Dreams and goals are the driving force for all of us. Not just in our love or work lives, but in our everyday lives too. These can be as simple as trying to drinking more water, saying hello to new people more often or loosing that stubborn tummy fat. Always dream, and always set those goals. No matter how big or small.

The question I wanted to get to the bottom off was that once you get to the top of the mountain, and you achieve all you want, what then? 

A few of you suggested you just climb another mountain, and then another!  Keep dreaming!  This seems to be a great concept on paper and is all very well and good, but I fell down the other side of my mountain. Not only did I lose all my trusty mountain climbing equipment on the fall, but I was bruised and bloody. My bones were broken and I was lying face down in the rubble. A faint pulse in my heart was the only thing keeping me alive. I was in no state to climb another mountain. I needed an air evacuation. Asap.

So maybe the answer lies in our own preparation before we set out to climb the mountain and achieve our dreams.

A young lady called Alexis got in touch with me and told me her story. She had graduated from high school recently and now found herself on the exciting journey to University. However she was plunged in to darkness when everything she had known had changed. She had left her childhood home, her old school friends and the comforts of a place she knew so well to chase her dream.

Alexis felt like she had entered the depths of Moordoor, and the world of the shire was a distant memory. It was not an exciting nervous, the one we often feel when a great new change is coming. This was a nervous-ness that brought her to her knees. Alexis always wanted this dream, this goal of education. So why had it crippled her so much when she was granted what she had worked so hard for?

It appeared to me that Alexis didn’t have the correct mountain ropes to operate in this new world, and she wasn’t prepared for the journey ahead. It was then in that moment that it all made sense.

Alexis and I, share the exact same trait. We had become dependant on the world and people around us to validate our own sense of self. When the  world we have come to know so well is taken away or our situation changes drastically, everything around us crumbled.

Confused? Let me explain..

I had spent all my years fighting to get to the top in music, I slogged from gig to gig, from studio to studio, night after night. I didn’t care as long as I got to the top. My own health took a back seat. I built my self-confidence from the success of each job as I went. Instead of praising myself, I took praise from others, and built a tower of admiration from the outside world. A mighty tower it was, but it was built on loose foundations.

When I was flying high, all my self-worth was rooted in the achievements of my career and not in Jon Shone the person. When I met my amazing girlfriend in America, our love was so powerful and strong, I began to use that as another sense of validation. When the touring times were tough or I was alone, I would turn to her to get me through. I put a hell a lot on her during those years that she didn’t deserve and something as I reflect, I deeply regret.

So you see due to our weak foundations, when things are taken away through choice or through circumstance, our building collapses. We fall down the mountain, and get hurt. Badly.  This is when it is dangerous to achieve your dreams. 

In order for us to thrive after the race is won, We must have a solid foundation in who we are before we go and achieve our dreams. We must be strongly rooted in our own self that we can stand alone in this world, steadfast, if we are seeking to climbing to the top. We must seek our own approval first, and not rely soley on the appraisal of others during our journey. We must understand that nothing lasts forever too, and that you can only sustain being at the top for so long. We need to have the right equipment in order to climb that mountain and to face what comes after. 

I finished another glass of wine, we paid the bill, I bid my mother goodbye and I was alone once more. A little drunk by now,  I wondered if I could even spell biscuit in my state, let alone say it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Is It Dangerous To Achieve Your Dreams? (Part 1)

 

Recently my whole world changed. Everything I knew, was no more.  It got me thinking..

At the start of 2016 I found myself back in my little house in England, jobless, girlfriend-less, uncultivated friendships from my touring years and to top it off I was living in a building site. The last few months plunged me in to the most difficult and darkest times of my life. It was in this darkness that made me begin this blog and just to put the situation that unfolded into perspective, let’s rewind 6 months…

It was a sunny day in Montreal, Canada. I was touring on the OTRA tour with One Direction, the biggest band in the world at the height of their fame. It was our second  World Stadium Tour and life was oh so fucking perfect. Yeah I was tiring from touring, After all it was the 8th year of living out of a suitcase. I was getting unhappy from the exhaustion of the relentless schedule but I was still on top of the world. I was playing music at the top level on huge stages and staying in fancy smancy hotels.

I was busy prepping the Ritz Carlton Hotel room where I was staying with rose petals and candles for my beautiful girlfriend. She was doing an 8 hour drive from New York to be with me. We were so in Love. I had met her touring at the very start of my work years in Florida, I had been 26 and she was 20. I loved her dearly and wanted to show her how much so. I went all out and made the room in to a condensed Chelsea Flower Show for one night of steamy passion 😉

That weekend fireworks physically and metaphorically took off in to the night sky. They exploded on stage in front of another 60,000 fans and they exploded in my heart for the love of my life. Life didn’t really feel like it could get much better.

For my whole life I had dreamed of this exact outcome. As a kid, I would sit on the climbing frame in my back yard whistling away on my recorder like an irish gypsy possessed. I improvised to the tracks spinning on my Sony Cassette Walkman. Music did something to me inside, even at that young age.  I can never vocalise or describe the way it made me feel.  It just touched every aspect of my soul and took me to a place far outside reality.

Fast forward a few years, to being a teenager. Fortuanlty not a spotty one. It was just by luck I had a good complexion, I was years away from an advanced skin care routine. At 15 I found myself glued to morning programmes like Saved By The Bell, Dawson’s Creek and California Dreams. I wanted my own slice of that American Life. Being a teenager in America looked so much more appealing. Beach life, sexy cheerleaders, burgers and just a damn site cooler than the gloomy and gritty British alternative.

I dreamed of sitting on a dock in some sleepy town in the old US of A with a Joey Potter esq girl, kissing as the waves lapped  softly between the wooden pillars and as the sun set we would fall deeper in love.

So at 31, both of these elements I have mentioned above had become reality  (I even got to do the dock kiss,  it really was my own magical Dawson’s Creek moment) I got exactly what I had been dreaming of all my life. I envisioned it, I worked hard for it and it came true. All of it. Big time musician and my very own star spangled banner girl.

Yet now as I type this, all those things have gone. I am alone in my house in the UK. The screaming fans at stadiums seem a distant memory, and my once american beauty, now heartbroken. Everything in tatters. Sitting here I try to process how everything that once was, is no more. How could all that come to such an abrupt end?  Living my days in the past, I pine to return to that post concert kiss from her on that dock. The return of the fireworks. I want to transport back to that single moment when I had it all in my palm. A time when I knew all my dreams and goals had come true.

So I began to ask myself this simple question as I struggled to understand what was going on.

Is it dangerous to achieve your dreams..? And what happens after you do?  

Part 2 will follow…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hi!

Thanks for subscribing to I, me and more me. As narcissistic as the title sounds this blog is anything but. This is my first attempt of writing down the world as I see it, and the world as I would like to see it. On second thoughts, maybe it is narcissistic. Anyhow, Ive had a lot of experiences and things happen to me so far. I hope by sharing my wisdom after 32 years of fucking up and trying to correct these mistakes, I can help others live a more fulfilled and spiritually happier life.. Here goes. Be gentle if you can.