Читать книгу The Vagabond - Frank Rautenbach - Страница 9

It was on a cold Los Angeles November night in 2011, when I woke up from a nightmare. It was one of those messy dreams where I felt like a wall of fear was closing in on me and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I remember waking up with my heart racing and feeling extremely anxious.

As I tried to shake off the sleep, I could feel pins and needles all over my face and moving down the sides of my head. I took short shallow breaths to calm myself down. With one eye half open, I checked the time on my iPad: 1:10 am.

After what felt like a few minutes, I managed to force myself to fall asleep again – only to step right back into the same nightmare. It startled me, and I woke up again. This time I was awake enough to realise I was experiencing a panic attack. I have always suffered from claustrophobia, so I knew what a panic attack felt like, but the anxiety I was feeling was more intense than I had ever experienced before.

The truth? I didn’t want to face the fear or make sense of it; I just wanted it to go away.

So, I tried once more to force myself to sleep, but every time I managed to doze off the nightmare would reappear. It was like someone kept picking a fight with me and I just wanted to call a truce.

It can be so hard to reason with yourself when you’re caught between half-asleep and half-awake states. But I eventually admitted to myself that whether I was awake or asleep the fear was not going to go away.

Lying on my back and with my eyes wide open, I finally surrendered to the source of my fear.

I was about to turn 40 years old and I realised that all the hopes and big dreams I had harboured for my life had not happened. But, even worse, they couldn’t happen any more.

All the mistakes I had made and all the missed opportunities I had lost could not be fixed. The image and the life I had so fervently and carefully built over my twenties and thirties was lying shattered on the ground. The truth was that I had experienced many successes in my life, even internationally in my acting career. But the important things I had been hoping for had not happened.

It was over.

The despair I felt was so overwhelming, I thought to myself that this is what it must feel like to go insane. I had to do something. As I checked the time on my iPad, I realised at 2 am there weren’t many options available to me other than praying.

I tried not to wake my wife as I made my way to the second bedroom with panic still audible in my breath. I thought about what I might pray and ask God for: ‘God, I need a job and we need money. I need a breakthrough. Make my dreams come true. Please help me!’

But all those prayers seemed pointless to me. Especially since I had prayed them so many times before and look where they got me.

As my knees hit the ground, I was surprised and overcome by the latent bitterness and anger that coated the words that spewed from my mouth. Instead of asking God for the usual stuff, I let rip with a string of accusations that served as evidence that He had let me down.

I felt like a jilted lover. All God’s promises of the happy ever after had come to nothing. The sting of betrayal I felt left me angry and embarrassed. Like all heartbroken lovers, I tried to make sense of it all by casting my mind back to where it all began.