Transcription
Lila: So, can I start with just asking you: who are you? [laughter]
Rob: What kind of answer do you want?
Lila: Oh, come on! [laughter]
Rob: This is going to be so much work!
Lila: Let's begin with a little bit of bio.
Rob: Okay, sure. So I was born in London.
Lila: When?
Rob: In 1965, September 5^th^ 1965.
Lila: Virgo!
Rob: Virgo, absolutely, yeah.
Lila: ... with the details.
Rob: [laughs] My father was from Libya, and kind of a refugee. He was in camps in the Holocaust, in Belsen.
Lila: How come? Do you know?
Rob: It's a long, long story ... so let's start right in! [laughs] It's a long story. So what I understand is that Libya traded -- it was an Italian colony for a long time. And then the war, the Second World War broke out. And my grandfather (my father's father) had the idea that if he traced his ancestry back to Gibraltar, which was a British colony six or seven generations before, then he could claim British citizenship, not Libyan and therefore Italian. And in that way, his sons would be free of being drafted into the Italian army, so they would be safe. That was his idea.
So he did this, and then the Second World War broke out, but then they were immediately put in prison as prisoners of war by the Italians. It backfired. But then, even worse -- I think I have the story right -- so they were prisoners of war; it was okay. In Libya, the Italians were casual; they weren't like the Nazis, you know? But then somehow they got transported to Italy -- still as prisoners of war; not as Jews, as British citizens. And somehow in the transportation they crossed paths kind of accidentally with some Germans who found out they were Jewish and separated them and took them to Belsen.
Lila: Bergen-Belsen?
Rob: Bergen-Belsen. He was in a series of camps, and that was one of them.
Lila: How old was he?
Rob: He was a teenager, but I don't think he really even knew exactly what year he was born. I mean, he was from a different culture, a different generation, and he's dead now. But he was a teenager. And so he went with, yeah, basically the whole family, and they ended up in Belsen, but survived of course.
Lila: The whole family survived?
Rob: Most of them, yeah. He almost didn't make it, but yeah. It's a complicated story. But I grew up with that, you know? I grew up with that, like, intense -- it was just always around. It was in the air. It was in the psyche and stuff. So I grew up with that, that sort of sense of that massive dukkha, you know? Huge. It was something I was always really interested in, actually. I had a difficult relationship with my father -- really just [makes fists and touches knuckles together] like that, you know. We were very different in a lot of ways, and he was really scarred from the war, really traumatized. But something about that, I wanted to kind of -- I didn't have the language for it at the time, or even the self-consciousness, but I really wanted to open my heart to it. I wanted to open my psyche to that sort of enormous suffering -- not just his, but the totality of it, what humanity is capable of and that sort of thing. And I don't know that the same was true, let's say, of my brother or sister. So I had this funny, strange kind of intuitive relationship with it. It was there, around, and sometimes he would talk about it more -- usually when he was upset he would talk about it.
Lila: Really? What would he say?
Rob: Well -- differently; if he was angry, he would use it as a, like, "I didn't da-da-da-da!" [laughter] But other times, say he'd been upset about something, and then he was coming out the other end. He had a terrible temper. He'd rage. Awful, you know, and really a bit crazy, to be honest. But say he was upset, and then he was kind of coming out the other end -- maybe even some weeks later -- and something was softening in his heart. Then sometimes he would just talk. And he would tell you stories about the camps and things like this. And I just really wanted to drink it in, you know? There was something in me that I just -- I don't know, like a sponge. I think he, maybe, again, probably didn't compute conceptually, consciously, but I think he sensed that. And so he would talk, and I would listen. Sometimes he would talk for hours.
Lila: Wow!
Rob: So I grew up with that, and it was just infused -- it was in the walls, it was in the air in the house and in my childhood. And the other kids -- I grew up in London -- no one else around really had that history because they were second, third, fourth generation immigrants. So I had knowledge and access of this thing that probably, until my friends were teenagers, they didn't even hear about, or didn't know anything. I remember the headmaster in the school one time saying something like, "I hope you have never heard this and never have to hear of it again," and he started talking about the Holocaust. I'm like, "What are you talking about?!"
Lila: [laughs]
Rob: I was like seven or something. It was the air I breathed.
Lila: You mean terrible stories?
Rob: From my father? A mixture -- funny stories, terrible stories, miraculous stories. His father, my grandfather, was a Kabbalist. He must've died -- when did he die? -- I don't know, but I was young. So we used to go -- they stayed in Libya; they went back to Libya after the war. My father got fed up with Libya because it was also very antisemitic, violently antisemitic. So he just, "I can't ..."
Lila: And it's an Arab country.
Rob: Yeah. So they were integrated Jews before, but then they went back after the war and it was really, really violent, is what I heard. And my father just wanted to get out. So he came with his British citizenship that he had got [laughter], that got him into trouble in the first place. He came to London. But the others stayed, and then Gaddafi came with a coup, and in one night suddenly they were in real danger. So they hid in their house, the rest of his [family]. This was 1967, I think. They hid in the house, and someone smuggled them out of the house in the middle of the night, and they came to our house in London -- like this extended family of Libyans.
Lila: You'd never met?
Rob: I had been there. I had been there when I was, like, one. I don't remember. This is all story. I don't remember. I showed you a picture of my grandmother. She's a Libyan -- the dress, and they're just a completely different culture. They came, they camped out in our house, this small house in London. There were I don't know how many of them. They'd literally escaped in the middle of the night, and they stayed, I don't know, a few months or something in our house. Then some went to Israel and some went to Italy.
Lila: So you have relatives in Israel.
Rob: Many, whose names I don't even know -- so many. A few Burbea and Aburbea. You'd look in a phone book or something, Holon and Tel Aviv and Netanya. One time I was in Israel, I was a teenager, and I was looking for my aunt. I think it was in Holon, but I don't remember. I was completely lost and trying to find this woman. I went to a bus stop, and there was an old woman there, and I asked, "I'm looking for ...", in my pidgin Hebrew, I asked. [laughter] And I looked at her, and I saw in her eyes this -- I recognized in her eyes. It was my aunt! [laughs] But I could tell even before. It was something in the eyes. I recognized my father and the family soul in her eyes. So that was interesting. I can't remember exactly how it unfolded, but she was very pleased to see me.
[9:29] My grandfather, he was a Kabbalist, and I think he was a rabbi. I'm not sure. I never really got to communicate with him because I didn't speak Arabic or Ladino.
Lila: I was going to ask, what did he speak?
Rob: They spoke Ladino and Arabic and Hebrew and Italian. And then my father and his brother spoke very good English, which I don't quite know where they learnt or when they learnt it. But he [the grandfather] didn't, and nor did my grandmother. So I had no way of communicating with him. He was just this guy -- you know, he was into his Kabbalistic study and stuff. I have a good feeling-memory from him, and a kind of visual of him. But I couldn't really communicate with him. My father told stories about him and stuff that happened around him that's kind of miraculous. I don't know how much is true. But he's a kind of soul-figure for me.
Lila: Do you remember one story?
Rob: [laughs] Okay.
Lila: Do you want to share?
Rob: Yeah. There are maybe a couple. My father was really ill in Belsen. He says -- and again, I don't know if this is true -- but he says he was the one person who ever went into the hospital in Belsen and came out alive. But he was in hospital. He had typhoid or something like that. He was really, really weak. He came out of hospital. He was on crutches. He was a teenager. He was very weak. And there was this woman, I don't know if you've heard of her, Irma Grese. Have you heard of her? No? She, if I remember -- I think that's the name -- was a Nazi SS officer in Belsen, and notorious for her sadism. She was there. And my father was there, just very weak, with crutches, and hanging out I think with a few people, including his father, my grandfather and I think his brother, his older uncle who just died aged 94.
So they're sitting around and they see Irma Grese, and she comes towards them. My grandfather took the crutches from my father. He just grabbed the crutches, and he put them as if he was the guy who was really weak. She came over and she started kind of picking on him because he was obviously the weakest one. Then she pushed him. They were near a slope and she pushed him, my grandfather. He fell and tumbled and tumbled, like this [rolling hand-over-hand motion]. And she found that hilarious. So she's, "Hahaha!", laughing like this. But that satisfied her. So he tumbled like this, and my father said if he'd have fallen -- like Anne Frank, she died when she fell, she was so weak. It's a shock when you're so ill. So he took the fall, and he tumbled. She got her humour satisfied or whatever, sadistic humour. And she went away. My father said if that had been him, if he had kept the crutches, he would have died. That's not, maybe, a miraculous story. [laughs] That's a compassionate story.
But there was other stuff. I don't know what to make of this, but it's in the lore, you know? What's the story -- it was something like, they were doing some work, an intense period of work in the camps or something. They were really being worked too hard. They came to my grandfather and they said, "You have to do something because we're going to die." My father always said when he [the grandfather] said these special prayers, he goes into a trance or something, and he -- I've never heard of this; maybe you have -- ties knots in a handkerchief. Have you heard of this? Yeah? I don't know. He ties knots in a handkerchief. And then it started snowing, and it just snowed and snowed and snowed, so they couldn't do any work. They all got some respite. These are the kinds of -- there are others, but that's the kind of story. Like I said, I didn't know him, but I grew up with this sense.
Lila: When he came over, how did you ...
Rob: Well, I was so young. We used to go every year, we used to drive three days of complete family madness [laughter] in the car, from London to Rome to see the family. I say that, but actually it was a great adventure, to drive like that. So we went every summer, I think until I was about 9, to spend time with my father's parents and his siblings and their families [inaudible]. So I knew him like that, but we couldn't speak to each other, and at that time I had no interest in spiritual -- nothing whatsoever. I was just into football and whatever.
One more thing, yeah. This is all hearsay, because I didn't really know him. But my father, after the war, became an adamant atheist. He just said, "It doesn't make any sense. This is complete rubbish." So he went that way, and then at some point, I think when he met my mum, who is English -- she's 82 or 84 -- she's English, she wasn't Jewish. So they started, and somewhere in their courting, before they were married, he decided, "Okay, I want to get married and have a family." But then he decided, "So I want you to convert and become Orthodox, convert Orthodox." It's a lot to -- it's quite a project. So she did that, and then he became religious after this period of atheism. But I always felt, I never felt like his religiosity was very deep. It was a very fear-based thing and a very identity-based thing and very rule-based.
So I had this grandfather who I heard about and later became more of a soul figure, an image figure to me, with this very deep sort of spirituality, and then a father where it was very oppressive and really kind of -- it was really strict in our house, you know? I couldn't play football for the school team on Saturdays, so I used to sneak out. It was crazy, all this madness. So it was kind of brittle, fearful, very contracted and kind of oppressive -- my sense of it as I was growing up. And somehow it didn't kind of translate, whatever it was. Who knows why or whatever. It was very different.
Lila: So you actually grew up in this Orthodox religious Jewish ...
Rob: I grew up as -- Orthodox religious Jewish background, but my father was Sephardi because he was from Libya. But there wasn't really a Sephardic culture in London.
Lila: Ashkenazi.
Rob: Yeah, it was all Ashkenazi. In many ways, I felt like an odd one out. I felt like an odd one out for being Jewish. I felt like an odd one out also because my father was very dark. He looked like he was from Pakistan or India.
Lila: Arab.
Rob: Yeah, but the dark Arab, yeah. Somehow we [Rob and siblings] didn't get that. My mum's very pale, so we inherited more of that. But people would be racist towards him and stuff. So we had the Jewish thing. We had this kind of racist mixed culture thing that was really ugly, you know. And then within the Jewish thing, I also felt like it wasn't quite -- because we were Sephardi. But I grew up in an Orthodox Jewish house. Everything was really like this [chopping motion with hands, indicating strictness].
Lila: And second generation.
Rob: Yeah. Holocaust. Yeah, it was very intense with that. And then my mum was converted from a very sort of English sensibility and culture.
Lila: Why did she do it? She wanted to? Or did he persuade her into it?
Rob: [laughs] I can't ...!
Lila: She didn't mind? It's quite a thing to [inaudible] of someone.
Rob: I wouldn't like to -- I could guess, but I wouldn't like to. Also because she's still living. You can ask her! [laughter] So it was intense. It was a very tense place, very intense vibe to grow up in. But it was Orthodox, and really strict. [repeats chopping motion with hands]
For a period, I was into it, when I was kind of young.
Lila: Like in what way?
Rob: I used to, you know, I could read without the vowels, I knew the services off by heart. I knew all this stuff. I was saturated in that. We had a really strict Jewish education. I just, at a certain age, I took to it. And then [claps hands] at some point I just ... [laughs] "No," probably when I was like 13 or 14. Then I was a very adamant atheist, into science and all this stuff.
Lila: And you did your Bar Mitzvah?
Rob: Oh, I did my Bar Mitzvah. Believe me, I did my Bar Mitzvah. I did the whole thing.
Lila: [laughs] Do you remember?
Rob: Yeah, yeah! [speaks Hebrew]
Lila: Oh! This one is about war.
Rob: It's all about war, yeah. It's interesting.
Lila: Not all of it! [laughs] Some of it is not.
Rob: I forgot -- prostitution I think is some of it as well. You know it well!
Lila: I just understand Hebrew well! I don't know it at all.
Rob: Oh, okay. Yeah, sure. A lot of it's about -- well, I can't remember now. But yeah, so for a period I was into it, and I did that, and I was saturated in that culture. I took to it at a certain age, and then I really rejected it. Then there was a battle with my father about it. But the other thing about him ... Is this okay?
Lila: It's great! [19:53]
Rob: The other thing, he couldn't -- when I was 13, 14, just very into science and logic and this kind of thing, and I think my brain developed [inaudible] and all this stuff. Then at a certain age, it was probably around 16, 17, I really -- I don't know if it was my first love and then being rejected by her; I don't know if this triggered something. I spent a lot of time on my own in the year -- this was around 16, 17 -- and a lot of time in nature. And something just [exploding sound/motion] in my consciousness. A whole other sensibility to music and to nature and to some kind of spiritual sense that I didn't really have. Something really happened over a period of about a year. It was very, again, really intense, but I'm really thankful for it, you know. I really got into music. It was so important for me. And I started playing.
Lila: What did you play?
Rob: I started playing guitar. My parents, my father -- [laughs] I'm telling you too many things at once! But he was really into music. My mum played piano fairly well. So they started us, very early age, at piano, and I hated it. [laughs] So I did it for like a year and then I think I managed to get out. And then later they said, "Okay, start again." Violin -- which is actually what my father wanted to play. And he said in the camps there was a Jewish violinist, and he just was totally taken with this.
Lila: Maybe it was my grandfather!
Rob: Really? In Belsen? You have a relative in Belsen, or in the ...?
Lila: Yeah, he was a musician. That's how he survived. He played just about everything.
Rob: Every instrument?
Lila: Yes.
Rob: Wow!
Lila: He was this genius. I don't know the story really well, and I don't know where he was, but probably also there.
Rob: What country was he ...?
Lila: Poland.
Rob: Who knows? I think there was a thing the Nazis did, the SS did -- they took these musicians. Anyway. So there was someone, or a few people in the camps, that really made an impression on my father. So he really wanted to learn the violin, so he made me learn the violin. [laughs] He didn't, at that age. So I hated that as well. I really wasn't into it. I did it, I think, for a year or two. But then something happened when I was 16 or 17, and I really got into music, and I got into classical guitar and also I was really into Hendrix and different things. But I studied classical guitar very seriously.
Lila: Oh, me too.
Rob: Did you really? [laughter] At the same age?
Lila: Yeah, yeah.
Rob: Oh, interesting. And yeah, I just saw this, there was this programme. It was called BBC Young Musician of the Year. It was like a competition. I saw this young guy. It was on TV. I just saw him play this guitar concerto, and I said, "I want to do that." It was just so clear. So I started, yeah. Anyway, when I took up guitar, it was because I wanted to do it. I just really loved it.
Lila: Can I just go back a bit and ask you -- you are the oldest?
Rob: I'm the middle. I have an older sister, a year and a half older, and a younger brother, a year and a half younger. There are three of us, and I'm in the middle.
Lila: Sandwiched!
Rob: Sandwiched, but also the oldest male, which I think with my father -- he never finished school because of the war, and he had this kind of refugee mentality around food and around money and savings. He saved all his money and sent us to as good a school as we could go to. But there was so much pressure on us. And I kind of achieved academically, but for my brother and sister, it was really heavy. It wasn't their thing.
Lila: It was like a mix for you, because you also were so drawn to music, and then ...
Rob: That was a little later. I got really drawn to music. So my father, there was so much pressure academically, and to achieve. I didn't really get liberated from that until after I started at university. So in other words, I followed that trajectory. I was kind of -- I'd play up at school that I was a bad boy.
Lila: Were you? I can't imagine you were ... [laughter]
Rob: It's like something in me played it, so I could be that, but I always did well academically. It was so much pressure, all this Holocaust stuff, and refugee -- to excel and make sure you're going to achieve and you're going to finish your education, be something. That was the thing: be something. And if there was any indication I wasn't, it's like, "Look at him! He is somebody! He's made it!" This heavy -- did you have the same thing? It took me until I was like 20. I went to university and I went to Oxford and all this stuff. It was all what he wanted to do for me. But then after that, I said, "That's it. Now I'm going to study music. I have very little money. There's a school in America and I can get a place there." I went to Berklee to study jazz. I was, by that time, into jazz. I told my father, and it was terrible. He just completely didn't speak to me. But at that point, it was like, "I don't care about this." It took me that long to kind of ...
Lila: How old were you?
Rob: 21, I think.
Lila: Wow! That's pretty young to stand against your father in that way. It's pretty young.
Rob: Maybe. It was so strong in me. But it was really difficult, you know. So I had a very difficult relationship with him. It was very oppressive. But he wrote to me. After I was studying for my final exams, in psychology actually ...
Lila: When? In Berklee or Oxford?
Rob: In Oxford, in psychology.
Lila: You majored in psychology?
Rob: I started doing physics. I got a place doing physics. I was really into physics. I was really into, like, finding the unified field theory and the ultimate, you know -- this was a really mystical thing for me. And actually then I went to India in between for a couple of months, and I just got much more interested in the mind. I was young. It was before I was practising and everything.
Lila: Just for a trip, to India? Wow.
Rob: Yeah, with a friend. So I was there for a while. I got very ill. I'd smoke too much -- you know, took too much. I wasn't really into practice at all. But something, I got really interested in the mind.
Lila: India does that to our psyche.
Rob: Yeah. So I got back and somehow I couldn't completely give myself to physics, like that whole project. So I tried to change to psychology. My father flipped out. I was still in Oxford.
Lila: From physics to psychology, he flipped out?
Rob: Yeah. I was still in Oxford, and he was just like, "This is ..." He wanted me to be, like, a physics professor and all this stuff. So he freaked out. I stayed in Oxford and finished my degree. Soon as I was finished -- even before I was finished -- I told him, "This is what I'm going to do." And he really freaked out this time. It was terrible.
Lila: After he put so much into you, and ...
Rob: Exactly, yeah.
Lila: You were strong! 21, it's a kid.
Rob: I was strong, but it was like, I had such a visceral force in me.
Lila: Visceral?
Rob: Visceral is like guts, like it was really physical, you know? This kind of, something wanted to express musically. And I still have that -- not necessarily just in music, but in everything, even the Dharma teaching. Something wants to come through. And I felt it so strongly. And I didn't care about money, and I didn't care -- it's just, "I have to do this." But it was terrible, it was just awful with him. But I went. I had enough money, I think, for six months or something.
Lila: How did you scrape -- how did you do it? How did you make it? 21, going to the States.
Rob: Well, it's a long story. Which bit ...?
Lila: I mean the whole thing, just in a few lines.
Rob: I think psychically it was just that, by that time, something had been happening for really quite a few years. I had started practising by that point as well. I started when I was like 18 or 19 in Oxford, and really took to that as well, got really into it straight from the beginning. But something had been happening for a while, just in terms of what I knew in my soul, in my body, in my whole being was most important to me -- these things about something wanting to express things that came through, and art, and music, and creativity, and spirituality. It was just -- people were saying all kinds of things, you know? Other people said, "You're crazy." It wasn't like I was a virtuoso or anything. I was really a beginner, you know? People said, "You're completely mad. What are you doing?" And I just had this ...
Lila: Because you wanted it so much or ...?
Rob: Why were they saying that? Or why ...?
Lila: Yeah, why were they saying it?
Rob: Because you looked at me and it wasn't like -- I had just super excelled, achieved academically, and then physics, and then psychology, and all this stuff, and then it looked to people like I'm throwing that away for something that's ... it's not like I was an obvious musical talent or anything like that. I was really kind of a beginner. So it was a huge risk, you know. But I just trusted the love I had. I had so much love, and I knew that was more important than 'talent,' whatever that means. If you have enough love for something, it's like, you find a way to make things work. So I just trusted that. How I knew that, I don't know. I remember, 17, 18, there was a force, like in my body, almost to express, and it was like I couldn't express. I wasn't capable musically. It was almost this frustrated, pent-up thing. And it was hard in a lot of ways. And even then in music school, being at the bottom of the pile, it was hard.
Lila: First time ever, probably.
Rob: Yes. Yeah, absolutely.
Lila: But you were on fire. [30:57]
Rob: I was completely on fire. I would take my guitar to the school -- I was so happy to be doing music. It was like a liberation. I'm, like, finally doing what I want to be doing! All I was doing was music, and away from the whole craziness of the family, and in a different country. But it was hard. I used to go -- I was at the bottom of the bottom of the pile. There were people at that college, there were people coming from Europe -- they had scholarships; all they needed was an entry to get a US visa so they could make connections. They didn't need the school. So they were already like maestros. I would take my guitar, and I would go to school, and after, I was dragging [the guitar]. It was so hard. It was so painful. I wanted it so much. And I was really just beginning, and then comparing myself. It was really painful -- and wonderful to be doing music.
Anyway. So I had money for six months. My father -- I wanted to go completely on my own, and they said, "No, we're coming with you, make sure you find an apartment." [laughter] So they came. He was already -- I say this with a little kindness -- I think he was a little crazy. But on this trip, when they were helping me find an apartment and cheap furniture and whatever, he got even weirder. So it was like, really, really bizarre. And we were fighting. I almost punched him. Then they left me, and they were going to go, I think, to California for a few days, and then come back and say goodbye. He really didn't want me to be there at all, so that was part of it. But he said, "Okay, you can do it for six months or a year, and then ..." I was like, "Okay, sure." [laughter]
So they went to California, and in the airport, he had a brain seizure, and he collapsed. They found a brain tumour. He was completely disoriented. And in the hospital bed -- he was very confused, but he said, "Don't worry. I'll pay for the music school." So everything kind of softened in that -- crazy, yeah, just mad.
Lila: You know sometimes this craziness, I have no clue what was there but oftentimes it happens, it's a brain tumour, and it causes it.
Rob: Yeah, because that's what I was wondering -- the doctors said that it might have been there for fifteen years! It was a benign tumour, and a very slow-growing one, and pressing on his brain. So it did occur to me. How much was from the war and the Holocaust and the trauma of the camps? How much was just how he was? And how much was from this brain thing? But it's certainly possible, yeah. Anyway, he said that. In this crazy situation, he thought he was going to die in the hospital. I had a sense that he wasn't, but he thought he was going to die.
Lila: It was so sweet of him to actually come and meet you where you wanted to be.
Rob: It was very sweet. At the end of the day, I know that he really loved me. I had such a hard time with him. But I did therapy and whatnot, and I came to a place where I just kind of accepted his limitations. I don't have a problem with him now. I saw what he could give me -- it's like, there's a lot of peace there, and it feels good. I might have wished, "Oh, I wish I had a more peaceful childhood, or an easier, less intense, or less pressure," but it was what it was, and it's part of my soul. It was part of forging what I am, and I'm grateful for that. I don't have any lingering, like, "Urgggh," anything at all with him. He thought he was going to die, so he did this -- it was very beautiful. I ended up staying -- I mean, I had very little money at times, but I could do it. And then he actually died a few years later, before I graduated.
Lila: He kept supporting you ...?
Rob: Just about. But basically, yeah. Basically I was able to do it -- touch and go, but I was able to do it, and then he died of heart disease that was undiagnosed, which was really sudden.
Lila: But he wasn't, like, pressing you to live ...
Rob: I think his idea was like, "You finish this. You grow up a little bit. And then you come back and get a normal job. This can be a hobby," you know? [laughter] That was his idea. But anyway, things didn't turn out that way. It's so weird. I went to America to study, with enough money of my own for a few months, and I ended up staying fifteen years.
Lila: Fifteen! How old were you?
Rob: I was 26 when he died. It was '92, and he died, like I said, very suddenly. I got a call; he was already dead. I flew back for the funeral. I think also I was dragging out my music school after a certain time because I didn't have enough money to pay full tuition. I just sort of dragged it out a bit longer.
Lila: And you did plan to go back, or had something in mind? It was just "I'm staying here"?
Rob: No, I was just staying here. And also, by that point, I had gotten into a psychotherapeutic process there, and I was really dedicated to that. It was like, I wanted to stay here and do this, both these things.
