It’s been a little while since I’ve written one of these things, and truth be told, it’s probably because I’ve been a little nervous.
A lot has changed since the last one, I have moved country (again) and now there’s a whole heap of new humans in my life.
New humans
More.
new.
humans.
to.
judge.
(Insert shocked face emoji)
And so I postponed, letting all the thoughts that will follow float around in my extremely busy non logical creative mind….
Until, that was, I came across the following piece of text from one of my favourite Alain De Botton Books ‘The Consolations of Philosophy:
“What should worry us is not the number of people who oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so. We should therefore divert our attention away from the presence of unpopularity to the explanations for it.
It may be frightening to hear that a high proportion of a community holds us to be wrong, but before abandoning our position, we should consider the method by which their conclusions have been reached. It is the soundness of their method of thinking that should determine the weight we give to their disproval.
We seem afflicted by the opposite tendency, to listen to everyone, to be upset by every unkind word and sarcastic observation. we fail to ask ourselves the cardinal and most consoling question: on what basis has this been made? We treat with equal seriousness the objections of the critic who has thought rigorously and honestly and those of the critic who has acted out of misanthropy and envy.
So I thought “Fuck it (yes I do swear), Ima write a blog”
And you’re most likely thinking “Oh my goooooooooood you’re such a nerd” (Yes I am)
That or you’re already snoring…
Either way, I may as well start for those who made it past that last paragraph …
As most of you are aware by now, I kinda have a small love of photography. So when Mum approached me with a photo of myself aged just two, holding hands with my late grandad, brother Jason and Nanna Jean, it was only natural I decided it was time to delve into the huge blue box tucked neatly away in her walk in wardrobe, and for a period of roughly 3 hours, relive my youth.
(That and the small fact I’d spent the afternoon walking up Darwen tower, in a search of the initials my Nan had carved into its walls when she herself, was only a child)
Rebel.
As I dug through the piles of photographs, my mind flickered back to dreams that once filled my head.
And I smiled, and cried for the young naive us, that were so oblivious to the twists and turns that would become everyday life.
As a child, when I dreamt of my life to come I always did so of England, of cottages and all things crooked and old. I wanted to live a slow and meaningful life.
‘Meaningful’
When you type that word into google, it lists some of the following synonyms:
‘Significant, Relevant, important, consequential, material, telling, valid, worthwhile, purposeful’.
Seems like a relatively simple thing to do, list a whole heap of words to describe ‘Meaning’
Then you apply it to your life, and suddenly, things get a hell of a lot more complicated.
Human’s and meaning, what is it about us humans that make our relationship with that word so complex.
Thats right, we’re intelligent buggers. Our downfall really, or at least I believe so.
We are brought up in a society that tells us we can be anyone and anything we dream of, that the world is our oyster, that we must be defined by our experiences, our beauty, our careers. That we must BE someone, or DO something, in order for our lives to have meaning, in order to be accepted and most importantly remembered.
However Mark Manson very easily brings us down to earth with a thud in his book ‘Everything is fucked, A book about hope’ where he states:
‘If I worked at Starbucks, instead of writing people’s names on their coffee cup, I’d write the following:
One day, you and everyone you love will die. And beyond a small group of people for an extremely brief period of time, little of what you say or do will ever matter. This is the Uncomfortable Truth of life. And everything you think or do is but an elaborate avoidance of it. We are inconsequential cosmic dust, bumping and milling about on a tiny blue speck. We imagine our own importance. We invent our purpose—we are nothing.
He’s got a bit of a point…
As you can see from my previous blogs, I haven’t found life an easy one. And last year I’d found myself back fighting negative and unhealthy thought patterns that were defining my life in a profoundly negative way.
So I spent 6 weeks with a therapist, a wonderful woman, who helped me unravel my life experiences in order to understand how and why I had refused to let go of the damaging thoughts that were attached to them. But during that the process I met (re met) a wonderful man, and was on my way to falling in love.
Now in hindsight (oh hindsight, rolls eyes) what I should have done after those therapy sessions, was put my focus into changing my mindset and my unhealthy thought patterns, instead, I busied myself beginning a new life (don’t judge me, we’ve all fallen in love).
But the novelty of new life only ever lasts a short while, like a break from a hike with a heavy backpack. Now let’s say our life backpack is where we’ve stored all our unresolved negative life experiences and thoughts that accompany them. If the backpack is full, which mine certainly was, then it begins, after a short while, to become heavy again. And that is just what began to happen. I tried to rebuild a new life, on an extremely fragile view of myself. And surprise surprise, I failed.
Now when I think about most of those childhood dreams as a 31 year old, I have to admit I have, (or did have) enough of them, most of them in fact, to imagine that little old me in those photos would be extremely content adult.
But I was not. I reached my 30’s, carrying an extremely heavy backpack full of all the negative experiences my life had handed me, and it impacted significantly, they way in which I viewed my world, and predominantly myself.
How did I let that happen?
As you’re probably aware I’m extremely passionate about understanding the how’s and why’s of our little peoples behaviours. The relationships they have with others, and how that shapes them into the person they will be as an adult.
Because the experiences we have in our early years, define us in ways I believe most of us don’t truly understand.
The ways in which we view the world, the paradigms we have in our heads, they’re built up of all those little experiences, our ability to trust, to feel loved, accepted, our ability to feel self worth.
And they begin with the small teeny little details that we so often don’t give even a second thought.
Following through with our words and our promises. Aligning our words with our actions and behaviours, providing them with a secure base in which they can venture off into the world.
Now I may be a bit of an extreme case to some, but if I tell a child who is barely one, I will wipe their nose “One last time” because its clear that they don’t want me to do so, one last time is what I shall do, Regardless of if I’ve cleaned it to the standard I had initially wished, because I gave that child my word.
And because thats where I believe we must start, with those teeny interactions that essentially build up their trust.
Our children observe and absorb more than we could even begin to imagine, and we underestimate them, far too much, our behaviours and relationships with them form attachment styles within little people, sometimes healthy, sometimes not. And surprise surprise theses are the attachment styles we carry through with us into adulthood.
Childhood never seemed so significant, right?
A few weeks ago some girlfriends and I watched Rocket man (so if you haven’t and you don’t want a spoiler then scroll, real quick, go!)
The film is centred around Elton John attending therapy, It goes into his childhood, where we see how his relationships with his parents have negatively impacted his life, and shows us the ups and downs of his whirlwind life, which has resulted in an addiction to drugs and alcohol.
In the end, he is faced with himself as a child.
Elton, having gone through therapy approaches himself as young ‘Reginald Dwight’ giving him a hug, and telling himself that he’s not been ‘Reginald’ for an extremely long time, and in doing so ultimately says goodbye to the person he once was.
Ouch.
Cue the tears.
It impacted me greatly, because I believe most of us never really do it. We never let go of the perception we have of ourselves as young, naive children. Subconciously, the child and your perceptions of how you were perceived, they never leave. Some of us more than others.
I never did.
Alain de Botton, wrote a book called Status Anxiety in which he says:
‘The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.‘
So if you feel unworthy as a child, if your father left, if you were bullied in school, if you were rejected by the people you hold highly, if your observations of the people closest to you, are ones of low self esteem, if your worth is judged on material status by the person you share your life with, and in order to feel better about yourself you look to others for validation, how do you turn those thoughts around?
Well you don’t. You grow into an adult, but ultimately remain that broken and hurt child.
Because that change and validation has to begin with us.
A few months ago, I received a message via social media from a young man I went to school with that read a little like this:
“It’s true what they say then, the ugly duckling’s do turn into beautiful swans”
Now, I’m not sure if this was meant to be a compliment, but it was not.
It affirmed for me the way in which I perceived myself as a child, ugly and unworthy, constantly striving for approval from the people I believed to be my friends.
I never let go of that child, and those views, I placed them in my backpack, and I carried them around, then I placed more negative experiences, and comments and perceptions on top of them, and I found myself striving for recognition and approval in all areas of my life, my dreams of cottages and a simple life, getting lost under the weight of what I believed was expected of me, by others.
And the longer you carry that backpack, no matter how you change and how the perceptions of you change with you, no amounts of compliments from others will ever come close to unpacking it.
I’ve lived a life full of the most wonderful experiences, but i’ve always felt a sense of something lacking, my brain has been trained to believe I still need to prove myself, I still need to strive for acceptance, for validation, and it has been clouding my values.
My ‘lack’ was a lack of appreciation for the present, for who I am, not who I must be, where I am, not where I must be, for what I have, not what I don’t have, and I’ve caused a lot of hurt, not only to myself, but others for me to realise it. In searching so hard for ‘meaning’, I was missing it completely, in the everyday moments I dreamt of having as a child.
I’ve learnt a lot of important life lessons in the last few months, most importantly, that I was wrong, I was a victim to my experiences, instead of owning and growing from them. I was living in a constant state of past and future, with next to no present. And it takes the loss of the thing you always dreamed of as child to realise you already had everything you could ever want.
Last year I found 25+ undeveloped rolls of film from our childhood that are over 20 years old. It’s the strangest feeling to see memories from so long ago for the very first time, which is a little ironic, when you’re trying to let go of the person you used to perceive yourself as, as a child.
Maybe it will help, we’ll soon find out, but for now I’ve just realised how long this blog is, and I haven’t begun to scratch the surface of my intentions….
I’ll give it a rest for now
Much love, always
Stace