Note on the image – A welcome pause with a pint of tea, as served by one of my favourite pubs in Lewes. How comfortable are we to pause for a rest when people around us are busy?

When I see what other business owners and freelancers are doing over the Christmas break, I sometimes feel a twinge that I’m not doing enough.

This year, my twinge was:

“I’ve put my LI posts & community building on pause, I’ve not even though about email marketing – I could have scheduled things over the break – I’ve been so lazy! How will I grow a business if I’m not prepared to put the work in?”

(Marketing for myself is a new project, and if anything that’s the one I’m getting wobbles about – am I doing it right? Am I doing enough? What if I fail and no one is interested in my coaching … and so on)

I went back to work on Mon 8th Jan, and I felt that when I came back to work this Monday. I opened my email and had a cache of emails, some from people like me running a small business, and I immediately told myself I’d been lazy.

Is that familiar for you too – do you see or hear what other people are doing and compare yourself? Find yourself thinking or feeling that if you were doing what they do, maybe you’d be enjoying more of what you want? Maybe that’s what would quieten the nagging feeling there’s more you want from your business?

HANG ON a moment … I’m convinced this isn’t actually the way we need to be talking to ourselves, let alone running our businesses. I don’t think it will actually get us what we really want and it certainly doesn’t honour our true, authentic selves. You know, the parts of you that make you unique and able to make the contribution only you can?

Then I caught myself and thought about what I need from a holiday. I need to let go – I find it so hard to switch off most of the time, and when I do take a break, I need it to be a real break.

1/I need at least 3 longer periods in the year when I let it all go (1 week minimum, 2 weeks is good). I turn off email, put on my out of office and don’t respond to anything.* Christmas is usually one of them.

*(I sometimes make an exception that there’ll be 1 or 2 small, specific things I check, on specific days. I’ve learned it’s really important to keep it boundaried and not to let this ooze into the whole holiday though, or I don’t relax and I get resentful).

2/ I also don’t promise myself I’ll do any ideation, planning, goal setting or visioning about where my business is going, ‘cos I never actually do it and I can do without beating myself up about that. Yes, that’s after years of promising myself I’ll use the break to “think about where my business is headed”, because that’s what I’ve heard other people say and it sounded like the kind of thing ‘real’ business owners do. That’s as opposed to ‘pretend’ business owners, like me 😉

But I’m not writing this to tell you that my way is right! I’m writing it to say …

We need to decide for ourselves what we need.

No one else has the magic answer on what makes you sing, while your business plays the harmonies.

And one of the main problems with following someone else’s instructions or guide? You can easily miss the nuances that fine-tune it for you.

Take my 2 points above about what I need – it’s not even as black and white for me as they suggest.  

1/ I do take time to let pretty much everything go. And sometimes, there are a couple of small things I need to check. I make a note / put them in my calendar so I can forget about them for a bit. Sometimes it’s MORE stressful to try and tidy up ALL the loose ends before a holiday. If I want/need a few more days off, sometimes I need to tidy up a couple of things during the holiday.

2/ I don’t promise myself I’ll do anything as formal as ‘business planning’. And I know I won’t be sitting in front of a laptop (unless it’s for online shopping) while I’m on hols. BUT I do think about my business … it’s a part of me. Yet it’s important for me that I let it happen without expecting anything of myself.

I mull my work over in a completely unfocused, unplanned way. I let things surface, I think about what I want more of, what I want less of, I think about what really pissed me off this year and what made me feel good about myself. This Christmas I reflected a lot on my development as a coach and how I’ll continue to build my networks once I move abroad. And I didn’t write anything down, I just let it percolate.

And the best bit – I’m deciding not to criticise myself for any of this, I’ve decided that’s how I work best at this point in my career. That easing of self criticism – that is a thing worth celebrating all on it’s own!

How do you rest? What do you need to know you’re taking care of yourself?

Rabbits & heroes

I recently re-read my favourite book in the whole world: Watership Down. Years ago I fell in love with Richard Adam’s story of a perilous journey made by a band of rabbits set in the very real landscapes of Hampshire. My penguin books edition tells me it was originally a story he told his daughters while on a long car journey to Stratford-on-Avon.

Watership Down never fails to bring me to tears and I’m surprised by the depth of feeling it conjures every time I read it. I find both comfort in re-experiencing familiar parts of the story and new reflections that illuminate my mental landscape in fascinating ways.

Place

This time round I’ve been reflecting on the importance of place and physical landscapes. I remembered attending a writing workshop in Dungeness last summer led by crime writer William Shaw.  It was an inspired location for a workshop, presided over by the nuclear power station and formed by the unique landscape. Shaw made the point that writing about an existing place literally grounds your story. As we sat, having ceased to hear the ever-present hum of the power station, this made a lot of sense to me. Being able to write about the details of being in a place (the sounds you hear while walking, the smells on the air at certain times of day or year) lets other people into a world that your story inhabits.

I’ve always loved that Watership Down is based in familiar, English landscapes and is set somewhere I could visit. I was more aware on this reading that Adams narrates landscapes that I feel part of. The world he creates is coherent on a physical and emotional level, not just an intellectual one. This is a necessary condition for the most wonderful thing about the book: it gives the gift of stepping outside my usual human frame of reference. It imagines the world from a different perspective. I’m not saying the book isn’t about human concerns, human experiences and isn’t anthropomorphism. It is! Despite this, it gives me a feeling of encountering the world through different senses. From expansive tracts of scrub & woodland to the confines of the burrows, the coherent physicality of the landscapes creates space for the rabbits to navigate.

Thinking about how a book can create a new world, familiar enough to enter at all but different enough to enlarge my own experience reminded me of heady days (!) of MA research.

‘Beyond my situation as reader, beyond the author’s situation, I offer myself to the possible ways of being-in-the-world which the text opens up and discovers for me.” This is what Gadamer calls “fusion of horizons” (Horizontverschmelzung) in historical knowledge.’ (Gadamer, quoted by Ricoeur, 1974: 107)

Ricoeur introduced me to an enduring metaphor for the act of making meaning while reading: the idea that the written text opens up a horizon of meaning to the reader. I’m not at all sure I’ve respected their (Ricoeur’s & Gadamer’s) original intentions, but I love the spatial metaphor and it filters, usefully, into my thinking all the time.

While Watership Down may not be high-art, it is compelling and emotionally involving. It discovers a horizon for me, a slightly different one each time I read it, and I gladly explore it.  As an example, the BFI published a fascinating article on how the film Watership Down challenged romanticised portrayals of Britain’s rural landscapes – that’s a different possible way of being-in-the-world right there. Or another example, I find reading the book gives me respite from being too much in my head and in my thoughts. I idealise through thinking and rationalising and tend to neglect my intuition and emotional experience. Watership Down gives me permission and space for some respite.

Reference: Ricoeur, P. 1974. Metaphor and the Main Problem of Hermeneutics. (Find the article at this link).

Journeys

Another thing I have always loved about Watership Down is the very real sense of threat created by mere words. Or as Adams describes them.

“… sharp, hard letters that cut straight as black knives”.

(as carried by a sign post erected by men announcing the intended development of the Sandleford Warren area.)

It’s a journey in more senses than one and the rabbits court risk, encounter threat and overcome it. They negotiate things that are difficult, they learn and they change as they journey on.

As the rabbits journey together, each character becomes recognised by the group for their particular strength. Dandelion is the storyteller, offering the group comfort and certainty by reaffirming identity and community. Blackberry is a problem solver, able to make connections and join disparate ideas. Fiver, the quintessential outlier, is the shaman of the group. At first, Fiver’s visions must be sponsored by more forceful personalities, but his counsel eventually becomes the most trusted of all.

I love the way they learn to rely on each other and celebrate their different strengths. And celebrate they do: the story is built up by telling the contribution each rabbit makes to progress towards their shared goal. Stories within the main story tell of a rabbit hero, El-ahrairah, with an explicit nod towards the end of the story about how the boundaries between stories of El-ahrairah and of their own adventures have blurred.

And I realised that’s it’s okay to be the hero of my own story.

I’ve always loved believable stories about heroes. Heroes whose adventures I want to go on, heroes I can learn from. And as I grew older, heroes that were flawed, heroes I could relate to. Heroes who had to make difficult choices and who weren’t always confident and heroes who didn’t always win. I’ve always wanted to be a hero, which shows up a thing about myself. I find it hard to give myself permission to celebrate those times when I use my strengths.

And the idea of being the hero of one’s own story and that sometimes going unnoticed reminds me of this fabulous track from The Divine Comedy.

“All the people pushing by
As the sun dips in the sky
All the songs that go unsung
When the working day is done”

 

2019

I’m sitting in a bit of my home that didn’t exist this time last year, watching a sunset of winter colours. This building has spent the year in transition from a functional shelter to the family home I’ve never quite dared to dream about. Two teenagers’ bedrooms huddle upstairs, empty at this moment. My partner puts his Mum on speakerphone, telling us about her latest visit to his Dad in hospital. This house crackles with life, love, K-Pop and heated conversations.

Over the last two weeks of December I found it useful to acknowledge that I’ve found this year difficult. It’s hard for me to really sit and look that in the face. I feel burned-out. Some days I’ve felt hollow and sure only that I will drag myself through the day, without the certainty of why it’s important I do so.

At the same time when I stop and flip through my cherished memories of the year I’m amazed at the treasure trove I’ve amassed. I make a conscious effort to do so, to avoid losing the moments I’ve worked hard for and the gifts of connection with beloved people. That doesn’t stop me feeling more than a little bruised by my course through the year.

Home, hearth, kin

Transition, I realise, has been a big theme in my 2019. It was year 2 of living with a long term partner, only the second time in my life I’ve been in that situation. 2019 has seen me redefine my shape and boundaries. I’ve chosen family life as an integral part of not only who I am, but also my safest living spaces.

With some mental gymnastics, I now think of myself as a parent. Parenting teenagers is sometimes everything, sometimes contracts to a small, folded bundle. Which then edges unnoticed into unexpected areas of my life. I’ve also learned both to offer more empathy for my partner’s coping strategies and to hold more tightly to my boundaries. It turns out the two are not mutually exclusive, in fact they operate well together.

It’s been a year of unscheduled uncertainty too and I’ve found that taxing. My partner has been unemployed for the last six months and ultimately decided to pursue retraining and a career change. In terms of his well-being and personal development this is great. In terms of being able to say “I’m shattered, let’s go out for dinner”, or even “let’s finish the flooring throughout the house” or, for me, “I want to feel financially secure” it’s less great.

But this isn’t only about me as part of a family unit. This place is an extension of the line of bricks I set down some time ago, ready to house my identity, my core sense of who I am. My home is about what nourishes and inspires me. I love watching the birds fossicking in the garden, from the sofa. This evening lilacs, greys and silhouetted trees mark the boundary, not only of my own cosy home, but the edge of town. I love the feeling of freedom I get when I look out from the back of the house over the river valley.

A grand and foolhardy project (or two)

I’ve managed to capitalise on my growing sense of freedom in my work life, too. This year I took on managing and running a 1 week summer school for 100 PhD students, along with an academic colleague. It involved working a LOT more hours than I expected AND it was hands down the best event I’ve ever been involved in organising. I met some wonderful and inspiring scientists and was treated to a hilarious thank you speech from my boss.

I’ve also given myself more freedom to make decisions in my freelance work, resulting in delivering the best marketing campaign of my career to date. This was thanks to the lovely, talented team I worked with and my own determination to do it properly, despite methodological resistance from the client.

Reading my poetry on stage

By the time I got to October I’d delivered both huge projects, was exhausted and found myself ill with a cold every weekend. I’d just pick up enough on Monday to struggle back to work, only to start feeling crap again on Thursday / Friday. In this month, I found out I’d won a prize for my poetry and I finally started thinking of myself as an actual poet.

A web of chance encounters encouraged me to start writing poetry in earnest in 2019. A gift of a new translation of Gilgamesh last Christmas plus chats and unrelenting energy from Maf’j (a colleague at Brighon’s Fusebox) led to ideas for a VR experience around poetry and naming spells.  An introduction to CommonPlace, a project led by Evelyn Wilson, and unerring encouragement from dear friend Neil Hopkins got me to dust off an old WIP and start writing new poetry. I entered a poetry competition run by BHAC, won 3rd prize and got to perform my poem.

Performing my poetry on stage for the first time, to 300 people is a thing I’ll never forget. Honestly, I was still shattered and ill but it cheered me up for a bit. I now give myself permission to think of myself as a creative and a poet. I take myself seriously with it.

Being a daughter as an adult

I had an amazing start to the year in Thailand, a trip motivated by a family wedding. I made some fantastic memories, especially of being with my Dad. My most cherished memory is the wedding procession in a village just outside Uttaradit where he and I marched in the grooms’s procession, hefting small banana trees in 35^oC heat and full sun. You kinda had to be there for that one and most of my Dad’s side of the family were 🙂

I shifted my relationship with my Dad for the better during that trip and over the last year. I’m proud to say that in November he came to visit with my step-nieces and we all had a really lovely day. That’s only the 2nd time in 10 years he’s travelled south to visit me and it’s taken 2 years of patience and nudging to make it happen.

Over the last year I’ve learned to ask for and accept help from my partner (moral support is useful!) and to be kinder to myself about my frustrations with my relationship  with each of my parents.

————

I started this blog post nearly three weeks ago, just as the year turned. As I reflected and wrote about the conflict of feeling anxious, exhausted and burned out while also knowing I’ve created so many brilliant experiences and connections in 2019, I’ve realised that it’s ok to hold both sides.

I can feel my own need to come up with a grand reveal and to present, with a flourish, my unified, beautiful and flawless ‘achievement’ or discovery for the year. I’m resisting it. My practice of the moment is be (more) okay with conflict, with disagreement and without having a unifying narrative.

Time out over Christmas gave me a chance to re-centre and rebalance.

I’m ok.

Really listening: a poetry network

Sometimes the beginning of a change is so small no one notices it. I wonder, in fact, if this is always how it begins. How would we know otherwise? 

Shifting from feeling intimidated by poetry to asking for help with exploring it is something I started on years ago. So many people light up when you ask them about what poems they like. Try it for yourself, listen with genuine interest and see what happens. 

Wonderful, fascinating people have done me the honour of reading aloud a poem they chose and talking to me about why they like it. I’ve captured recordings and published them here so you can listen to our voices speaking words we enjoy. 

Over the years I’ve changed from being fearful about opening up and sharing the things that move me, to being curious and joyful about being vulnerable. I find this encourages those around me to open up too.

Within every recording is a moment of human connection with someone else. From lived experiences in military service training to the scariness of being the person who decides where you go in your life. Every single one started with an offer to truly listen while the other shares a poem they like.

I’d love you to join in. We invite you to listen to poems we’ve recorded and / or contact me if you’re up for recording a poem of your choice to go on the site.

Above all, please enjoy!

 

White noise

With thanks to a friend for the inspiration for this post – someone asked me what I thought of an album recently.

We were both found a lot that resonated in our lives in The National’s Trouble Will Find Me when it came out. The new album Sleep Well Beast was therefore an interesting one to share some thoughts on.

What I discovered about my experience links to my discoveries about emotional repression and expression, so I’d like to share it here. I’ve not shared anything of what the other said as they’re not my words.

Guilty Party

It’s complex: layers of sound and each one is distinct from the others, but they have a kind of chaotic-ness in common. It made me think of white noise – my attention was darting everywhere in the space of my awareness in response to the sounds.

My musings moved on to imagining of a kind of intellectual white noise. Listening was like distracting my conscious / rational watch-guard and letting an emotional response unfold without judging it too closely. Which is a thing I’ve often used music to do: allow my intuitive / emotional self some space without judging myself too harshly for it. I wonder if that is just me, or if that resonates with anyone else?

This evening I’m listening to Kraftwerk’s Europe Endless, which I discovered about 9 years ago now. It was one of the first times I enjoyed something that wasn’t relentlessly upbeat, though it has that layered, consciousness-occupying quality to it I was talking about above.

I wonder if I’ll ever enjoy really, really simple music?

 

Past hurts

Therapy is hard. Reconnecting with past hurts is painful. Some days I find it overwhelming: 3 years (and counting) of picking through the debris of past hurts. In overview, I find it consoling or I’d not still be doing it, but in individual moments it sometimes bloody hurts. Sometimes the hurt feels bigger and stronger than me.

I choose acknowledging how I feel as often as I can bear it. The alternative is ignoring it and so ignoring part of what it is to be alive. Ignoring a chance to be vulnerable with others and share something of what it is to be me. But some days it is harder than others, so I try not to be unkind when my feelings about things seem bigger than I am and I want to cry.

 

the glass on the table

The liquid in the glass laps gently against its sides as I move. I mustn’t spill it, it must remain intact. It’s my job to look after it. I’ve only just realised I’m cradling it to me. I’m so used to holding it I don’t even see it any more. That’s why I’m always so careful. Funny that I stopped realising why.

As the session goes on I describe this mental image. It arrived unannounced and as clear as day. I routinely dismiss my internal imagery: it never occurred to me it was any more than a frivolity.

your hand in mine

Tears growing around my eyes, I reach my hand out to seek comfort in contact. Funerals are difficult. Unexpectedly, she takes my hand and I feel warm fingers in mine.

To physically know that someone is present, alive and breathing, is a gift. Gratitude swells within me spilling my tears over the brink of my eyelids. I bring my left hand to rest on the back of my sister’s hand so it is between mine.

Skin catches against my palm: her skin is drier than mine. I want to soothe, make the skin supple and soft for her. Anxiety prickles in my gut: evidence of fragility is difficult to bear. “She probably does too much washing up,” I think.

Guilt washes over me for this interfering over-protective thought and I remain still. Focus on breathing, focus on touch.

Rinsed by emotion after emotion after emotion I am left the impression of a dry hand clasped between mine, the texture a pattern I can see. The warmth and pressure of our folded fingers an indent upon me.

the middle of the forest

In an instant, like the flick of a switch, I am in the gloom surrounded only by thick trunks and still, damp air. No path, neither more nor less traveled, and I am rooted. Black tree filled terror inhabits me and I’m surprised to blink and see the pale walls of the therapy room.

It was real. The forest in my head sprang up in an instant and it was as real as the prose in your mind right now. It gripped me with fear, fear of being lost. Irretrievably. Forever.

That was one of the strongest and earliest experiences of consciously tuning into my internal landscape. It was terrifying and held a deep foreboding. It was also a way to navigate my internal processes: these are the things that stop me dead in my tracks in my normal train of thought.

I’ve become so good at switching out of the fear and anxiety that I didn’t even realise it’s a substantial part of my experience and it stops me in my tracks regularly. Without realising it I switch tack and find something else to focus on. It limits me: limits my creativity, limits my ability to connect with my own feelings and stops me from exploring the extent of what it means to be human, to be me.

If anyone ever thought therapy was easy I can now report, categorically, it is the polar opposite.

A touch of honesty

Hello 🙂

I’ve not written for a while, but I’ve been planning a new twist to the blog. I have settled on another, very specific purpose for it, that I’ll pursue for as long as seems apt.

Most people that know me know me for being open and honest about my life and the things I find difficult. Yet I’ve been on a journey through counselling over the last 18 months and what I’m learning is just how much I edit myself. Just how much I contain and hide (especially from myself) in order to fit in and save face.

Right now I am facing, more painfully than I ever have done, just how much anxiety I suffer. Just how much I can hate the way I feel. Just how much I sometimes wish, wish, wish I were somebody else. I’ve been hiding it for years from everyone I love and, especially, from myself. The only sure way to stop me from sharing it.

It is okay. I am learning and, once again, it feels like a steep learning curve. It is terrifying to be confronted with the strength of feeling I have. I am learning that I get angry about simple things not going as I need them to. I am scared witless about the things I want from others and life being plain to all. After suppressing it for years, the reality of me feels chaotic and overwhelming. I am just learning to stop clinging to plans and spreadsheets (anyone remember the holiday in Cornwall I planned on a spreadsheet and tweeted about?) in order to save myself from my feelings. I have barely allowed myself to feel angry about interactions with another person since I was first married. That was about 15 years ago now.

Having feelings about stuff is currently terrifying. I am desperately afraid that no one I care about will accept me if I share how I feel. How I really feel about things. I can only bear to test it slowly and only with a very few people. However, I know that studying an MA (the origination of this blog back in 2008) was utterly terrifying. And I completed that fucker, with flair and panache 😉

I’m bricking it, but I’m determined to explore who I really am and do it in my own, inimitable style. I want to use this blog to share some of my findings from my counselling and self exploration journey, hence from now on this blog will be titled …

The Glass on the Table.