Yesterday was my 44th birthday and, throughout the day, I wrote down 44 things I wanted to tell you that feel true right now. They all felt important at the time, but reading them back has made me feel extremely self-conscious and silly.
I’m going to publish them anyway because it’s good practice to do things that make you look a bit silly.
For a long time, I fell into the trap of thinking that life, or maybe God, was making me suffer as some kind of grand lesson or as punishment, but I have come to realise that’s not why I suffer. Most of my mental suffering simply comes from the fact that I’m constantly rejecting the flow of life as it is. I’m creating so much mental tension and friction that it HURTS, far more than it needs to. My suffering is mostly a skill issue.
I feel happiest and most aligned with life when I’m drawing and painting, and yet I experience an almost pathological level of fear when I think about trying to make art and will endlessly avoid doing it. I have never understood this.
I generally find it very very hard to start things, and once I do start I find it very very hard to stop, and this daft pattern is the absolute bane of my existence.
I have tried every productivity system under the sun, and the ONLY thing that actually works is to do a little bit of the things that matter most to me whenever I can, letting them accrue very gradually. Every other tactic or system makes me unwell. The harder task is accepting that my body can’t cope with more than that right now.
Despite everything I understand about internalised ableism, the meaninglessness of ‘productivity’ and the need for self-compassion, the shame I feel when I compare myself to other people and how much they do in a day still comes close to eating me alive.
I hide or stay quiet about most of my symptoms throughout each day which is both the right thing to do (I do not want our lives to be dominated by my body’s weather) and incredibly isolating.
I have been working on a novel for a long time now and am embarrassed at how hard I’m finding it. Writing it feels like putting my hand against something scorching and I can only do it for a very short amount of time before I am drained dry and feel extremely unwell. I have wanted to quit a thousand times but I desperately want this story to be allowed to live. It’s gorgeous, it really is — I’m just writing it very slowly and badly just now.
Although I believe I can write well sometimes, I am not sure I’m cut out to be a successful published author, given everything it entails. This makes me really sad some days. I do not yet know how to thrive in this industry in this body, life and personality. For now, I want to keep trying though.
If I was truly honest about my deepest dreams, I think I would like to be an illustrator, but I have no idea how to learn, where to start, and how to stay solvent if I were to pivot like that.
Apart from three years in my life when I earned between £18K-£21K, I have lived most of my adult life on less than £15K a year and yet we’ve always, somehow, had enough. I am endlessly struck by the miracle of this — it’s proper loaves and fishes stuff. I owe my life to people’s generosity and kindness.
Despite having a body that reacts bizarrely and unpredictably to movement, exercise is one of my greatest joys and I try to do as much as I’m able to without hurting myself. In another life, I believe I could have been an athlete or a dancer.
The two most difficult truths I had to face last year were, firstly, that a part of my brain has become addicted to thinking of myself as a victim, and that secondly, many of my parenting decisions over the years have been rooted in my need to feel safe and ok, not in what was actually best. Ouch.
I find friendship painfully difficult. I constantly have thoughts that I’m getting it wrong, being annoying or disappointing, or that I’m too much (or too little ). Despite knowing these are just meaningless thoughts, I still really struggle to relax around other people and often feel very lonely.
I often worry that western psychological therapies are mostly a distraction from the real issues at play in humanity and just keep us chasing our own tails. That said, I still pay for my son to see a counsellor as I’m not sure what a realistic, safe and compassionate alternative would be right now.
I believe my spiritual home is near mountains. I don’t know what it is about them, but they make me sob with recognition, belonging and peace. I am endlessly thankful to Turadh for giving me the opportunity to spend time in my soul-place of Glenelg. Every trip there is a genuine pilgrimage to me.
Endometriosis means I should probably give up gluten for good, but I’m in denial and REALLY don’t want to. All the best things are glutenous!
Even though I get it and want people to earn the money they need, I am utterly utterly exhausted by people trying to sell me something and hate feeling like almost every person online has an angle these days. It leaves me feeling hollow and left out in a way I find hard to describe. I don’t really know how to fit in here anymore, whether I should compete or copy, or opt out altogether.
It doesn’t help that I am extremely suggestible to the promise of a course or programme. I can be very compulsive and if I had the money would probably sign up for hundreds of things. In the moment of reading/watching the sales pitch, I am 100% convinced that whatever it is would change my life.
My biggest regret is not going to university. Being a student makes me really, really happy, and if I could afford to stop working to do a degree I would in a heartbeat. I think my course hunger is a big part of this — a longing for that student/learner feeling.
I am an avid saver and never buy anything before I’ve saved up for it, even if it takes me a long time. I actually really like this about myself and it means I live without debt.
I LOVE cleaning and keeping my little house clean and tidy and am quite uncomfortable at how dysfunctional that makes me sound. I use the FlyLady method, spread over the week with F doing the heavy stuff, and it gives me such genuine pleasure. My love language is a shiny sink.
One caveat: I currently have a strange block around watering my houseplants and I don’t know why.
A meal that I haven’t had to cook is the best gift anyone could give me.
Most days, I think about people I’ve hurt in my life and make wishes for their happiness. Some weights I’ll never be entirely free of and I’m ok with that — it keeps me honest.
I am simultaneously not doing anywhere near enough for the world and doing the best I can with a very fallible mind and body, and the guilt and grief of that double truth is a constant companion.
I experience extreme physical pain when I think I’m being rejected, criticised or judged, even by complete strangers. It’s a full body experience, as reflexive and automatic as a heartbeat, and I have no idea how to stop it.
I have a tendency to revert to seriousness and I treat this tendency in myself like it’s a dangerous disease (it is).
I still don’t feel like I’ve found my style. I feel uncomfortable and not ‘myself’ in all of my clothes, struggle with my reflection, and rarely have the confidence to go shopping, but I’m not sure this actually matters all that much.
I don’t think I’m a very fun or easy companion. I’m incredibly quiet, like doing the same things over and over, and am often hyper-focused and withdrawn. Plus I am nearly always tired. The fact that F and other people in my life enjoy being with me is a gift I feel grateful for every single day.
This one is going to sound clumsy. Although I fully acknowledge that my identities grant me both certain privileges and disadvantages in the eyes of wider society and I will always honour the importance of identity to other people, I have stopped labelling or holding identities for myself in my head. Fixating on them fixes me as something solid when I am actually always changing, and I want to be free to change. It also creates a binary sense of ‘me’ and ‘other’ in my head which just hurts everyone.
I have never been more sure that I’ve chosen the right person to spend my life with. Not because it’s effortless or perfect, but because I wholeheartedly trust that we are both old enough and wise enough to know what it takes to make a relationship work and to survive life’s unpredictability. Also, he makes me laugh every day which is, I think, the thing I need most (see point 32). Also, I just really, really LIKE him.
The highlight of my week at the moment is to go to a little coffee shop in town. I am known there by name and feel such fondness for the staff who work there, it makes me gawky and shy. I wish they could be my friends. (They gave me a free cake as I wrote some of this).
I am working on a huge, intricate cross stitch picture, a little each evening. It’s going to take me well over a year. The fact that very very few people (perhaps no one?) will have had the patience to finish it is intensely motivating to me.
I am finding perimenopause a frankly horrible surprise and had no idea it would affect me so profoundly.
I believe that wealth-hoarding is an immoral act and aberration to life itself. I do not believe money is morally neutral — it can’t be until its lack isn’t a cause of human pain and inequality. I also believe modern-day capitalism, as it exists now, must be dismantled or we will annihilate ourselves. I hope I get to live long enough to see what comes next.
It sounds fatalistic, but I truly believe huge, irreversible change is coming to the world, although I don’t know what form it will take. My mission is to train myself to stay in the present moment so that when things collapse, I’m ready. I will be better able to cope with my own experience, accept loss, stay present and compassionate with other people’s pain, and respond from love, not endless self-protection.
I have spent my whole life believing that thinking and figuring things out holds the answer to all my problems. This has been a terrible mistake. My thinking mind is the least helpful, interesting and reliable thing about me.
I am learning to trust what exists underneath and behind thinking in the quieter, still place. It is safe to let go and let it steer. Slowly, slowly, I’m learning how to do that.
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