The Charm Quark’s posterous

I have a world first to announce. In fact, I might announce two world firsts. The first world first (just to screw you around with words) is that I won a competition this Christmas. A lameness competition. Yes! I am officially the lamest person (apart from James the Dancing Geek) that Johnny B Truant has ever encountered. I achieved this by having an imaginary world for which I had designed a tax system.

The second first was that for the very first time in my life, I felt rather low leaving my parents'. Normally, there reaches a point where conversations about bowel movements, dietary fibre and allotment politics exhaust me, but this time was different. There's always been an emotional tension as well, something that has always driven me to live as far as away as humanly possible without actually leaving the country.

The last few years have been fraught with explosive battles between my mother and me; ever since I first left for university twelve years ago I've been unable to spend much time there without developing a severe case of bruxism. This time has been different. I've changed, and my mother's changed. I was stunned that she'd been to a counsellor, but it seems to have changed everything; we've even been talking about how difficult I'm finding it emotionally to do the whole publishing thing.

I'll talk about the conversations we had in another entry. Tonight, I felt pulled away to a lonely life in the north as I left. Over the last few days I've thought about dropping everything here and living there instead. Of course, it's ridiculous, and the moment I did it I'd realise it was a mistake. It wasn't until I walked in through the door of my apartment and saw it again that I realised I was in the right place.

There's a lot to catch up on here and elsewhere. I have a great deal to work out in my mind after the last ten days, but at least it seems all the issues with my family have been spontaneously resolved.

Loading mentions Retweet

Sometimes, life sends you wonderful things. Two parcels in the mail full of fantastic new meditations, a book or two. Friends who keep supporting you and kicking you up the rear end when you need it.

Other times, life sends you things to help you learn lessons, or because it wants you to change direction. I had this lingering feeling for about a week that I might well end up with my parents and grandmother (the woman who recently lost a battle with a door to the detriment of her vertebrae) over Christmas. I was in two minds about it. Nice to be in company, especially family. Not so nice when my parents have their own issues and attitudes about my life.

I described the bust-up with my mother in my last entry. Puzzlingly, it didn't involve my dad, who used to be the man everybody feared. Somehow he developed a reputation as a very tough teacher that spread even as far as the rougher quarters of my school. When I was younger, I knew you just didn't cross him. My mother's technique for getting me to do what she wanted was to get my dad to yell at me.

Last year, that didn't work. She rushed off to find him, so he could presumably yell at me and terrify me into obedience. Dad came on the line. "Mum says you want to be a writer," he said in the tone he uses that's somewhere between confused and sombre.

"Yes," I said.

"Well, I think that's great," he said. "You have to go and do these things when you're young."

Dad has read Amnar, of course. He's read all of the original seven books, although somehow he managed to miss out the crucial sixth book. This led to some baffling conversations. Since we're both basically historians (he was a history teacher, and my geography PhD is basically history in a cunning disguise, i.e. I added some maps), we have a lot of good conversations over the material that appears in the story.

There is, however, a palpable pressure to do what they want me to do. Or at least, what makes my mother worry least about me doing. This is my issue, I appreciate that. It's up to me to decide what to do with my life. Yet it's also a huge emotional tug to turn around to your mother and have to say that you're not actually capable of preventing her worrying. I realised this evening as I was reading (books and revelations go together with me, you notice), that a lot of the issues I have around doing all this with Amnar come from wanting to make her happy.

On one level, it really upset me that I was upsetting her last year. She has developed huge fears around doing anything out of the ordinary. While her life experiences made her react with increasing fear, mine have just served to make me tougher. I feel bad about doing this, going out on a limb. In fact, I think ever since I began writing I've felt bad for doing it, mostly because I could see it was upsetting her.

Pause.

I just had a Freudian slip moment. I meant to type "I know she wants to protect me from all the bad stuff out there." What I actually typed out was "I know she wants me to protect her from all the bad stuff out there." In some ways both are true. She doesn't want to have to face the rejection and the pain of The Big Failure, as much as she doesn't want me to face it. These are complicated emotions, and I always find myself going into conversations with my mother arming myself with proof that I'm doing all right.

Work needs to be done around that. Most of that work is chilling out around her and remembering I can't do anything about her chronic guilt, stress and fear. I've done a great deal about mine. Hers is the little corner of the world where I constantly get dragged back into the badness.

This will obviously require some preparation. How convenient that "The Survivor Personality" showed up in the post this morning. Most of my preparation involves working out my patterns, doing a lot of breathing and relaxing, and remembering that no matter how much I try to do the right thing for my mother, I never actually can.

Loading mentions Retweet

I was going to begin today with bad news. Well, not bad news as such, but a description of last night's Outrageous Screaming Terrors. I was overcome with fear and doubt, wondering how I'll feed myself in January, pay the rent and survive generally. This is what happens when you make big decisions about your life. Fear comes up, doubt comes up. I managed to settle my mind down after a little practice, but it can be tough. I've read so much lately about stretching your comfort zone rather than leaving it. Yet I seem to have left my comfort zone so far behind I'd probably need not just satnav but an Ordnance Survey, compass and a pair of sturdy boots to find it.

This morning, I woke up to find myself showered with good things. First of all, it's beautiful outside. This does mean that my apartment will be freezing cold all day, but I'm quite happy to keep my fan heater on for the pleasure of a cloudless sky. I came downstairs feeling rather flat, thinking I would need a lot to make me feel good today. As I supped upon my detox drink, the intercom went off and I heard that wonderful gravelly voice on the other end: "Postman!"

Not just one parcel but two! Two parcels! A while ago I ordered myself the four latest Paraliminal meditations, and today they've arrived, along with a book by Al Siebert on resiliency. This immediately cheered me up, as these were technically Christmas presents for myself to give me a bolster through my current Life Crash. Thrilled by this development, I set off for my morning walk.

You might remember from my rather scattered entry yesterday that I mentioned I didn't have anybody to share Christmas with. This isn't good when you're feeling festive and happy. Oddly, despite the Life Crash, I am feeling very upbeat most of the time. On my way out of the door for my walk, my iPhone beeped at me, telling me I had email. My mother was getting in touch to ask if I'd like to go down there for Christmas.

Now, there are issues around this. Since the last time I spent real, physical time with my parents, we had a bust-up. In fact, the bust up was this time last year, when a contract came to an end. I was desperately terrified, despite a friend offering me emergency financial help. For the first time, I talked to my mother about seriously writing. Seriously, after writing fourteen books and keeping an online diary forever. I was almost ready to acknowledge a few important things about my life. Unfortunately, my mother wasn't happy with this at all, and things grew ugly. For a few months we didn't speak.

The relationship between my mother and me and writing is a difficult one. She'd worked in publishing and maybe even had ambitions to be a writer. I don't think anything could have been worse for a woman who's had her personal dream crushed and abandoned than having a daughter who writes her first books between the age of eight and nine. Looking back, there was no way I was ever going to be intended for anything else, to be honest.

Regardless of that, the attitude has always been that I have to get a Proper Permanent Job, and do the Proper Permanent Job for all eternity, no matter how I feel about it. This is something I've absorbed into myself, along with the idea that I'm responsible for making my mother feel OK about what I'm doing. In a desperate bid for her approval, I did everything I could to please her. I went to university and studied geography. I thought about being an academic, but it really didn't fit.

Leaving academia behind, degree and PhD and big brain in hand, I set out to become... a secretary. Yes! You have it right. My mother, after teaching in Africa, after doing the same things I'd done in life (constantly breaking rules, taking risks and the rest), had become a secretary. So I thought I'd be a secretary too. Unfortunately, it just didn't work out. Not only did no permanent jobs come along, but when I did contracts, I didn't seem capable of doing them for very long. It's taken four years of working on and off, starting my own business as an analyst, to realise I am really, really, really not cut out for office life. Or indeed any job where other people tell me what to do with myself.

Still, I tried very hard. When people told me that many people have to do things they don't like, I felt guilty for wanting more from life. Why should I have to have a life where I spend nine hours of every day for the rest of my life in a situation I hated. Who'd choose to do that? At the same time, every time I've tried to run away from writing, it's dragged me back again. When somebody asked how I'd managed to write so many books in such a short space of time, I had to reply that basically, it happened by accident. I wasn't planning on it. All these words just come pouring out of me, this world won't let me go.

Even as I write this I feel a little bad. My patterns are showing up (which is good), as I tell myself it's not fair to think I have any right to be a writer, to make money from it, to have Amnar take off. In short, to let myself be me. This is one of my patterns, the major reason why I hold back. And, I think, why I wake up at 3am with the Outrageous Screaming Terrors.

Regardless, it seems like I don't have a choice. It's started to feel like if I don't do this willingly, the universe will ass-whup me into it by some other means. I'm currently indebted to people like Charlie Gilkey and the Woman Known As The Girl Pie for promoting me and pushing me forward with this, while I dig in with my nails and think "No! I must plan for mediocrity! Mediocrity and boring are good!"

Despite the fact that my mother tends to put me on the defensive, I called her up and after some back and forth, I'm flying down there to see them on Friday night. It might be flinging myself into the lion's den, but also a good opportunity to test my gradually growing confidence in myself and what I can do. Patterns and habits can be revealed and worked through!

On the plus side, I get to see my gorgeous and thoroughly wonderful niece and nephew. My niece looks so like me that people usually assume I'm her mother. I'm secretly proud of this.

Loading mentions Retweet

Today I started dancing in front of the mirrors at the gym. In the changing room, not actually in the gym itself, I hasten to add. Partly, I was excited because I actually went to the gym, as opposed to telling myself I would go and then not going. Yesterday, I managed to get halfway there when I realised I only had half my kit. I couldn't convince myself to go home and get it, so I just went about my errands, partial gym-kit in tow.

Getting to the gym was a good sign. I'm also very pleased with a new detox drink I've been trying out. Usually detoxes turn out to be painful assemblages of pill-consumption and a restriction to shredded lettuce. This is not a fun way to eat. This detox allows you to eat pretty much anything you like without sending you running to the bathroom every five minutes.

The very best thing about this is that also tastes very good indeed. That's important. I'm not sure where we get the idea that in order for something to be good for us, it must be horrible, but I've come to the conclusion that that's what most detox-peddlers believe.

I also found myself feeling very good today. Just generally feeling good. This is despite the packed streets filled with people ignoring the recession, and that usual sardines-in-a-can sensation of Christmas shopping. I seem to have slipped into a routine for dealing with the crazy and the stories going on in my head. Confession is the thing. Something comes up, I open up about it, and it's released. It's meant going through a great deal of things in a short time, but this is all good. I've felt lighter than I have in ages.

Even better, the Amnar podcast was released today, which meant going through that mildly cringe-making moment of listening to myself tell the story of Tay's appearance in the story. I actually remember recording this one, and it was one of those sudden crack-up episodes where I released I'd written something good without knowing I had. Tascha and Daar's exchange over bats and sonic hearing is one of those sections where I can feel relieved that Amnari aren't the kind of goody-goodies you just want to shoot in the head.

You might remember that I mentioned I'd done a crazy thing yesterday and contacted somebody about writing. They got back to me. They didn't run away in horror! I was shocked. What she did do was give me a great many helpful links in case I ever wanted to start copywriting. Something to dig through over Christmas.

And now the great confessional part... I have nowhere to be on Christmas. Or rather, I have somewhere to be but nobody will be in it with me.

This has happened to me once before and at the time I was very brave and said that I would have Christmas alone for some serious contemplation. Now I'd like to admit that actually, it's a bit daunting. It's mostly daunting because there's a huge sense that you rate as a social human being if you have somewhere to be at Christmas. It shows that other human beings care about you enough to share their Christmas with you. If you have nowhere to be - nobody to be with - you're sad and lonely and a bit pathetic. Like three-day-old lettuce.

A few things have led to this. My mother has been diagnosed with Crohn's, and is still getting used to medication. My parents are also dealing with my grandmother, who recently lost in an altercation with a door and has been hospitalised. Under no circumstances am I allowed to go down and visit. My grandmother is very strict about this. She has her pride and she doesn't like people fawning over her in hospital. It's also a plane ride away.

Last year I spent Christmas with friends which was a bit of a rout, and lots of fun except that I drank. I'm not good at drinking alcohol. I'm very petite so it tends to act quickly and painfully. I'm also not used to lashings of rich and exciting food, which my stomach wholly rejected. Quite frequently. All night. Yes, it was embarrassing.

Other friends are doing other things, usually with family. And I can tell you from experience that there is nothing worse than spending Christmas with a strange family, with their own unique beliefs and traditions, especially when you're going through Major Transformational Change. I get up in the morning with one set of limiting ideas, and go to bed utterly changed by the end of the day. I have no idea who I'll be by Christmas. Anything could happen.

Last time I spent Christmas alone, I got a variety of different reactions. I had a few friends who'd spent Christmases alone and felt a combination of loneliness and liberation. One friend treated it as a personal insult and demanded that I spend the time with himself and his Catholic family. I have nothing against Catholics but I didn't really want to be around his family, especially considering that he never wants to be around his family either. That is not an advert for a great experience.

I remarked to a friend while discussing my solitude this year that in many ways it's worse to be the Poor Abandoned Temperamental Author Seeking Shelter and wind up feeling like a stray dog brought in for the day, than it might be to be alone. I feel upbeat and happy and festive this year, and if I could spend Christmas with a bunch of other happy, upbeat and festive people in the same sort of life-place, on the same path, I'm sure I'd be very happy. I'm not sure I'm up to being in discomfort for the sake of proving to the rest of humanity that I am, actually, capable of having human relationships that involve Christmassy socialisation.

I'm wondering, actually, if this is one of those kicks from life. Being alone with the pile of books I've got to read, I can go through Stuff. It's the ultimate Facing Myself experience. At least, that's what I'm telling myself at the moment.

Loading mentions Retweet

Since I've decided to start shifting my thinking away from "I have so many issues" to "who am I really?", this is relevant. There's no obligation on anybody to read all of what I write here. I am just exploring as this stuff pours out.

I don't really want to talk about loveableness or creativity or quirkiness, or things that people usually say when they try to describe themselves. These are CV phrases. I'm curious about what my behaviour says about what's really going on. I say things about me, but what's happening underneath the surface?

The title of this post comes from the film Fight Club. I have a review poster in my bedroom with that quote at the top of it. I passed it as I came downstairs to write and it was appropriate. I was thinking about resiliency, and the Al Siebert interview I read last night. This was a great discovery. I've had this book on my coffee table for three months and never looked at it. Suddenly, I'm all over it.

Resiliency is all about the capacity to bounce back.

This is the story of how Amnar arrived in my head. It's also a story about how helpful amnesia can be if people are telling you that you can't do something. Ten years ago, when I was severely anorexic (I weighed about 64-78lbs) I was at university and breaking into my second year. I was also on anti-depressants. Suddenly, I had a grand mal seizure. The type where one minute you're standing there, and the next you're on a gurney in an ambulance feeling slightly embarrassed and more than a little confused.

In Britain, if you have two in a year they call you epileptic and put you on drugs. At the time, I said I had anorexia, I said I might have another reason for having seizures. Electrolyte imbalance, or perhaps a side effect of medication. They were, on the other hand, very insistent. Christmas ten years ago I had a second seizure. A junior doctor insisted that I could take both my anti-depressant and my new epileptic drug at the same time.

I have a two week black hole in my memory from that point to the night I woke up in hospital. Apparently, I lost the capacity to speak properly, began having frequent, violent seizures and became almost completely unable to function. Eventually, my mother 350 miles away spoke to me one night, and I couldn't string a sentence together. She called the campus medical unit, who initially refused to act. Eventually, they somehow got to me and I was admitted to hospital and resuscitated.

One abiding memory remains and that was seeing the whole of Amnar right there, knowing what it was to be a Servant, and getting a full view of the whole story.

What matters right now, though, in this jaw-droppingly serious story, is what happened afterwards. I woke up and refused to take any medication. How I did this, I don't know. I know I was tormented by doctors and nurses about it. My short-term memory was blitzed. Everything was constantly new, and at the same time, irksomely familiar. A chronic sense of deja-vu. A week later I was released from hospital.

I am told, because I have no memory of it, that most people assumed I would give up university and go back home. I'd be put into an institution to deal with the brain damage they thought might be permanent. There was a constant pressure to get me back on both medications, and I refused.

I have tiny snapshots of memory left; going to see the Head of Year II in Geography, handing him a piece of paper explaining my situation. I was a top class student achieving very high grades. They wanted to keep me. The department, apparently, backed me staying. I went back to lectures with half a memory. I remember my first lecture, and how painstakingly I took notes so that my slippery mind could hold on to the ideas.

Losing my memory, the temporary loss of my mind, should really have done for me. I relied on my good memory to write essays, to communicate, to live. I don't remember ever wondering if I should give up university. It never occurred to me at all. I graduated when I should and went on to postgraduate study. As I was collecting results for an essay and project in my third year, I was informed that I'd been given a three year scholarship for my PhD. It's awarded very rarely and only in exceptional cases. The department hadn't really told them the subject of my thesis. The case had been all about how I simply didn't give up, even when my brain failed.

That's resiliency. I don't say this as a boast. I hope you don't take it that way. Last night I sat there thinking about all the times I've almost deliberately hurled myself off the metaphorical cliff, and in every situation I find my way through. This is something that can be learned, apparently, but not taught.

I was wondering how I do it. I thought today about how I saw this advert, and I decided to be crazy and write this strange email to somebody I don't know all about me and my writing. Just because I wanted to see whether the words flowing out of me went anywhere interesting with this person. I've always thought that I seem to be constantly in trouble, but perhaps it's just the counterbalance of the fearful side of me, too afraid to step up to the plate, while something about crisis, taking myself to the edge, pulls something out of me that I otherwise can't find.

The quote in the title is all about knowing how you handle the storm coming at you. It's not easy. I don't think I could say it's easy. There are times when I've wished I could have short-term memory loss during all my crises, so I don't remember how scared I am.

Why am I writing all this? Well, because I'm terrified. I wanted to remember that whenever I'm terrified, it's usually because something big is happening. I go to these places and do these crazy things because they remind me that I'm alive. I can tell somebody else's grandkids about doing all these things, in the hope that they'll have the courage to go "Hey, if she can, so can I."

There I was thinking all this time I was pretty much hopeless and lost, and not knowing what I was doing. Deep down inside, as I said before, I have some kind of plan. I know how to cope, to side-step, to dodge and to walk straight. I have a capacity to hold on tight no matter how afraid I am, and wait for the thing that feels right to show up rather than moving with my fear. It's really hard. I'm not going to say that not jumping when you feel terrified is easy as picking daisies. That's what I'm doing right now, all over again. Whatever happens on the other side of this big scary open space I'm in, this vortex I feel I'm in right now, I always know it's the right thing. It's worth waiting for.

Thank you for reading.

Loading mentions Retweet

An email from somebody whose blog I found over the weekend. Pace Smith is all about communication and she is sexy with words. It was she who wrote the line on which the title of this entry is based. I only added the 'expiating', for effect and to prove that I too can play wordsmith when I try.

She had read one of my posts over the last couple of days about my "not being good enough" and how this had become embedded in my identity. Her idea is that this concept of identity doesn't work that well for me. "Not being good enough" isn't actually a part of my identity in the way that I thought. It's extrinsic, an adopted story to which I've become attached over time. The word of the moment is 'smallenating', which doesn't really exist but should.

I've been smallenating myself. It started deliberately and became chronic. Chronic smallenating, until it was so much a part of what I do to live and get on with people, that I don't know how to do anything else. The idea is that if I try to self-sabotage, if I keep making myself small and insignificant, people will like me. Or at least, not hurt me as much.

It's a pattern, a habit, a program for survival. And also a chronic belief that it's bad to even like yourself privately, let alone say something like 'Hey, I think I might not be the most awful and evil and bad person who ever lived.'

People will hate me if I think I do well, that's the basic program, I think. If I be myself, if I let go and allow myself to be and achieve all the things I want, I'll be the ultimate evil.

Move aside Hitler.

It comes from being told when I was very young, over and over again, that I was far too confident and that in fact, I was stupid and useless. You start to believe these stories if you're told them enough.

Pace calls all these things "awesomeness inhibitors", potentially the best term ever designed for dealing with such problems as feeling like this. Much better than calling oneself a perfectionist or having low self-esteem. "Awesomeness inhibitors" fits into the wiring and programming model of the brain I've been working with.

I've spent most of my life trying to do badly, trying to fail without actually failing so badly I get yelled at by my parents. In one light, being anorexic is one very good way to hold yourself back, although it actually does wonders for your mental arithmetic (add up the calories in every meal in that menu in five seconds, and then just order the green side salad anyway). I keep a running tab on how badly I'm doing. A mental voice in my head over the years has kept telling me how bad I am, and it's so constant that it stopped being audible some time ago. It's just a low, incessant buzzing.

Here though, is the thing. Having decided yesterday during my Waterstone's epiphany that I was "okay", in a fundamental, universal way, things started to shift. I start to see myself differently. I can even feel the new neurons connecting up and sparking away.

I happened to buy a book called "Never Good Enough", but by the time I got it home I realised it's no good continually getting things that focus on broken bits needing to be fixed. Just reading descriptions of the people used as examples in the book I felt healthier. Instead, I ended up reading a book about resiliency by Al Siebert.

I have an incredible capacity for resiliency, for survival. This is my first step into awesomeness. For all the decades I put into carefully not doing well at anything, it was one of the few things I turned out to be catastrophically bad at doing. That, and playing the trombone.

There are ways of describing yourself and who you are, what you've been through and what you can do. Perhaps this is why I never liked it when people tried to be empathetic with me over having been anorexic. I wasn't weeping in the corner. To be honest I really am rubbish at the whole victim mentality thing. It's something I do, I see, to get on in the world. If people see me that way, they'll think I'm safe and harmless and won't hurt me. Yet it gets on my nerves a bit when they see me as weak and struggling and helpless.

Everything I've experienced was just an experience. Forgetting the pain of the moment, you can sink back into that moment when you wished the ground would open under you and it just didn't. You had to stand there and take whatever it was you had to take. It takes strength to do that. Some people focus on the pain of what they were experiencing, others on the fact that they were still standing up at the end of it all, and that they kept going. Their heart kept beating, their liver kept functioning. They kept on going even when it seemed like the end of the world. However much their mind hurt, their spleen hardly noticed.

That's where I come from in life. After writing back and forth with Pace I started to think about the strength that I keep tied down and try to hide. I ordered Al Siebert's book on being a survivor personality. It's nice when you see yourself described and realise that all the things you've been through weren't a demonstration that you're a terminal screw-up, but that you have the courage to step out there and do the crazy scary thing regardless of consequence.

That is the start of the breakdown of the awesomeness inhibitors, I reckon.

Loading mentions Retweet

First note: I'm a whole bundle of posts and talk today. Well, it's Sunday. That's what happens.

I have a friend who has them in the bathroom. Epiphanies lurking under the toilet seat or in the shower head. They're just waiting to spring up at you and say "Ping!"

I had mine in Waterstone's.

Somebody hasn't told a great many people that there's a financial crisis on and it's the End of Days. You can hardly move for shoppers, all of them buying books about how to cope when the world falls apart, how not to waste your money on faddy things, and books by Malcolm Gladwell. His books are not in the 3 for 2 sale, which is rather disappointing.

I wanted to read something but I didn't know what. I went to my usual areas and looked at the books blankly, in the way that you might look at paintings in the Uffizi, admiring the colours and the art. Somehow I found myself in the Self-Help section. I found myself thinking that it's no wonder we all think we're messed up. There are so many people writing books about our apparent faults that it's easy to start to think you might have a bit of a problem.

This is how I got stressed out. I thought there was something wrong with me for a very long time, and it needed to be fixed. I needed to be repaired, like a car about to fall apart. I don't think right! I'm not earning millions! I'm not calm and peaceful all the time! I'm not in a perfect, loving harmonious relationship! I don't have perfect children! I realise I've spent a lot of my time thinking there's a place you get to that's right, where you're all right, because of all the stuff you have to prove it. A certain bank balance, the Right Job, the not-quite-perfect-but-lovably-quirky partner. Until then, read the books and do the stuff and listen to the exercises on tape.

The feeling that there's something a bit, say, wonky, in your life is the hook that gets you in. Then you decide there's a whole slew of stuff that isn't OK. Until you get there, until you prove it all, what do you do?

This isn't the revelation, by the way. That's coming up about now.

There's a pillar in front of one of the bookshelves in that section of Waterstone's. I leant on it and looked over all the brightly coloured spines telling me how to be happy now, to get back my self-confidence, to perfect my relationships, how to pull any girl or boy I want in thirty seconds.

"I should choose something," I thought.

"But," said a voice inside me; "you're okay."

If Arandes Nashima himself had walked up to me at that point and said it, I couldn't have been more surprised. Me, the young woman constantly at odds with herself, deciding that actually, on balance, she's okay.

(Arandes Nashima, if you don't know, is from Amnar.)

Maybe this is how you get to detachment. There's a Buddhisty concept that suggests that whatever state you're in, that's okay. So whether you're single, struggling, super-rich or Jeremy Clarkson, you're still okay, just as valid, just as acceptable as anybody else. I believe it's mentioned in one of Pema Chodron's books where she talks about a student who refers to himself as "Buddha being angry" or "Buddha feeling sad."

I know that reading another book about self-confidence or self-esteem, or Dealing With Fear, or anything else isn't actually going to improve on anything. I wanted to put a big sign up over the whole shelf and say "You're OKAY. However you feel right now, that's COOL."

It's a slightly freaky thing for me, because of course I've spent my whole life thinking I'm in some fundamental way not good enough for anything. But you know what made the change? Realising that it was okay to think that I was in some way not good enough for anything. It was all right to think "Argh! I messed up!" or "Argh! I'm not perfect!" or just "FAIL!" in some existential way.

Of course, now I'm utterly terrified. Being okay is new. It's one-step-at-a-timesville from here on in. But that's what gets you to detachment. Being okay with not being okay. I have no idea what comes next, aside from learning to be okay with fear, and doing the things that come after the fear.

Final note:

Speaking of Le Free, the Amnar podcast has not yet gone out and people are asking. I'm talking to Dan tomorrow about it, so we can also get the donate button fixed. That made my Friday. Lovely people telling me they wanted to donate, but couldn't. Ah. Otherwise, I'd probably never have known.

Thank you.

Loading mentions Retweet

Random thoughts for a Sunday. I might be starting a tradition here.

Amnari words

There is a word that has been with me since I was about ten. It popped into my head and has never left. It's the Amnari word, 'tesh'. It has no meaning; it's what they call an 'emotion word' from the very birth of language, intended to convey compassion. It's a word about oneness or I'm with you. It's a word mothers or gadasim say to their children, and it's also a word used by watchers to convey support to patients; warriors sometimes say it to each other when they've had a hard fight. It's a word I could use right now.

Arandes says that tesh is the most important, most easily transmuted word in Amnari. When it's said you understand what it means so it conveys the same in any language, whether you speak Amnari or not (and the chances are, at this stage in the game, that you don't). It's a very simple word, with a huge application, and the most important application. It's used to make other people feel OK about themselves. In Amnar they don't worry about making speeches or sending presents, or what might make everything work out. They sit with you and say "tesh."

Holosync

At the very end of November, I finished Holosync Level II and started Level III. I've been on Holosync now for a year and a half, and I'm almost religious about it. I've never actually missed a day of listening, at least as far as I'm aware. Moving on to a new level always leads to 'the funnies', the moments when you stand in Tesco and start crying over the picture of the cow on the milk carton, start smiling at small children meaninglessly or develop peculiar aches and pains. It's not often, it has to be said, that you get to say "Well, my occipital bones are playing up."

Just say no

James, the Dancing Geek, has been talking about letting go. In fact, everybody's letting go. Letting go is the new taking control. It's also hard work. I'm a fan of the Sedona Method, which took me a year or so to actually learn. The trick? Say no.

The Sedona Method, for those who don't know about it, is a technique for letting go of unpleasant, or indeed pleasant, sensations and emotions. It's not, as one reviewer mistakenly thought, about getting rid of them. It's about the acceptance of the constant flow of emotion and feeling. It's about learning the skill we lost in childhood; the ability to fall over, cry, get back up again and carry on playing.

To use the method, you have questions to answer: What's your "now" feeling? Can you let it go? Would you? When?

Whenever I used to say "yes" I clung on. I thought letting go of it had to feel like something specific, that I had to do something. When I realised I could just say "no" and the feeling evaporated of its own accord. Sometimes, saying "no" is a really good thing to do. That was one of those times.

Back to words, English this time

I've been trying to find the word that describes my attitude to what's happening to me. The whole Life Crash phenomenon. Watching the stuff unfold before me without being troubled by it. Some people seem to think I'm stressed or upset. Not true. The word I was looking for was detachment.

Detachment is a tough thing to describe, as is depression, which in some senses is the opposite. Depression might be described as a kind of negative attachment. At times, the experience of depression is like being in a room with 900 people all telling you you're crap at once. At other times it's like being alone at the end of the world when everybody else has died, and you have no way of making a good cup of tea. Either you feel like your mind is running a 300-ring circus or that it's stopped completely and your body didn't notice. Having it leave overnight, without a fight or a struggle, makes you feel like you woke up one day and everybody moved the furniture around in your apartment. Very subtly.

This new place, this ability to watch with detachment, is interesting. It is fearlessly going into emotions and thoughts with the realisation, deep down inside you somewhere, that they can't actually hurt you. This is a wonderful thing.

Loading mentions Retweet

After the whole splat thing yesterday, I found I'd been linked to by a guy whose blog I'd discovered. I really liked the blog, and commented on it. It then tumbled into a conversation about Amnar, how I came to find it and know it was My Thing (my purpose, my reason to be, etc), and the whole splat-healing process.

This kind of relates to how I feel about advice and why I haven't opened myself up to comments too much. Last January I went to see an Oscar Wilde play, The Ideal Husband. It features a guy who at one point says he has no use for good advice, so he passes it on. I rather felt I knew what he meant. I've never been good at taking advice, and rarely have people offered it. Once somebody said I always seemed to know what I was doing. It's true. I do know what I'm doing, even when I don't. Usually I don't consciously know exactly what I'm doing, and I'm not a great Planner. But I do have a sense of knowing. And deep down, it's a sense of trusting.

I've seen many people out there offering others the key to finding their purpose, knowing where they're going and what they're doing. It's all wonderful for those who need tools to help themselves out. But I wonder, is this a bit like all the advice given to new parents over babies? Have we forgotten how to trust ourselves?

Liaison's lesson

After I met Liaison in the summer, he kept telling me what I should be doing. This would go on for hours. He was very good at it, so I just let him blaze away about how I should do this, I shouldn't do that and I was getting it all wrong. The apartment is a good example. I needed to get out of my apartment, he said. We sat on a lawn somewhere and he told me all about how I couldn't stay in that apartment, I had to leave. Too expensive, too much rent to pay. It went on for about nine hours, I think. Then he walked in the front door of the apartment and like everybody who sees it for the first time, his jaw dropped. For the next nine hours he apologised constantly. He would never tell me to ever leave my gorgeous apartment ever again.

He asked why I never argued with him. "Fight me!" he said. "Tell me I'm wrong!" What's the point? I asked. I know you're going to learn for yourself eventually, I'm not wasting my breath.

A month after we split he acknowledged, ruefully and painfully, that whatever advice he ever gave me was wrong, and that therefore he didn't feel he needed to tell me what to do. I knew, and I would do it anyway whatever he said.

I don't think I'm alone in this. Genetically I may have inherited the Bloody-mindedness Gene from my grandfather, which makes it slightly more obvious, but I think we get lost in the slew of advice and stuff that's out there, and stop listening to ourselves, our small quiet voice inside saying "hey... what about...?"

The comments thing

I felt a bit guilty for talking about not allowing comments on my blog at In These Heels? I thought, "People will think I'm so big on myself they all want to write Outpourings of Love and Support to me!" Well, it was only based on experience. It has happened in the past.

During the summer, when my world fell apart financially, a friend considered writing me a big thing about how wonderful I was. I was in a very weird scary space and not really talking to anybody. I'd walked off a financial cliff and had to hope I'd either grow wings or that there might be a trampoline at the bottom waiting for me. She didn't tell me until after everything had worked itself out - which it did, it always does - that she had actually written a whole piece for me and then deleted it without sending. She said it didn't feel right.

Of course, in part, it's my programming. It doesn't take well to lots of outpouring. It finds it distrustful. It was about respect though. It was about realising what I needed and that what I needed was the stillness of being alone, going through this thing and finding my own way. It happened that it was letting go and trusting. Letting go and trusting are my new big things.

Let go and float

There's something to be said for letting go and trusting, letting life take you where it will. I have an inner sense when something is right for me. What I'm doing right now is waiting in that space until I know the next time to take a step, to make a move. Sometimes it can be terrifying. It's also a learning experience. Learning to be in the moment, not believing that endlessly doing will necessarily take you somewhere else. 'Not doing' is a tough thing to learn.

There's only so much of this stuff that you need

I had an email from the universe. It said that as much as it was happy to help me Work My Shit Out, it would much rather do the whole Making Life Happen that comes next. Point taken. Like many people I was getting caught in the self-development trap where you go from seminar to course to thing to course to seminar. You get seminar-high and think your life will change. But it doesn't. Feeling confused and empty we look for something to fill the space, to tell us what to do. We want a plan, a set of steps. Guarantees that it will work. Our lives will be magical.

We feel like, when it doesn't work, we failed in some way. Maybe it's time to do this: to be with the emptiness and confusion. To learn emptiness and confusion. To approach it with kindness rather than thinking we have to fix something. An answer will come. You might not realise until you're there and you're already doing it. You might be doing it now. You don't know. This is what I've been learning this week. To sit with the confusion until the little compass inside starts to point and says "Over there." Or life approaches, which it always does, and says "Hey, this!" And I know it's time to do.

Thank you for reading.

Loading mentions Retweet

There was a moment yesterday when a dam burst. Actually, the dam burst the previous evening during a reading of Jean Piaget's development levels. But it didn't hit until yesterday morning I sat down and wrote about the life-crash I'm going through. In this post I thought I'd talk a bit about the stuff I did (or didn't do) that is taking me through this strange experience. This might be a long post, so I'm going to use subheadings.

The software in my head is like Windows ME running on a Mac

We have our programs, which I mentioned in the last post. Havi Brooks talks about them, and so does Bill Harris and a few others. Programs develop when we're young in response to the circumstances we're in. They're there to help us cope. If you had a hard time at some development point (as Bill Harris has said), a part of your programming gets stuck there. Although most of our programs develop over the years into adulthood, if something goes crap in your life at some critical juncture a part of you that's designed to help you survive will come to some unpleasant conclusions about how to live.

An example from my life. I had almost no friends, but a couple got close to me. Very early on, they would be very kind and then very unpleasant. I learned that when people are nice, they're only waiting to be vicious later. A program develops that makes it hard to trust and hard to open up. I still find this in adulthood. I confessed to somebody that I assume that people who like me are just people who haven't realised they hate me yet.

This isn't dramatic. There's no drama or suffering there. It's just a program. It's part of being a human surviving on earth in complicated surroundings. Even the little voice that says you have no right to feel the pain you're feeling is a program. We're often taught not to feel emotional pain when we're young. Hands up if you were told that "big girls/boys don't cry" or some equivalent. We take this on board. As adults we tend to assume that our children only learn when we're actually intentionally teaching them. But kids are learning all the time. Especially when we're doing something we don't actually want them to learn.

Where I came to: the splat (and an analogy)

Imagine that you live in a house. It's a crap house. The wood's rotten, the roof leaks, the sofa was apparently made of nails, and there's a hole in the floor. You can see it's a crap house. You don't want to live there. It's horrible. You've already bought the house next door which is clean and dry. The taps work without making suspicious gurgling noises. It's lovely.

But you're suspicious of it. You're very familiar with where you live and it makes you feel safe. There's something about the goodness that makes you feel suspicious. A nagging feeling that it'll go wrong. That the universe will work out that actually, you don't deserve the house. It'll all go away and go back to being horrible.

Over the past year and a half, I've learned the Sedona Method, I've been on Holosync, I've used Paul McKenna's trance hypnosis tapes and I've used Paraliminals. I've bought courses. People offered me free life coaching to heal me. Gradually, the old programming began to fall away and the new programming took its place. I grew more confident, more outgoing, more at ease with myself.

But it's difficult, because when I notice sometimes, that things are new and different the old programming tells me I'm Going To Die Right Now OMG! And it's pretty damned urgent about all of this. So I flop back. It's taken a while to see that this isn't failure, this doesn't mean that I'm going to die alone in the leaky house with the sofa made of nails. It just means that I'm trying to protect myself. I'm trying to be safe in a big world that I was raised to believe was full of Terrifying Things.

Learning to meet myself where I am

This is the crucial thing. Right now in my life I have nowhere else to be, nobody else to be. I have no responsibilities to anybody other than myself (and possibly the people who listen to Amnar podcasts), Amnar and my own health. Maybe my accountant, but not really until the new year. I don't have to do anything. It's the perfect time for learning this stuff, this how to be okay stuff.

I read a lot of Havi's blog yesterday. Havi is all about approaching yourself with compassion and gentleness. A great many life coaches and personal development people talk about "musts" and "shoulds" and how you should make plans and goals and Go For It! And they say it's easy to just go out there and do it. Not, though, if you have the wonky wiring that says "If you do that, you'll die."

Some people say you ignore the programming. Trample on it. Some people recommend saying "Thank you!" before the trampling and pushing it out the window. What I like about Havi is her recognition that this doesn't work. The programming won't go away just because you said "Thank you and goodbye." If you try to ignore it and do scary things anyway, you may add to that programming more evidence for why you shouldn't go and do the scary thing.

I've spent, I realised last night, my whole life living according to the trample yourself and go for the goal rule. Put yourself through hell! If you really wanted this, you'd walk across hot coals to get it! That's what I've been told.

Balderdash.

I tried that with my PhD. Never want to go there again. I don't want to talk about my PhD and what I did. It was terrible. I'd have been better off paying somebody £150,000 to beat the crap out of me every day for five years. It would've been easier. Now it's all about being an author, getting Amnar out there. At the moment, if I want to do the whole pushy-pushy sell-myself thing, I have to shut off my vulnerable core. The small frightened place inside me that just wants to run and hide.

Guess what? Amnar is in my vulnerable core. That's where it comes from. So it's either, pushy-pushy or Amnar. That's not going to work. And I don't want to become a published author and find that I hate Amnar for putting me through so much hell in the same way I ended up hating my PhD for being so fucking painful to finish.

Havi works differently. Gently. Goes to the place you are, not tries to drag you to the place she happens to be.

Trying out compassion instead

Instead of assuming my pain is there but useless, thank you and goodbye, I tried something else. The pain isn't bad. It's not something to be afraid of. But it does want to be heard.

For years I've felt this clenching tightness, this freak-out "NO!" screeching at me when I go towards certain things. Instead of trying to get rid of it by rushing off to do a Paraliminal or read another book or do another exercise, I sat and listened, and felt. I felt the soreness that was there. The pain that was there.

After a while, it began to speak. Just a little voice. I gave it space without threats or judgements about it. I know it's me. It's a girl who's five and scared at a school where suddenly she's an outcast. It's a girl who's fourteen and sitting in empty corridors, hiding from everybody and hand-writing novels in a folder. For a place inside me, that experience is still real. With my head clear of painful memories, of the subconscious need to be something other than me, I could just be there with it. Listening to it speak.

All this stuff inside needs is attention. Gentle attention and appreciation. It doesn't matter how long it takes. I can feel that it's okay not to be able to do the stuff that other people demand that I do. After so much trying to please them, I can find me, and work out what's best for me. I've always known. After all, I knew and decided which university I went to and which course to study. I have the knowledge and the understanding of exactly the right way to go inside.

What it takes is the time to hold my own hand to go through this. Even if you're not ready to be comfortable with discomfort, you can be comfortable with the resistance to that discomfort.

There's a difference between pain and suffering

A great many people suffer. They don't want to have the thing inside they have. The pain, the memory, the horror. They wish it hadn't happened and constantly look outside for somebody else to take it away. Or they fight with their past as though it might be possible to undo what's been done. Maybe they go looking for the perpetrator, make them see reason. This is suffering. It's thinking pain is something you have to run away from or fix or resolve.

But pain is human. When you break your leg, you experience pain as a way of telling you that running the London Marathon would be a bad idea. It allows healing to take place. When you break your heart, or your mind, you tend to try to hammer yourself into the shape you think the world wants you to take. Or you fight with the world for stigmatising you. Or you just fight with yourself for feeling pain.

The pain in your heart is there for the same reason you get pain when you break your leg. It's telling you something important. Listen without judgement and it eases.

The day of the splat

I sat and listened as my head told me how others would close off to me, how hate would come my way. Nobody would understand. Everybody would run away screaming. I sat with it. Didn't react to it, didn't try to make it go away. Eventually, it began to look outside at reality and see what was happening, and settled down. It'll need a few more experiences to acknowledge that it's going to change, but it will. There is time.

So this is what it is to know and feel pain without resistance. I've never been here before. The more I do it, the more things change. Faster, as it happens, than it ever changed when I tried to get rid of it via other means. In many ways, that's ironic.

A note about comments

On my blog, comments are closed. Some people say that this is distancing myself from people, but at the moment, that's what's best for me. I've been resistant to comments not because I'm scared people will be mean but because, oddly, I don't want Dramatic Outpourings of Love And Support. It's okay to just get a coffee and sit and read this without serious emotional engagement with me and without trying to offer me help, counselling or support. Dramatic Outpourings have always made me uncomfortable, possibly because I'm English. I don't need an essay on how amazing or horrible you think I am for doing this, or anything else I've done. Read it and take away what you take.

This was the support conversation that rocked me, personally.

Friend: So you went splat on the internet.

Me: Yeah.

Friend: Big time suck right now?

Me: Suck and odd and good. It's great and it's not.

Friend: Need a hug?

Me: Need caffeine more.

Friend: I know the place to go.

Thank you for reading.

Loading mentions Retweet