I lost a lot of friends today. Maybe they weren’t friends in the first place but clowns, parading through my life with masks of good intent. It still hurts when the clown laughs the loudest though. I often wonder when the clown suit gets put away if you can look at yourself in the mirror and be proud of who stares back.
A sobering understanding of my position on the priority list of those I surround myself with settles like a fine dust on everything around me. Things now seem a little less bright. I was hoping to matter as much as you to me, but it just goes to show who you end up being friends with when you learn that others happiness is your responsibility and their needs are more important than your own. I seem to have taught those that I call friends that it’s ok to treat me with minimum consideration for my time, my voice, my dreams, ideas and advice. These feelings are rather uncomfortable.
Pain is uncomfortable.
We all have our coping mechanisms and sport used to be mine, it’s therapy now. And although therapy doesn’t work for everyone, it has helped me see things for what they are. Like looking into a crystal clear pool of water and being able to see all the way to the bottom. When you start seeing things clearly, you can start positioning yourself consciously and calmly, instead of chaotically trying to survive in murky water due to not knowing what lurks beneath. It’s the single greatest opportunity to step out of survival mode and step into really being alive.
The thing about sport is that it leaves you too exhausted to figure out the underlying issue, you end up too tired to do the work and feeling physically overwhelmed trumps heart ache and hurdles of the mind. You’re actually just avoiding whatever the issue is, never really dealing with it or arriving at a solution. Let’s go treadmill.
Therapy on the other hand has invited all the issues into session and now I know them all by name. All these many scallywags now join me every Tuesday for an hour to have a good old chinwag about what we all got up to in the week. It’s not something I always enjoy. It’s hard to show up week after week, it’s hard to be committed, it’s hard to be consistent and it’s hard to face the truth about yourself and the world around you. It’s hard to put down the stories spun to victimize ourselves and in the same space present ourselves as victors, never really taking responsibility for being here, because you know, it’s hard. Therapy is hard.
The beauty of therapy is that you can’t unsee what was once in the dark and now in the light. What makes therapy bitter-sweet is that you can’t put what was once in the dark, back in the dark. Instead, you have to make space at the table, dinner is about to be served and sharing meals are precious.
Throughout life we have pivotal opportunities to change and demand to be treated better. But you have to wake up first. Waking up to being treated in a less than desirable way by others is at first a shock to the system. Speechless as reality shakes at your heart. Your heart coming to terms with how little you’ve valued yourself and how much you pretzel yourself out of proportion in order to fit into others dreams, ideas and desires. And others, they just lap it up. Your chest tightening at how even when you give people the opportunity to not be a doos but be lekker, they choose to be a doos. I’ve never understood this particular trait in the human race, how being a doos is worth more than being lekker. How kicking someone when they’re down makes you feel good about yourself. How even when you know the right thing to do is to give a helping hand, you turn a blind eye to get ahead. Well…I hope you get there first (cue thumbs up emoji).
How sad that getting there first is encouraged, praised. That winning in work and life and love looks like a helluva amount of unnecessary noise that drains out what actually matters. That we think we have to conquer, exclude, fight and fear to get what is rightfully ours but actually it takes softening, inclusion, surrendering and love that gets us what we want. That being seen means to elbow your way to the top with hashtags and a million followers. What world are we living in? Have you seen Wall-E, we’re steering straight towards those humans reality at an alarming speed. Fuck you AI.
You know what I will look back at when I’m old, how in the winter and summer different spider species spin their webs across the entrances to my house and how their webs determine the route I take. The ants that ended up in my basin because they’re really thirsty, letting them drink and then sweetly helping them out of that slippery sliding death trap. Opening the window for the dragon fly, fly, bees and wasps that end up trapped in the house. Ushering the snakes and the scorpions out the front door because I can promise you they are as confused about ending up in your house as you are about them being there. I will remember the hollering at a friend in the surf as she swooshes past me on a wave, the sting on my skin and sound of the kelp swaying in the icy Atlantic, the afternoon sun streaming into my kitchen making everything feel like it’s going to be ok, the night jar and the owl playing tag with their call signs and the copious amounts of cups of tea drank in my house, the garden, the mountainside where peace abounds. I will remember the sound of my moms voice, how laughing makes me feel, how wide open spaces of nothing but wilderness opens up my lungs to really breathe. How I only really feel free when far away from anything human related.
I will not remember how many jewellery pieces I sold and who to. I will not remember how many times I won a contest while competing in surfing and long distance running. I will not remember the stats of my business beating the stats of yours and I will definitely not remember that I had a shop in the most popular part of town. Who cares? Yes, yes, I know…we all care about different things, and you care about the shop in the most popular part of town. It’s ok. This piece of writing is not about you, it’s about me.
Staying true to my slow going nature, I have taken the scenic route in all areas of my life, call it the long way around. In life, in work and especially in love. Therapy is no different. It’s the long way around to understanding life. We all seem to want quick fixes, news flash, they don’t exist.
The toughest part about therapy is that you can never go back to the way things were. This goes for the good and the bad. Yet another bitter-sweet pill to swallow.
Ok, enough about therapy, the point is that over the past few years I have felt like a bulb in the soil making my way to surface and the sun. Now that I can feel the sun on my skin there is no option but to grow differently from the conditions of the bulb in the ground.
Waking up is bitter-sweet.
PS find people that care as much as you do, otherwise spend time without them, you’ll be fine!
x