Over on Substack, I have been writing a series on how I have learned to love myself over the last 6-7 years, please do subscribe to me there, as it is where I do most of my writing.
The most recent one, part 7, I published is about how I noticed that a separation was occurring.
And a copy of it is here:
Im Male, 47 and learning to love myself.
And this didnt happen overnight. It’s still happening.
Sometimes it’s the little noticing things that aren’t spectacular to describe or read about, so this one doesnt arrive with fanfares, it’s something I started to notice.
You see, having lived around the orbits of others, trying make or feel guilty about keeping other people happy – and realising this actually wasn’t my responsibility – and the exhaustion/busyness of this….. (eek just noticing how huge this shift was – but hey, thats the healing journey isnt it, huge incidentals that just roll out)
Back to 2021, I was now in a space of safety, my own flat, with clean air around me, and also in a space of choice. Living on my own for the first time in my life. Not alone, I didn’t feel alone at all.
I could choose what I did, what I spent my money on, how I spend my time, who I spoke to, where I went, what I did – pretty much for the first time in my entire life.
You’d think that this was the green light to fly and to be free and go on adventures….and yes…. it did begin this way….
However, what this also meant was that for the first time also in my life I had time to think – previously there were known default switches and no choice- but now, because I could choose, I had to make choices, and this meant that so many thoughts could invade in a way that I had put them at bay.
The working week was often relatively easy to navigate all of this, and many evenings I would enjoy a local walk around the marina, cook and eat and then read. But getting towards the weekend, I would begin to get paralysed by thoughts and choice.
Where shall I go? what will the weather be like? when are you going to cook? or shop? The ____ needs doing? Will you have time? What about x? is it even worth doing x?
And so on.
Thoughts invaded more in a place of choice, than previously, when patterns were in a survival mode, now they had time, and I had to make choices, decisions, and it was as if I was small to them.
There were some Saturdays when the choices were paralysing, as the voices of the questions repeated over and over again…. why?
Because I was used to being told off for doing the wrong thing, not being tidy/good enough….and now…. that wouldn’t be the outcome however late/messy I was, I could do what I wanted – yet sometimes I still couldnt do anything….. unless I had vacuumed first…..
Previously I didn’t have time to ‘think’ because the routines of default expectation operated on a daily basis, and it wasnt just time, I didnt have space or even feel important enough to create that space, I just acted reactively, trying to appease or please. No time for thinking. That was before. And in a way it was less of an internal struggle because I just ‘did’ without thinking, even if I was dying a slow soul death.
But now.
In my own space, in my own time, freedom to choose…..
Could fairly regularly become what I termed…
The treacle days.
When I could be in life, because I was too busy being subject to the storm in my head.
Yet my thoughts and the internal voice, critic voice, had been my protector…..it was slowly, in my new way of life, becoming a hindrance.
Before I learned about how to respond to these inner thoughts I would wrestle them. Or submerge to them, on a number of occasions I would end up ‘just doomscrolling twitter’ to escape other thoughts and then feel even worse, and not move from the bed. The thoughts got darker as they got noisier. I’d act out self soothing practices just to respond to the noise in my own head. I didnt know any different, I was just in it, it was new, relatively speaking.
And yet…..’Nothing’ was happening – the day was sunny, the sea was there to be walked along the edge of, nature called and I could walk with a camera, and I wasnt being unduly stressed by work, and set boundaries with others.
And then I would notice. I would realise.
Even 40 mins, and hour later or longer, of feel consumed, overwhelmed by noises and voices, that I realised, that I didnt have to do what, or listen to, what the noises in my head were saying.
On other occasions I would notice a little bit earlier, and move.
I’d stand up and say to myself; ‘ Right, James, lets just go, we can go and walk down the nature reserve and look at the birds, you can you know’ and it was as if I was gritting my teeth to myself, to talk back to nothing other than my own head, giving myself permission to be.
Even if the thought chatter still came with me on the walk – I was in somewhere, I was walking, and my eyes could focus on elsewhere, and be in something. I read a book on bird therapy, and the writer said that looking through binoculars helped him focus on one thing, and cause there to be breaks in time where the ‘many’ thoughts had to take a back seat. I understood what he meant.
Previously I didnt have separation from my trauma conditioning to think. Now I was beginning, slowly, to operate from the internal critic, thought voice that had a tendency to want to fill the gap of space and choice, when I didnt make a plan. I hadn’t realised how ‘indecisiveness’ was something I had grown up with, yet what it actually was was fear of making decisions and having to think through them, for feat of upsetting people, for also – when I did the right thing for me – I was criticised, punished or it unleashed the monster into decades of anger, and spouting it off everywhere. (‘Im still angry he didnt go to university’, might be on my mothers headstone)
So all the conditions around the choice making I had in the past was now being revealed, in a place when I didnt have to make it. I started to trust my gut. I made small gut choices, especially around clothes (colourful socks and shirts started to be bought, as they made me feel good and confident – and done largely without overthinking it)
But it was moments when I had space, and had choice, of time, of a day or two….
‘You are not your mind’ was the first chapter in ‘The Power of Now’ by Eckhart Tolle, that I read, very deliberately and slowly, in 2021 – I genuinely dont remember when I bought it, but the edition I have has a 2020 date stamp on it, so I am assuming 2021. Much of this book felt aspirational at the time, yet, given the many underlines and comments I made in it, tiny glimpses of it were resonating, especially around the thought patterns that were revealing themselves to me, as they had the space to.
I was a long way off this…. but this was hopeful…
The good news is that you can free yourself from your mind. (The Power of Now)
Within a few years, I was noticing that I was able to separate from the internal chatter, and ‘I’ could take charge. Slowly. One sometimes overwhelming thought Saturday at a time. This was a slow slow process. And im note sure I could have articulated this back then, 5 or so years ago.
I continued also to read more about love – from bell hooks, in Paulo Coelho, and even what I had learned previously, love was an action, a verb. Learning to love myself was an act of doing, of making choices, of realising that indecisiveness or over thinking (both of which I was now revealing) were caused/created by something deeper.
I couldnt ‘think’ my way out of thinking, I had to take and make tiny actions – where a nurturing ‘I’ was separating from ‘thoughts in my head’ – gently, slowly, learning how to listen to them, watch them and not ‘be’ them. A combination of learning about thoughts, my patterns and conditioning, and continuing to learn about love, acts of (not thoughts of) self – love, were starting to happen.
It was the beginnings of a great separation. Self love was about ‘doing’, and noticing that there was an ‘I’ that was separate from my thoughts.
I could actually choose. But did I feel I could?
If you would like to subscribe to me there, read the previous 6 parts and stay up to date with the next ones, please click this link.
James Ballantyne 