Dancing Geek

Today I intended to get on with something concrete.  Just one little thing that I could do to move me forwards.  I still intend to find something, but despite feeling really good about this idea all weekend when I got up this morning the idea suddenly filled me with dread.

Oh, hello fear.

So, I decided to try and find out more about what was going on, because I’ve never been the one to push through yuck and hard, but having learnt other ways of engaging with it I don’t have to ignore it and hope it goes away any more.

Child me

As I sat with the thought for a while, trying to understand what had changed, I realised that when I was thinking about it as a future event I was very calm about it all, I saw all the benefits and really wanted to get some of these things done so as to move towards my goals.  However, once it got into the present a different mindset took hold.  This one was definitely much more of a child’s viewpoint.  The feeling of wanting to stamp my feet and scream “NO!” at the top of my voice, to pout and say “You can’t make me.”

Since I now know that I don’t actually have the mental or emotional age of a toddler, there has to be something else going on here.  So again I sat with the idea as to why I would react so strongly, and in such a child-like manner.

I wondered if, like fear, it was trying to protect me from something.  I wrote out a little note asking child me to let me know what it was protecting me from or wanting to keep me from losing.  I certainly have read enough about adults who have forgotten what it’s like to be a child, and are causing suffering for themselves and others as a result, to want to make sure I didn’t lose the connection to my little playful boy-self but this didn’t explain what was going on for me.  (Which isn’t to say it doesn’t make sense, at least to me, but that it doesn’t have that click-aha feeling attached to it of suddenly seeing what’s going on.  It’s this separation between sense and fit that causes so much well-meaning advice to be completely useless and frankly annoying.)

Team of one

At first, I wondered if there was a way for adult-me to choose what to do, and boy-me to choose how to do it.  So that both were happy.  But thinking this through with examples showed that to blatantly fail very quickly.  It needed a more combined approach, where both adult-me and boy-me were involved in all decisions, which is tricky because I don’t want to end up with a life that looks like a camel and frankly the idea of installing some kind of beauracray in my head just to make decisions sounds terrifying and nauseating.  Rather, finding a way to get back to a feeling of wholeness where I include both these sides is what experience tells me is the route to take.

Still, until that happens I’ve got two competing ‘voices’ to deal with, so I sat them down to talk.

Adult Me (AM): I need a CV in order to improve my chances of X. [yup, I'm still being coy about the details for now]

Child Me (CM): BORING! *pout*

AM: It could be fun remembering all the stuff we did before.

CM: … (ouch)

It turns out that remembering all that stuff actually hurts.

Peeling back the layers

Once I get to an ouch, I know that I’m starting to get underneath the surface of what’s going on.  The next thing I wrote says it all:

I’m still so afraid that people will laugh at me & think I’m odd.

Which triggers shame at still being afraid, compassion at being human, and pain from the memories that caused this protective fear to get put together in the first place.

More to the point, if someone laughs at me I’ll remember what it was like at school.  I’ll remember all the hurt, and the loneliness, and the misery, and the hatred, and the fear, and the anger, and the resentment, and the confusion, and the betrayal, and the pain.

Can’t think why I’d want to avoid that.

My current plan is failing

I didn’t even realise I had a current plan, but it slowly dawned on me that I was trying to forget about all of this.  Trying to erase what happened and give myself a new childhood full of happy thoughts, good friends, fun times and laughter.  And it’s not like these are bad things to have, it’s just that I can’t have them as a child and as an adult at the same time.  And that’s where we come back full circle to the original problem.

I’m trying to be a kid and an adult at the same time.  I’m trying to be fully self-actualised (yuck, spit, ack – need a better word for this) and at the same time to rewrite my childhood by giving myself what I didn’t have before.

Turns out that doesn’t work.

I suppose I could put a hold on the adult stuff and try and give myself a wonderful new childhood, but the lovely denial siren is going off in my head at the thought.  I know that I wouldn’t be satisfied with that, it wouldn’t be real, and it would cause as many problems as it might seek to solve.  So I need another plan.

If I am not able to fix the crappy parts of my childhood, can I accept them?  Can I forgive myself for not knowing then what I know now and let what happened be what happened?  Not let it define who I am now?  Not need to fix it, but rather start from here and move forwards?

Right now, I’m not sure, but it sounds like a better plan to try.  It’s a more mindful plan, a kinder plan, a more compassionate plan.  I’m just not sure how to make it happen.

Soft vs Hard vs Easy

All this stuff is working in the soft still.  That is, working with emotions and mindsets as opposed to real world systems and actions.  Now that I have an idea of what I want to happen for me I’ve this drive to get into the hard stuff as well.  And I can do both at the same time, it’s just that the hard (concrete) stuff will be hard (difficult) whilst I’m still working on the soft connected to it.

Knowing that I’m working on making the hard (concrete & difficult) stuff easier (but still concrete) makes it easier in itself, or more palatable at least.  It becomes a choice between waiting indefinitely or working to get the rewards, rather than a choice between doing the hard (difficult) stuff or not.  It seems that child-me can get on board with the first option (waiting is boring after all) but not the second.

[I'd edit that to make it make more sense, but I can't be bothered.]

Whatever happens, I plan to start letting go of the past, let it be what it was, and instead look at the present and what I can do now to change the future.

Yup, I swore in the title.  Guess that makes me a bad person.  Or just someone who’s been hanging around at IttyBiz too much recently.

But more importantly, my whole ‘Oh My God, I don’t know what I want to do with my life’ thing is over.  Yup, just like that.  Which isn’t to say that I won’t feel that way again, or doubt the decisions that I’ve made now, but that’s the other part to it all.  The ‘it never ends but that’s ok‘ part.

So why am I absolutely bricking it?

Well, the short answer is, now that I know what I want to do, I’m left with the getting on with it part.  And damn it that’s some scary stuff right there!

So I’ve tweaked it out in little bits here and there.  I’ve spewed a lot of the emotional gunk out in a more private space with some trusted friends and I’ve had small conversations with some people who aren’t very close to me or my life but who can tell me about what’s involved.  However, I’m still feeling a big wall of fear holding me back.  I’ve done a little sculptural planning, scaffolding if you like, and thrown away the bits where I started to overplan the details and minutae.  The getting stuff done part, however, continues to elude me.

In fact today I’ve done lots of important stuff, none of which relates in the slightest to my big 3 goals I have written down beside me.  They’re all maintenance and hygiene tasks as it were.  Washing up, laundry, library renewals, car tax.  Oh yes, all necessary, and all doing nothing to move me forwards.

So what next?

My trusty question comes to help me make some progress.  Well, for one, I’m acknowledging that I’m procrastinating here.  I know what to do about procrastination.  I have some awesome resources on it.  So one thing I can do is work on the procrastination, but there’s a part of me that is sat there going “Oh please! That’s just another form of procrastination!  Just get on with it!” and I’m inclined to agree.

“Isolation is the dream killer” is a favourite quote of Barbara Sher’s, by which I mean she uses it all the time on twitter.  So I’m thinking I need to get outside help with this one.  Tomorrow I should be seeing someone (i.e. unless plans change, unforeseen circumstances and all that) who can perhaps help me out with one.  The other I friends online who can give me a push.  The third, well actually that one I am working on a little already, and again I know people that can help me with it.  Time to get some gentle butt kicking me thinks.

I’ve a couple of ideas hanging around at the moment that I want to do.  The thing is, they involve putting myself out there.  They do it in different ways, but they’re both very much outside my comfort zone in terms of biggification.  And I’m totally stalling.

Am I really stalling?

I have “perfectly valid” questions cropping up about each of them, things like “What am I looking to get out of this?” and “Is this the right one to go for?” but the thing is that these are both just long winded ways of asking myself ‘Why?’:  “Why do I want to do this?”, “Why should I go for this one?”.

I believe that the empowering question is ‘Why not?’.

“What have I got to lose by doing this?” – Nothing

“What’s the worse that can happen if I go for this one?” – I get it

So those “perfectly valid” questions?  Yeah, they’re real questions, but they’re stalling questions.  It seems I can add ‘needing a very good reason’ to my list of stalling tactics:

• Staying up late and sleeping through the day
• Telling myself that I’m not ready, I’m not prepared enough
• Needing a ‘very good’ reason

Visualising my fear

This came from another extended (2 hour) meditation today – thanks to Joely for “giving me permission” by example.

After clearing my head, like I wrote about yesterday, I started to think about what was holding me back from following through on these two ideas, bringing my attention to how I feel when I think about them.

I noticed a tension at the base of my sternum, where the two rib cages separate.  So I gave it form in my mind and it showed up as this black, sticky, dense rubber ball.  It immediately started pumping out this noxious toxin so I put it in a bubble and ran a tube out of my body to drain the liquid away.

Thing is, I wanted to talk to it, so I tried to make a gap in this transparent plastic cover but every time I did the toxin would get sprayed through the hole (it wasn’t till later that I realised why).  However, I was pretty determined so I put a second ball around the first, put a drainage tube on that and then opened up a gap in the lower half of the first ball and the upper half of the second.  That way sound could travel (if a little muted) but the toxin was safely being drained off.

At this point, I got a strong feeling that the toxin wasn’t wanted by the black ball. So I asked if I could lance it to take away the toxins and it agreed.  A quick prick with a pin and a gush of toxins ran out and down the drainage tube.  The ball began to shrivel and dry out and it suddenly became clear that it was hollow as it split open down one side, being unzipped from the inside.

Out stepped a funny little creature – purple, bloated, but with two definite arms and legs.  It had been stuck in the ball and desperately wanted to take a shower.  So I made it one and it had a wash.  As it washed, the creature lost the purple colouring and bloated look.

It turned out to be a tiny little version of me (which totally threw me at the time).

I was naked, so I gave myself some underwear and we sat with each other for a bit.

I noticed that there was a sense of vacuum where the ball had been so I cleaned out the area with some warm scented water and then let it fill up with this.  As I did, the area expanded into a spacious, spherical swimming pool, fresh water ran in from above (my heart) and drained out below as there was still some ick left behind to be dissolved, and no one likes a stagnant pool.

So yeah, the fact it was right in my third chakra didn’t escape me.  Eventually, I noticed that my tiny little me had erected this protective barrier, complete with defense system, but that it had somehow kept going long after it was needed (namely at school) and had caused my little me to become trapped, deformed and unhappy.  Gee, metaphor much?!

So let’s add to the stalling tactics:

• Staying up late and sleeping through the day
• Telling myself that I’m not ready, I’m not prepared enough
• Needing a ‘very good’ reason
• Keeping everyone away by being toxic
• Hiding behind an unnecessary protective shield
• Trapping myself into a tiny space to be safe, even though it ends up totally disfiguring me

The bit that was missing

There still felt like something was missing after all of this so I decided to do some Shiva Nata to see if I could get anything more to come up.  I went through a few rounds then settled down to see what came up, just asking myself the question “What am I missing about this?” over and over again.  Suddenly I realised that a little story had played itself out in my head.

Rather than type it all out I’ll go with this: think a global version of Cloverfield, but with odd little pixies (blame Alex for those) and everyone running scared.  Suddenly it turns out that they’re terrified of me, my image is splattered across the globe and I’m an instant world hero.  The pixies all run away.  Then the world goes back to normal, except that everyone knows the pixies are scared of me but they don’t know why.  People start avoiding me, they start shouting at me in the street.  No one dare come near me.  I’m completely and utterly alone, I walk into a full dance studio and it empties and I’m left just dancing alone.

So yeah, again with the not very closely veiled metaphors – what can I say, I guess my subconscious understands that I don’t tend to get the subtle cues.

It turns out that I’m scared that if I let myself shine fully again that I’ll end up completely ostracised again.  Oh school, what wonderful things you taught me.  Let’s just pull that out so it’s easy for me to find again.

I’m scared that if I shine fully I will be ostracised (again).

Finding another way to feel safe

I am going to do these things, I happen to be fortunate enough to have a damn stubborn streak for things like this, so I could do with finding to help me feel safe even though I’m putting myself out there.

The most obvious thought is that I need to find people who are like me, find my tribe.  I have some great friends and groups already, but I’m also looking for other Dancing Geeks.  I’m looking for a way to feel like my own little brand of crazy is not so crazy.  I’m not sure how, but I’m sending this intention out into the world and we’ll see what comes back.