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What if brave never arrives?
Do you ever feel like you’d do something if only you felt braver about it?
Things like…
I’d speak up in a work meeting if I knew that no one would think I was stupid/annoying.
I’d say no to my child if I didn’t think it would cause a tantrum.
I’d set a boundary with a family member or colleague if I didn’t feel so scared of displeasing them.
These are all real-life examples for me!
And my most recent one:
I’d start sharing consistently on my mailing list and via social media, if only I knew that people would like what I was sharing…
This time around, I didn’t get fooled by my mind’s chatter.
I’m doing it anyway.
There’s stuff that I’ve been seeing and sensing for many years, and there is stuff that is just occurring to me now, that I would not previously have shared for fear of appearing weird or offending someone. At the very least I’d have put a “vanilla filter” on it before sharing, so that it would seem more “normal” and less “out there”.
My objective in sharing my writing has become really clear, and feels different to before. I am writing to share what in my heart I know to be true, because I think there are people in the world who would benefit from hearing it.
It’s liberating. And it’s terrifying to a girl like me who has based a lot of what I’ve done, up until recently, on the need to please other people.
I’ve recently felt that need to please unravel. You might say it’s perimenopause. You might say it’s some kind of post mid-life crisis awakening. And maybe it is these.
What feels most true though is that it’s just time. Something about losing my mum a couple of years ago has put me firmly in touch with my own mortality. If I’m going to really live, there isn’t time to base my actions on pleasing people any more. I sat with my mum as she was dying and I had conversations about dying with nurses and support staff who had been in the presence of dying people of all ages. It was a beautiful, heart opening experience and I saw an entirely different side to our National Health Service.
If there was one thing that was common to all of those conversations with people about dying, it was really living.
Uncovering my people pleasing pattern and committing to feeling the discomfort of taking actions that fly in the face of it is central to making this happen now in my own life.
It’s really uncomfortable taking actions that I know might not please everyone. My jaw gets tight. It’s a familiar pattern of anxiety. But I’m no longer prepared to use that feeling as a reason not to do what is in my heart.
So I keep showing up. Everything I write is me showing my system that it can do this and I have the capacity and I’m okay. My jaw still gets tight sometimes, and I do stuff to help it relax. But I’ve realised that what the tightness is signalling to me is not to be trusted. It comes from an outdated operating system, one based on the assumption that I can be damaged by what other people think of me. That just doesn’t look true any more.
This is really raw and edgy for me, and I’m on the lookout for where else in my life I’m still basing my actions on pleasing people. I reckon there will always be more to see.
