I am on a short therapy hiatus. I’m on a week long pottery course this week and then off on my holidays next week for a fortnight before I get back on it. This means I have a little luxury in terms of time to do my homework, although I still have some to do. Of course.
Every therapy session starts with the question ‘How are you?’ From there we wander to and fro as I genuinely try to answer that question instead of just saying, ‘fine.’ That’s a challenge before we even get out the gate. I am so habituated to saying, ‘fine,’ or making a joke about how I really feel, particularly if it’s something gnarly and socially unacceptable, that it can be a significant challenge to talk about what’s real. This is usually where I have to refrain from apologising for whatever it is that I feel and/or minimising it so that I don’t come across as over indulgent and self obsessed. If you can’t talk about yourself in therapy, you’re not going to get very far.
From there we poke about in the homework of the week before and use this as a springboard to explore what I think and look at it with someone who is in a position to dig deeper into the tender bits that I may have glossed over. Whatever we discover usually leads to a question or two at the end of the session which becomes next week’s homework. Last week’s questions were: ‘Where is your teenage self now?’ and ‘How do you feel about the people who bullied you when you were growing up?’
I had fondly imagined I could shelve these questions until I got back from my holiday, but the problem I have found is that once she asks me, I start to think about the answers right away. My brain just starts poking at stuff and whirring off in all directions. I try to ignore it, but sometimes the thoughts get louder and louder until I might as well just get on and face them. So even though I don’t have to do my homework for ages, it seems I am doing my homework now.
My ex-husband was/is an alcoholic. He was a very, very wet alcoholic and now he is a very sober alcoholic and has been for over a quarter of a century now. When you spend a lot of time in AA rooms as I have done, as one of the many perks of being married to an alcoholic, you learn that whenever the alcoholic really committed to their alcoholism is where all maturing stopped. My ex was thirteen when he decided that never being sober was the funnest thing a boy could do. So that’s when he stopped growing up. It makes a lot of sense. Once a person sobers up, they also have to learn to grow up. Or not. Things get messy.
Trauma can have a similar effect in the way that it stops or alters time. People who experience PTSD, for example, have such a violent reaction to their trauma because no matter how far in the past it might be in real terms, in their head it is always happening right now. For me, having a major trauma at the same time as going through the major shit show of being a teenager enduring puberty was just too much. I couldn’t deal with both things, so I simply shut down the growing up stuff and concentrated on getting through the immediate hell at hand. It turns out that I had frozen some of that too, so I have had to thaw that trauma and put it where it belongs and now I’m moving on to the growth bit, for my sins.
Now that I’m piecing everything back together, co-ordinating all the missing parts of myself and flipping on all the switches I had turned off, it appears that I am 17 going on 52. This film has already been made many times over in Hollywood, so you know the drill. I need to learn all the stuff that is useful from my teenage self, try not to let things get too messy and learn to grow up without vomiting blue raspberry Sourz all over my cream carpets and going through my goth phase again. My husband has always said that he would love to go back to being a teenager but with the brain and experience he has now. It appears I am living out one of his fantasies. I am not so keen.
My therapist believes that teenagers are very powerful human beings. They have passion and strong beliefs and a bunch of questions they want answering. They also have strong knees and the stamina to carry all their banners into battle. Part of what makes them so powerful is that they inhabit the liminal space between being a child and being an adult. We all know that the margins are where the magic seeps in. Existence and what you do with it are particularly malleable at times like these. She pointed out that being a woman entering her hagging years can also be pretty powerful and is an equally marginal place. She asked me to think about this in relationship to myself.
I wonder if, like the seventh son of a seventh son, I am about to find out that I am a lady sorcerer? Two liminal states of existence layered on top of each other means that I am basically quantum powerful and might end up being the next Doctor Who. I would like that. I already have an overlong scarf.
I know that my teenage self is very much to the fore right now. I can feel her, peeping out through my crone eyes. I once listened to a radio interview with a woman who had some kind of neurological episode in her forties. When she recovered, her last memories were of being seventeen. She said that when she got out of hospital and pieced together the life she had lived since she was seventeen, she didn’t like herself very much. She wondered why she had wasted so much time doing things she didn’t like and why she had accepted so much mediocrity from herself and everyone around her. She ended up being so grateful for what happened to her because it allowed her to start again and live a life her seventeen year old self could be proud of. She considered it a gift.
I thought about this in relation to my teenage self. What I think my teenage self would say is; ‘You’ve not done a bad job, actually. In fact, you’ve done a lot of things I would never have dreamed of doing. You’re surprisingly cool for an old duffer.’ The regrets, and there are a few, are where I let other people tell me what I could and should do. The times where I squashed my instincts and played by the rules that I thought grown ups should adhere to and that if I did them, I would feel more grown up. She’s pretty proud that I got all this way despite myself and the world. She’s fairly sure that in my case, there isn’t an awful lot of growing up that needs doing. She thinks that it’s time to grow out. Grow out of bad habits, grow out of restrictive boxes, grow out of the tiny space I allotted myself.
As for the bullies. When my therapist asked me what I thought of them now, my first response was to blurt out: ‘They were right about me.’ As soon as I said it I realised how truly I felt that. I had carried the belief that they were the only ones who saw me as I truly was and that they had caught me out, pretending to be a good, kind, thoughtful person. A lot of the time that was how I felt. I felt like I was a bad person pretending to be a good person. I felt that when they told me I was ugly and stupid and that nobody wanted to hear from me about anything, and that nobody would love me, they were just seeing the real me. The me I was trying to hide from everyone.
I don’t feel like that now. The shock of saying they were right felt like it jolted me out of that state, into a space where I could properly interrogate and let go of it. Things have changed. I know they have because this morning, when I arrived at my pottery class, I was completely calm. I did not default to being the child, scared of being found out. I didn’t turn into the person who beat herself up for not knowing how to do things. I didn’t get angry with myself. I didn’t try to apologise to people for existing, or over compensate because I was raging with social anxiety. I didn’t have a migraine from all the things I was trying to stop doing or being. I didn’t feel like I was in school and I just had to endure the day and wait until I got home to be myself. In the past, this is how it would have been, even doing things I really wanted to do. This was how it always was. I was always the child waiting for the bullies to find me out. I was always the bad person, pretending to be good.
Today was different. I was talking to the pottery teacher about the pleasure of being able to fully inhabit my body and have a complete experience of connection between my body and the clay. I said: ‘It feels so great. I have spent so many years outside of my body. This is probably the first time I've been this connected since I was a small child.’ She looked at me and said: ‘That’s brilliant. Your words have given me goosebumps.’
Today was a miracle. Truly a miracle. It was a quiet, perfect miracle in which I allowed myself to be fully present in my body and my mind and do something I really wanted to do without getting in my own way. I just was. I just am.
🥳🎉🎊
This. Omg this! I needed this:
"The regrets...are where I let other people tell me what I could and should do. The times where I squashed my instincts and played by the rules that I thought grown ups should adhere to and that if I did them, I would feel more grown up. ... it’s time to grow out. Grow out of bad habits, grow out of restrictive boxes, grow out of the tiny space I allotted myself."
11+ years I wedged in. Here's to growing out. Cheers!