Acceptance, Surrender and Forgiveness

After a bit of light relief I am back on my therapy grind again. To be fair, I have been working super hard on it behind the scenes, but time and Susans wait for no man, so it has had to take its place in the queue.

I had caught myself thinking, ‘I’m probably at that time now when things will calm down a bit, therapeutically speaking. Maybe soon I will reach a nice plateau, where I can amble about, feeling smug, pontificating on wellness and generally getting on the last nerve of my nearest and dearest.’ It was, of course, at this point, that everything exploded and I have never felt more pressed and in need of balm. I think this stage of things is called; ‘farkinell.’

The thing about explosions is that they tend to get to the heart of things pretty quickly, due to the outsides of things flying into the air for twenty miles around. Even though it is invariably horrendous when this happens, it does, once your ears stop ringing, allow you to look at what was holding up that suspicious wall in the first place. I have been picking about the ruins, wondering at some of the cowboy builders I employed to create this place, and realising that they are all me in different hats. Which is about as annoying as you would expect.

I had one of those suspiciously easy therapy sessions yesterday in which I did quite a lot of reversing and hemming and hawing and then found the point of things about ten minutes before the end. I have given up being annoyed with myself about this tendency. I accept that I therapy like I park my car. I need about fifteen attempts and a run up. It gets parked in the end.

The point I was getting to turned out to be super pointy and has left me with a lot of thinking, which for me entails a lot of writing. Sometimes homework is brief, sometimes my therapist goes away and thinks about what will be most useful. This morning I got a message: ‘Forgiveness, acceptance and surrender are prescriptions we throw at others in the midst of crisis. It’s so simple to point these out as destinations for wellness, but actually finding these places is quite challenging. What do these mean to you, and how do you feel about self-forgiveness?’

I find all three of these things difficult. I come from a long line of women who specialise in holding families together, keeping wolves from the door and being stoic. The other thing they are good at holding is grudges. When they weren’t doing that, they also did a fine line in going berserk and setting fire to stuff. I’ve done my family tree, and it’s mangel wurzels and peasants all the way down but I do have a sneaking suspicion that the maternal line is being held nice and taut by Boudicca somewhere deep in the mists of time. It’s a fiery line of molten lava and wild fury.

The difficulty of course is that this is not how women are supposed to be, at least not in polite company. Women are supposed to be pliant and docile and good at babies and drudgery. Trying to tame a tiger and make it wear a mob cap and drink milk, instead of growling and rending flesh was always going to create an interesting Frankenstein’s monster. I am the product of generations of this contortion. It has given me a variety of bold and arresting complexes and a lot of migraines.

I think that what I learned to do with a lot of these unacceptable traits is turn them inwards. The anger, the refusal to accept things and the point blank refusal to surrender are things I have found so difficult and so shameful that I have, for the most part, shoved them away on the inside. When they wouldn’t go away, I just used them against myself. I have been so angry at my inability to be like other people, to fit in the world as it wants me to, to be the ‘right’ sort of woman, whatever and whoever she is. I have refused to give up trying to change myself into someone better, but not in a good and healthy way, until quite recently. Not in a way that has helped me or been better for me. It has always been a way that has made me feel more stupid, more powerless, more of all the bad things.

In the past, I have made room for all of this ‘more’ by attempting to make the real me less. Less loud, less colourful, less old, less physically present, less intense. I have failed at this over and over again. The saddest and most blindingly obvious thing of all is that during the times I have exerted dominion over at least some of these aspects of myself and shrunk them, I made things worse because the more I was making room for was not nice to me. I was not nice to me. More self-talk, more harm, more criticism, more attempts to make other people happy by making myself sad.

The first answer to every problem was: ‘make yourself smaller Katy. Take up less space. Be less present.’ When I do it, I invariably get praise. People love it. It has given me a twisted gratification, but one that is bestowed by other people and which keeps that terrible loop repeating.

I don’t want that any more. I don’t want other people to be pleased with me. I want to be pleased with myself. I want to be pleased with myself without diminishing myself, without buying my way out of things like I used to and without dissociating to the palace I built myself out of books and imagination, where it’s safe and warm and problems happen to other people. I want to be awake to myself and my life. The life I want and which I am learning to start living.

So I have been sitting with my dis-ease and boy is it anxiety inducing. Since yesterday afternoon I have been a bundle of sheer panic. I sat with it as long as I could and then I bought myself some new clothes, which doesn’t work, but I was desperate and it did help to fill the time. So did eating half a canister of pretzels, which made me feel that at least I didn’t compound my misery by thinking about eating lettuce or looking wistfully at photos of Kate Moss. I read a book, but it was a self-help book, which made me more anxious. I stopped short of reinstalling all my social media, but I did do so much French on Duolingo that I hurt my finger. I am now the new mayor of La Rochelle I am so fucking French. Every time I picked up a distraction, I worked to put it down and sit with how I really felt. Eventually I wore myself out and went to bed. My homework was waiting when I got up. I read it and coined a new therapy phrase, ‘the micro breakdown’. I felt like James Acaster in Celebrity Bake Off: ‘Started baking it. Had a breakdown. Bon appetit.’

It’s been a rough day. A really rough day. I have done quite a lot of thinking about the harder bits of my homework that I haven’t written about here, because it appears that even I have boundaries and I have reached them. It turned out that there were quite a few dark, scary bits of myself that I really didn’t want to think about or talk about, but I did anyway. Then I went for a walk and thought about why I’m putting myself through all this when I could just slam the lid on everything and walk away. It’s not like I haven’t done a lot of therapy by this point. I have filled out several sticker charts by now.

I persevere because I am sick and tired of hating myself for who I am. I am exhausted by the constant effort to be someone who makes other people’s lives easier, which makes my life harder in every way. I am heartily sick of the constant realisation of how awfully I behave towards myself and how I have coded that behaviour as necessary or good, when it is neither. I know that therapy doesn’t magically make your life better and pave all the streets with gold, but I will settle for more being more content and kinder to myself. I have surrendered myself to the therapy process and I have accepted that I am going wherever it will take me.

Acceptance and surrender are going to be an ongoing practice, but at least I have an inkling of what that practice can look like now. As far as forgiveness goes, in talking about some of the things that have happened to me, I found myself finally taking my own side in things and forgiving myself for not having done it sooner. What came up overwhelmingly in the last couple of days were great waves of fear. I couldn’t hope to hear myself and think things through when all that fear was there. I am learning to acknowledge it and work with it and soothe it, and in the space left when it is gone, I can fill it with things that help me grow rather than make me small.