The Value of Me

Last year I spent a few months working on something that I found incredibly challenging. The prevailing wisdom is that it’s important to step out of your comfort zone from time to time. You never know what you’re capable of until you challenge yourself. I get that, but I have spent so much time out of my comfort zone in the last few years that I feel like I could offer guided tours. I was very much done with discomfort.

Discomfort was not done with me though, so I did what I always do in those situations. I put one foot in front of the other and I moved. That’s the annoying thing about those times. It’s not really like there are a bunch of other options available to you. Nobody pulls up alongside you and offers you a ride back to your comfortable life. And when you do get back to less challenging terrain, you have, of course, been changed by what has happened to you. Usually that means renegotiating what makes you comfortable, and that isn’t always a picnic either.

What was different last year was that while I was working on the challenging thing, I was also working very hard in therapy. At the time, that nearly broke me. I was not flush with reserves of inner strength going into the situation. Doing all the hard things simultaneously was rather like patting my head while rubbing my belly while someone shouted mental maths problems at me through a megaphone. I did not love it.

One thing about working at the edge of my breaking point is that it didn’t leave me much room to put up the usual emotional resistance. Building walls is hard graft and I had no hands free left to do it. Rather than fight against changing things and find excuses for not changing, I surrendered far more to the process than normal and although I hate to say it, it did me a lot of good. There was a lot of soul searching, a fair bit of heart break and a lot of grieving to do, but things changed, as they so often do and this time they changed largely for the better.

One of the good things that came out of the very hard work was a bit of cash. Previously when I had earned money I tended to do one of two things. I either spent it straight away before someone could take it from me, or I immediately handed it over to someone else who I thought deserved it more. I was very much of the mindset that I was a burden and a nuisance and that the least I could do for those people who had to spend time with me, was financially compensate them for how much money and emotional work I cost to keep. Either way, I was very much about getting rid of the money as soon as humanly possible. Keeping it around can be fiercely challenging.

Slowly, over the years, my relationship with money has been changing. A lot of the work I have been doing is about what value looks like and what money stands for in my life. Like food, money is an emotionally weighted thing, fraught with all kinds of judgments and beliefs that play a huge part in the way I feel about myself.

The money from this work that I had done has been sitting in a bank account for months. I made the decision that I wouldn’t do anything with it until I worked out what it meant to me and what I actually wanted to do with it. There were a lot of awful things attached to it that I felt sick about when I started to think about it. The loss of an extremely important friendship, a betrayal and a feeling of real anger about what had transpired during the time I was earning it. It felt like dirty money.

As I write this, I know what a privilege it is for me to have money that I earned, that I can just leave in a bank account while I indulge my complex feelings about it. What I think about any situation where I find myself acknowledging how lucky I am is, what a fucking idiot I would be if I squandered that privilege. I am in a position many people would kill to be in. I intend not to waste it. Had this happened last year, none of this would have been possible. Things were very different then. I don’t take any of this for granted.

Just keeping the money around for so long has been a huge change for me. Especially as it comes with such negative connotations. For a while I think I felt it would have been less dirty if I had robbed a post office to get it. As I did more therapy about other things, like valuing myself properly, I began to think about the money differently. Things really changed when I sat down and talked about it with Jason. I hate talking about money more than I hate thinking about it. I usually end up crying, I find it so stressful. This time I was able to talk about it without bawling and I really surprised myself when I found myself saying. ‘I want to take that money and spend it on myself, for myself, because I earned it.’ In truth I’ve never worked harder for any money, ever than I did for that. And that money cost me dearly.

Those people who know me would say that I have never had any problem spending money on myself. I would argue that what happened in the past was a very different thing. I used to spend money (and sometimes still do), to escape from myself. If I felt discomfort, I could buy myself something nice to distract myself from that feeling for a while. It was always worse when I felt the least valuable to myself. I had no worth as a person, but I could buy it in a shop and while I didn’t feel I could fix the things that were wrong with me, that was good enough. That doesn’t happen very often any more.

I didn’t want to give someone else this money to help me escape from myself. I didn’t want to give someone else money as a consolation prize for having won me in life’s tombola. I didn’t want to show people that I was worth sticking with by paying a bill so that I could look responsible and be a grown up. I wanted to keep the money until I found something to spend it on that I valued, for me and nobody else. I wanted to invest in myself.

The first thing I did with the money was book myself onto a one day writing course with

Clover Stroud

. I wanted to put some money into taking my writing seriously and I couldn’t have invested it better. Last Thursday I went to the Cotswolds to sit in a barn with twenty strangers and talk and write about things I am much more comfortable writing alone. It was powerful and important. It was also terrifying, but in a good way. I was out of my comfort zone, but this time I had driven myself there and knew how to get back.

The next thing I did was book myself onto a two day pottery course back at Turning Earth in Leyton. I had decided that pottery probably wasn’t for me after my last course there, but after a few weeks, when the dust had settled, I changed my mind. What I realised was that spending five days doing an intensive course was not for me. I’m not made for intensive anything these days. I need time to be able to lie on the floor in the dark, on my own from time to time. Unlike the last fifty two years of my life, I am, it transpires, in no hurry.

A two day course learning hand building techniques was perfect for me. I went along with an idea of what I wanted to make. I discussed it with the teacher and then she helped me figure out how to make it. It was exactly what I wanted.

What I learned from both courses is that I am not like everyone else. I don’t write like other people. I don’t make art like other people. Even though it can be scary sometimes, not fitting in, I don’t and I can’t and trying to do that in the past has made me sick. It isn’t easy doing things differently. It isn’t easy, changing the habits of a lifetime, whether that’s how I value myself, or how I spend my money or how I express myself when I’m around other people. What I learned last year is that the cost of not doing it is far more than the cost of learning to be comfortable in yourself.

There’s still a little bit of money left. I’m waiting for the right thing to come along to spend it on. It feels a lot cleaner now.