“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.”
Dan Millman.
Another day at the keyboard and driving myself forward to get in the habit of considering, on creating and on making change for myself.
I’ve spent too much time in the past, too much energy on focusing on the shoulds in life. You know those ideas our little internal narrator carries as being part of your acceptable standards – “I should work hard on these exams so I can get a good job”, “This relationship is okay so we should settle down” and the evergreen favourite: “I should be better”. Little, meaningless benchmarks which become a complex and codified structure for us to berate ourselves within once we fail.
It is peculiar really, how we co-opt these ideas in to our own subconscious. We speak the words in our own voices, that being the way that causes most harm because we only use them to hurt ourselves. And we, as you might imagine, are the traitor on the inside.
The shoulds were so ingrained with me that they contributed to my workplace stress becoming overwhelming and I had to enter into a period of therapy. Many people consider this idea with a sense of shame. I wear it like a badge of honour, it was the point at which I, that is to say what I consider to be the “real” me, actually began. I started seeing the shoulds for what they are and started to be kinder to myself. It allowed me to open the door to a love that wasn’t settling, that wasn’t an archetype I felt I ought to take on. I became free. Sure, it opened me up to the risk of hurt. I did get hurt, I did suffer loss, but it started to be on my own terms.
I got a taste of freedom. And I liked it.
Of course this was only a small part of the world in which I operate. At this point in time I am on maternity leave. This will, in less than five months come to an end. With it comes a return to work and, inevitably, a loss of a sense of freedom being away has given me. This loss seemed to hit me heavily in the last few weeks and any momentum and creativity I did have dissipated.
It took me a little time and a lot of emotional wrangling to get my head around what I needed to do to shake this funk. In embracing my freedom I seemed to be afflicted by a loss of industry. With no should there was no driving force behind making change, nothing it appears to motivate. Also the shoulds started to regain a foothold around motherhood and my relationship – I started behaving in ways which fitted an internalised vision of the nuclear family instead of taking up my own space and building into myself a sense of needing time and space for creation.
I discussed things with the boy and tried, in my usual hamfisted and clumsy way, to explain that I needed help to get myself back into a sense of forward motion. I don’t ask for help easily, ever, but I have the luxury of having an actual partner in my life who understands me, respects me and helps me, without ever being requested. We agreed a way of working both of our creative natures into the day – he works best at night whereas I need the light to even get started. We carved up the care of our children and the care of each other.
I turned to my own thinking on the matter. Instead of being chased by should I needed to be running towards something. I’m not trying to keep up with an appearance to complying with any expectation – I am chasing my potential. I need to go full force, not into battle but into building, into creation. That is truly the best of the woman’s way. Not in breaking, but in the entire power of Gaia, taking what we are given, wholesale destroying and making anew. Turning any lot into creation, into home, from the very darkness in us which takes life itself, binds it to our life force and births it into the world.
Not all women have children, but all women have the power to be mothers, to bring creation and change into this world. Now is my time to embrace that.
Just Real Ruby 