Yes swiftly following on from my first and what I hope will be the shittest post of the year, Happy New Life is this; I have now proudly hit a Happy New Low with absolutely no views of Happy New Life on Medium. Yes, that. All after having finally being able to sign up for Stripe with a reactivated british bank account that I had to move continents to do. Stipe isn't yet operating in South Africa, which raises questions about the ability to get articles from the global south. I wish I was kidding.
The
truth is the Happy New Life post was shit. All I did was tell people
(that don't know me or care) that I had moved continents. Without
the whimsical romance of talking about the subtle grey moods of Scotland
or the energetic stamp of Table Mountian that is still following me around (after all it is one of the Earth's 12 energetic portals). That I
fear I might never really get over my love affair with South Africa and her people. I wrote an article about a new year and homecoming without deep-diving into how emotionally complex and nuanced that is an experience when you have lived somewhere else for seven years. How time and space collapse. That I
understood myself and the space around me totally differently. That both
I and the spaces that I occupy have changed and are yet are strangely familiar along with the old friendships and even smells. That a
continental jump leaves me to examine myself and my choices. How I
became the person that moved to another continent and never managed to learn another language. Then I thought about life and how tough it had actually been when you are not fully in flow. When you love and you
don't belong. You live and you never land. You may connect yet you never
grounded. Yet we are all African. It makes me ask bigger questions
about everything. The human race? Borders and nations and the planetary
consciousness that may be needed to shift everything.
I
have to review the continental move I had made to South Africa. How little I'd actually recorded of it. How I felt? The things I felt I
could not say? The emotional journey. The things that were strange too
figure out. The things that were strange to learn. The things that were
far too complicated to piece together in a 500-word article. That one
bad 500-word article at a time would have still told a story, that I may
now have to tell in retrospect like so much else of my life. To realise
how much I had failed myself in this process of being and becoming as a
result of some serious unresolved anxiety. The stuff I took with me and
the stuff that was generated and the stuff I was holding onto. That if
I'd actually just fully committed to myself and my process how much
further along in life I might be? That I might just have some extra
funds in the bank, a happy fulfilling relationship and of course much
much more. For seven years I was having a full-blown eight of swords
moment and I realise more roundly now of the person I was being to keep
everyone else safe, including me.
I write a lot. I journal a lot and it's one of my main therapeutic activities that I use to manage an overactive and highly creative mind. Blogging has become a way of recording my creative thoughts so that they might actually hold some value rather than let them grow mouldy in a storage facility somewhere. Yet my anxiety has stopped me from fully publicly sharing. Cause someone might just tell me my opinion is shit or I'm factually incorrect. Ten years after posting stuff onto Facebook its clear that Facebook is too emotionallhy close, I don't think it's actually a place for serious writing. It's been disheartening for me to share some blog post on my personal page and see no click through. Maybe's it the algorithm, maybe it's my friends or maybe it's my writing? What it has been though is a testbed for getting over myself. If people rarely ever responds you can write anything. It's just a matter of putting myself out there. This is where blogging is a challenge how much do we actually want to tell people? How much does sharing really serve us? How useful is vulnerability when our plans for a better life get off to a shit start? When all the chat these days is about resilience. It's the new 'strong'. All this coinciding with what is supposed to be one of the most depressing times of the year. How are we doing everyone?
What I have learned is that consistency is key. That consitancy is challenging or me especially while learning to navigate emotional safety & boundaries. It's the biggest thing that I have to learn. Dharma is ongoing for me. As it is for everybody. You have to let go of so much to write consistently. Perfectionism isn't an option. You have to be willing to be shit in order to get started, you have to be willing to make mistakes to learn things.
I'm making the new neural pathways now. I'm breaking the old patterning and I am learning what isn't mine to carry. I am integrating. I'm figuring our systemic trauma and healing and understanding the dysfunctional systems that I have both survived and am replicating in my own life. It's uncomfortable. Then I also have to think about how much work I have already done and how much value my inaction has already offered.
I've been messing around with Medium,
figuring out if it is something for me, or if actually, wondering is this a way to make money? Can this help me get to where I need to be in my life? Or is it just going to be yet another time suck? That's what I have started to enjoy about Medium. That people were here to read. That they didn't have to search one obscure blog after another to find something useful. For the most part, I've been excited about its simplicity and delighted with the way in which you can easily import articles from other websites or blogs. It has thrilled me and confused me as to how I might integrate the multiple blogs I'm writing onto one platform. That I might find a place of comprehensive overview, even though I'm still not 100% sure what I'm doing. I've got an idea and a vision. However there is no real plan (are real adults meant to say such things?) Medium made me feel confident to share who I am and what I write about, even though it may be uncoordinated complex and explorative in nature, based on conversation and enquiry, not facts.
