The Constant Spiral of Self Discovery

It’s a never ending process guys.

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Hello dear red cabbage readers,

It’s been a while since a post of this type, forgive me. This one I’ve been working on for nearly a year. 😱

I sit and I wonder. I read so many books about people who have ‘found themselves’, or discovered some great insight. The marvellous

Katherine May

whose journey and kindness that filtered through the page led me to Substack, and

Caro Giles

where I very recently read 6 months of moon chapters in one sitting and need to read more and again and again. These wonderful women who have trodden the path of self awareness that helps to enlighten us all. There are many more I’m sure, somehow Substack (or at least the section I see most) is full of these inspirational people who have somehow pulled back from the brink and made sense of the world around them. Writing has been cathartic for them it seems, bringing a purpose to the world around them.

Photo by Sergiu Vălenaș on Unsplash

Many years, ago I tried the same thing. I was in my late 30s. I had 3 kids all at primary school, I worked part time and I wrote a bit, quite a lot really for I was writing a novel. I wrote 90,000 words in a coherent form and I was proud of it. Then someone told me a novel,should be 120,000 minimum (an author I knew) and I squeezed in those extra words and ruined it. I also actually had a proper local friend back then, one I really cared about, but I knew even at that point that I wasn’t first on their list and as close as we were then we so we are distant now. I spent a lot of time ‘working’ on myself, healing the past, learning to be at one with myself, to love and accept myself. What I didn’t realise back then was that this wasn’t going to be a one off event, that I would need to do it over and over again and I ignored myself for years afterwards.

It seems circular this need to rediscover myself. We start at the bottom of the spiral and as we move up, as we discover ourselves, our spiral widens. At one point I thought it was a kind of depression that circled on round again and again, but in retrospect I feel it was overwhelm, burn out, and just (JUST! Lol) the need to be authentic to myself and keep the wonderful, amazing me I once found at the fore and not crushed under the weight of motherhood and marriage. I needed to be myself but constantly subsumed that to be there for the rest of my family. Somehow along the way I even forgot who that remarkable person even was; their likes, their passions, their needs. I forgot my career plan, literally forgot it - when I remembered it years later I mourned for the life lost. I stopped writing, I stopped listening to ‘my’ music, I stopped my art, I tried to mould myself into the good mother, the good wife, into the person I thought I should be rather than the person I wanted to be. I made many acquaintances but few actual friends. I stood on the outside of life and looked in, watching rather than participating, the constant hyper-vigilance, the constant self doubt, the doing of other more sensible things instead, the hiding of myself behind mediocrity, the struggle to be my full self. I’ve also made my writing ‘less’, something I always later regret but can’t find the right bright words to put back.

There were extenuating circumstances at times. My mother’s death, my father’s remarriage, and then later his death too, a chronic illness diagnosis, the loss of my career, the loss of many friends because of my illness, hard times in the family with mental illness, my eldest growing away from me, so much stress. But now late in my sixth decade (where DID the time go?) I have finally realised that once is never enough and I need to embrace myself again and again and again. I’ve let it slip for too long. Reading about these wonderful women has made me realise this - is it autistic burnout? ME burnout? Life burnout? After a few years buried I feel I am emerging again. As long as I don’t push it or work too hard so the ME/CFS crushes me again, I might actually get somewhere again.

Ta-ra for now, Tx

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