Letting go

I was 14 when I decided I was going to be a Social Worker. In hindsight it seems like a pretty strange decision to make as a young teenager but I guess some needs are so deep that when there is no other way, we are forced to meet them ourselves. I was as longing to be saved, as I was to save others.

Ten years on and I am a qualified social worker who has just quit my first “real” job after only four months. The job that I had dreamt about and worked towards relentlessly for ten solid years. Less a job and more of a vocation. I was made to be a social worker and because of this every shitty experience I’d ever had was okay because I was training. Gaining valuable experience for my future self. Every experience I’d wished I’d had would be fulfilled through these beautiful, cathartic moments where I would become the person for these kids that I had always longed for myself.

In reality the four months were hell. Weeks and weeks filled with sleepless nights, debilitating stress and an overwhelming sense of helplessness in the daily pursuit for hope. I’ve never felt like I couldn’t do something before but leaving this job was not a choice, it was necessity. And just when I’d had my life all neatly tied up with a bow at last, it came undone. And the whole fucking mess came spilling out. When I quit my “dream job” I lost not only the ideas I’d had about my career but the ideas I had about myself too. That I was capable and strong and tenacious. A social worker. A wounded healer.

Life is funny like that, isn’t it? We can plan with precision and care how the entirety of our lives will pan out but it is as useful as a daydream. I am quickly sobering in my new found knowledge; that my life may never look like I thought it would. That our lives rarely do and that there is beauty in that. That our real character will be shown in how we faced the challenges and the U-turns, not how we predicted them. In how we were able to grow and adapt to our changing surroundings. In how we were able to hope, amongst our pain and our dying dreams.

Some of the most beautiful experiences of my life were mistakes. Completely unplanned, unpredictable moments and chances which I am thankful for everyday. Life really is more complex and more creative than we could ever comprehend and it is our responsibility to ensure we never limit ourselves to our own imaginations. I might get a new social work job and continue my career or I might not. I might be a teacher or a writer. I might not be the person I thought I was going to be but that doesn’t mean I’ll stop trying. We don’t always have to succeed to win. Success won’t always look like we’d imagined but it doesn’t mean it’s not worth having.

Sometimes the greatest strength is not in how hard we hold on, but in how gracefully we can let go.

Rebirth

“I’ts always darkest before the dawn” – Florence and the machine

If you could take away any pain you’ve ever experienced; heartbreak or anxiety, would you? This is the question I’ve been asking myself frequently. As anxiety slips it’s way back into the forefront of my mind I am once again forced to confront that maybe our lives were not meant to be simple. That contentedness was not meant to be our ambition. Once again forced to confront what about my life makes the most primal part of me feel uncomfortable and uneasy. What am I telling myself. 

The easy thing would be to wish it away as so many do and have done. To deflect and drink and smoke and forget. I know because I’ve played that part too but when I made the decision to travel alone despite my anxiety I made a bigger choice. That I would choose bravery, that I wouldn’t run or hide anymore. This isn’t really about anxiety anyways. That’s just the name I’ve given to my own demon but the truth is everyone has their own version of it.  Everyone has wounds and over the course of our lives we will be called to them again and again and again, relentlessly. This suffering is not a hindrance to our lives. It is as necessary as love and joy and vitality. It’s where growth and change have the space to happen. Suffering is not something we should avoid but instead something we should embrace. And every time we make the choice to visit these wounds they get smaller and smaller. We have the power to heal ourselves. We only doubt our capability because we’ve never tested it.

You know they say when a baby is being born it cries out because it thinks it’s dying. It’s afraid because it doesn’t know whats happening only to be born into a whole new adventure, one it could never have anticipated. We’re still like that. We hold on desperately to people because we fear the pain of loss. We deflect from our own pain and fear because we can’t yet see what lies beyond it, what great changes it may prompt. We long to stay warm and safe in our bubble forever but that isn’t life. We have a chance to live but in order to take it we have to let go of the idea that it’s going to happen inside our safe cocoon. It seems like it’s the end, but actually it’s the beginning. Don’t be afraid. Come out into the world. It’s time.

 

Making my bed

I’m 23 years old, 24 at the start of the new year. I work as a barista in a coffee shop, in a job I neither hate nor love. I’m at a place in my life where I’m neither happy nor unhappy. Not anxious, not depressed or heartbroken, not broken at all and yet not happy either. I suppose I always believed that happiness was just the opposite of unhappiness. I work in a job that I believe uses less than 10% of my creativity or skill as a person and maybe even less of my attention. That brings me no closer to who I really am or that lets me explore that. One of my new years resolutions for 2016 was to stop working dead end jobs and I am really no further than when the year began. And the more I settle into this routine the more I think that there are two types of people in the world, people who are content with this kind of life and people who aren’t. The people who will get out and the people who never do.

So I made a list. 25 things I want to do before I’m 25. Things which range from learning to play my banjo better to learning how to drive. The smallest most insignificant things like making my bed every morning, because that what I thought successful people did, to

Number 12 on my list: Climb Black Mountain (03/10/2016)

getting my dream job within the next year. Because those people who are neither happy nor unhappy, the ones who live largely unfulfilling lives, the ones we all know and think we will never become, they were just us once. Just some 23 year old girl with a degree she wasn’t using, writing some amateur blog and thinking about how far away those dreams seem in reality.

But you don’t need to be the person you want to become tomorrow. That’s the kind of thoughts that keep people immobilized. That its too far away, it’s too hard, its too unrealistic. It probably is. You don’t need to get your dream tomorrow if that’s not actually feasible. You can only get there when you get there. You just need to take small steps in the right direction. You just need to do one small thing that brings you towards it everyday. You don’t need to write a novel, you just need to keep writing. You just need to keep your dreams in your sight.

All you have to do today, is make your bed.

Getting fired

I’ve been fired from two different jobs in my life. The first time I got fired from a burrito bar for pulling a prank on my boss. (No regrets, it was a really funny prank). The second time was 2 weeks ago just as the last year ended and a new one began to emerge.

I was working as a bartender in a casino. My boss said that he was looking for somebody more “bubbly”. I wanted to tell him about how the kids at camp call me Munter, how I’d stay up to tell them stories about made up pigs with three legs in funny accents. But I didn’t.  He said they were really looking for someone who was less cold. I wanted to tell him about why I became a social worker. That I wasn’t made to serve the wealthy their drinks while they gambled, I was made to serve the poor. That I’m here to help the people who can never seem to help themselves. But I didn’t. Instead I excused myself to use the bathroom and I laughed and laughed until my eyes were wet, delirious with gratitude, and thought about our inability to liberate ourselves from the unhappiness in our lives.

My new years resolution is to stop wasting valuable time. To stop getting so hungover that I can’t function for full days. To stop binge watching TV. To stop working dead end jobs when I know that’s not who I want to be. To stop making decisions based on other people. To stop being content with being miserable. To stop being helpless.

We don’t have the right to feel helpless. We don’t have the right because we aren’t helpless. I should have quit that job weeks before I was fired. I should have found another way. Why are we always waiting for someone to set us free? For someone to make us happy or make us whole? Why are we always waiting for opportunity to happen and when are we going to realise that the opportunity is us. It always has been. We are the potential, we are the change.

When are we going to learn that we can save ourselves?

All my love,

Maeve

Being broke

I have 85.14 Australian dollars to my name. $85.14 to get me to New Zealand tomorrow and be able to hang out and you know eat and live until I can eventually find work. $85.14 and a beer is $10 and I stopped being able to afford those a while ago. $85.14 in all the world, and yet,

and yet.. I’ve never felt less broke.

It’s not like I’ve been living it up in Australia and Asia, I’ve been budgeting hard. I just didn’t start with enough money to begin with. I worked several jobs for a the year I spent at home but I couldn’t afford to travel the world. There wasn’t enough. But here I am, writing to you on my 30 minute turn on the hostel computer in Melbourne. I remember someone asking me once how Stevie (my travelling buddy) and I were always able to afford to travel everywhere. WE WEREN’T ABLE. We went to Puerto Rico once for a week and I can’t recall now how little money we had but I do recall the week we spent camped out on a beach underneath some coconut trees surviving on tins of tuna and pineapples. We were two kids from working class estates in Belfast, with never the means or the opportunity to travel and yet, there we were

So how exactly do you travel with no money. You wwoof! (Willing workers on organic farms), you work on peoples farms and they allow you to stay in their homes and give you food. You couchsurf! You stay on a strangers sofa that you’ve met on the internet. (It’s safer that it sounds, and totally free). You camp out on a beach in Puerto Rico and hope you don’t get shanked in the middle of the night. You meet friends at camp and hope they live somewhere cool in America. And most importantly, you adapt. You have to.

And people are so good! In all the places I’ve been, alone or with my travel buddy, staying on sofas or allowing people to stay on mine, trusting people I didn’t know, nothing weird or creepy has ever happened. I once left a canadian guy the keys to my house in England over Christmas and then I flew home to Ireland. I told him to just lock up and post the keys through the letter box when he was leaving. And you know what he did…

He locked up and posted the keys through the letterbox but not before he cleaned the house and left a sweet note.

A guy asked me yesterday in the hostel while I was eating dinner “Do you think people are mostly good or mostly bad?” and the truth is I believe people are just good. period. People have done some fucked up things lately but over all as a race we are good.

And the more the money drains,the more I’m forced to trust and live in this community. The more I’m forced to call on traits I didn’t know I had like being pragmatic and easy to live with (That was a hard one) and low maintenance. The more I’m forced to just be grateful and keep saying thank you to the people who keep making it possible for me to be here, and to be welcome here. The more crazy and real and mind-blowing the experiences get. The more good I see in the world and in the people making it, and in myself. I have travelled the world a lot in the last four years but it was the world that made it possible.

And the more I realise that I am not broke. I’m whole.

The real question

When I began this trip I had one objective and in many ways one real question I wanted answered;

How do I stop being afraid?

I figured if I put myself in the most overwhelming and chaotic circumstances, eventually nothing would frighten me any more. And my plan was going surprisingly well. Then one night in the back of a nightclub in Van Vieng, Lao I met an Irish guy (typical) who was asking himself the same question. He said he was a “normal”, confident, popular guy. He was content with his life and yet almost sporadically he would awake in the night gasping for air.

It wasn’t until he asked me the question; “How do I stop being afraid?”, that I realised I’d been asking the wrong question. It’s wasn’t how. That’s why nothing had worked. I had drank and prayed and willed the fear to be gone with no success for almost 16 years.

It was why. 

Why are two happy, content, “normal” 20 something year olds waking in the middle of the night, after a seemingly regular day, unable to breathe. And as soon as I’d asked the real question, I knew the answer. They aren’t content.

It is said that the body knows. It knows things we don’t understand yet. It feels danger before we sense it. And once I’d asked the first right question. a thousand new questions unfolded.

What about my life am I not content with? If the body truly knows then what is it trying to tell me? Am I acting in a way that is true to my truest sense of self? That person we are when we’re small; unchanged by loss and deceit. And why here? Why did I have to come half way round the world to allow myself to ask these questions?

What exactly is it that I’m running from, or perhaps the real question:

What am I running toward? 

Are you ready?

This is the most common question I faced during my last two weeks in the states.

Are you ready? I was never sure whether they meant ready to leave or ready to go but either way I always knew the answer was no. I had planned over and over again, I had talked myself in and out of the trip for six months but at no part could I honestly tell you I’d felt ready.

Change terrifies me. I had a very chaotic life. Everything changed, all the time. I stopped counting the new houses after 30. I was always the new kid in school. People dropped in and out of my life all the time, their ability to protect me changing as they changed. There was love. Always. But there was also chaos and change and confusion.

And by the time I reached 18 I desperately craved stability and routine. I desperately craved calmness. But when I got it, nothing changed. I still felt afraid and confused and chaotic. And I realized that the chaos wasn’t my environment anymore, it was in me. It had shaped me. It had raised me. And so began this journey. And four years later, after counselling and medication and yoga and routine I decided I was bored of catering to my anxiety. And I booked a year long worldwide trip around the world. 

I decided that I would put myself into the most chaos I could imagine and I would find a way to cope with it. I would have to. This is sink or swim. And sometimes I swim and I know I’m in the right place and I know this is going to shape my whole life in a new way. Some days I am so sure the answers are here. And some days I sink. I sink and sink and sink and wake in the middle of the night in an unfamiliar hostel unable to breathe.

Am I ready?

I didn’t eat for 4 days when I landed in Asia. I didn’t sleep for 5. Of course I’m wasn’t ready but are we ever really ready? Are we ever ready to face our past, to face the person it made us and didn’t make us. Are we ever ready to come face to face with our fears, to face all the things that hold us back and tell us we can’t. Are we ever really ready to face ourselves, and decide that maybe it’s not who we wanted to be.

All my love,

Maeve

Your story

Since as far back as I can remember I’ve told myself the same story;

• Girl gets sick and dies from freak illness nobody ever gets
• Girl is too anxious to spend time alone; or travel, or leave the house without something to distract her mind
• Girl is too anxious to watch scary movies or shows about hospitals and sickness and pain

And exactly what you think might happen, happened. It became my story.

Is any of it true? Maybe, I don’t know anymore. But I believed it to be true and therefore it was true. So often our perception is our truth.

And I lived it. I lived this story out my whole life. Right down to the darkest corners of my mind and back I’ve played my part accordingly. And then one day I realized I was more afraid of living this story than anything else. I was more afraid of the way my life was beginning to take shape than of the illnesses I had obsessed over for 22 years. I had spent so long obsessing over these imagined illnesses than I’d failed to see I already had an illness. And it was fatal.

It was killing me from the inside out. It was taking my personality, my social life. At one point I was so anxious I couldn’t eat for days and weeks and slowly mentally and physically I began to fade away. I had that “butterfly stomach” feeling constantly, my mind consumed with the fact that I could drop dead at any moment and yet so wholly unaware of the fact that I’d been dying for a long time.

That was almost two years ago now. It’s been over a year since I had a panic attack which were at one stage a daily occurrence. And yet I do not write to you from a pedestal of epiphanies and redemption and light. I do not write to you anxiety free with a pamphlet of 5 easy steps to make you feel “normal” again.

Instead I write to you from the 5th day of a year long, worldwide trip. I write to you from a clammy room in upper Manhattan, New york city where a girl, the same girl from the first story tells herself a new story.

One where she travels the world.

One where she falls asleep without a movie on.

One where instead of reminding herself how anxious she is, she reminds herself how resilient she is. How much she’s already overcame, and how much she still has left to conquer.

One where instead of focusing on how breathless she is when she steps off the plane, she focuses on the fact that she did it anyways.

And she reminds herself that this story, this running monologue in her mind is shaping her future. That it’s shaping her.

And she gets to decide how that reads.

She gets to write it.

All my love,

Maeve x

Flawed

“she refused to accept her wounds came from the same place as her powers”  Power-Adrienne Rich 

We all have those days, or weeks or sometimes even years when you look into the mirror and the person looking back at you just doesn’t seem good enough. It might be your looks, you’re too fat, you’re too thin, you’re too ugly to be loved or wanted. Somebody’s broken up with you or cheated on you and somehow you’ve made that be about you and your flaws. Somebody’s smarter than you or more athletic or more musical and no matter how hard you try and practice and graft you just can’t get there. You fall short time and time again.

For years I’ve been attempting to be this ideal person. This image i conjured up, hand selecting traits I seen in the people I admired. Patient and kind but feisty. Humble but confident. Good at sports and music and lively without ever being over bearing. I have now concluded this was impossible. All I could ever be in the end was me. And I have wounds. I’ve seen pain and betrayal. I’ve had my heart broken. I’ve felt abandoned and forgotten and scared and with this has come wounds that aren’t ready to heal. With this has come a lifelong struggle with hypochondria and anxiety. A defensive and argumentative nature. A need to be right. To be the one in control. 

But it took me a long time to realize these things I hate about myself were also a part of the things I loved. They were also my powers. Yes I am defensive but how else would I be a social worker, how else would I defend those who can’t protect themselves. And yes I’m anxious and overly analytic but this very story, this journey back to myself had to first begin with loss and confusion. Only when I had no idea who I was anymore, when I’d lost my whole self in my mental illness could I begin this journey.

I’m not preaching for you to remember the things you love about yourself but rather for you to love the things you hate about yourself. To realise that your bossiness, your sensitivity, your shyness are just as valuable as strengths and occasionally are just two sides of the same coin. Their is power in your flaws and weaknesses and quite often your wounds are just the beginning of a new power.

It’s okay that you’re not as pretty or confident or creative as her or him in or everyone else. Its okay that you can’t master a skill other people seem to find easy. That you can’t run fast enough, speak in public or get the hang of that sport you’ve been playing for 2 years *cough rugby cough*. These are exactly the things that push you onwards to run a little faster, train a little harder, speak a little more. These are the moments that breed strength and ambition and bravery.

“The road is long and in the end it’s only ever with yourself..” The sunscreen song-Baz Luhrmann

And sometimes the things we don’t achieve are the most valuable moments of all.

All you can do is try and try and try to be a little more empathetic. To try to listen that little bit more, to try and catch the ball one more time than you did yesterday. And to remember that change comes slowly and compassion sometimes even slower. That patience and humility are traits that some people have to cultivate and practice. That sometimes it takes a whole life time to stop defending yourself. And that the journey to self awareness and improvement often begins in our ability to first show ourselves this compassion.

Hold on or let go?

I read this interesting article the other day and it stated that the people you spent your time with in your 20’s will define who you are going to become. Here’s a quote from it;

“The time you spend in your 20s is arguably the most influential in regards to your future self. Who you spend time with and what you spend time doing plays a massive role in you reaching your full potential.”

Do I believe this? Yes, in some ways, but there is always time to change the life you’re living. What I do know though is that time is precious. It’s valuable. And it’s yours to decide to divide up in whatever way you see fit. There’s so much I still want to do in life and sometimes I feel like there isn’t enough time to do it all. This isn’t true though. We have all the time we need, sometimes we just don’t know how best to allocate it.

This doesn’t just apply for how we spend our time but also who we chose to spend it with. There will always be times when we have to spend time with people we don’t necessarily chose like work and collective hobbies but even in these circumstances you have choice. The choice to refuse to accept who they want you to be or who they already think you are. The choice to stand strong in your own character, your own beliefs, your own agenda and to realise that if you have to change who you are to gain their acceptance or approval, then it isn’t somewhere you need to be or something you want to be apart of.

Sometimes though it’s not easy to see when a relationship or friendship has run its course. In times like that I simplify it to one simple question

Does this person make me feel like a bigger version of myself or a smaller one? 

Friends and good relationships are ones in which you see yourself through their eyes as a bigger, braver stronger version of yourself. More funny, more intelligent. Friends build you up, make you feel invincible and worthy. They make you feel big. They help you grow. They support you. They change and you change but somehow you adapt to get those two pieces to still fit together. 

They put the hard work in and when something isn’t working they put it in again and again and again. They try something new. They value you and they tell you that they do. And they show you that they do. Their the people on the side lines rooting for you even when you stumble, even when you come last. They love you even when you can’t love yourself. They feel your pain. They feel your doubts, your insecurities. And when you’re sure you can’t go on, when you’re absolutely sure you can’t take a single step more, when you have nothing left to give, they show you how to give a little more. The take the step with you, sometimes they take it for you.

The hardest part is acknowledging when is the right time to hold on and when is the right time to let go. Again I ask myself one simple question;

Have they given up on me? 

If the answer to that question is yes then you already have the answer to yours.

Life is too short to spend with people who don’t appreciate you. Change is necessary. And that choice you make between holding on and letting go, between giving everything and giving up becomes the story of your life. Write it carefully.