Learning to honour my current self
"It was as if I was living through a future version of myself that didn’t yet exist."
“I had created a personal brand from the outside in. Just like I had created masks for myself so many times before. My brain is a seasoned expert in camouflaging. It has always been seeking, collecting and organising new data points to try to fit in. And this was no different. It’s a crafty trick, that I’m surprised I caught.”
Dear fellow human,
A tension in my belly lingered in the background of last week, a myriad of fearful thoughts scurrying around my skull. I felt as though I needed to make a decision, but I didn’t know what I needed to make a decision about.
And then, out of nowhere, I experienced a moment of clarity whilst sitting in my favourite people-watching spot in my local park. I had moments before hurried to put written words to my jumbled thoughts. Thankfully I was carrying my notebook. I wrote:
“I am caught in the tension of wanting to know and not wanting to be sure. Of wanting to be out there and not wanting to be known. Of wanting a blueprint and not wanting to be restricted. Of wanting discomfort and not wanting unease. Of wanting to know the answers and not wanting to pre-empt the ending.”
As soon as I read these words back to myself I realised they were about these letters. I recently turned on paid subscriptions and had fallen into old habits of operating from a place of ‘what do people expect from me and who do they expect me to be’ rather than ‘how can I create as much freedom as possible to express who I am in any given moment’.
This is a familiar pattern. I have always tried to create the foundation, in the present, for a version of myself I picture in the future. I sought certainty of who I would become. My imagined future self was the hope, authenticity, and acceptance that I craved. The act of creating these fictions allowed me a taste. It was as if I was living through a future version of myself that didn’t yet exist.
In reality, my collection of future versions of me rarely ever collided with the real me. The plan would inevitably fall apart in the execution phase as I found some other inspiration and moved on to the next project. On the occasions I did embody parts of my hypothetical future self, my world would crumble as I realised it didn’t fix anything - hope, certainty, authenticity and acceptance were nowhere to be found.
That’s what happened this week.
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