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Stepping forward
It’s somewhat of a introspective time of year, maybe fuelled by the endless grey clouds and rain we’ve been having here in the UK. It sort of sends you inwards, when there’s not much changing outside. I feel as though something is ending and something else is waiting to start, but I’m not too sure what. Coming to the end of my studies, my mind is on the future, some sort of gainful employment maybe, at least some sort of way to make a living that’s fulfilling, fun and interesting.
I’ve been looking back at the cycles in my life over these last 4 decades, and it all seems a little like start and dead end. Re-start and another dead end. Switch and start and dead end again. I’ve felt myself viewing my working life as a series of endless failures over the years, even looking at myself as an endless failure. I couldn’t work out why I couldn’t follow the perfect progression of those around me.
I couldn’t stick with one job, one trajectory. I admit, being in my 40’s now and looking at careers of those around me, there’s some regret that I didn’t ‘stick it out’ in one of those jobs I hated, follow the promotion trail. I sometimes find it hard comparing myself to others, feeling I should be a head of something, a director of something else, a manager of somewhere by now. But I left everything I started. Over the last few years though, I have recognised some kind of pattern. I’ve found in these pattern there are clues. And in these clues are answers. And in answers, there is positivity.
With each of those inevitable, wry aftershocks that come with late-diagnosed neurodiversity, a few more crusty layers fall away, revealing a kind of tentative truth underneath. A hint of gold shining in the rubble. It just takes a bit of digging.
Everything reaches an end, where somehow, I have to change. I’ve felt like it’s just a dead end over and over, to be honest. Why couldn’t I stick with one thing? But I’ve started to realise, dead ends are my phoenix.
I start, and then after a while, it is time to end. Looking at it with the knowledge I have now, of course it works like this. I feel now like it couldn’t work any other way. There’s quite a bit of comfort in that. Having an explanation is the first step of a new plan, I feel. This plan also sounds like a challenge. And that is fun in itself…
After a few years doing something the same, every day, the dopamine runs out, the fun is over, the achievement is achieved. I have been ‘good enough’. The chapter closes, and a new one begins. My brain wants to break free and follow excitement. So is the way. Small cycles, and longer ones. They run concurrently, always looping, always starting and ending.
Society values predictability, stable linear trajectories. When you show up with a CV with a good chunk of semi-successful-but-not-quite jobs listed, with no coherent thread of promotions running through it, it’s met with a grimace and offers to tailor it into something more palatable. I saw myself as a failure that kept hitting a brick wall. But of course I did.
I straighten up a little and look back with clear eyes. I fought and fought and pushed myself past the natural end of everything I ever did. I got burnt out, I got ill, I got depressed. I couldn’t understand why I was so good and then suddenly, I wasn’t. Everything has ended in some sort of burnout and I couldn’t see why. I thought I just wasn’t cut out for success, as I defined it then.
But, and I whisper it, because it is still a new revelation and kind of precious, I can suddenly see it. I got bored. The dopamine ran out. For me, it truly explains why I’ve gone down in flames so many times. Pushing to stay consistent when every part of my brain has given up and just wants difference, excitement and novelty. High stress, low reward, no freedom, many rules, rigid time, hardly any praise. Monotony. No opportunity for ideas or creation. The surefire, 100% successful ingredients for burnout. Of course!
The slog to the top isn’t interesting to me. The reward at the end of a long, long task? I just don’t care. Is the thing I’m doing fun? Then I’ll be amazing at it. As soon as it stops being fun, or challenging, or interesting – I’m right out. It could be a billion pound job at the end of it and nothing on earth would get me there. It could be a career trajectory to be the strategic director of actual Earth, but if there wasn’t a fun path to getting there, I’d say see you later mate. I think I’m making peace with that.
I’m motivated by praise, problem solving, new things, connections. Things where I can win, things where I achieved, where I want to push myself and have freedom to put new ideas in place, to create things, to just do stuff fast. It’s true, praise lights up my dopamine connections like nothing else. I love stuff that is challenging, and finding a way through the challenge and feeling like I’ve won. I love interesting things. I can jump about between unrelated tasks endlessly and get them done incredibly well in record time, if there’s a bit of panic, chaos and freedom attached. Little cycles, within bigger ones.
As for the bigger ones, the ones that stretch over years, well. They come to an end, too, if there is not enough variety, not enough incentive, not enough freedom to stretch out and go full galaxy brain. It’s ok. For me, it’s natural. It’s inevitable. I think of the environments I worked in previously, and that ‘aha’ moment is almost delicious.
So, 7 years into my foray into academia, I’m feeling a little apprehensive. A year before I hand in my thesis, I’m running on fumes and spite like most final year doctoral students, determined to try and finish one damn thing in my life, but slightly worried about what comes next. Do I want to fit myself into that academic structure? Just how much room is there to create something that is sustainably interesting? Is there a trajectory with enough momentum and space to keep me going? Is there glory on tap?
I would love to carry on learning, discovering, researching. The freedom of academia is something I’ve never seen in any other job, yet at the same time the entrenchment of structure is deep and very resistant to change. But there has been space to spin an entire dinner service of plates, follow research rabbit holes, push myself to do more than I ever thought. I’ve actually thrived here.
If I choose to try and carry on, at least my eyes are open to how my brain thrives – and I know that if the cycle ends, it is a natural end, and not because I have failed. Having compassion for all those past endings gives me strength to face the possibility potential of a new one, and the courage to change things that aren’t working to things that do. A recent conversation described it as lily-pad working. Hopping happily from lily to lily, all within a pond. I love that.
So I know if it doesn’t work out, I can make peace with thriving non-linearly, and hop and shimmy sideways into whatever else is on the horizon, head over heels.
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Unsettlement
Do you ever feel that something is shifting? Like you are on one side of a veil, about to step through, but to what, you don’t know. A subtle shift in the wind, a smell hinting on the breeze, a sudden illumination that suddenly highlights a whole different path. Like a diver tiptoeing to the edge of the high board. Toes curled over the edge, arms stretched above. That perfect moment of stillness. The held breath, the clear exhale. That infinitesimal pause, the pinpoint before, and then…
The pause amplifies. It wraps around me in its stillness, the infinite and the instant, endless depth and the deep black potential, waiting for an atom to shift the balance. What I saw as stagnation is instead a building, a deer gathering energy before taut muscles spring forward in a leap. The tightening of an elastic band before a snap. Feeling the pause, feeling the ache, the yearning for movement that is almost painful. I want to know what is on the other side. I want clarity, explanation, boxes, linearity. Instead, I teeter on the liminal.
I look back at cycles repeating themselves over and over and finally realise I need to let go. I feel the constant strive for something that fits in that neat box, for something tactile, solid, defined. The endless wish for that definition to fit in. But the realisation is I’m not made for linearity. I didn’t trust my tangentiality, but I think that’s what is on the other side. A linear road leading me to this veil. Through that doorway, the final freedom to bend and change and whisper on the winds. The expectation of completement, of one track progression, all the things I’ve bent and fit myself into over 4 decades. You do this, then this, then this, then this. Tick, tick, tick.
tick.
tick.
Standing on that high board, I open my eyes. Ready to dive.
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Maybe it will all be ok
I feel as though my whole life was building up to this. Nothing special, nothing momentous. No news, no occasion. Just a hint of knowing, of acceptance, a beginning in this middle life.
I turned 42 this summer. A true mid-life age, but I feel everything else was a beginning, a prelude. Wild rides, highs and lows, not knowing who I am, swimming through decades. But it is here I am starting to come ashore. Two-score and two. That many years to begin to say, I am her, I like that, I am good at this. To expand into a body and soul more solid than it has ever felt before. To voice that which I didn’t dare before. To feel tentative joy in experience. To watch the glitter of that August-dry grass in the breeze and feel that same sway in the wind, the joy of movement, the embrace of my place in the web of it all.
My hair is falling out in clumps, probably hormones, probably the final year of the PhD, but with the shedding comes a thought of letting go, of leaving those memories locked in keratin and colour behind. Hanging from branches, pulled from hairbrushes, carried away in water flow. I keep a lock, pandemic hair, curled in a small basket, waiting for some magick to show itself, the time to be right to throw it to the wind or sea, or maybe stay with dark earth in silence. Tiny, silver-white hairs begin to regrow in place of long, red strands. I stare at them in amazement, wonder that I got this far, the emergence of a new chapter. Older me squeezes the hand of my younger self somewhere in another dimension of my mind, a few layers deep. She is healing, slowly, slowly. She is beginning to see the path. Neither of us know where we tread in coming years, but we get there, together.
That peach August sun picks out diamonds in the parched grasses surrounding the garden. The flags glow warm underfoot, skin sinking deliciously into the heat. The breeze tickles branches, glorious days. Rosehips glow red, blackberries shine that deep purple-black in the hedge. Harvest is early, this year, pushed by the heat of this dry, bright summer. These are my days, tiptoe-long and layered. Now I allow myself to stretch deep into the multi-layered love of the season, embracing the true depth of feeling for maybe the first time. Not just love for the long days, but each feeling is faceted, past and future, place and expansion, light and dark, what is and will be. Layers and layers, as always.
Two-score and two. The August exhale, the ripening of a harvest sown unknowingly all those years ago, fighting tooth and nail against storms, against identity, against myself. Now, as age spots and wrinkles begin to adorn my skin, I am beginning to understand. With each white hair, I feel love. With each darker spot on my hands, I smile. With new lines on my face, I gaze in wonder. It took a while to get here, but I wouldn’t change it. 42, but I feel I may begin to know myself for the first time ever. I am still discovering, settling, testing. But it feels different. In place of dread, a hint of a smile plays on my lips. Maybe it will all be ok.
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Lughnasadh and a little refresh
It’s been a fallow year or two here in blog land. Torn by too many possibilities, overwhelmed by ideas of what a blog should look like in the 2020’s, rushed by general life and being “just too busy” to even remember the joy I got from blogging. I found myself swept up in social media addiction, way too much busywork, spending too much time in my head and nowhere near enough time on the things that I know bring me peace. It’s like that sometimes, though. We need to jump into the foaming waters of a fast running river to be carried to the wide calm of the delta.
I think I’m reaching that wider, calmer destination. This Lughnasadh, this time of harvest – I was wondering what could possibly have grown this year. I’ve stepped away from my nature spirituality, lost the regular, deep rhythm of the waxing and waning days. I’ve been running on adrenaline, leaving little bits of myself here and there, forgetting, maybe intentionally, who I am. Maybe I needed that.
But even after all this flitting about, spreading thinly, ignoring hobbies and joys and losing myself in work and apps – there is a little harvest here. The high energy of solstice is mellowing, and I along with it. I sowed chaos, and I am reaping calm.I’ve tried to look back on the last few years, whilst I was still bubbling in that quick flowing water without realising. I was experiencing but not processing, although I wasn’t aware of it at the time. A good few life events have occurred, and I breezed through them all, pushing at the edge of the envelope as always, taking on more and more. I’m fine, I’m fine I’m fine. The distraction that comes with the thrill of pushing yourself. No space to think of anything else. No time to let it settle.
My harvest is the out breath. My harvest is running out of steam. My harvest is a pull to the ever turning wheel, to the fading of the vibrant green leaves, to the stories and roots and stones of old. My harvest is letting go of expectation and writing my heart out. My harvest is letting tears of grief fall. My harvest is noticing the breeze.
I’ve noticed a change, a creeping in of compassion, an invisible embrace holding myself more gently than before. The things we talked about in years of therapy and I never could quite imagine. Something has broken down and the result is a gentleness, a tentative joy, an acceptance. Not doing things because I should but doing things because I am. I am those things. I am tree, and mud, and spirit and cells. I am night and dark. I am human in this ever connected web.
I needed to lose myself to come back.