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Open-Hearted Living – beautiful… and an absolute bitch!

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Welcome back!

Ahead of the second season of Behind the Hashtag, I’ve been revisiting all my previous articles; they are a powerful reminder of the journey I started some years ago. Many of the struggles I faced make more sense to me now.

Since I last shared an article with you all, it’s been a time of incredible growth, AND you can bet your sweet ass that growth has NOT been comfortable. No question, it has most definitely been worth it, though I’ll never pretend it’s been easy.

Most annoyingly, I have come to accept that growth can never stop. If we want to experience all that life offers growth must be part of that journey. Acknowledging that truth also means understanding that I don’t have to LIKE something to accept it.

The Behind the Hashtag season one cliffhanger ending had me “wrestling a greased pig in the dark”, a term I borrowed from Bréne Brown to describe personal growth. In hindsight, I needed to step away and make enough sense of what I was working through before writing about it – hoping that would allow the shared experience to be vaguely useful to the Behind the Hashtag community when I returned. Being useful is the hope and intention of all the writing I share.

I’ve been working on the struggle between my head and my heart – and what a Game of Thrones-level battle that turned out to be! At times, it is fun and funny but also brutal and very difficult. Thankfully, I did not do this alone; to say it took a village would be an understatement – this was a global support effort from family, friends, fellowship, therapy and even a horse (more on that later). And yes, I do realise how high maintenance this makes me sound … all I can do is own that, be incredibly grateful and pay it forward in any way I can.

So, I return once again from a place of “Love and Loss”, where this journey began in honour of my late friend Chrissie, who always wanted me to get started with blogging. I still hear Chrissie’s encouragement and down-to-earth advice as I reflect on life. However, this particular return to writing is a very different version from the first one. Behind the Hashtag came back into my heart on a day when I was processing the death of my dad and, at the same time, ending another relationship which had been beautiful and powerful but ultimately would not be healthy for me in the long term.   

Love and loss indeed – but a moment where I was the most open-hearted I think I’ve ever been in my life. A moment when I realised that the armour I’d built and held around my heart for years had quietly fallen away, one final large chunk of armour came off when I least expected it amid grief, and I simply did not see it coming. It was emotionally raw, and I felt exposed in a way I had never experienced before. It was both beautiful and a complete bitch, to be honest.   

What helped me was having the humility to accept that this really was the cost of admission to a happy and honest life. An open heart isn’t always going to feel happy. An honest heart, however, would always be healthy. I could celebrate that being a people pleaser was now firmly in my past. I was willing to do whatever it took to live the life I had worked so very hard to build – even when that felt difficult and painful in the moment.

In the coming weeks and months, I’d love to share the recent chapter I’ve been living through. The past year, in particular, has had the most incredible adventures, brutally difficult life events, some of the most glorious fun I’ve ever had and, above all, given me an understanding of how I have been getting in my own way for most of my life! As Taylor Swift sings in her song Anti-Hero…” It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me…”

I’m looking forward to taking the journey with you all and hopefully opening YOUR hearts along the way.

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Wrestling a greased pig in the dark

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“Wrestling a greased pig in the dark” is a line from Brené Brown’s book Rising Strong. She refers to the expression as an excellent description of what you might experience if brave enough to “try and get your head and heart around who you are and where you come from”. This felt like the perfect way to capture what I’ve been doing ALOT over the past few months, and in one way or another, I suppose I’ve been doing it for many years.

Let me assure you that no actual pigs have been harmed in the writing of this article – although I did find that tackling Brené’s question is not work for the faint-hearted. I can tell you that it’s been worth rolling my sleeves up to do the work as I haven’t felt this calm, happy and healthy for a very long time, with occasional spells of batshit crazy as I continue the work! Whilst no one can do the work for you, I was hoping that if I shared some of my experiences and insights, I might save you a little bit of the leg work – especially if you fancy getting your arms around your very own greased pig :-).

The conversation which began when I started Behind the Hashtag really helped me on the road I find myself on. When you’re in the midst of doing the work, it’s challenging to actually reflect and write about it–it can be a bit raw and tiring. Having taken a break from writing, it has now felt like time to get restarted with sharing some of my experiences, hoping they may help others who could identify with my struggles. I’ll do my best to give the whole, sometimes messy, occasionally funny, picture.

I did need that step away for a while. Sometimes you need to get very quiet and very still to hear what’s going on in your “head and heart”. It’s been so helpful for me to take a breath and also take a break from ploughing through a to-do list. I’d noticed that everything was beginning to feel like work – even those things I usually get great joy from, such as Behind the Hashtag. Always notice that and listen to it – when you suddenly notice you stop enjoying something.

As I begin to pick up the pen again, it seems very appropriate that what’s nudged me back towards writing is reconnecting with the memory of the dear friend who always gave me the “What are you waiting for?” encouragement. It was Chrissie I set out to honour with Behind the Hashtag,  and whilst there’s not a day I don’t think about her, it was reflecting on stories about Chrissie, in planning for her long-overdue memorial service, that reminded me of her wonderful “you can do anything” attitude she would always fill me with.

It hasn’t been all hard work, though. I was also finally taking some time and space to focus on health and wellbeing. As part of this focus, I needed to build new routines, shift what I had been paying attention to and above all, tackle what I’d been avoiding.

As well as clearing ACTUAL cupboards, I was also clearing my mind. If you don’t stop to reflect and take stock, you can miss so many of the things that you’ve already got – they are just tucked away at the back of a cupboard.

It’s not the first time I’ve tackled the physical and mental de-cluttering, but something different did happen this time. If you’re taking on a major project – like a “deep clean”, you would usually call in professionals to help – they have the equipment and experience to help. So, whilst I’m incredibly blessed to have a local and global “village” of gifted friends, who have never waivered with their love and support, I realised I needed some “reinforcements”.

Having more help wasn’t the whole story of what was different. Part of what has made the past months so challenging and incredibly helpful is that I became teachable! Years of learning, reading, researching, observing, studying… like some frenzied student on too much caffeine… literally years of looking for answers to life’s struggles. And only in these last months have I actually become teachable – which is oh so very different from learning. That doesn’t mean I always get it right – far from it! It does mean that I notice and learn from it when I get it wrong… then move on.

For a few years now, at times, I’d been noticing I would be absolutely exhausted and not really understand why. Well, it turns out my head and heart had been in a wrestling match for years; I’m now finding out slowly but surely how to stop the fight! Working out our patterns – particularly those that pull us away from where we’re trying to get to – can be a game-changer. Over the next few months, after some hard work and more exploration, I’ll be happy to share what’s helped me. And I promise – there won’t be a greased pig in sight!

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The Farts of Wrath

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Do I know the Behind the Hashtag community well enough to tell The Farts of Wrath story? I’ve concluded that if the word fart in the title switches you off, you’ll quietly walk on by this article. If, however, you want to learn more about the physical price your body can play for being a people pleaser, this might be helpful.

At the heart of this life lesson for me is the impact of years and years of pushing down what I wanted ‘in service of others’ (might sound familiar to many of you) and the power of finally finding a safe space to let go of stress.

In the 5+ years leading up to my “aha” moment, I’d been living a very stressful and unhappy life. In particular, the 18 months before my breakthrough had included a marriage breakdown, house move, family illness and my own physical burnout. I was a lady much in need of stress reduction. A feeling I know many of you are experiencing right now with all the current additional life stresses.

The light on my horizon at the time was a wee break coming up with wonderful friends from my hometown – we’d been partners in crime since our late teens. I’d actually NEVER been on a girls holiday – 50 years old – and this was my first one! I’d NEVER been on a relaxing, read books all day by the pool kind of holiday. For almost two decades, my holiday experiences were the perfect manifestation of my people-pleasing. Imagine you dislike theme parks and are petrified of rollercoasters … but find all your main holidays are at Disney? What the hell! People pleaser on steroids or what!

I should say that subsequent trips to Disney with just my daughter Iona has helped change my experience massively – not always easy (Would you kiss Mickey Mouse with that mouth?). I have now reframed Disney for me with some beautiful memories.

This shift in the holiday scenario was significant. It was when I realised the damage that the people-pleasing had done to my body and soul over the years.

Determined to not crawl into this holiday with the current exhaustion levels I was experiencing, I decided to finally take the advice of a very dear friend and see a kinesiologist. I found a wonderful local practitioner who proved to be a game-changer for me.

As I experienced it, at the heart of kinesiology was finding out what my body was holding within. Every experience you live through – good and bad – goes into your body. One of the key things that showed up for me was the impact of years of “pushing down” my own needs. I expected some’ anger… it turned out to be way more than anger. Apparently, I had full-blown WRATH! Marvel movie, end of the world, levels of WRATH. No wonder I was exhausted.

Armed with some natural remedies and meditation affirmations, I set off on holiday – already feeling better. The blast of laughter with my beautiful friends before we’d even left the airport proved to be brilliant medicine too.

The joy of sitting around the table laughing, sharing, crying, eating and laughing some more was incredible. A holiday that restores your energy versus exhausts you! Who knew? I’d shared the story of the wrath within me as we were catching up. Everything just felt lighter from sharing.

Then the strangest thing happened. After a few days of relaxing, sleeping, feeling completely safe ‘to be me’ and taking all my natural remedies from the kinesiologist – there was a shift. It was a very audible shift. Unfortunately, it seemed very appropriate that my wrath was working it’s way out of my body – in the form of thunderous farts!

I’m not exaggerating – Thor himself would have stepped back in awe at these bad boys. The first day it happened, I didn’t realise the noise had travelled from the ground floor to the top floor of our four-story townhouse. As I stepped out on the rooftop terrace with my morning coffee, my dear friend Rhona, who didn’t look up from her book, commented, “seems you’re wrath is finding a way out there, girl”. Who knew? Not the most sociable way to process your stress – you need some very loving friends to embrace this particular outcome.

But fart humour aside, holding stress in your body is incredibly damaging. I’m still working on ways to make sure I look after myself – I’m midway through reading Burnout by Emily and Amelia Nagoski and learning how to complete the stress cycle. When we can’t control the stressors in our lives, we can minimise the impact of stress on our body. More to come on this topic in weeks ahead, and I look forward to hearing from the Facebook group on ‘What is working for you?’.

I leave you with a “try this out” and a question – What might you be pushing down into your body with the stress in your life?

You might find a body scan helpful to try…

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Untamed – Letting loose your inner cheetah!

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NEVER has a book been recommended to me by so many people – Untamed by Glennon Doyle. This is one of those books it seemed EVERYONE was talking about when released. Of course, I had to read it.

Cheetah shoesI got quite interested when I read the dedication at the front of Untamed, “For every woman resurrecting herself”. After coming out of from a big chunk of your life and through the wringer of divorce, it can feel like a resurrection – or the very least a rediscovery.  So I was hopeful that there would be some helpful insights and experiences.

At first, I didn’t fully understand the book’s opening story about a cheetah living in captivity, but as I read on the metaphor of a cage and the as yet ‘unlived’ version of life outside, really made sense.

We told a story about Tabitha, a cheetah brought up in captivity. When the zookeeper was asked if Tabitha missed the wild she replied, “No, she doesn’t know any different. She’s never even seen the wild. This is a good life for Tabitha.”

“She doesn’t know any different”… if you don’t have a comparison – Glennon imagined the cheetah might say, “I should be grateful. I have a good enough life here. It’s crazy to long for what doesn’t even exist”. As powerful as I know gratitude to be, it is possible in some circumstances for it to become a bit of a cage. I say that as someone who, for the best part of two decades, “didn’t know any different”.

I’m not going to suggest for a moment that this book will give you lots of easy answers, but it will most definitely challenge you to ask yourself some pretty difficult questions. Being really honest about my reading experience – I didn’t find it easy. At times it felt as though the writing was running at the pace of a cheetah in the wild. If you’re looking for a neatly packaged, clearly signposted life map, this is not for you. If you want an authentic and very raw window into human pain and the messiness of life – dig in!

Part of my struggle as I started to read this book was that I didn’t know the author’s voice. It was such a personal story – but I didn’t know the person. It helped me to listen to the audiobook, and this may be the first time I’ve actually listened to and read the same book in parallel!

I have a very different life experience from Glennon Doyle. We ALL have our own experiences. So although I didn’t necessarily relate to the life she had lived, I could absolutely relate to the feeling of being caged. I suspect it is a feeling shared by far more of us than we care to admit. Because we know we “should be grateful”.

There was a very powerful question this book had me reflect on again. How much of your life is your idea? I realised several years ago that a great deal of my life wasn’t “my idea”. I captured this in my TEDxTalk, the notion of life looking much better on paper than how your lived experience felt. This question also helped me see that the more my life was “my idea”, the happier and more energised I was becoming.

My 18-year-old selfThe line in the book which made me smile was,

“My spark was always inside me, smouldering”

That’s when I realised that hints of being untamed had begun to emerge for me last summer. When I finally had the chance to take a holiday with my “Inverness Girls” (we’ve known each other since we were 16). As we relived the laughter and nonsense of our teenage selves, this wonderful group of ladies helped me realise that my wild and fun 18-year-old self was still in there … deeply buried, but still there.

I’m not sure it’s possible to fully capture the power of this book, I think the impact will come from different parts of it depending on where you are in your life. The passage that properly gave me goosebumps was: “Then I built a life of my own. I did it by resurrecting the very parts of myself I was trained to mistrust, hide and abandon in order to keep others comfortable”.

It strikes me as funny now that just after that girls holiday last year and the rediscovery of my 18-year-old self I treated myself to a pair of “I’ll buy whatever the hell I want shoes” … and they were cheetah pattern!

I reckon I’d been itching to be untamed for quite some time – I wonder, do you have an inner cheetah just waiting to let loose?

Next Steps

We have an exclusive Behind the Hashtag community on Facebook, if you’d like to join the discussions click here.
For those who want to go deep, here is a great reading guide from Glennon Doyle.
If you want to hear a discussion on the book I loved this Brené Brown podcast.

 

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Would you kiss Mickey Mouse with that mouth?

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I have a long and complicated relationship with Disney.  I’m sure we’ll explore that in more detail in the future, but for now, I want to focus on a particular visit to Disneyland Paris with my daughter back in December 2018. 

I pick this trip because it was a defining moment in our mother and daughter relationship.  The trip was to give my daughter a break from what had been a pretty hellish time for her.  We went looking for a bit of magic, I didn’t expect the turning point to be what we now fondly call the “f*ck off afternoon”.

Let’s go back a little in time before we jump in.  In my review of the Brené Brown book ‘The Gift of Imperfection’, I highlighted that I’d discovered my tendency to numb what’s really going on, to avoid my most difficult emotions.  In the lead-up to the trip, there had been a whole range of things for me to avoid, our lives had been turned inside out.  As well as avoiding my own emotions, I had also been trying to shield my daughter, as much as possible, from everything that was going on.  It’s tough to hide anything from an intelligent fifteen-year-old with the wisdom of Yoda, discovered I.

Instead of just shielding her at home, I thought an escape to “the happiest place on earth” to get a dose of Christmas magic seemed like a good idea.  It had been a hellish few months with a sudden divorce and house move, plus several loved ones battling serious health issues – which in turn triggered some serious health issues of our own.  We were both holding a lot.

I’d been pushing plenty of difficult emotions down, no question, trying to “stay strong” for others.  I remember reading a quote from Martha Beck:

“Anger is the immune system for the soul”

I had a massive amount of unexpressed anger at circumstances not only not of my creation, but also very much out of my control.

But Disney isn’t a place of suffering, surely?   Well, I’ve seen both sides of that coin, and we found ourselves – after a relatively calm morning – in an edgy discussion which got dark very quickly!  What started out as teasing suddenly had my anger blast out in our hotel room with full-force and me telling my beautiful girl to “f*ck off”.  I don’t know which of us was more shocked! After apologising, I dashed off to brush my teeth – subconsciously washing my mouth out too perhaps…

This incident could have derailed our whole trip, so  I’ll be forever grateful for the wisdom and understanding of my daughter, who saw it for what it clearly was – a build-up of months and months of unexpressed emotions.  We cried, we laughed, we cried a little more.  Then this wondrous calm came over us, and next thing you know we’re watching the gorgeous Disney parade as though nothing had happened!

Thank goodness for a strong enough relationship to withstand such an outburst.  It’s now the habit in our home to be honest and open about emotions – my daughter actively encourages it to ensure we don’t have another “f*ck off afternoon” as it’s now known.

No matter how far you push down emotions, they will find their way out.

Eventually, everyting you are pushing down will rise to the surfaceEither by making you ill or suddenly and dramatically being expressed and hurting those around us – I’m just fortunate that I have an amazing daughter who was ready to work through this with me.

I’m sure Mickey Mouse would have been as horrified as we were – but also proud of how we turned it around!   

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Loss & Legacy

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Have you ever had a friend who is always your voice of reason and comfort? The friend you wouldn’t make a major decision without calling them first. The friend who you phone first if something wonderful or something horrendous has happened to you? The friend who you laugh with until you snort (or worse, depending on your age and pelvic floor condition). The friend who is always in your corner.

Well, I’ve been lucky enough to have a dear friend who is all of that and more – the voice of reason and comfort. Many years ago, Chrissie Griffiths started out as a brilliant work colleague and ended up being one of my family. So it was devastating when we lost our Chrissie to brain cancer in March 2020, she worked so hard to kick its arse for over 18 months, but sadly it wasn’t to be beaten.

Sunrise on a morning walk with Chrissie

Sunrise on a morning walk with Chrissie

As heartbreaking as it is to lose someone too soon, it’s not my goal to focus on lamenting the loss. What I want to focus on is bringing Chrissie’s voice as the first one into this space – she was always nudging me to start writing, I can hear her lovely Hampton accent, “What are you waiting for Hun? Just get bloody started!”.

So I love the idea of keeping the legacy of Chrissie’s wisdom, humour and kindness going with the principles of Behind the Hashtag, she always loved the idea of sharing experiences which might help.

The rules Chrissie lived by were pretty solid and at the very root of them was helping others unconditionally and she never looked for anything in return – just that they were better in some way after she left them.   There wasn’t much in life that Chrissie hadn’t seen and I’ve never met anyone so non-judgemental, that doesn’t mean she didn’t have a point of view mind you and often before getting on with helping me, I was on the receiving end of a few “Well that was a bit f£%&ing stupid Hun”. Ironically, Chrissie was always the first to say that life was too short and no one enjoyed a laugh and bit of fun more than her and often pushed us to “stop and smell the roses” even in the middle of really difficult things.

Chrissie & I on one of our walks

Chrissie & I on one of our walks

As I reflect on Chrissie’s insights and legacy – I’m also drawn to learn from her regrets. No one ever thinks they will get cancer – especially someone who didn’t drink or smoke and lived one of the healthiest lives. So, despite all the wonderful things Chrissie did for others, I also know there were many things she wanted to do for herself but was ‘waiting for a better time’. Sadly for Chrissie, time was not on her side.

My learning from Chrissie’s legacy is NEVER put things off waiting for the ideal time. If you want to do it – just get on with it. My friend’s death has reminded me that nothing in life is guaranteed, so rather than waiting, I’m jumping in now and invite those of you taking the time to read this to do the same.

If you want to make changes in your life, this might be the ideal space to get started!

Thank you, Chrissie, for your legacy.

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