The world will wait for you

The gross and loving space that being stuck provides.

The world will wait for you to be ready.
It will wait.
You can sleep in a little longer.
Kiss a bit deeper.
Snuggle into your breath.
Go on a retreat within yourself.
Shower later in the day.
It will wait.
Allow your ideas to simmer.
To not yet know.
Befriend the edges of resistance.
Create space for uncertainty.
Linger some more.
Pause for a second to catch your breath.
The world will wait for you.
It will wait.

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I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know what I’m doing and I’m trying to make that okay. My insides are not matching my outsides and I’m trying to make that okay. It doesn’t feel okay, it actually feels pretty shit. My insides are a cornucopia of delicious things. Days spent hand-in-hand with my community. Sitting by trees as their wisdom floods my pores. Crouching on rain-freckled pavements in curiosity at a snail colony. Writing. So much, writing. I am living freely, fully and ever so, enchantingly. I have the delicate and loving gift of time. Yet, I am floating in this space that I can only describe as a borderline. Not between two countries, but between myself.

I really don’t know what I’m doing. I feel directionless. Without a route. That I’m waiting for something to happen and it’s not happening, but I am too exhausted and apathetic to make it happen. I don’t have what it takes, I keep whispering to myself. I don’t want to spend hours creating “content” for algorithms when I could be making art. I don’t want to send emails to people I found on LinkedIn that begin with “I hope you’re well” in the hopes they’ll find value in what I do, when I don’t even see value in the companies they work for, but I know it may well allow me to pay my bills. I don’t want to keep knocking on closed doors and closed minds, to persuade people in archaic industries who can’t even acknowledge the prejudice decorating the welcome mats in their office. I don’t want to re-do my website again. I don’t want to sign up for anymore courses that tell you how to “grow” your business, email list and followers when the world is moving so fast that the information in the course is outdated by the time you get to the end of it. I don’t feel particularly compelled to market myself and squeeze my work into a 10 second reel while bombs, militia and governments are decimating people across the world.

I don’t know what I’m doing, but I do know. I know how I want my life to feel. It’s pretty close to how it feels now, I just don’t know how to exist and support myself in a world that prioritises things instead of feels. I know who I am. I have spent so long trying to learn who I am and I know her. I know her so well that my pulse quickens when I think of the woman I have cultivated, fought for and returned back to. I hate that I can feel so at peace inside myself and taste the nectar of how precious this life is each day but I don’t know where my place is in the outside world anymore. I’m pissed off that we are so entrenched in extractive, capitalist systems that you need to be paid to be yourself in order to survive, instead of just being yourself. There’s shame living in my bone marrow, it speaks to me in the shower, while waiting for the train, sometimes even through the empty spaces in my dreams. It tells me that I’m lazy. To get my shit together. Work harder. Be better. Get over myself. You’re a grown up, where are your savings, where’s the house you don’t want to buy.

The shame pokes me in the ribs and asks me, “where did that girl go, with her big Pinterest dreams and audacious tenacity?,” well she’s fucking tired. She wants to nap in a field somewhere and let the moonlight bathe her tits.

In actuality, all the ways that life has threatened to break me, has just caught up with me. I’ve been doing the work, boy have I been doing the work. The work is all I know. All I’ve been immersed in for much of my adult life. I wrote a book on it. I believe in it. I taught it. Advocated for it. If “do the work” was a person, it is me mate. Yet, it doesn’t mean that the pain just goes away; trauma doesn’t work like that. My insides in all their abundant yumminess that I’m so grateful to feel most days, are the result of doing that work. I’ve just reached the season of my life where I’m noticing that the traumas I’ve lived through are trying to prevent me from creating the outsides that I desire.

Sarah Ward in her wonderful Substack letter, titled “Can you give yourself what you desire?” said, “I have been the cock block to my own life.”

Let me repeat that:
"I HAVE BEEN THE COCK BLOCK TO MY OWN LIFE”
- Sarah Ward

This never used to be me, but for the past year, damn it this is me. It’s me because there’s no end goal when it comes to healing. There are seasons. Seasons where we are living. Seasons when we’re in the trenches. Progress is made. We see the rewards. We feel it. We think we’re going backwards, but we’re never going back. Then, there are times when it just feels unbearable because your therapist somehow finds a brand new scab to pick on. There are times when we are re-traumatised by something out of our control that it brings all of our stuff back up again.

I’ve seen how trauma has impacted my romantic relationships. It was a huge focus for me. I did EMDR on it. Cut cords. Read out texts from boys to my therapist, like I’m reciting a monologue from Shakespeare. It was an area that I could never truly see myself feeling secure and regulated in. For now at least, as I tentatively touch my wooden coffee table to ease the superstition, I feel good about it. The stories aren’t very loud. I feel so distant from my past selves who couldn’t imagine ever feeling this way. The work works. And I am no naive baby lamb, you bet, when a trigger pops up, which it always will, the next frontier of healing will reveal itself.

Right now, what is feeling loud and impenetrable is my relationship with my body and mainly my career. Feeling both of them at the same time is as unhelpful as an unripe avocado that needs to be turned into guacamole that evening. Career was always my safe space, the topic that I never bought self-help books on and felt very confident in. I would always shrug it off and say, “oh that’s just not my lesson to learn in this lifetime.” I thought I was good, that my soul had more important things to feel horrendous about. I mean, I’ve spoken in front of 500 people without a glimpse of anxiety, I really did not believe it was my lesson to learn.

Haha bitch you thought.

Now, here we are, career stuff is coming for me harder than the police tracking down the most wanted list. I don’t feel brave anymore. I was brave enough to leave a decade of working in fashion, beauty and journalism behind to become self-employed. I was brave enough to move to NYC by myself when I was 22. I would send emails to magazines telling them that I was a big deal and they should interview me. I’d spend hours pitching myself for events and workshops at household name brands. I’m ashamed that I no longer feel brave, that I’ve seen too much and felt too much that has diminished my bravery.

The trauma that lives in my fascia is always surveying the world to create evidence files that prove any number of stories that my brain has decided to believe about myself. That’s what C-PTSD does. There’s only so many things that you can experience without believing that the rest of your life will be more of the same. I believed that I was unlovable for most of my life because I was raped at 15, abandoned by my dad, sexually harassed on the street too many times to mention, followed home, and emotionally abused in a relationship. That was my evidence file in that area. The evidence that I would list whenever the people who actually loved me, reminded me of how loved I was. It took time to believe it and now I believe it. I know I am loved. I know I am lovable. I know I am love.

My brain is now annoyingly doing the same with my career. It’s ignoring the incredible things that I’ve achieved when I never believed I would. It’s creating a new evidence file of supposed proof that, “things like this just don’t happen for people like me”. People who have experienced some of the things that I have.

I wrote this in my journal and I’m sharing it even though it sends shivers of shame up my spine, because I know in my bones that shame can’t survive in the light of being seen:

When will I let go of the story that I need to suffer. When will I release this idea that I am a victim. When will I shed the belief that I am not worthy or deserving enough to have abundance and success, just because I am someone who has not had enough experiences of physical, financial and emotional safety?

My nervous system is familiar with freezing. It knows how to fawn. It froze to keep me alive. My body has been trained to believe that it is safe when we are dysregulated, because that is what we are used to. I live in a Black body that is slowly weathering from living in a racist society, where cortisol swells my belly and unnerves my mind. I carry not only my pain but the pain of my ancestors. Hyper-vigilance lives under my skin. Startling at intrusive sounds. Always on the watch. A body that had to learn that it is our home. It has taken time for me to un-learn and un-know. Time spent returning back to the state of owning my own body again. I am still travelling there.

In this moment in time, I know that I am in a trauma response. I have gone into the cave of disassociation because it is what I have always known. Even after years of “doing the work”, my mind knows what my body is still learning. I am not eating well. I haven’t been walking. My yoga mat is collecting dust. I don’t know what work to do. I am ignoring my to-do list. I don’t know what comes next. Yet, there is the conflict, the borderline of still having such joy in me, love in me and the ever-present curiosity of leaving the house each day to savour every last drop of my time here. I am still laughing and dancing, I don’t know a world in which I am not frolicking. I know what to do, but right now, I don’t want to know it. I have support and I am trusting and opening my heart to it. I know I will be okay, I know this is a season. I am privileged to be trained and qualified in the practices that will help me and I also have a circle of hands lifting me up. What comforts me the most, is the knowing that the world will wait for me.

The world will wait for me while I find my bravery again. It will wait while I grieve. The world will wait for me as I teach my body how to find comfort in things that are filled with nourishment instead of neglect. It will wait. The world will wait for me as I take this time to re-discover what this version of me needs. It will wait for me as I place one footprint in the sand in front of the other towards my vision. The world will wait for me as I transmute this phase of not knowing what I’m doing into eventual certainty. It will wait for me as I take as much time as I need to forgive myself. The world will wait for me while I create and birth new work in the world. The world will wait for me as I percolate ideas and decide what is now a yes. It will wait for me while I pivot and have compassion for myself.

The world will wait for me, and darling, it will wait for you.

Captured by the loving eyes of someone who loves me, Becky Symes.