hello. I have spent the day furiously deep in thought about what direction I wish to go in - with regards to the business, how I live my day to day life, and physically which direction to go, as I am yearning for a spot of adventure. The problem is, there are too many ideas and not enough hours in the day, or days in the week, or weeks in the year. As I have mentioned, I am trying to live slower. For me, this mainly concerns learning how to move. I want to move forward with thought, intention and structure, to both maximise the time and the quality of my life. This seems like a very simple, sensible and achievable practice. However, I am absolutely riddled with ADHD and I am used to operating out of a sense of organised (to me) chaos. While thought and intention mark every move I make, structure most certainly does not, but that does not mean that it cannot have a place.
Structure has signified different things to me - it signifies stability and safety, two things I yearn to feel in all the different dimensions of my life. But it also makes me feel a lack of freedom and control. My desire for structure makes me feel as if people are pulling each of my arms from different directions, some kind of willing resistance. Then I realised I was still thinking about this from an old perspective based on past experiences. I have spent most of my twenties in environments and situations I did not want to be in, did not feel comfortable in, and did not align with me. There’s probably been less than six months of the last decade where I felt like I was in the right place at the right time, surrounded by the right people. I never really felt safe or at ease, but I was doing everything I could bring that feeling into those spaces so that they may feel right. It seems like such an obvious thought now, but it never occurred to me that I did not have to do that, until a few years ago.
I have always been a massive hater of anyone who espouses the opinion that you don’t owe anyone anything, and you should never trust anyone. I think it is one of the saddest ways to live. I want to trust everyone and share everything with everyone because that’s what makes life wonderful. I hate that the world is so cold and transactional. Along with stability and safety, one of the other things I yearn for is a real sense of community, and community cannot be built on a foundation that lacks trust, respect and basic decency. These feelings were what made it very difficult for me to extract myself from the places I did not feel happy or safe in, because while I may not have even liked the people or situations I was in anymore, I still cared, and I had respect for everything that had passed and the ways it contributed to my life. If something could be salvaged, I was willing to salvage it and use it as an opportunity to grow, instead of carelessly casting it away.
It’s about four years now since I started having difficult conversations with and around the people and things that occupied large spaces of my heart and life, and very little remains. The conversations and actions hurt my heart so much at the time going into them, but what took me most by surprise was the relief I felt after. I felt so confused and even sad at the fact that I did not miss people who I thought I would journey through life with. It made me feel like I was betraying my own values, but I learned I would much rather be free and alone, than feel lonely among people. That’s not to say it has been easy because it absolutely fucking hasn’t, or that I handled it all as well as I could and should have, or that it hasn’t had some very damaging effects on my nervous system - but I am glad of it all as I know anything I have in my life going forward is true and real.
Circling back to the concept of structure, all of these thoughts made me realise that I feared structure because I did not want to be in the environments I was in and deep down I did not want to build a framework to remain in them. I’ve been noticing a change in the last few months and I think that is because I can feel myself slowly shifting into the place where I am meant to be. I was so used to being alone in almost every part of my life that I could not envision even wanting to make space for people in my life, but I have found myself doing so, and doing so because I want to and it feels right. While it may not be inherently easy for me to be structured, I want to learn to be. I’ve been thinking of it in terms of a garden. If you fill it with plants you don’t want but feel like you should have, you’re not going to want to spend time in it and it is going to feel like a burden taking care of it. One of the plants may go bad and spoil the rest. But if you think carefully and only fill it with plants that fuel your heart, life and soul and complement and enrich each other, it is a blessing to be able to take care of it. What a gift to skip down the garden path and water all the things that bring you love and joy. I just need to figure out where the fuck this bountiful garden is at.