Nimue Brown's Blog, page 381

Fictional solutions

Since last November I have been wrestling with trying to write a novel. This has featured long sections of block, bouts of despair, existential crises over the point of fiction, gloom over the state of the industry, frequent absence of faith in myself and other entirely unhelpful things. The novel has yet to achieve first draft status.

I have over the years written more than a dozen novels, most of which have been published with small houses. Technically I know how to do this. The question of what has been going wrong, and why a thing I once loved and defined myself through has become a form of torment, has taken some considering. Some of it is because you can spend months of throwing everything you have at a project and sell half a dozen copies – most writers cannot make a living, and that can get demoralising.

Things are better at the moment, and I’ve been writing a few scenes most days. I test these on Tom as I go, which means I have some confidence that it’s not total rubbish. So, what’s changing?

One of the answers is that I have greater financial stability. I’ve picked up other work that pays steadily, the flat is bought, the mortgage is cheaper than renting was, so I’m under a lot less pressure to produce commercially successful work. Rather than trying to write something that will sell, I’m rediscovering something I had in my teens and early twenties, and lost in the need to make writing pay. I’m putting the words down like my life depends on it, not my livelihood. It’s much more emotionally exposed, and a little bit like going mad in an organised way, but I am now giving this book everything I have, and I feel better as a consequence.

The other issue, is time. I can’t switch from my blogging, marketing press officer day job head to creating fiction at the switch of a button – I have nothing lined up to write about, and if I stay at the computer, things from my other jobs will flow in and I end up doing those instead. I have learned it is critically important to make spaces, every day, where I can think about what I’m going to write next. To do that I have to get off the computer, but then what? I can’t just sit round waiting for inspiration to strike.

The answer appears to be crafting. I love working with my hands, so that’s a happy thing all by itself. If I’m making something I’ll pay it a fair amount of attention, but it leaves some bits of my brain free in a way that encourages ideas to pop up. Working on developing ideas is nothing like as effective as holding the right pace, not working at it and letting things pop up in their own time (or me). If I’m crafting, there is space for that to happen, but it’s fine if nothing comes because I was doing something anyway. I’ve made two rag rugs and am working on an appliqué wall hanging, and around this a book is slowly getting written. I’m much happier. For now at least I have found a solution to the writing side of the problem. In terms of the commercial – I’m going to do what I love and see if anyone will buy it. I just don’t have what it takes it write fiction for a market, and there is no point pretending otherwise.

While I was writing this blog post, I got into a conversation about a possible joint project for next year. There are a few things in the pipeline, so long as I can keep my head clear enough to see them through. I’m going to need embroidery silks, and dead t-shirts, apparently.

Lying about Love

Of all the human emotions, love is the one we are most dishonest about. We lie and say we feel it when we don’t, for all kinds of reasons, including to avoid causing pain, to get laid and to get other advantages. We say we don’t feel it when we do, to avoid awkwardness and complication, to protect ourselves and others. We’re often not even honest with ourselves about our own feelings, because it is frequently easier not to even go there.

Love is a good thing. Perhaps the best thing there is in this life. It brings joy, wonder, profound connections, and it can get you laid, and that can be glorious. Love begets children and enables enduring connections between people – not always sexual. It underpins co-operation and allows us to have a positive experience of our lives, cultures, landscapes, and other life forms. Without love, being human would be a rather cold and sorry business, I think.

So let’s talk about cake. Most of us like cake – if we can find sorts that suit our needs and appeal to our senses. Cake is one of life’s good things, it brings sweetness and comfort. Talking about cake is also easier than talking about love.

Would we say we wanted cake when really we didn’t? Would we worry that if we say no to cake today, no one will ever offer us cake again? Is this the only cake we are ever going to get? Is no better cake imaginable? Must we make do with a cake that has the wrong jam in it, and lie about liking the jam? If we want some cake, do we feel ashamed to admit this? Do we worry that people will be alarmed or affronted if we tell them how much we like their cake?

But of course cake is not as vulnerable and personal as love… it only connects to our style and buying power, to our body shape and body image. If we make them, they are full of effort and a desire to win approval and recognition. Cake is loaded with deeply personal things, but only a minority of us have eating disorders. Most of us know how to handle cake far better than we know how to handle love.

I learned a long time ago to mostly avoid mentioning how deeply I care about the people around me. I form powerful, enduring emotional attachments, I put heart and soul into anything that is more than a passing acquaintance and I’ve watched people step back if I so much as imply that there is a serious feeling on my part. Too much, too intense, too willing to give even… I’ve had plenty of conversations along the way where I’ve been asked to tone down, step back, or just plain go away. I find it difficult because I know this is the most and best I have to give, and learning how not to even put that on the table where anyone can see it most of the time, has been hard.

It takes a lot, these days, for me to chance telling someone that I love them, outside of already established connections. I have to trust that person not to hear demand or proposition in my words, or to be alarmed and threatened by it. There are few things more demoralising than baring you soul, and have that act of exposure cause someone you really cared about to push you away. Love is more exposed than cake. I wonder sometimes what life would be like in a culture where emotional openness and generosity were encouraged rather than frowned on. Where we supported each other in caring rather than hiding our hearts defensively. I rather feel it would be a better and happier way to live. Whether you can get there from here remains to be seen.

So, anyone for cake?

Goddess mythologies and social justice

A guest blog from Karen Tate

How are ancient Goddess mythologies and religions relevant for social justice?  How can we all hear the call of the Goddess?

So let us look at several brief examples of the Sacred Feminine as deity, metaphor or myth and how we’re given a template for living or advice for values we might embrace with social justice in mind…..

1) We find under the broad umbrella of Goddess, many faces across continents and cultures, with no mandate that we worship one name, one face.  Instead we see a metaphor for plurality, diversity and inclusion in the loving and life-affirming Sacred Feminine, rather than the jealous, One Way, androcentric and exclusionary god of patriarchy keen on asking men to sacrifice their sons to prove their loyalty and a holy book filled with violence.  Those embracing Goddess might easily see choosing peace, tolerance, gender equality and peoples of all walks of life; gay, straight, people of all skin colors and religions or no religion at all, as being in alignment with Her diversity, resulting in a  more inclusive, just, equal, balanced and sustainable world and society.

2)  Consider the mythology of the Inuit Goddess Sedna.  She is the gatekeeper between humankind and the sea creatures of the regions near icy waters on which indigenous people depend for their livelihood.  If mankind  becomes too greedy and exploits the creatures of the sea, Sedna cuts humanity off until he takes only what he needs.  Greed and excess are taboo as we are all inter-dependent upon each other.  As our environmental Goddess, Sedna, teaches us to be wise stewards of Mother Earth and Her creatures.  This is a rejection of excess and exploitation in all forms and She calls us to environmentalism and to be Her spokespeople protecting habitats across the globe.  We might be called to be at the forefront fighting against fracking, poisoning our water and air, and depleting our natural resources.  We would deplore exploitation of any kind, including wage discrimination, worker exploitation or multi-national corporations decimating local economies and indigenous peoples.   We certainly would use our vote to support those who fight for the 99% and allies who would  protect Mother Earth and Sedna’s creatures.

3) Egyptian wall carvings clearly show the Egyptian Goddess Isis bestowed upon pharaohs their right to rule and they were to rule their kingdoms governing under the laws of the Goddess Maat, namely truth, balance, order, and justice.  Similarly, we see the Hindu Goddess Kali standing atop her consort, Shiva, whose powers must be activated by Her. Clearly this suggests patriarchy, or rule of the father, resulting in rule by the male gender,  has not always been the way of the world, nor would be the way of the world with Goddess restored to center.  Neither would we want patriarchy in a skirt as absolute power corrupts absolutely.  Even a cursory glimpse here shows a call for female leadership and a respect for women’s power, both of which are sorely lacking in our world as academia, corporate America, religious institutions and politics has less than 20% representation by women in the United States.  We must support women who embrace Goddess ideals and support their leadership in these bastions of male control.  Isis instructing pharaoh she is granting him the right to rule, but only if he employs the Laws of the Goddess Maat, can be seen as support for civil rights, voter rights, worker and immigrant rights and consumer protection from powers that might mis-use and exploit the individual or the planet.

4)   In the thealogy of the Sacred Feminine, Goddess affirms women’s bodies and sexuality.  Priestesses of pharmacology, mid-wives and women hold the power over their own bodies and life and death is in their hands.

Today the patriarchy dictates to women the parameters of beauty and women fall victims to their standards spending millions with plastic surgeons to live up to some impossible ideal. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, 13.1 million cosmetic procedures were performed in 2010, up 5% from 2009.  Beyond physical beauty, the patriarchy wants to control all aspects of women’s sexuality and reproduction.  Known in the United States as Big Pharma, pharmaceutical companies now hold the power over women’s bodies as they encourage women to disconnect from their menses, that monthly inconvenience, that curse.  They say, here, take our pill and see your sacred blood magically disappear.  Disconnect from one of the very things that empowers you as a woman   In a not-so veiled culture war, one political party has declared war on women by attempting to de-fund Planned Parenthood, thwarting access to contraception, trying to pass laws to make divorces harder to obtain, trying to legalize the murder of abortion providers, and by having miscarriages investigated and abortions abolished.  Women’s bodies and lives are the terrain on which this current extremist conservative movement is taking a stand.

If we had a feminine face of god at the center of society, or Her ideals affirming life, female authority, sacred sexuality, and leadership,  men and their institutions would not control or dictate to women.  Equal is equal.  Women would understand their sexuality and bodies are sacred and in their own hands and would not be complicit in their own oppression or exploitation.  Fortunately many women are catching on to this as they embrace groups like the Red Tent Movement.

5) Goddess thealogy affirms female power.  Where Goddess was worshiped, her temples were the centers of wisdom, culture, and financial power and were often presided over by women.  The Unitarian Universalist Women’s Cakes for the Queen of Heaven curriculum, as well as researchers such as Merlin Stone and Heide Goettner-Abendroth, in her book, Societies of Peace: Matriarchies Past, Present and Future  point to matrilineal, matrifocal or matriarchal societies  where Goddess was venerated and maternal values practiced, women and children were protected and had a spot at the center of the culture, reaping the benefit of that positioning at the center.  Not only must we restore women’s position in society to that of equal partnership with men but we must once again turn to the attributes of the Feminine, such as caring, sharing, nurturing, negotiation, collaboration, solidarity, partnership and peace – all of which have been marginalized or demonized under patriarchy – and embrace these values so that quality of life is restored for the most of us.

In conclusion, I’ve touched briefly on but a few ideas showing how Sacred Feminine herstory, metaphor and  mythology might be reclaimed and reinterpreted to provide a roadmap toward a more sustainable future.  We have in the feminine images of divinity deities, archetypes and ideals to show us the way.  It is up to us if we want to move away from or temper the “authoritarian father” idealogy that shapes our religions and culture and instead heed the advice of the Great She and her Sacred Feminine liberation thealogy as our role model.

How do we hear her call?  I can only speak for myself.  Once I started focusing on Her, trying to learn about different goddesses as either deity, archetype or ideal, she becomes a part of you.  You are inspired by her, motivated by her, empowered by her.  You just have to listen to your heart, your head and your body and you will develop and strengthen the connection.  I think its really that simple.  It’s a relationship of reciprocity.  You focus on Her and you get much in return.

 

*********************************************************************************************************

I recently read Karen’s book, I thought it was inspiring and I very much enjoyed it. You can read my review on Goodreads. Goddess Calling can be found here -

eBook £6.99 || $9.99
Mar 28, 2014. 978-1-78279-441-7.
BUY | AMAZON US | AMAZON UK
Paperback £9.99 || $16.95
Mar 28, 2014. 978-1-78279-442-4.
BUY | AMAZON US | AMAZON UK

The shape of our stories

Back when I was working on Druidry and the Ancestors I spent a lot of time thinking about how we tell history stories. Tales of change and progress tend to dominate usual ways of telling. We don’t talk so much about continuity, wrong turns, or mistakes. The tales we tell of our own lives are differently shaped, influenced by when we see ourselves as being at our peak. Is that ahead, (progress narrative) or behind (decline narrative) or do we stay much as we are?

I was fascinated by how Theo writes of her life in this recent post on Wild Yoga.  It’s a mode of telling that emphasises change without any great sense of progress towards a specific outcome. There is no invalidating of past selves, no hierarchies of achievement. I find that really interesting and it prompted me to think about how we shape personal stories. In my teens I would have told you tales of progress, in my early twenties those would have become tales of change, with as much lost as gained and no sense of direction to establish whether progress is made. In my late twenties and early thirties I would have avoided telling you stories at all because at that time there were too many things that had locked me into silence. It was a decline period for me, with no scope to admit how much had fallen away and how much damage I had taken.

At the moment I am telling continuity stories. I am doing all the things I used to do – writing singing, crafting, making wine and preserves, swimming, walking and dancing when I can. I feel closer to my teenage self. The things I do, connect me to more recent ancestors, to my arty grandmother (now departed) and to my father who is also fermenting and preserving things. I tell stories of childhood kitchen adventures.

I feel more like me, and because of that shattering period, I am keen to tap into things that connect me to an older sense of self. Looking for substance, for identity and familiarity, for the things I enjoy and that give me a sense of fulfilment, for feelings of rootedness, groundedness and belonging. Tales of continuity help me to heal the legacy of the hard times, and are helping me rebuild a sense of self.

Different times call for different kinds of stories. It is worth thinking about what the stories we tell do for us. Carrying us forwards, helping us let go, or making us miserable and tying us in knots. We make ourselves and our lives when we make our stories. We tell ourselves into existence, with little tales we create in our own minds. The process of making sense of life is one of making narrative, and how we tell the story, how we shape it, informs who we think we are.

What is the shape of your story? How is that story shaping your life?

BOOK REVIEW: WHEN A PAGAN PRAYS

Nimue Brown:

I’m always touched by people reading my stuff. I’m always moved by people responding, but this one achieves whole new levels for me, because there’s something very personal picked up on in all of this, and the reviewer is someone I very much look up to.

Originally posted on contemplativeinquiry:

Highly recommended When a Pagan Prays by Nimue Brown is an ambitious book, and a courageous one. On my reading it blends two voices. The first offers a cool appraisal of prayer by a Pagan Druid strongly influenced by existentialist philosophy. It tells us that value and meaning are not written in the stars: we have to provide them for ourselves, and it’s our responsibility as self-aware humans to do so. The second voice describes a personal journey, essentially a recovery story centred on re-connection with the “numinous”. This leads to a re-frame of scepticism about prayer and a hard-won willingness to say: “I like prayer. I’m not angry with it any more. I’ll keep doing it, keep asking and searching, doubting and wondering”.

I will start with the second voice, for me the predominant voice of the book, though it takes a while to be heard. This is at…

View original 515 more words

Valuing the ephemeral

Science can incline us towards the idea that what matters most are the things we can measure. It tends to help that the things we can most readily measure, we can also point at, and are therefore more able to agree about. How much money you have, how many cars and how big a house are easy things to point at when you want to compare yourself to others. For much the same reasons, governments like to point at employment figures, and do not want to get bogged down in conversations about whether those jobs are any good or worth doing.

Worth is very hard to measure, unless you judge it by money. The same is true of quality of life, happiness, wellbeing, sense of community and the state of your soul. Sure, you can survey people and ask them how they feel, but then you’re relying on self reporting, and of course people aren’t reliable and can lie to you. How do you measure love, friendship or enlightenment? How do you measure and value the way a sunset makes you feel?

That we can more readily measure some things than others invites us to invest more effort and attention in the things we can measure – both personally and as a culture. So we talk about how many lives are saved by different medical interventions each year, not the quality of life for those who continue to live. We take our measure of spending as a measure of how well we are doing as a country, no matter what that money is being spent on. We want faster train travel and more oil and we can measure the profits, and the growth but we can’t measure the value of the landscapes these destroy, and so we don’t measure that value, and we trash something irreplaceable.

I’m generally pro-science. I recognise that by its nature, science can only go around measuring measurable things. Issues like the state of your soul and the beauty of your location are hard to approach that way. The habit of measuring locks us into some very narrow ways of thinking about worth and value. Because money is the most readily measurable thing in the equation, so we down-value what we don’t pay for – the domestic work of women, the dawn chorus, our clean air, the future of our children – we tend to be very short term around how we see the price tags, too.

This all fits in with what I was exploring yesterday (thank you Helen Noble for the prompt on facebook). When you take narrow measurements of value, a certain kind of resource and person will tend to dominate your society. Those who can accumulate material wealth are treated as the most valuable members. Not those who are most generous, or cause most happiness, or do most to enable others. Not those who have brilliant ideas, or who add beauty to the world, but those who have the biggest pile of coins, no matter who they exploited and what they ruined forever in order to achieve that.

Our current value system actively encourages us to trash the planet on which our lives depend. We need to change that, because as the saying goes, when there’s no clean water to drink and no food to eat, you try eating money and see what good it does you.

Cultural power games

It can be tempting to think of patriarchy as a system that benefits all men at the expense of all women. This itself is a line of thought that benefits patriarchy, because the more you entrench ideas of gender division, the easier it is for the patriarchy to stay in place. Most men do not benefit from this system, but by creating the illusion that they could be winners, they are encouraged to play along, and have been for hundreds of years. There are also women who play along, who seek ease through complicity, seek to win on the terms patriarchy lays out, and who are happy to denigrate other women to make a position for themselves.

Patriarchy can be really shitty to many of its male participants. In unbalancing gender relationships, it undermines what relationships you can have. Just as there are limits on what you can do as a nice slave owner, there are limits on what you can do as a nice guy in a heavily patriarchal culture. If you do not match how the culture defines masculinity – maybe you are gay, non-violent, not ambitious, not hungry for power over others – then you will be labelled as feminine and the culture will denigrate you that same way it does its women. If women are cast as inferior, then a woman being better than you at something is really threatening. Patriarchal cultures put most men in positions where they do not get to feel superior, but are forever watching their backs, and are as limited in their identity options as their womenfolk are. Culture is people, so this only works because the majority are willing to participate or do not notice what they are upholding. (Consider ‘throws like a girl’.)

The important question to ask, is who wins this game? Who benefits?

Patriarchy is a system of power-over. It gives men power over women, but it also gives men power over each other. Physical power, financial power, ownership of resources, and that more ephemeral notion of ‘authority’. It is a system that encourages all participants to let the people (mostly men) and institutions (mostly run by men) that are in charge, to stay in charge, because they have authority and authority should be respected. If that upsets you, then in a patriarchal culture, the answer isn’t to challenge those above you, but to kick an inferior so as to achieve catharsis (UKIP in a nutshell, most forms of fascism in fact). Inferiority is constructed along lines of gender, race, poverty and lack of power. Only a handful of people really benefit in a system of this shape, and they get to sit at the top of the heap, wielding authority because that’s what they’ve always done, because they have more money and habits of power than anyone else.

If you like having power over people and you want the freedom to use other people as objects, then patriarchy is a system that will suit you well. If, regardless of gender, you don’t enjoy using or being used, this is not a system you are ever going to be happy in. What enables it to survive is that patriarchy does not present itself as a system, it has always offered itself as an unassailable reality. Of course it’s just natural that these are the people who end up in power making all the decisions. And now, cleverly, they have us largely convinced that we pick them by voting, and not looking hard enough at how many of them went through the same elite educational institutions.

Gender conflict is a symptom, not an underlying cause. It is a consequence of a system that fundamentally believes in power-over and the use of resources, where other people’s lives, bodies, minds, health and existence most certainly do count as a resource to be used. My feeling is that we are only going to sort out issues of gender politics when enough of us stop being enthusiastic players of the power-over game which has been set up explicitly such that none of us can win it. This is basically feudalism with a new hat, and we have been persuaded to do it to ourselves.

Tides in personal Druidry

What we do isn’t necessarily a linear ascent, becoming ‘better’ Druids year on year. When I started, I was very focused on the wheel of the year as represented by the eight standard festivals. I worked extensively with the four directions and all the associations that can be brought into that circle. I studied cycles of life and correlations between the elements and pretty much everything.

After a while this started to feel reductive, a limiting narrative. I became interested in approaches to ritual that weren’t seasonal, and more nuanced ways of thinking about seasons. They aren’t events after all, but subtle shifts from day to day. I started looking at landscapes and thinking about ritual circles that responded to the land rather than the arbitrary four directions.

Then I started to find ritual forms too restrictive, needing something more fluid, responsive and of the moment. I came to explore contemplation and just being in a space with people in a non-ritual way. My practice became much more about walking, presence, quiet communion. Things it gets ever harder to point at and say ‘that’s me doing my Druid stuff’. I’m making wine and chutney with gifts of the season, and foraging for some of that, and that feels a lot like me doing my Druidry, but at the same time, it looks a lot like me standing in my kitchen doing things to fruit. No ritual, no special words.

At Druid Camp this year I was reminded that there are things I like about ritual – not least the bringing together of people to share experience and inspiration. I think it would be interesting to have a mass Druid chutney session, but tricky to arrange. I think there’s real spiritual power in practicing fundamental life skills together. But it’s not the same.

And so some kind of inner wheel turns, and I find myself drawn back to the idea of doing rituals, and inclined to work with elemental meditations again. Not because one way is better than another, but because these things also have their tides and seasons.

Sometimes Druidry seems small and simple to me. Sometimes it seems vast and complex. A flower seems small and simple if you stand over it in a field. It seems large and complex under a microscope, or if you’re given its chemical makeup to ponder. Get far enough away from a city and they resolve into simple shapes, too. No one perspective is more true than another.

 

 

 

 

Bare breasts, bare feet

As those of you who have been with me for a while will know, I have an exploration underway into having unfettered breasts. I’m ample enough up top to have spent the last twenty years strapped up, so building up the capability to go unstrapped is taking time.

At Druid Camp this year I had chance to play with a few possibilities in a safe space. I spent the week mostly barefoot, sometimes with a bra, sometimes with a bikini top that offered far less support, sometimes loose under whatever top I had on. As I had suspisioned, being bare foot on grass makes a lot of odds. Most of us walk differently with no shoes on, tending to drop pace and place bare feet more gently. This reduces impact and means there is less swing generated further up.

Soft earth and grass doesn’t impact as much when you walk on it – I’ve done plenty of barefoot walking on tarmac and the difference is huge. The jarring impact of putting feet onto a hard surface jolts the free-range breast about rather a lot, making walking uncomfortable. It’s also hard on your feet. Softer surfaces make bare foot walking more viable, and reduce impact on the breasts. I find I can jog short distances barefoot on grass with little or no breast support. Neither feet nor chest could bear that on a hard, urban surface.

The moral of the research at this stage seem to be, if you want to be in a natural state, you need to be in a natural state. The more artificial your habitat is, the more you will suffer if you don’t protect breasts and feet from the consequences.

If you’re wondering about all the sticks and stones inherent in natural places… if you are barefoot you learn to pick your way carefully, and you don’t end up with the same rhythms. On rough terrain, you walk differently. With tarmac and concrete we can march vigorously over many miles, battering that tempo into our bodies. It’s worth remembering that the Roman roads were built precisely so they could march armies about quickly. Roads, tarmac and cement come from our desire to be places faster than our bodies are designed for. Modify your habitat and you have to modify your body to cope, hence shoes become more important, and you can’t run without a bra once you have shoes and a hard surface.

I’ve gone over to softer bras with no metal underwiring, and to floating about unfettered where I can. But, depending on my feet for transport, and having no choice about the surfaces which get me where I need to go, I’ve got to have boots to deal with the impact of the surface, and I’ve got to have chest support to deal with the impact of the boots on that surface. The more you can match your shoes to the needs of your breasts, the better this is going to work, though.

Chemical adventures in feeling appreciated

For much of my life, I’ve struggled to know how to handle positive feedback. Those of you who have said encouraging things to me in person know how odd and awkward I can be around that. Part of it is simply lack of practice – praise was not a significant feature of my growing up so I was late learning anything about how to handle that socially. I’ve had far more negative feedback than positive, such that I tend to worry more about being wrong, failing and being a nuisance, than I tend to anticipate good responses. The desire to be ‘good enough’ in other people’s eyes has always been a significant motivator for me, but for most of my life, I had no sense of achieving that.

For about five years now, I’ve been in a relationship with a man who praises, enthuses and expresses delight. Initially I found this all a bit alien and ascribed it to him coming from a more innately exuberant culture (he’s American, I’m English). Apparently over the years I’ve got used to this a bit, until recently I’ve been noticing a thing that has some interesting implications. I’ve become able to enjoy the experience of praise. I feel a warm glow in response to it, rather than disorientation.

Arguably everything that happens in our bodies comes down to chemistry. The bonding of parent to child is a chemical process, so is falling in love. Pleasure is chemical – an orgasm has a lot to do with oxytocin. Reward experiences are chemical, and it is into this chemistry that recreational drugs plug themselves.

Up until recently, my body apparently wasn’t releasing any kind of reward chemicals in response to praise, and now it is. I have no real idea why any of this is the case – why I didn’t before, why I do now. Some things in our bodies seem to be innate and automatic, others have to be triggered or learned, some can be learned in unhelpful ways. I’ve not tended to trust praise, waiting for the sting in the tail, (it was good considering how rubbish you are, etc) or the suggestion that as I can do it after all, I will have to do everything else to the same level or be considered a slacker… Historically, praise just didn’t feel safe, more like softening me up so the next slap will sting more. I can’t pin that to any specific experiences, but as teasing and bullying featured heavily in my childhood, it’s not wholly irrational.

I think what’s happened is that I have learned to trust a bit. I’ve learned to feel that people who say positive things may not have hidden intentions. They may not be softening me up in order to get something out of me or do something to me. It may not be going to pave the way to ridicule, or to increased demands, or some kind of knockdown (see, if you’d made some effort before you could have done this all along!).

It is entirely possible, that all these years later, my body has caught up to something that perhaps is there from the start for most people. A sense that praise is a good thing to be enjoyed, and a simple chemical release alongside that, to reinforce the feeling of something good. I’ve spent my whole life aware that I was missing something around this whole issue, but not knowing what it was, or how to name it. That sense of not being quite a whole or normal person may not have been crazy after all. May not have been some kind of self indulgence based on making myself seem special by claiming to be odd in some way (been round that a lot). Maybe I just was missing this small, vital chemical trick that changes everything about how I interact socially with others, and how I get to feel about myself and my achievements.