On self-abandonment

I’ve been thinking a bit today about self-abandonment, and how it can show up in so many sneaky and subtle ways, perpetuating the repeated trauma of abandonment that so many of us experience as children.

When I write, I am often trying to keep the reader in mind – you, the person reading this, whoever and wherever you are. As a writer, I write for the sake of it, but I also write and publish so that my words get read. I love reading (although my god it’s so much harder these days with a short attention span, darn the 21st century and it’s stupid attention grabbing and simultaneously sapping apps!). And I love it when people read my work.

There’s a little problem in this for me, though. Sometimes, I can get so focused on the reader – on you and managing your perception of me – that my words get all twisted inside me and often, they stop coming out altogether. Particularly if I anticipate judgement, anger or having my perspective shot down. I’m still learning how to differentiate being criticised externally from being annihilated internally. How to remember that in writing, as in all art forms, relationships and life, we have very limited control over how others perceive us, and that what others think is no true measure of our value or worth.

These often exist as theoretical ideas rather than lived experiences for me, though. As my therapist has pointed out, one knock and I get derailed and start to ‘plummet’ – fast.

The fact that I haven’t posted a single thing here since July this year is a case in point. Something happened after I published my last post that made me retreat, even from my own tiny space on the internet.

But I didn’t just stop writing here. I haven’t been writing much at all, apart from my paid copy writing work – which is something, of course. I really appreciate being paid to write, and the way it supports me to be consistent and to build a body of work, which is a phrase I heard years ago that I instantly loved.

The problem for me is, writing for work is not the kind of writing that makes my soul light up. It’s not the same as working on my memoir, or exploring my perspective and expressing my voice in this space.

As a writer, I am far from alone when it comes to what Steven Pressfield calls Resistance. It’s something every artist encounters at times. It goes by different names, of course, and it shows up in lots of behaviours. Its essence, I’ve found, is fear.

To me, it often feels like avoidance, and just like when I’m avoiding a person or a difficult conversation, I find that it takes up so much headspace. There can be hundreds of days sometimes between me writing something, but throughout that time, it is on my mind every single day. I wish I was exaggerating. Alas, I’m not.

But today, a sudden flash of insight arrived. I’m sure I’ve realised this before – I must have. I’m 38 and I’ve basically been in therapy and personal development for 2 decades. It doesn’t matter really. What matters is me trying to put words to this insight.

Today, I realised that this lifelong struggle to show up to writing is perhaps a sign of just how deeply I have learned to abandon myself.

I read a lot about this online, and often find my internal ‘critical parent’ scoffing a bit and quickly scrolling to the next post. It’s likely too close to the bone. Therefore, I imagine that you too, reading this right now, are going to scoff a bit, roll your eyes and brush this off as another self-indulgent piece by a privileged white woman who doesn’t now how good she has it. And I am privileged, I am a white cis woman who hasn’t faced many of the problems faced by so many people in this world. But I also carry a lot of old trauma, and I’m still trying to figure out how to truly heal that on a cellular level.

And this piece, this acknowledgement that when I don’t write, it is a form of self-abandonment, is really crucial to me. Because it changes and informs how I relate to myself when I am in that space of avoidance.

It means I can choose to show up to the words, to the act of self-expression, from a different place. It becomes less about anything external, including the ongoing questions I have about finding out what I’m actually capable of and what my limits are – something I just wasn’t massively equipped to explore in my family of origin, because so much focus and energy went into self-preservation and survival in a tough family situation.

Instead, writing can be part of my commitment to myself. Rather than using it as a weapon in the war against myself, to prove how crap or useless I am, I can remind myself that each time I sit down to write, I’m taking a step into connection with myself. And the more I put myself into the world, the more I can get the truth into my bones and tissue – that it is safe to be alive. That I don’t have to let a once frazzled nervous system shape my life, stifle my voice or keep me from expressing myself.

There is so much I have inside me that I want to say and talk and write about. And my sincere hope is that the best is yet to come.

Photo by Hussein Abdullah on Unsplash. Thank you, Hussein.