The legacy of fear

I’ve got to the stage with the anxiety that I don’t live there all the time. In terms of quality of life, that’s huge. It’s mostly due to knowing that my bloke can stay in the country, and knowing that I can keep my child – having both of those in doubt for a number of years was making me very ill. It means that on a calm, unstressy day I am now a passably function human being. I forget, all too easily, how many panic buttons there are and how easily they are pressed, so if I do ok for a couple of weeks I’m badly thrown by the panic when it comes. Of course life is not stress free.

There are some kinds of stress that I can handle, and I’m building a picture of what it is that tears my body up and makes me not just emotionally messy, but physically ill. That which I have no control over is a significant issue. If I have scope to act in a way that can fix, offset or avoid, then even really stress things are bearable. Things where it’s out of my hands – as it felt like with Tom’s application to stay, are really hard.

But why? In part because I assume the world is hostile towards me. I assume that the more I want something, the higher the risk that I am going to be punished simply for daring to want. I get very anxious around things I need that are awkward and inconvenient. I am afraid of answers roughly shaped ’you cannot get there from here.’ My logical mind knows that mostly, there are ways, and that ‘you can’t get there from here’ does not exist in many sane and functional systems. It probably doesn’t help that not all systems are as sane and functional as I would like them to be. What underpins it is too long in contact with people who were not reasonable, or fair, or I sometimes think, terribly sane. It’s been an odd sort of life…

And there it is, the thing I want, and the challenge to overcome before getting it (yet another evil and terrifying form, of course, and bureaucracy always makes me a tad queasy.) I want this enough to be terrified. Then the racing pulse, the stomach cramps, the sleeplessness. The speed at which I move from emotional response to bodily distress still surprises me. It shouldn’t, I’ve lived with it for years.
I’ve found it helps to pick apart the fear, and name it. Nameless dreads are always worse than the ones you can pin down. Where possible I give mine names like Bob and Geoff, Nigel, and Justin, because that makes them a tad more manageable. I’ve learned not to try and shut down my mind in escapist ways, but to walk into whatever the heart of the fear is, trying to face it and name it. I can’t say this helps with the getting to sleep, but it gives me tools. In the short term, emotion and body fail are far more potent and immediate than logic. However, every time I throw my rational mind at the fear, I make some small bit of headway.

“You are not a nameless dread, you’re a snorting application form.”
“Snort,” said the application form.

A lot of people live with fear. Being open about it has brought me a lot of heart breaking stories from fellow travellers (feel free to keep them coming, because it helps to acknowledge this stuff). Fear is easy to hide. It doesn’t show up in bright purple blotches across your face. No one else can hear that your heart is racing, or feel your gut tying itself into dysfunctional knots. It’s hard to explain. People who are not afraid look at the apparently small thing that is crushing you to death and see how small it looks to them and think you are being melodramatic. It’s just because they do not realise that to you this thing has manifested as an elephant, or a landslide of mud and that it really is squashing the life out of you.

To those of you who do not understand, be grateful. It is a precious gift in life to live without terror.

Who am I?

Picking myself apart, I look for things that were put on me from the outside. There are a lot of them. I look for things I’ve been taught to believe that don’t hold up to rational scrutiny. There are a fair few of those, too. I carry so many assumptions, absorbed with little thought. This is a process I started in earnest when I was writing Druidry and the Ancestors. Looking at the way in which ideas and behaviours can be passed down through families, unconsciously. Hurt and wounding transfers from one generation to the next. In my family one of the big issues was that we don’t do physical contact readily or easily. I’ve had issues with boundaries that stem from there.

Often when I’m working on a book, I’m experimenting with my own life and thinking, to see what I can find out first hand. That doesn’t stop just because the book is published. I found myself thinking about my paternal grandmother last night. I know so little about her. I may have inherited some physical problems from her, and I do not know what else. What came to me from those ancestors? What of their lives and stories is meshed into my being? I do not know. I also keep asking what it is I bring to the mix that is truly myself, my own spirit, not a repetition of ancestry, not a manifestation of DNA, or training, but purely and totally me.

I have been aware from the outset of this work that the answer could be ‘nothing at all’.

There’s an energy that is mine. It’s a wild, high octane, intense, manic sort of energy and if I’m not careful with it, it can leave me burned out. It’s not reliably safe to be around, either. A forest fire, hurricane energy that isn’t as careful as it could be with people who get too close, and that worries me. I also have a perception that spiritual means calm. Spiritual people are all mellow and at peace with the world. I’ve put in a lot of time trying to be mellow and at peace with the world, and I can do it a bit, but it gets ever clearer to me that it is not in my nature to live there. The hurricane self needs to be more active.

There has never really been space for me to be wild. I’ve always had to be domesticated. I was taught not to show off, or make a fuss, or draw attention to myself and I learned to be a passably inoffensive presence. Now I struggle with energy levels and depression. The more time I spend quietly looking at this one, the more certain I become that I need to give my wild self more room, more outlet. I need to accept that I am not a creature of still, silent contemplation all the time. There are hungers in me. I do crave attention, that sends me out onto stages and into ritual circles, it has me writing books and blogs. Why should that be shameful? Why should I feel any need to pretend that I do this for ‘good’ reasons and that ‘good’ precludes attention seeking? Celtic tales are full of attention seekers. The bards, heroes, the beautiful women, the magic users – they aren’t self effacing. They take pride in what they do and draw attention to it.

Is it really a virtue to stay silent in face of pain? To not ask for help. Being open about my shortcomings, and learning to ask for help gives other people chance to step up and be heroic. It’s not failure to need input from other people.

I’m aware of food hunger in my body, and sexual desire. Having spent a while now exploring what it means to want, I notice how much I want rest and sleep, physical affection, intellectual stimulation, laughter, beauty, experiences. I’m a demanding creature by nature and I want a lot out of life. I am not satisfied by banality, by that which is unimaginative and lacklustre, and I’ve spent a lot of years pretending to accept what bored me witless, just to avoid hurting other people’s feelings. What I learned along the way was that wanting made me a bad person. My wanting was an affront to others, who either couldn’t make sense of it, didn’t like it, feared it… and I let myself feel responsible for that, hiding those bits that I was learning were monstrous and unacceptable.

I am not passive by nature. I’m experimenting with not being ashamed of the hungers, drives, desires and impulses that come from my body. I’m looking for spaces in which I can express them and distancing myself from places where being biddable seems like a requirement. I’m learning to accept that I cannot conform to the image of Druid as chilled out speaker of calm wisdom. That manic, fierce, burning energy that has so much potential for trouble, is mine. Is me. It may well be the most ‘me’ thing I’ve got. It’s survived a lifetime of attempts to cage and tame it. It has survived my feelings of shame in it, my rejection of it, my self-hatred. There is an old skin on the outside of me, and I can feel it loosening, ready to slough off.

The happy Druid

I’ve met a lot of people along the way so far, from people who were penniless and living in single rooms in Bed and Breakfasts, to people who have big country houses and go skiing every year. People who have been invalided out of the workforce, the self-made and the downright lucky. I’ve known plenty of wealthy people who were a long way from being happy, whilst misery and poverty go together very easily. Without a doubt, the happiest people I know are either retired, or self employed, doing something they care about and feel has value, and have strong friendship networks.

Often self employed people like me work longer hours than regular employees and do so for less money, but, you get to say no when you need to. You can fit your work around your life, and I see a lot of that amongst the self employed, especially around child raising. People who work for themselves always have more scope to be creative, and get more direct financial reward for the things they get right. There are more risks, but these days most regular employment is so insecure that the risks seem a lot smaller than they used to. At least when it’s your company you can really fight to keep it going and don’t have to depend on whether anyone else is determined to make sure your job continues to exist. What I hear from regularly employed friends suggest that increasing numbers of workplaces are becoming unreasonable, disrespectful pressure fests. The self employed may not have as much cash, but we don’t endure any workplace bullying unless we do it to ourselves.

There are basic essentials that we all need. Recent discussions on facebook around food budgets demonstrate that a person who knows their stuff and has enough wriggle room for some bulk buying, can live well on fairly little. Less desire to be fashionably dressed keeps the clothes budget down. Feet as transport save money, and the cost of gym membership. There’s an art to being less affluent, and one of the key requirements is knowing that cash does not equate to happiness. Yes, life without the basics is miserable, but that’s not always a money issue. Rest and sleep are basics, plenty of highly paid, high flying jobs will deprive you of those. Human relationships are also a basic human need, and if you’ve got to work all your waking hours, or deeply antisocial hours, money costs you in terms of relationship.

The first secret to finding happiness rests on knowing what actually makes you happy. That’s going to vary for all of us, but whatever you think you’ve got, it’s worth poking it. The joy of shopping, for example, can often be about getting a temporary sense of power out of spending money, but if you run up debts, that disempowers you, it can become like an addiction. Getting drunk can feel like happiness, but there’s thinking out there that our young people do this just to blot out the reality of the rest of their lives. So just how happy a state is that? Merry is great, slightly pissed can be wonderful, but so off your face that you don’t know which way is up? Its popular, hugely expensive in terms of police costs and antisocial knock-ons.

I am able to get by on very little because I know what I need. I have books, online articles and radio 4 to supply me with intellectual stimulus on a daily basis. I have good company in the form of my bloke, my child, fellow boaters, excellent friends and a wide selection of casual acquaintances in the wider world. I need time outside and most especially, panoramic landscape views. Enough food, exercise and rest are possible to achieve, although I don’t always get that balance right. Lying in bed, snuggled with my man, cat purring in my ear, child giggling at the other end of the boat as he reads Pratchett in bed… of these things are contentment made. Happiness is not a big, dramatic sort of emotion. If I need thrills and adventures, moving the boat on a windy day, cycling a hill, undertaking an epic walk – I can challenge myself. I don’t get bored. I have the freedom to think and feel as I please, to choose a lot of what happens, or negotiate it in ways that work all round. I am free from bullying, and unkindness doesn’t feature much in my life. I feel very lucky in all of this.

I’m happy when small things go well, and when what I do works for other people, when publishers say yes, and the child says ‘today was an awesome adventure’ or things to that effect. I’m happy when I feel that I’m acting ethically, and walking my talk in some way or another, and when what I do manifestly benefits someone else. Money can be nice, especially when it represents people who bought my books. But money does not buy me the call of the cuckoo, a child’s laughter, or the man who looks at me with adoration in his eyes.

Working with energy

Nope, not a New agey post from me today, more a pondering of how the biology works, or in my case, doesn’t, partly prompted by reading some excellent material from Dorothy Abrams. I don’t have a deep understanding of bodily energy systems, but I can observe, and am starting to notice, and question a few things.

For the last ten years or so, I’ve run flat out whenever I could, punctuated by times of illness and burnout when I could barely move at all. To do this I have learned to ignore pain and exhaustion, which is something I’ve been trying to unpick for a while. Yesterday I noticed that my muscles can be tired, while the rest of my body jangles with restless energy. It’s like being on a caffeine high, without drinking the coffee, and it contributes to not being able to sleep. My guess is that it’s the adrenal system.

Adrenaline is there for short term bursts of life saving fight and flight activity. It’s there for emergency dashes to the water hole, and for when you’re going to need to walk a long way to find any food. It has its place and its uses, but we aren’t supposed to use it all the time. I find I’m easily tipped into anxiety and often feeling threadbare in a way that leaves me wide open to depression, and I think this is because I’m pumping more ‘energy’ into my body than my body is realistically able to use. What I’ve been calling ‘running on willpower’ might better be labelled ‘running on adrenaline’.

In the last few months I’ve started to feel like I need to take proper care of me. I’m tired of living with pain, and the depression and anxiety are no kind of fun. I’m looking for root causes. Most of the circumstantial causes have gone, leaving a legacy of thought and behaviour habits to tackle. If I kick into fear/adrenaline mode at the start of each day, I start pushing and forcing myself from the moment I get out of bed, and then later fall into bed so wound up I don’t sleep, thus perpetuating the whole cycle. I can afford to stop doing that now, so am trying to get my adrenal system to step down.

This is another form of being vulnerable. Risking saying ‘no’ to things, and people. Not trying to do everything right now. It’s a process of learning not to think of myself as a commodity that should be available on tap, but as a person. I still struggle with that one, it’s another legacy issue. When people don’t treat you like you’re a person, you can end up believing it – it’s such a tidy explanation, you don’t have the same rights as real people because you’re too flawed to count. Intellectually I’ve been resisting that for a while, but the emotions often move more slowly.

I think that to move forward, I’ve got to explore making the constant adrenaline drive stop. I’ve got to let myself be tired and sluggish and a bit useless for a while. Then perhaps I can get some better rhythms going around being able to rest and recharge. There’s every reason to think that if I can sort this, I can reduce pain, exhaustion, depression and anxiety such that I end up with more energy and more scope for doing things. That helps me feel less self-indulgent about the process, because I still struggle with ‘because it would be better for me’ as a justification for anything.

Being with someone who supports me, and who will manifest that support in practical ways, is a huge difference. Being with someone who soothes my anxiety with gentle physical comfort, and who encourages me to take care of myself, not because I’m a massive inconvenience if I get ill, but because I am worth taking care of. Having the space in which to do this is so important. Head space as well as right physical environment. Having the inspiration from other Pagan writers to challenge my ideas about physical and emotional pain. I’m going to try and do something radical to change my life, and to be well.

Emotional Pain and Sanity

My recent blog about psychological violence elicited a very good point from Robin Herne – namely the way in which more New Agey approaches to life suggest that it’s up to us not to feel hurt or upset. We shouldn’t in this system, need or want to experience pain, and we can let it pass over us, and not be affected. This is an approach that facilitates bullying, and is often deeply unhelpful. Part of the problem is the tendency towards a glib simplicity that isn’t equal to real life situations.

Firstly there’s the issue that being able to cheerfully ignore that which might hurt, is insane, and not something to aspire to. We need negative feedback, it tells us when we are short of the mark, actually wrong, or causing pain to others. There are few things more difficult to deal with than the person who will not hear that they are causing pain and distress. No matter how uncomfortable it may be, to be a sane and functional human being we all need to be able to hear that we’ve messed up. That can hurt. We need to take that pain on the chin, and respond to it. We also need a culture in which is it allowable to make mistakes (and therefore to learn), but that’s a whole other issue. It’s very easy to tune out the negative feedback, maintaining your inner calm through total disinterest in the feelings and needs of the rest of the world. That’s not Druidry.

Then there’s the kind of hurtful stuff that comes as a result of other people’s pain, fear, insecurity and so forth. Fragile egos and wounded souls can inflict hurt, not out of malice, but sometimes because they have no idea how to do better. The ‘do unto others before they can do unto you’ mentality. Responding in kind will further entrench hostility and increase pain all round, which helps no one. Ignoring it certainly isn’t guaranteed to make them go away, and may also reinforce erroneous beliefs. If the flailing person is your partner, parent, colleague… they need dealing with, compassionately. It requires seeing past the spikey surface and finding a way to engage with what is underneath. Think about how you might try and work with an injured wild animal, and take that as a model. Move slowly, make no sudden movements or alarming noises, be patient, expect to get bitten. People who cause hurt out of their own pain can be helped out of that place and it can be well worth the effort and the odd bite. They need to learn that not everyone is going to hurt, attack or humiliate them.

There are hurts that come because someone enjoys causing pain. I think these are often more subtle, so you won’t even notice at the time that you have been reduced. Instead, you’ll be apologising for having got it wrong again, for misunderstanding, for not being good enough, clever enough, patient enough. These are the hurts that don’t (unlike the first set) offer ways to improve. They give you a sense of failure, unworthiness, insufficiency. There’s often no sense that you could do something to fix it, either. You *are* a bad person, a waste of space, a nuisance. You can’t fix that, and they treat you accordingly no matter what you do. The hurt doesn’t necessarily come in the moment of abuse, either. It’s a slow desolation of self. If you are a never good enough child, self-esteem trampled by parents or teachers, you may never even realise there are alternatives, you just internalise how rubbish you are, and that puts spikes on the inside, that will shred you perhaps for the rest of your life. It can happen in workplaces and in relationships too, although there we stand a better chance of spotting it, but not everyone does. You can break a person and them not realise what you have done, which is truly awful.

The only way to respond to the third kind of pain, is to recognise it and get the hell out. The person who will wound you and declare you never good enough, will never be impressed or won round. They may well encourage you to think it’s possible, the eternally dangled and unreachable carrot that allows them to beat you conceptually (and sometimes literally) when they please.

Emotional pain can be dealt with productively. There’s the sort we learn from to grow and develop. If you can grow and develop by taking onboard something that hurt, then it was useful pain and you benefit from it. There is the pain caused by the suffering of others, and if you spot that and deal with it compassionately, things can improve for both you and the other one, and for people around you, too. The third kind of pain serves no purpose beyond entertaining the sadist who practices it. The only thing to do is recognise them for what they are. If you can never get it right and never be good enough, you are experiencing the kind of pain that needs not only to be ignored, but to be escaped from. The greatest agony in this can be the requirement to recognise that someone whose opinion you have respected, and you have trusted, is actually rather awful. That one hurts, and fear of that pain can keep us prisoners when we should be running away. It can be easier to internalise the blame, than face the hideousness of a corrupt soul. We can fool ourselves into thinking we can save such a person, or that they only do it out of pain, but stay there long enough and you’ll see that nothing changes – you do not become ‘good enough’ to please them and they do not become secure enough to let go of their justifications for abuse. There comes a time when sanity demands saying ‘enough’ and walking away.

Psychological violence

The brain is a physical structure which is shaped by what we do with it – learning, practice, habit, life experience, memory – this is all part of the mix. Our minds are not amorphous things separate from our bodies but real, tangible structures that respond to what happens to them. Hit someone in the leg with a hammer and you will get nasty bruises, and possibly a broken bone. As a culture we take that kind of thing seriously. However, we seem to assume the mind is a whole other thing. Violent assaults on the psyche are not assumed to cause breakages in the same way. Now, when it comes to considering criminal damage, it will always be hard to produce evidence of psychological trauma, but I see no reason why that should make it culturally acceptable. I find myself wondering if depression and anxiety are to psychological damage what bruises are to the hammer.

For many the idea of psychological violence will involve really overt forms of torture. In practice we aren’t talking about watching puppies being drowned, or being threatened with death for not complying. Most psychological violence is far more every day. As a child I was taught the rhyme ‘sticks and stones will break my bones but words can never harm me.’ It’s a commonly held idea. Bullying words aren’t causing you real pain, is the theory. We’re taught to accept this kind of bullying and to feel ashamed if we are hurt by it. This only serves the abusers. Humiliation, denigration, ridicule, dismissal, all undermine the sense of self. These things take away self-esteem and your feeling of being a person. The lower key, more mundane stuff is insidious, and can be inflicted daily. I remember a woman whose husband shouted at her all the time. She was a mess, but did not feel she could go to the police because she expected they would tell her she was being silly. He hadn’t laid a finger on her, but her nerves were tattered. I do not know how that one ended.

It’s so easy to make clear to a person that they are worthless, useless, a nuisance, unwanted, unloveable, unacceptable. The martyred air of one who is having to go to some lengths to tolerate you, is soul destroying to encounter. Having holes picked in the smallest things that you say and do, as though your small tastes and preferences are stupid. Being blamed is another one. Having your emotions ridiculed. Try being bullied to the point of tears by a person and then have that same person call you melodramatic and irrational for crying. A bit of you dies on the inside.

Being shouted at, being mocked, being the butt of cruel jokes. Your body treated as a sexual object, not a living expression of yourself. Or, your body treated as disgusting, or as something to laugh at, or as something you should feel ashamed of. Try telling someone they’d look so much better if they wore what you told them to, day after day, and see if their self-esteem holds up… or don’t if you’re any kind of decent human being. Lecture, demand, punish, tell off other adults as though they were especially stupid children. So often the one dishing it out is painfully insecure and only doing it to big themselves up. That flailing, fragile ego can be a source of so much pain and destruction.

Evil is often small. The worst things we do to each other are often mundane. Most of us will not be literally stabbed in the back. It’s that other stuff, the bruising of soul, the cutting up of identity, that causes the damage. The wounding to feelings is not fantasy, it’s not something we *should* be able to shrug off. Emotional experience is no less real than the hammer, and the brain is no less a physical structure than the leg.

What worries me most at the moment is the campaign of psychological violence being deliberately waged. The perpetrators are in the media and in parliament, and the people they are working to destroy, are the poorest and most vulnerable in society. Slackers. Scroungers. Worthless, useless, sponges, waste of space… and who, being presented with that on a daily basis, does not feel themselves dying on the inside? Who can hold out against that and not start to feel that the world might be a better place if they were dead?

Depression kills people. If you bully a person to death with sustained psychological violence, they are no less dead, and you are no less guilty of killing them then if you had done it with the hammer instead. The law might not be able to judge it, but a culture can. We do not have to lie down and take it. We won’t fix it by taking up the same arms and using psychological violence back. That’s just another way of losing. Of course it’s tempting, of course we feel justified, and want to lash out and even the score, but all that gets in the end is more pain, more damage. We can say ‘not good enough’ and we can disagree, non-violently. Not just with the politicians, but anywhere people start taking word-hammers to other people’s minds.

The consequences of anger

Plenty of religions (and Yoda) discourage anger, but we don’t talk much beyond vague ‘bad karma’ and ‘god doesn’t like it’ ideas about the consequences of anger. There are times when rage is a good and needful thing, enabling us to change perceptions, change our lives and so forth. There are times when dramatic upheavals and huge responses are called for. The trouble is that the anger lingers on long after the moment has passed. The echoes of historical injustice, the memory of pain, can keep us trapped in a moment that has actually gone. I know because I’ve done it. Then there are the smaller things that people let themselves get angry about, and can still be bringing up years after they happened. I don’t think I do that much, but I’ve been on the receiving end of it, and yes, that makes me angry. It’s so easy to get angry with someone else’s anger, too, and escalate the thing up into something truly hideous.

I feel anger as a physical tension in my body, and there’s a definite relationship between it, and anxiety. A lot of my anxiety has to do with the things I am also angry about. I don’t want them to happen to me again. I don’t want to be a victim. I’m angry because I am afraid, and afraid because I am angry and round it goes. Live there and it will make you very, very ill. My experience of angry people suggests that a significant number (but not all) are angry defensively, trying to protect themselves from wrongs and threats, real and imagined. When the threats are real, the anger can be useful. When the threats are imagined, the anger is as dangerous to the person holding it as to anyone else. Someone who has got into the habit of feeling afraid may no longer be able to tell the difference. There are people who are determined to cast themselves in the victim role so as to justify lashing out in anger against others as well.

There are people who seem to enjoy being angry. It can, after all, feel powerful. And yes, the righteous anger that throws off the chains of slaves and brings down tyrannies is a good kind of power, but that can get addictive. Of course when we are angry we want to believe that we have the moral high ground and are entitled to hit out, with words or fists. We want to feel good about manifesting our rage. Movies are full of examples of ‘heroes’ who do just this, reinforcing our beliefs about how good it is to crush the opposition. Only it isn’t good. It leads to retaliation and feuds. It leads to broken relationships that cannot be fixed. As soon as you get into win/lose scenarios, everyone loses.
It’s not easy stepping away from what you firmly believe to be righteous indignation. That hunger for justice, that need to have your pain recognised, the desire that other people should do something about it… I’ve seen what it does. I’ve yet to see someone come out of the angry place actually happy with the outcome. It’s not about the winning, it’s about what the being angry does to you. It robs you of peace. It keeps you revisiting all the things that hurt. There comes a time to put it behind you, learn what you can and move on. Where that place is will vary depending on person and circumstance of course, it’s not for anyone else to dictate who should be ‘over it’ by now.

I’m alert to signs that people are angry because they are afraid. Sometimes those can be eased with a gentler, more careful approach. I’m not going to be angry with someone because they need me to be more careful with them – that would be pointless, and would entrench the fear. I’ve had people get angry with me on those terms, it achieves nothing good, and creates more misery. If I think someone just enjoys being angry, I’ve learned not to argue because there’s no point, it just makes them worse. Better to walk away and come back if they calm down. I’m not interested in being a whipping post.

My own anger, I am trying to turn into something else. I’m not prepared to let it keep me in an afraid place. Anger can also feed courage. It can be the motivation to stand up and say or do what is necessary – not to strike back, not to lash out or to hurt but to calmly face down and try to fix. The kind of anger that would enable me to calmly support other people who need help, and calmly not escalate things when other people are being bloody stupid. It’s not about supressing the feelings, or not experiencing anger, it’s not letting it run on and not wilfully feeding it to get to some dramatic shouty place, and not enabling the people around me to go their either. Not that I live with anyone shouty anymore, but there’s a whole world out there…

Contemplating relationship

Some of the most important emotional relationships in my life, looking back, were with people who were not lovers. Some of the lovers, in retrospect, had little impact on me at all, and several were quite damaging. I was pondering this late last night, because I have a fondness for looking for patterns. I’m also on a quest for self-knowledge. So much of who I am and have been has been shaped by the people I was in most intimate emotional contact with.

Those soul deep resonances with others had the effect of tapping in to things that are intrinsic to who and how I am. Through music, literature, creative thinking, sharing ideas and beliefs… looking back those connections were as much about meetings of minds as anything else. I’m very much a thinky person, although also deeply emotional, but intellectual connections are really important to me.

The relationships that went awry involved pressure to be things that did not resonate with me. That included dressing in ways I felt uncomfortable with, acting in ways that were unnatural to me, and basically supressing my own nature for the benefit of others. It’s really that legacy which has created the need to do this whole ‘quest for self’. Picking apart what is me, and what was put on me from the outside, I’ve come to a fairly simple conclusion. There’s a thought form in comics art that goes ‘if it looks right, it is right.’ I think that may have wider life applications. If it feels right, it probably is right – at least in terms of being a reflection of your own nature. If your nature is sick, twisted, depraved and cruel, that’s going to raise a whole other heap of issues, but I don’t find that in myself.

I responded to playfulness and creativity, to deep thinking, inspiration, and people who were passionate about the things they were into. Part of me wanted simply to be on the receiving of that kind of intensity, I was attracted by emotional capacity, in part. To be what fires someone’s imagination, to be the focus of intense desire and to inspire fierce passion, has considerable attractions. I wanted to be there. I wanted to be muse and playmate, and all that. Being in that place now, I can look back and see more clearly what it was that I hankered after in those previous connections. The people who loved fiercely, even if they didn’t bestow that on me, were wonderful and inspiring. The people who just wanted to make me small enough to be unthreatening and easily managed, I could have done without.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, of course. It’s easy to look back and see patterns and relevance that was wholly invisible to me at the time. I’m also aware of how much that went wrong for me had to do with my not understanding my own nature or paying enough attention to my own needs. I let people tell me who and how to be, because I thought being loveable was the most important thing, and it looked for a time like being loved was conditional on modifying myself. Turns out it isn’t. To be accepted as I am, found good enough, adored not in spite of my nature but because of it, has been a revelation. It makes me realise, looking back, who the really important people in my life have been, and they were not in all cases the most obvious suspects.

What dreams may come

Dream interpretation has always fascinated me. As a very young person, I got my hands on a dream interpretation book, but I rapidly found that the ‘answers’ were a bit too tidy, and most of my dreams did not include things that could be readily picked out as symbols and interpreted that way. I’ve always tended more towards narrative threads, and my symbolism is pretty personal. My impression is this is generally the case. We all have symbolic languages in which our unconscious minds try and talk to our waking ones. Life experience, belief, preference and so forth contribute to make this personal symbolism work. Unravelling it is a journey into the self. The first question to ask is not ‘what does the book say?’ but, ‘what does that mean to me?’

I studied Freud a bit at uni, which confirmed my feeling that trying to impose meaning from the outside, is reductive and pointless.
That said, there are trends that stand some consideration. Firstly, if you are learning something, your brain will consolidate that during periods of rest and sleep. We aren’t conscious of much of the process inside our own minds. This is distinct from your Freudian unconscious, which has its own drives and agendas. It’s more like the way in which you can’t see what your computer is doing to make these words visible to you. That much self awareness would drive us crazy. So, we have a functional, not-conscious element to the mind that handles the sorting, storing, and comprehension without our conscious thought processes getting involved. One of the signs that you truly know a thing is being able to do it without consciously thinking about it. Dreaming can be part of the consolidation process, so what you dream may reflect what you’re learning.

Now, that Freudian style unconscious, that place of repressed emotions does seem to exist. If we are deep in denial about something, it bubbles up eventually. Dreams can express to us the things we are consciously trying not to be aware of – fear, desire, need, insecurity, all that kind of thing. There’s scope for self knowledge here, because if we can acknowledge the dreams that manifest what we’re refusing to deal with, we get closer to dealing with it.

The person who does not get enough sleep, also doesn’t get enough dream sleep, so having and remembering dreams is a good sign of sufficient good quality sleep. It’s worth considering your dreaming in this very pragmatic way, because it can give you some useful information about the state of your sleeping.

I also think that dreaming is a good indicator of your state of mind generally. Drab, dull, repetitive dreams – such as dreaming in extra days at work, do not speak of a happy and fulfilled mind. Anxiety dreams can be very telling. Having the same set of dreams can be suggestive that something in your waking life needs tackling, and that you are trying very hard to flag this up to yourself. The person who dreams strangely and widely, drawing on all kinds of experience, is probably in better shape than not, between the ears.

Rich dreaming can be emotionally rewarding, as well as going alongside good sleep. It is worth paying attention to dreams. You don’t have to believe in much, or see any magical component, to be able to notice that they are a function of the mind, and that something is going on there. Stay away from Freud though, unless you’re reading him for giggles. Don’t assume there is one right answer to your dreaming and that someone else can tell you what it is. The only right answers are the ones that make sense to you, and sometimes dreaming has no discernible meaning at all. Some of it is white noise. Some of it is prompted by external things. (The boat rocks and I dream of an earthquake, for example). We can get so bogged down in the question of what things mean that we forget that sometimes things just are, and that no extra layers need to be added.

When not to be angry

Every day brings things to get angry about, from human apathy destroying the planet, to global injustices and political stupidity. We need to get angry enough about these things to get up and challenge them. All too often what happens instead is that our energy and rage is focused on much smaller and more personal issues. There have been some great comments here on the blog recently about the importance of assuming people online mean well, and being willing to listen so as to develop our own compassion (Andrew and Sean, and thank you!).

Every kind of opinion and belief is out there waiting on the internet to offend and frustrate you, and any number of trolls lurk in wait for victims. There is simply no point getting angry about this one, it just feeds them. I think we mostly know that, even if we do still get drawn in.

Then there are those situations when the other person goes that bit further, making accusations, getting personal, dishonouring you. Whether those are public situations with strangers, or private situations with people we know, those are hellish, and the desire to wrathfully defend honour is enormous. This is the point at which we may look to our wider community for justice (by which we invariably mean support for ourselves). From observation and personal experience, this is not reliably forthcoming, for all the reasons I was talking about in the Druid in conflict post. Then what? A tattered reputation, recriminations, anger, sometimes bad enough to tear whole communities apart. It’s rare that anyone wins one of these, whether they deserved to, or not.

What happens when we get angry? We assert our case, make accusations, take the dirty laundry out into a public place… The thing is that when you arrange it so that shit hits the fan, pretty much everyone ends up wearing it. Often these things start small, a word out of place, an angry exchange, then digging up some history, and an escalation, often enabled by the wider community, until you reach a point of no return. By the time you’re venting angry words online in defence of your knowledge, skills, status, beliefs… it probably is too late. Part of the trick, I think, is nipping this sort of stuff in the bud before it gets out of hand.

Here’s an example. Last week, in a public forum, someone said something that most definitely implied I was stupid and irresponsible. As it happened said critic had made some wholly wrong assumptions about what I’d just posted. I could have got angry and defensive. What I chose to do was apologise politely for any confusion caused, and then explained. There was no come back, no escalation. I also had the pleasure of making said critic look like an idiot without actually being rude. Win!

I thank people who tell me things I did not know and offer counter-arguments because I am genuinely grateful for those. I learn a lot from the folk who see things differently, and am pro difference, not threatened by it. I don’t get any heated arguments there. I also like offering people free use of the blog to expound on different perspectives. I find that sees off the trolls. It’s very easy to write ‘here’s a total over simplification of the issue’ on someone else’s work, a lot harder to come up with the goods when invited to do so. And of course if they did, that would be win all round, and we’d all learn something.

If someone imputes your honour, and you respond by yelling abuse at them, threatening them or calling them stupid… the odds of coming out of that looking good are slim. If you can draw a deep breath and try to respond with compassion, politeness, and patience so much the better. It’s not easy to avoid being patronising, but worth a shot. If you persistently uphold your politeness, people are much less likely to take against you, less ammo is handed to those who would use it, and sometimes, the whole problem goes away. You have upheld your honour, by acting honourably. I’m amazed how many people seem to miss that one online. Everything we do is part of our Druidry, including what happenes when we’re really pissed off.

Leaving us time to go back to the much more important business of challenging governments and big business and trying to save the world.