Why are you here and what brought you here

A piece I wrote for my last counselling skills course presentation answering the question above.

There is a short answer and a long answer to why I am here . The short answer is that I was looking for something I could put on my CV that would show evidence for the skills I was accruing through the volunteering  work I had been doing. The long answer a bit more complicated and requires a bit of context…

I was a daydreamy, shy child and spent most of my formative years feeling like I didn’t quite fit anywhere. Although that now sounds quite upsetting, I think it was actually liberating. As a result, being normal or fitting in has never been a motivating factor for me. I think that’s meant I’ve got to be more playful, more experimental, and forge deeper connections with similar “freaks and geeks” who also suffered from feeling like the world was not quite made for them in a nebulous, undefined way. I have had the opportunity to create again and again different worlds with different people that fit us just fine – no judgements, just little bubbles where we could have fun and be ourselves. On the plus side, that’s meant I have developed a talent for connecting with people quickly and easily (particularly one-on-one) by being myself and letting other people do the same. On the minus side I am still utterly abysmal at superficial small talk, especially in groups where the focus always seems to be on homogeny rather than individuality.

The fun little bubble I had at home, was interrupted for a while at age 8 by my parents divorcing (an event I have unconsciously managed to black out fairly successfully. I can remember the day they split up and then moving into a new house - but apparently there is a whole year that separates those events and I have no idea what happened or what that was like). However, my mum and brother and myself did manage to rebuild a smaller bubble that was no less fun and felt a good deal safer. I had good friends at primary school and I somehow even managed to be accepted in the judgement fuelled world of secondary school, albeit as the ‘weird, clumsy’ one. But that was ok because I was quite weird and fairly clumsy at the time (the body I have now I have pretty much had since the beginning of secondary school when I curiously and suddenly woke up one day with height and boobs and hips and the rest. I towered over everyone else for that entire year, when slowly but surely most others started to catch me up). I felt accepted and loved for being me both at home and at school (though it wasn’t all lovely as this was punctuated by my dad making me feel bad every now and again for being too fat and/or too shy. Funnily enough being told you are ‘too whatever’ never actually seems to solve or change that particular attribute but does make you feel shameful about it).

Alas, alack this could not last forever. When I was 13 my mum met and fell for a man who had four kids. We therefore needed a bigger house. So we moved. We moved away from the safe, accepting worlds at home and at school that I had enjoyed up till this point and I was forced to exist in a home that made me feel unwanted, unwelcome and the source of all the problems the blended family faced, and attend a school that made me feel awkward and weird still – but in a shameful  way this time. I would sum up this time by the words ‘discord’ and ‘disharmony’ and ‘a constant sort of churny horrible tummy feeling’. I still had little safe bubbles here and there, it was just unfortunate that the worlds I managed to create with different people did not exist independently and we had to spend an inordinate amount of time in the ‘real’ world where judgements and fun did not exist as much.

I guess my main way to get through this time was similar to how my family dogs cope with having a bath. I put my head down and let it happen, just hoping against hope it would be over soon.

Eventually, I found my tribe. At 19 I got myself a job in a music shop and pretended to everyone that I knew a lot more about life than I did (though I’m fairly sure my innocence and naivety shone through despite my best efforts). At this point in my life, being accepted by people I thought were cool was mind blowingly revolutionary and I gave up the art course I was on to just work and hang out with these guys because, obviously, this feeling of contentment and acceptance was going to last forever right?

Not right.

Very oddly, real life started getting annoyingly in the way. People left, other people dated each other and the group dynamics were no longer the same. Although I was content it became clear to me that what made me happy at 21 was probably not going to carry on making me happy forever and ever I rather impulsively decided to go to university. The convention tends to be to quit things impulsively rather than join things impulsively (at least with me) but with a sudden burst of clarity - wanting to change things for myself, the way the people around me were changing their lives - became very important to me. Looking back, perhaps I had just managed to gain the confidence to try for something I knew I wanted and I knew would take hard work. It was an awesome decision, and probably the first real step on the road to me getting here.

It was also there that I met the total love of my life, Chloe. She was my soul mate and it was like breathing a huge sigh of relief when we found each other. This was in no way a romantic relationship but instead we described each other, fairly unironically, as ‘heterosexual life partners’ and she was pretty much my de facto girlfriend all throughout university. Although we both dated boys every now and again, no one could measure up to how we felt about each other. And lest there was ever any doubt, we would each spend a lot of time giving the ‘slow up and down side eye’ and being intimidatingly sarcastic to any boy that DARED show an interest in the other, and therefore no boy ever really stuck around long enough to matter. Which didn’t bother me then and bothers me even less nowadays. We just implicitly understood each other and were obsessed by the other (we would spend hours just talking about ourselves and how we felt about ourselves and how we felt about our friendship and never ever get bored). We had so much fun together that hardly anyone else ever got a look in. Apparently two girls excitedly chattering and giggling at every lecture, café, house party and club, wrapped up completely in what the other is saying, does not engender the invitation to join in.

Chloe was very, very sure about her thoughts, feelings, and opinions and I found that so exciting and refreshing. I still admire that about her today but I’m now a lot more content that my mind is flexible enough to change, and that seeing things from lots of points of view rather than rigidly sticking to your own opinion come hell or high water can have its downsides. But one thing she was completely inflexible on was the subject of therapy. Chloe had experienced a horrible childhood and this, manifested itself in lots of damaging behaviours. Therapy had cured her of that (well she still indulged in damaging behaviours but they were a lot more acceptable post-therapy than pre).  We surrounded ourselves with other broken people which meant that I didn’t have to feel bad about the copious amounts of drugs and alcohol I imbibed or the disordered eating habits I practised or the unsafe situations I got myself into, as there was always someone treating themselves worse than I did.

Regardless I had Chloe, I liked my life, everything made sense.

And then we had to graduate.

Although it hadn’t been a surprise that this would happen eventually I was still floored by it. Everything changed. I had no purpose and no direction and no Chloe (she was similarly shocked and rather than weather the storm together, we abandoned one another almost immediately). I had done a psychology degree with the idea of becoming an educational psychologist but the reality of having to work towards that suddenly felt insurmountable. I wanted everything to just fall into place and I had sort of assumed it would. But then I was left with a piece of paper that said my name and that I had a 2:i in Psychology BSc… and that was it. I was flabbergasted and genuinely had no idea what to do with myself. So I smoked lots and lots of weed and drank lots and lots wine and accrued jobs I didn’t really want, put my head down yet again and hoped it would be over soon.

Which, luckily, it was. I had a transformative trip around Europe with my brother when he finished university a year later and that clarity I’d had when I signed up for university returned to me. We had hardly any money so spent that whole trip just wandering around different European cities looking for parks to sit in and cheap food to eat. This allowed for a LOT of time to think. Without wanting to sound like a hippy or anything I love the way a metaphorical journey can match and marry to a literal journey. I started that trip so unsure about everything but having to live very simply and focus on the day to day, having the time to think and not think and just stare at the clouds, and talk to interesting and not interesting strangers, and have fun and fight with my brother - all made me realise that I was not happy as I was, but a vague plan of how I might make myself happy started to form. Starting with doing a job that had meaning, preferably one that meant I could help people, preferably one that meant I could work with children and young people. I had felt so stuck right up until the moment we started travelling. Moving around, seeing new things, staying in no place for longer than a few days made me feel completely free. I understood that the stuck feeling I had was of my own creation. Whenever people tell me how stuck they are nowadays I want to tell them and show them that they are not – that even the slightest movement in any direction will start to free them. It might not happen quickly, it might not happen the way they planned it, but just wiggling a little out of the chains they’ve wrapped round themselves will start to unravel even the tightest chains. But of course I can’t tell them that or show them that as it’s something that everyone has to learn for themselves, just as I did.

I returned from that trip energised and excited about my future. I landed a job as an outreach worker working with parents within a month of my return and it felt, just as starting my degree had felt, like another leap forward in getting me on the path I wanted to go on.

But then I met a man who sort of destroyed me completely. That feeling I was so sure of whilst travelling of wanting to help people was fulfilled wholly by him. I wanted to save him and give him everything of myself, and he greedily and unsurprisingly accepted it. It was a relationship that made me realise love can be destructive as well as nourishing. It was chaotic and messy from day one but I think I can be forgiven for not expecting things to happen like him trying to kill himself, or him calling me up to bust him out of the psychiatric unit at 4am, or him ending up in hospital with pancreatitis that meant he spent a month in a coma and nearly died twice. I saw him weigh six stone and have a colostomy bag and be so full of rage at life that it scared me. All in all it wasn’t good. I had my job to keep me in some sort of routine but every single day was a struggle to get through.

Eventually, and it was bound to happen sooner or later, I cracked and crumbled from the weight of it all and, remembering Chloe’s sage advice from years earlier, decided I would go into therapy as my only other choice was suicide. I had been unhappy before but this was something much uglier and harder to deal with. Therapy allowed me to confront that, and everything else as well.

I now think that I had to be completely broken in order to build myself back up again. The way I describe therapy to people who’ve not had it is that it’s like slitting yourself open from throat to naval, slowly taking out everything inside that constitutes you, examining it from every angle, and then putting it back in a way that works better - having grown to understand how you work, how all your experiences have added up to be more than the sum of their parts, you’re then able to use that knowledge to set yourself on a path that is more fulfilling and ultimately more enjoyable. It doesn’t mean you won’t experience bad things from time to time but it allows you to deal with anything bad in a much more functional fashion. The one thing it is not is easy. In fact it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done because it was so relentless. I constantly had to think about my choices, about the things I was carrying around with me, about where I wanted to go and how I would get there.

Slowly, just as in my trip around Europe, I wiggled enough to start feeling less stuck. After a few months I cut off all contact with my ex-boyfriend and, though that was hard, that made me feel freer. I repaired relationships with the loved ones who’d been shocked, appalled and scared by my relationship with him – and had therefore started to withdraw from me. I started doing things for myself, that made me feel good and seemed like they might lead somewhere (or at least look good on my CV). Every six months I started something new, like volunteering at a playscheme for disabled children, mentoring teenagers, and working at a counselling service for young people. I grew in confidence, I grew surer of where I wanted to be and wanted to get to, I eventually fell in love with a man that I felt nourished rather than destroyed by. I felt I had accepted myself. And to quote Carl Rogers: “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.”

After two years of therapy I was ready to carry everything I had learned forward and this course seemed the perfect way to do that. I felt like it would not only give me the opportunity to ‘peak behind the curtain’ of therapy and counselling, something that had given me back myself and my life and therefore something I found fascinating, but that it was yet another thing I could do with my time that felt constructive and fulfilling. It was also, as I said at the start, something I thought might look good on my CV as evidence for all the new skills I was accruing through my volunteering. And therefore hopefully another piece in the puzzle to getting me a job working directly with young people, and eventually to me getting on an educational psychology course.

Everything suddenly started to feel like it was falling into place even though it had taken my whole life to get to that point. It was so much easier and at the same time much harder than I had thought it was going to be. I have finally got really far along the path I had imagined for myself when siting around in European parks whiling away the time with daydreams because they were free. I’ve contributed to and enjoyed filling my spare time with volunteering work that energises me. I have now also landed myself a job that feels fulfilling, and gives me the opportunity to work directly with young people who need support like I always wanted. In fact it’s startling how I am able to compare and contrast myself to how different I am starting my current job with where I was starting my previous job. I walked into the new place feeling more confident, more able, and more like I was supposed to be there. As a result I’ve managed to already forge some close connections with people that also work there. They know about my life, about what I’m up to at the weekend, they know my likes and dislikes, and I feel comfortable sharing all of that with them. In my old job I was miserable when I started and rarely shared anything of myself with people at work. This time round has been much more enjoyable, less anxiety inducing, and I feel so much more at ease more quickly – just by dent of walking into a place and being me. I was only able to have that freedom because of all the experiences that have brought me here, but mostly because of the positive experiences I have had in the last three years or so. I would not be nearly as confident or comfortable being there without the job I’d done before, the volunteering, and especially this course. It has solidified and stretched my instincts for connecting with people. Particularly those people who are finding life a struggle. 

I also, finally, have an important relationship that is healthy. Even with de facto girlfriend Chloe, who I got so much from, we were so co-dependent that stepping outside of the safe bubble of our friendship was scary and intimidating. With my current partner, and he does feel like my partner, we are able to encourage and support one another to try and push for the things we want outside of our relationship – that develop us as individuals and mean we can bring back that individual growth into our relationship. Although we are FAR from perfect, I can’t believe that living with a boy (I Live With A Boy!!) works so well for me. I never imagined I was going to be anything than the crazy single friend people had. In fact, in all areas of my life, the word ‘crazy’ can no longer be applied as strongly. More importantly perhaps, the little bubbles of fun and safety I once clung to are no longer needed. I don’t need insulation from the outside world any longer.

I have found being part of this course something that has changed me profoundly. Like my new job, I have had this feeling of being in the exact right place at the exact right time. The group we have constructed and nurtured together is something I feel proud to be a part of, the values we tend towards, of being respectful, non-judgemental, honest and empathic are values that I feel that I’ve digested and understand much more fully than I did before. I think I’m a better person for having been part of this group, being able to listen and learn from everyone else and giving myself over to the learning we’ve done together and as individuals has been invaluable to me. It’s something that I’ll be sad to say goodbye to, but always happy I was a part of.