Sugar

If you read all of my columns they do boil down to some pretty essential truths. You hit on one of them when you said ‘the hard choice is often the best one,’ that life is both more simple and more complex than most of us would like to believe, that there is something about the essential, that we all have an essential truth within us which if we really listen to that, which is totally different than that bumper sticker ‘follow your bliss,’ which is bullshit. You know? And that’s, I have never read a self help book in my life. I think self help is pretty much bullshit. I don’t pay attention to this…what’s that Oprah book, like The Secret, or some sort of crap like that? ‘If you only believe, then it will be true,’ I think that’s a really aggressively entitled bullshit sort of approach to life’s complicated questions. And at the same time there’s a piece of that in Sugar that says ultimately we’re all responsible for our lives, we’re all going to fail, we all have something inside to offer, and our work here is to find out and express it in whatever channels are appropriate. So it’s not Sugar’s message, but it’s really just my life, everything I think about how to live, which is in opposition to that self help crap.

The problem with the term 'self-help' is that it has come to connote an easy solution or whatever; buy this book, follow these steps, your life will be perfect sort of thing. It does not and can not work like that. But in real terms the only way you can be helped is through helping yourself. No one else can make that decision and no one else can do the work. Which sort of sucks because sitting back and letting others take the reigns is waaaay easier. But I like and understand what Sugar has said here; life is much easier and yet more complex than we want to believe.

This life I've got going for me at the moment is so different from anything I've experienced before. I'm actually content for the most part. Like, I've had these fairly insane wobbles from time to time but I'll talk myself down or talk it through with the person I'm wobbling over or just plain ride it out. That's literally your only options in the first instance. I sit there wanting the feelings to just go away but they won't. They demand to be felt. After the talking or the riding (heh) then maybe a proactive choice can be made (like moving out frinstance) but change isn't something you do it's something that happens. And trying to force it changes nothing. You're in the same holding pattern just with a different view from your window. I sit here now feeling actually ok for the first time ever with a set of tools for working through the wobbles that everyone gets and I have to accept I always will get.

I look around at other people; particularly people who are going through a hard time themselves, and there's this weird feeling of I know so well what it's like to be there and I'm not there any more. I don't pity these people, I don't pretend to know how they need to solve their problems, it's just odd; looking at what they are going through. Knowing I was once in a place like that, knowing how difficult it was to pull myself through the river of shit in order to come out clean on the other side. Knowing that that's what they will have to do if they want things to get better. But it's also like, all this nice stuff - the living alone and my job I actually like and my volunteering that I love and my absolutely fan-fucking-tastic boyfriend (I hate girls - it's always invariably girls rather than boys or men or women - who go "I have the best boyfriend in the world" because I'm all "Number 1: no, please stop talking. Number 2: what you mean is he's a generically decent person right? He can't actually be the best boyfriend in the world. How is that even defined? Did he find the cure for AIDS? Broker a peace deal between Israel and Palestine? No? Then please see point 1" but, having said that, I have managed to snag the best person that I've come across so far for me. He's not perfect but his imperfections are peculiarly perfect when meshed with my imperfections) (also, that is what she said) - this is not stuff that's 'special' in any way and it's not like it was the ultimate goal. Not really. I don't even know what the ultimate goal was to begin with - to stop feeling like shit all the time maybe? To stop feeling empty and sad and disconnected. To stop feeling stuck. But in fact what I learned was to accept those things. To be alright with the fact that that's how things were, that that's how things needed to be in a sense. And with that, all of a sudden, I found myself feeling not shit, not empty, not sad, feeling connected to myself and the rest of the world. Feeling free, unstuck; feeling myself: unapologetically.

It sounds so easy when it's written down but it wasn't (and yet, like Sugar says, it kind of was easy in a weird way - I just needed to keep at it. But, in another way, it was so much more complicated than that makes it sound). It's such normal, boring things I have that are making me happy at the moment - loads of people have these things - but they were really difficult for me to get. Yet they happened incidentally from trying really hard, from looking at the dark sticky bits of my soul that I'd never wanted to examine before and not stopping when it got scary. Now I'm on the other side of that and though the temptation is there to run away from contentment I have to remember that what got me through the bad times is also what will get me through the good times: Standing up straight, looking everything in the eye, and not backing down from fear.

That place of true healing is a fierce place. It’s a giant place. It’s a place of monstrous beauty and endless dark and glimmering light. And you have to work really, really, really fucking hard to get there.