Find people who know EVERYTHING about you and still love you
The first step in learning to be and in enjoying the present moment
Ok, so I was initially going to write a short piece on how we can learn to enjoy the moment by learning to be.
I was intrigued by the idea while I was on holiday. I sat by the pool, reflecting over the fact that so many of us find it challenging to be present and happy in the here and now.
I wanted to argue that that not being present radically impacts the way we live our lives and lead the people we serve.
However, I ended up writing like 3000 words which was far too long…. So…. I am going to present the same idea over three (or so) pieces.
The idea I want to get across over the next few weeks is that we need to learn to be.
Learn to be — “be who you were created to be — not who want to be, or who you think you should have been. Be who you are right now. Only when you are content with who you are today will you be able to enjoy who you are tomorrow.”
When we learn to be, we can enjoy the present moment.
STORYTIME!!!
I must say I have been terrible at this for the majority of my life.
I didn’t know what peace meant or what it looked like
I had no idea what Joy was….. I knew what short term thrills were but not what an enduring, inner lasting joy felt like…
Do you?
I was continually striving to be better — killing myself in the process — another degree — another masters — maybe a PhD or an MBA… what else can I do for people to approve of me?
What do you do for people to approve of you?
I found it incredibly difficult to focus, as it meant being still with myself, which I HATED!
How long can you be still with yourself for?
I avoided my emotions and hid them in a cave somewhere in my heart. Anytime they would creep up, I would be unable to cope or deal with them. The only way I knew how was to escape… at first in harmful habits… like drugs and alcohol but when I grew up, I learnt to escape at the gym, at work, being busy, helping others… a more moral escape but still an escape, nonetheless. By the way, escaping is never a good idea. No matter what it looks like.
How do you escape?
I never felt like I belonged. I thought that everybody else was accepted into a community apart from me. I always felt like the outsider even though I always had people around me.
Have you ever felt like that?
I didn’t know how to receive love. I was so fearful of being hurt that I rejected people before they could leave me (this was an unconscious action which I later realised was prominent my whole life). This meant I pushed people away and even ruined an engagement.
I won’t ask…
I was a mess.
But amid that mess. I was lucky enough to have a councillor and a mentor who walked me through a three-year process of learning to be.
Of learning to enjoy the present moment.
I can promise you that I no longer inhabit the life I used to live.
You can have peace!
You can have joy!
You can be with yourself!
You can face your past without fear!
So here we go! I hope this helps you the way it helped me
The first part of the process is…….
FIND PEOPLE WHO KNOW EVERYTHING ABOUT YOU AND STILL LOVE YOU
Let me begin by telling you how difficult I found it to talk….
Luckily I had a very wise salvation army councillor who was extremely patient with me…
We first met on the third floor of a slightly worn-out building in Stratford, east London. I remember sitting in the waiting area. There was a black Nescafe coffee machine in the corner with a water cooler next to it. I always sat in the same seat. Facing the exit. Opposite me, there was a coffee table with the latest editions of the salvation army newsletter (They are interesting, at least to past the 3 minutes before I entered the room).
When Richard came to the door, he was a tall, slim man with short grey hair. He had a warm smile and blue eyes that could look into your soul and know what you thought before you had even thought it…… (little did I know that this would be true)
He said “Hey Fernando, welcome” and open his arms towards the door which I would need to enter. He would greet me the exact same way for three years. I started mimicking him towards the end.
The room was pale green with a small with a slightly outdated Windows PC in the corner, two yellow wooden chairs which were angled facing each other but not directly. There was a bookshelf in the corner with psychology books and a giant NIV blue bible.
Richard would always wait for me to choose the seat. Even though I always sat in the same chair, the one on the left… well until I chose a completely different ‘seat’, il tell you more about this in a bit. He always sat on the seat to the right.
I was particularly aware of the clocks in the room which were all in direct eyesight of both Richard and I so that we would not run over the 50 minutes allocated to us. At first, I hated only having 50 minutes, but then I grew to understand the importance of it.
Little did I know that this room would change my life.
When I started counselling, I found it very hard to talk.
I thought I knew myself. I thought I knew what needed fixing.
I wanted to go in, do what I was told and come out a whole new Fernando! YAY!
Then (fundamental misconception) I would be happy, and I could salvage the relationship I had ruined, and live happily ever after…..
Yet… I would, at times, sit in that little green room in silence for twenty minutes at a time with nothing to say.
Richard would look at me and just wait….. I HATED THAT!
I wanted him to break the silence….
When he wouldn’t… I would ask him a question… I wanted a remedy…but he would always answer in the same way…
He would say “Fernando, we are on a journey, you are in the driver’s seat, why would I know where you want to go?”
Yes, those were his real words…
I know… WHAT?!?!?
What he meant was … there are no quick fixes… He was not the answer, and nor did he have the answers. I was responsible for getting me where I needed to go.
I fought back.. obviously
I kept asking for answers…
I kept asking for solutions…
But he would answer in the same way “How should I know what you should do?”
I HATED THAT ANSWER SOOOOOO MUCH
He was the worst! But after many months, I succumbed to the understanding that asking him questions wasn’t going to get me anywhere.
After about a year of meeting with my councillor every Friday at 10:00, I took a different posture in the sessions, both figuratively and literally.
Instead of sitting on the yellow wooden chair, which was facing him, I decided to lay on the floor and face the ceiling. This allowed me to speak more freely (and avoid that awkward eye contact)
The floor was a good place for me to speak, I could look out of the window and see the birds flying…. I could look up at the air vent which had a teddy bears claw stuck in one of the gaps (don’t ask me how)…. Or I could look at the painting which hung between the two seats. The painting was of a blue boat trapped at sea….I always wonder if that painting was hung there just for me…
Now, on the floor, I felt more vulnerable. I felt like I had laid my defences down. Strangely enough, I felt more able to speak.
And instead of asking him questions, I would answer the questions myself (this was very hard).
Answering my own questions made me think deeply about why I was the way I was.
To be honest, he was right. The only person who could answer the questions was me. I had to be brave and look into my heart, my past, my mistakes, and try to weave the tapestry of my life into … not answers… but solutions as to who I was.
It took a lot of time
It was scary
I cried (I tried to fight them back)
Sometimes I couldn’t figure stuff out… but that was ok… at least I had become aware of more that I needed to speak about.
I realised that there was tremendous power in speaking entirely honestly and vulnerably about who I am.
Like…
The person who does things there ashamed of …
The person who did things he regrets and has to live with the consequences
The person who also cares for people almost so much that I don’t care about myself
The person who wants to love someone but is scared to be rejected
What were the real repercussions of growing up without my dad?
Why did everyone I tried to love, abandon me?
I had to speak about these things to be able to own my story…. To learn who I really was. Only when I was able to do this could I begin to BE.
I like what Brene Brown, the author of ‘Daring greatly’ wrote on this:
“Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy — the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.”
To be able to BE… we must find people who know everything about us and still love us. For us to be truly loved, we need to be truly known.
Some of us have friends and family members who we speak to and who ‘know’ us…. But who really knows you?
Who knows about your greatest regret?
Who knows about the thing you struggle with regularly?
Who knows about your inner longings and desires?
Who knows about your fears… your real deep fear?
Who knows about your dreams and desires?
Who knows the real you?
I was privileged to find someone in counselling who could teach me to be by simply listening to me. But I had to have the courage to speak.
I want to encourage you to find someone you trust and be brave enough to speak.
Brene Brown again said this:
“Because true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.”
After about two years with Richard, I realised that I needed someone in my life who would be a father to me outside of the four walls and 50 minutes of a counselling session. Although I saw Richard as a father already. I gave him Father’s Day gift once or twice I can’t remember…. I don’t know if he was allowed to accept it… but he did.
I was introduced to Mark in December of 2017.
He has been married to Jess for 25 years, and they have five beautiful children (they would say six children because they count me as one now).
I began meeting Mark every Wednesday at 9 am for breakfast. We always have the same breakfast — sourdough bread with marmalade. Mark makes marmalade every year in bulk, and it is fantastic, although he doesn’t have it with his breakfast which I still haven’t understood why. We have three slices of bacon, two poached eggs and earl grey tea. We have to have earl grey tea.
Mark is very similar to Richard. He is a brilliant listener. He doesn’t tell me what to do. He doesn’t give me the remedy. He allows me to speak and come up with my own conclusions. He trusts the process of learning to be.
With Mark, I again had to go through the process of talking, going to the dark place and letting myself feel known. What was interesting though was that this time, it was a little bit easier to speak.
This time, a lot of what I had struggled to say before was now, not easy, but slightly less difficult to say.
At one point, for about a year, I was seeing Mark every Wednesday and Richard every Friday.
I now had two people in my life who knew absolutely everything about me and still loved me.
The more I spoke, the freer I became.
The more I spoke about my imperfections and realised that I could still be loved the more I was able to be.
Here are a few things I learnt in finding people who knew everything about me and still loved me:
1. I became more self-aware. I had gone through the hard work of talking about my life to understand how I became the person I was and why I behaved the way I did.
2. I was also able to understand people in a more significant way and I grew in empathy for the people around me.
3. I became more confident. This was because I knew I was loved (not by everyone, but by those who knew me the most and that’s what really matters)
- This was also a different type of confident. I used to appear to be confident, but I was, in fact, insecure, and I just knew how to pretend to appear confident.
4. Since I was more grounded in my identity, the people around me took more notice of me, and people began to respect me more.
5. I learnt to care for myself because I had grown to love myself.
- I was able to implement more healthy work/life balances
- I was able to say no more regularly to things that weren’t good for me
- I was able to see my worth and not settle for things or people who were not good for me.
6. I learnt how to experience peace because there was no more shame in my life that wasn’t out in the open. I could be still with myself and not be afraid of my emotions. I didn’t have to escape anymore.
7. I began to live a joy-filled life because I knew I was loved despite how well or poorly I performed, and that freed me up to love every moment of life.
Letting myself be known and loved changed my life.
I really believe that anybody can experience this.
All you need to do is be brave enough to speak. Let yourself be fully known and fully loved.
It is a process, and change won’t happen overnight
There is a Chinese proverb which I love, it goes:
“The best time to plant a tree was 25 years ago. The second-best time is today.”
Start today.
Find someone who knows everything about you and still loves you
You can be free
You can learn to be!
