This is me

Recently, a friend of mine posted a note on Facebook where she talked openly and beautifully about her relationship with her mum – specifically, how she’d used her mum for many years as an excuse for not doing what she wanted to do and not being what she wanted to be.

This was a private post, so I’m not going to reproduce any of it here – but the realisation my friend had come to resonated with me, and so now I will share my realisations with you.

I have spent a long time avoiding my true self, and not following what I believe to be my calling. The reason for this, I realised as I read my friend’s post, is that I carried around with me the fear of other people judging me.

Not only that – these people lived in my head, and it was their voices I heard whenever I criticised myself for doing something wrong, completing something poorly or just when I fell back into old patterns of behaviour.

I believe we all carry people in our head, and if we listen to the words spoken in their voices, not only can we stop ourselves from acting on our dreams and desires, but we can grow to resent them as if it really were them stopping us.

But of course – really, it’s just us.

For my friend, the voice she carried and the person she blamed was her mum.

For me, the voices I carry are those of the people who bullied me at school, the people who excluded me at university and who made the first years of my working life a misery.

It is their voices that have stopped me from acting, made me withdraw and procrastinate about following my heart’s desire.

But it’s not their fault.

I’m the one who’s chosen to carry them with me. And now I chose to release them.

I’m no longer listening and I’m no longer hiding behind their imagined censure.

So this is me.

I…

…am an accountant

…am a writer

…am intuitive

…am a lover

…am Australian and English

…have seen and heard spirits as long as I can remember (that’s one of the hardest things to share)

…have two degrees and hope I never stop learning

…am a sister, auntie and great-auntie

…love cats

I am a work in progress

xx