Personal

On the coast, you always see people at the water early in the morning, before the day has started. Sometimes taking photos, sometimes just soaking it in. Sometimes they have company, sometimes they are on their own. They have seen the water a million times, they live here. They aren’t tourists.

But still, it holds something magical in that it can never be the same, and you can never be the same afterwards either.

In 2013, in the midst of a depressive bout (the only one that I have ever been diagnosed with or medicated for, but it is not an outlier – I’ve had them since forever, this was just the one I could not manage) – I thought about how light changes even what it does not touch. In a dark space, even if the light cannot illuminate the hole you have dug for yourself, it’s presence changes you and changes the space – it’s not for you – but you know it’s there.

It doesn’t matter if it’s water or mountains or trees or clouds or whatever stands before you in the outside space, it is never the same. And you are never the same. The process of being changed is what brings you back to the water or the mountain. 

It is the same reason why people run: to seek out some great unknown within themselves that they haven’t discovered yet, to experience living change from the day before, to know that they are not the same as they were when they woke up that morning, ate what they always ate, performed the same routines that they always have, answered the same “what can I have for breakfast?” question with the same answer they have given for the last 100 times the question was asked. 

So they can look at the water and see the ripples are a different shape and the sun has a different brilliance and the pelican is quite intent on fishing instead of gliding.

When I moved here at the end of 2013, I was quitting smoking and running every day. I was time poor and I had limited light to deal with and no street lights to speak of in the country, so I ran the same route every day. Without realising it, I started a challenge of taking a photo every time I was out there. Sometimes it felt like pulling teeth, sometimes it felt like a creative gift. The structure of finding something new, eventually revealed the truth that even the same 8km loop over and over and over again was not ever the same. Not only was it not the same in it’s entirety but also not the same in any small part of it either. 

It was always changing, and I was too. 

I hung onto smoking for grim life, obviously because I was addicted, but for other reasons as well. Some where obvious: it filled a need – whether that was something to do with my hands or a way to suppress emotions or just a way to be less awkward – but some reasons were less obvious. I held onto bad habits like precious jewels, because it meant I never had to change, not really. I could be safe in knowing I was just not good enough at anything and I could just keep on setting my body up to fail to prove my point. 

Once you allow yourself to be changed, it’s scary because you have to accept that you are capable of anything and that all of those ideas that you carried like invisible weights anchoring you to the places where you never leave and never adapt can’t keep you where you are anymore.

And you change. 

You aren’t a tourist looking at the water on your run. And you aren’t a tourist in your own life. 

How comfortable are you in your own skin?

A question that’s easy to ignore or shove under the rug or cover over with all manner of things in normal life, and a whole lot harder to do exactly the same during a pandemic. Even for those of us who it has affected very minimally (like myself), the environment shift has been palpable. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t taken a hit to their mental health.

Even when you are really busy, you are just with yourself a whole lot more than you are used to. Even for people like myself, who is pretty used to my own company, well it’s been a lot.

You find out pretty quickly the parts of yourself that you cherish and the parts of yourself that are deeply uncomfortable to stomach. The parts that get hidden under work, or doing things, or rationalised coping mechanisms.

Sometimes you are travelling along really well and then your brain decides, hey let’s replay every stupid thing you’ve ever done over the last 40 years with no breaks.

Then you really have to cling to this one idea: never judge yourself for the choices you made in order to survive.

It’s something I always remember from when I had really rough patches of mental health – maximum effort doesn’t always look the same. Sometimes maximum effort is making peanut butter on toast. You don’t know.

It has to be more uncomfortable to stay the same, than it is to change

This is true of any change – whether it’s fitness or nutrition or smoking or drinking or whatever it might be. It’s not going to happen until staying the same becomes untenable.

You can have help and you can have support and you can have strategies but ultimately it’s just you, sitting with yourself deciding if you are worth saving today.

You can’t change what you don’t love. So you have to find a way to love those parts of yourself that you don’t like so much, that make you feel uncomfortable.

Sometimes you’ll go back and forth on it, and that’s okay too. Certainty only comes with practice. A lot of practice.

And sometimes it’s not until you get to the other side that you feel how tired you are. Because all that effort you put into ‘passing’ builds up.

That’s okay too. Just like maximum effort looks very different depending on the day, so does doing your best.

My best is okay, and I bet yours is too.

For people who are newer to this blog and the operation move community, you might not even know that it used to be a partnership. For others, it only becomes obvious maybe if you are listening to the podcast from the beginning and you are obviously listening to two people instead of one.

The other day a friend of mine asked me how I was adapting to being solo. And the answer is, I’m adapting.

Sometimes I get reminded, like when people send me an email or a facebook message and address it to “Dear Ladies”. Well, there’s just one of me now.

Some weeks I feel like I have it all together, and other weeks it feels like there’s too much to do and I’m barely hanging on. The other day I was going back looking for a particular post I’d written on one of my different websites and I was struck by how many other things I used to do with writing and how they’ve all fallen by the wayside. It’s not that I don’t have time. Everyone has time, you know? But I choose to prioritise my time for Operation Move rather than other projects. But you have more leeway when you aren’t a solo act, and that became obvious looking back through my archives. I’m glad they are still there, though. It’s not a painful reminder so much as a revelation of ‘wow. I used to do that.’

Sometimes it feels like the elephant in the room, that I’m not talking about. But then I’m not sure if I’m the only one who feels that way. The truth is that separating out any partnership is a thousand different things, not just one decision. It’s email addresses and passwords and old blog posts and header photos and covers of e-bboks and administrative remnants and messages about old podcast episodes. It’s a million reminders that pop up in your Timehop. And it’s dates that are no longer recognised. I end up feeling like an adoptive mother because I didn’t create the sisterhood: but I nurtured it, defended it, protected it and advocated for it like no one else would.

I’ve been in a few business partnerships and I always tend to settle into the behind the scenes type role. I do a lot of the grunt work and the technical stuff. And someone else worries about the presentation. So although I was hidden to a certain extent, it also meant I was protected from some of the harder decision making parts and some of the harsher realities of running a business as well. Being on my own, I had to get really good at a whole heap of things that I didn’t know how to do, really fast. And I had to get REALLY good at managing my own stress levels so I didn’t implode.

But now the things I like about it is I get to pursue my own vision, if I make a mistake I’m the only one who suffers for it and it feels more mine now than it did before. In the past when I’d take over for periods, it always felt like limbo, like I was a placeholder. And it feels different now.

In a sense, I think going solo has allowed me to be more unapologetically myself.

My friend said to me she thought that with the logo redesign a website-redesign might be cathartic for me. And I think she is probably right.