Learning to honour my current self

"It was as if I was living through a future version of myself that didn’t yet exist."

Dear fellow human,

A tension in my belly lingered in the background of last week, a myriad of fearful thoughts scurrying around my skull. I felt as though I needed to make a decision, but I didn’t know what I needed to make a decision about.

And then, out of nowhere, I experienced a moment of clarity whilst sitting in my favourite people-watching spot in my local park. I had moments before hurried to put written words to my jumbled thoughts. Thankfully I was carrying my notebook. I wrote:

“I am caught in the tension of wanting to know and not wanting to be sure. Of wanting to be out there and not wanting to be known. Of wanting a blueprint and not wanting to be restricted. Of wanting discomfort and not wanting unease. Of wanting to know the answers and not wanting to pre-empt the ending.”

As soon as I read these words back to myself I realised they were about these letters. I recently turned on paid subscriptions and had fallen into old habits of operating from a place of ‘what do people expect from me and who do they expect me to be’ rather than ‘how can I create as much freedom as possible to express who I am in any given moment’.

This is a familiar pattern. I have always tried to create the foundation, in the present, for a version of myself I picture in the future. I sought certainty of who I would become. My imagined future self was the hope, authenticity, and acceptance that I craved. The act of creating these fictions allowed me a taste. It was as if I was living through a future version of myself that didn’t yet exist.

In reality, my collection of future versions of me rarely ever collided with the real me. The plan would inevitably fall apart in the execution phase as I found some other inspiration and moved on to the next project. On the occasions I did embody parts of my hypothetical future self, my world would crumble as I realised it didn’t fix anything - hope, certainty, authenticity and acceptance were nowhere to be found.

That’s what happened this week.

It started when I was updating the ‘about’ page of my newsletter to reflect new paid offerings. I felt the energy coursing through me as I picked all of the ‘right’ words, curated a perfectly formed idea, and packaged myself up within strict defined parameters.

I was trying to pin down exactly what I was going to talk about in my letters, the specifics of the value paid subscribers would take away (because apparently I’m a mind-reader as well as a writer), which ideas I would write about and which I would keep to myself, what ‘type’ of writer I would be, which community of writers I would fit into, and how people would perceive me. As I was formulating this vision of a future self, I was on a high. Assembling this box for myself made me feel safe, and like I was in control.

It was once I hit publish that the tension in my belly started. Now I had to live up to this version of myself. There was a demand, in fact there were many demands, that I had to meet. I baulked at the idea of being creatively constrained by the rules I had composed for future me.

Where is the room to change?

Where is the room to explore?

Where is the room to create?

Where is the room to just be?

I had created a personal brand from the outside in. Just like I had created masks for myself so many times before. My brain is a seasoned expert in camouflaging. It has always been seeking, collecting and organising new data points to try to fit in. And this was no different. It’s a crafty trick, that I’m surprised I caught.

I’m so thankful that I noticed this pattern. I am sick of doing this to myself. Just like personal expression gets renamed a personal brand, and creative flow gets confined by publishing schedules, my essence has been squashed by my robotic expectation that I would arrive at a certain version of myself on the page each week.

It’s not easy to accept that there will always be uncertainty, and that there are no shortcuts to learning to live in hope, with authenticity, and in acceptance of the current version of myself. But what I do know is that writing is what allows me to navigate and make sense of it all, and it is only possible for me to write what is truly genuine and sincere if my essence is free to be unrestrictedly curious.

And so I am writing to let you know that whilst I cannot make any promises about what exactly I will write about, or in what way, or with what value, I can promise that I will honour myself and write to you each week sincerely as the person I am in that moment - with all of the joys, the struggles, the heartache, the imperfections, and the uncertainties that a human has.

Sending love,

Charlie