Journey from Meh

Read the full episode here https://journeyfrommeh.com/uncovering-meaning-stories-tell-ourselves/ Four-letter words don’t offend me. But the one four-letter word that I have battled with is: rest.  When it comes to that four-letter word my natural inclination is to resist it with the ferocity of a toddler being told to take an afternoon nap. What is it about this seemingly innocuous word that sets off the stubborn two-year-old in me? I’m not sure if I’ve figured out all the answers to that question, but I’ve figured out some. Last week our little pack of two humans and two doggos spent five days far from the crowds; maddening and otherwise.  We discovered this wonderfully unpopulated 28 hectares of nature some years ago. It’s a rustic retreat where we start each day with a bit of mountaineering down to the clear river that borders the property. The four-legged pack members morph into mountain goats as they bounce from one boulder to another, tails in the air and noses to the ground - absorbing the criss-crossing stories of the veld. The rocks eventually spill out onto river sand and, while we’re still navigating the last of the rocks, the only evidence that we have dogs are dusty mirages dancing above the path - followed by the sound trail and echo of a plop and a splash telling us they’re swimming in the river. After a few minutes of them swimming in the natural pools we follow the path that meanders next to the river. They disappear into the surrounding bush proving that they take “bundu bashing” literally.  Leading up to our time away my husband and I were aware of the mound of work we were leaving behind, so we started to plan what work we were going to take with us. Luckily we course-corrected two days before we left; deciding to rest and recuperate so that we could make a renewed, energised charge at the mountain of work when we got back. We almost fell back into our old habits, but we were really grateful for the complete downtime. For most of my life I’ve had the energy pattern of a toddler - manic activity followed by collapse. I used to say that I was only aware of my energy tank as “full” or “empty”, nothing in between. Mid-life, burnout, and a bunch of life skills I was lacking, eventually led me to a point where I was evaluating my life and decided I needed to change the way I was living. I took a sabbatical to figure out how I was going to do things differently moving forward. Part of that exploration and figuring out how to manage my energy tank led me back to the word rest. I love words and I love fiction. Reading is more than escapism, it’s meeting new friends, travelling to the past, the future, different worlds. But the most powerful story that affects my life is the narrative running in my head. The sabbatical kick-started an exploration of the stories I tell myself on a daily basis.  Some of those myths and legends are so old that it helps to work with a narrative archaeologist - like a psychologist or life coach. Telling our stories, talking, in a therapeutic space is a powerful experience because it shifts the tales living in our subconscious to our conscious mind.  And when that shift occurs, it brings the storyline to our awareness, where we can work with it, evaluate it, decipher its meaning and choose what the meaning of that scenario is going to be in our future. This allows for a shift in perspective to take place. Shifts allow us to move forward.

Read the full episode here https://journeyfrommeh.com/friendship-poetry-dance-life-how-i-deal-with-grief/ As I’ve mentioned, my parents moved around a lot when I was growing up. The shortest period we stayed in one place was three months and the longest was four and a half years. When we moved to the city, where we ended up living for four and a half years, my parents told me and my two older siblings that it was “from her to the grave” for them. They would not be moving again. I took them at their word and put down roots. I joined the choir, took drama, starred in the school musical, continued to excel in academics and played hockey. My Monday morning lessons started with English, Afrikaans, French and Latin. I dreamed of working as a translator one day. Then, when I was 14, my parents informed me that we were moving. I was pissed. Betrayed. Reminding them of their promise was as futile as trying to drink the ocean through a straw. I just felt wrenched. Again. I was going to have to give up everything I’d been working towards. I was gutted.  Resistance was futile, but I decided that I didn’t have to collaborate with my betrayers. For the first time, I rebelled.  I told my parents I would not participate in their decision. They hadn’t bothered to consult me, or take my feelings into consideration, so why would what I think matter now.  I informed them that I wouldn’t look at new homes. I wouldn’t look at schools.  My sister, at six years older, and brother, at four years older, were already working and studying so weren’t as affected. They had already moved on. I felt alone.  Saying goodbye to friends, clubs, roles that I’d played in the microcosm of my youth was hard.  I begged my parents to let me stay in the hostel at the school I was attending. No. The parents of my best friend spoke to my parents. They offered for me to stay with them during the week and travel to the city my parents were moving to, which was an hour away, on weekends. No. My one-person resistance army was being bulldozed. I was crushed. At fourteen my female friendships were knotted with shared experiences, interests and coming of age journeys. From too many years of experience, I knew that these ties would not survive the move. I felt like I was betraying our bond and there was nothing I could do about it. My parents decided what school I would go to with no input from me. The school they chose did not offer French or Latin. Just another one of their awful decisions, I thought. I had to let go of the romance languages and accept the death of my dream to work as a translator. This would be the eighth school I would attend. I had left behind history, ties, friends, shared interests, a knowledge of how everything worked, where I excelled, where I fitted in. Here I was the outsider in a school full of girls who’d been at school together since they were five years old.  The days rolled on with an inevitability that crumbled my fight.  Eventually, I discovered that humour is a currency that is easily traded and started to make friends.  Over time, I settled into a friendship with two girls. We shared a love of poetry, books, Merchant Ivory movies, singing loudly together and collapsing into giggling heaps when we wandered off-key and forgot the words.  We dreamt about our futures and what they would hold. Living in a world where we controlled so little in our lives, we tried to imagine a world of our own making.

Read the full episode here https://journeyfrommeh.com/beyond-breakers-facing-turmoil-finding-peace/ When I was 5 years old my family travelled from the inland town we lived in to holiday with relatives living in Durban; a coastal city. Every evening my dad would excitedly tell us kids that we were going swimming in the sea early the next morning. My dad would wake us three kids in the dark. My older sister would choose to remain in bed and my older brother and I would accompany my dad to the beach. The routine became that once we got there my brother would decide to remain on the shore. The beach was deserted. No holidaymakers and their umbrellas and cooler boxes. No frenzied sporting activities, no smell of coconut tanning lotion and melting ice cream.  The navy blue sea and inky sky seeping into one, making the horizon an imaginary line. The cold grey, blue ocean tones only ruptured by the whipped white foam that indicated where the arching, rolling, crashing waves were breaking.  At the water’s edge, my dad told me that we were going to swim beyond the breakers.  I had to do exactly what he told me to do when he told me. I only had one request, “Don’t let go of my hand, daddy.” We ran in, my little hand engulfed in his, our warm bodies swallowed by the icy watery beast. Quickly my body was buoyed and, as my dad strode forward, I followed, tethered to his hand, kicking and swimming to keep abreast of him.  As we entered the choppy, bubbling aftermath of the bigger waves my dad would pull me up to keep my head above the water. We forged deeper into the blue. Quickly he too was lifted, feet far from the sand, as we faced the sliding walls of water now towering over us. As the closest mountain of water started to rise, seemingly to engulf us, my dad would tell me to take a big breath. Then we plummeted, blind, into the dark depths beneath the swirl. Eventually emerging on the other side, spluttering and wiping our eyes to see the next challenge ahead of us.  Again and again, the whale of water rose imposingly over us. We plunged, kicking with four legs and swimming with two hands, locked into his promise to not let go of our connection, as the sea breached behind us. As we navigated through the breakers we could not see beyond them, all our energy and senses focused on surviving the onslaught of water barrelling towards us - diving deep to avoid, as much as possible, the churning powering each wave. Ultimately our saline baptisms paid off and we’d emerge through the last breaker, bursting, exhausted, gasping, often gulping mouthfuls of salty liquid to discover we had made it through to the other side. The drama behind us and calm before us. An almost endless stretch of blue from us to the curved outline of the horizon. The crashing thunder of water now replaced by the gentle swell and fall - the meditative breaths of the sea. Swimming towards the horizon, to put some distance between us and the breakers, it was now time to rest, lie back and float while being lulled by the quiet and calm. Spreadeagle, relaxed, head back, ears below the waterline, our ragged breathing slowed as we floated in silence, secured like otters. And then it was time for the main event. The sun started to escape the horizon. Bathing us in its glow, warming us, painting the sky and reflecting its artwork on the surface around us. We were lying in a living kaleidoscope.  Submerged in Neptune’s womb we witnessed the birthing of a new day. The best day - a holiday.

Read the full episode here https://journeyfrommeh.com/the-soft-whisper-of-my-inner-voice/ My husband and I consider ourselves to be animal lovers. We have had five dogs over our twenty years together. Four of those have been rescue dogs. Rescue dogs are often mixed breeds. When adopting one, especially if it’s a puppy, you’re not quite sure what mix of breeds you’re getting. With an older dog, you can normally get some idea of the breeds involved by the look of the dog. The rescue organisation will try to help as much as possible with their best guess, or based on what the person who surrendered the pups told them, but that’s not always reliable information. Dogs are driven by instinct which is influenced by their breed. Characteristics that only come to the fore as they mature. It’s better, for the owner and the dog, to work with a dog’s nature and temperament than against it. Part of the journey with a rescue puppy is that you’ll only discover their innate instincts and characteristics as they mature. For me, discovering my own nature has taken some experimentation as well. I felt so different to my family growing up that for years I was convinced that I was adopted. The likelihood of that explanation was dispelled when complete strangers would walk up to me saying, “you must be your mother’s child because you look just like her.”  Adding to the complexity of me not relating to my relatives was the constant disruptions to my external environment with our regular moving from town to town and city to city. This forced my focus to be on figuring out each new external environment. Then I repeated the pattern. It was always assumed that I would study further after high school but, when I thought about the options of what I would study, I couldn’t make a decision. None of the options stood out to me. However, when I thought about travelling and backpacking that really lit a fire in my belly. So in the middle of my last year of high school that’s what  I decided I was going to do. My decision was not well-received by my parents. My dad told me that this would be the stupidest thing I’d ever done. My mother told me that I thought I knew everything. I responded, “No, it’s because I feel like I know nothing about myself. I need to find out.” My inner voice spoke in dissent from the voices around me. It’s the first time I recall listening. Essentially I was figuring out who I was by comparing myself to those around me. I was looking for some commonalities and, so far in my life experience, I hadn’t found enough to satisfy me. Travelling helped me with that. A world away I discovered people from all over who thought like I did, with interests that held my attention, conversations that stimulated me. The world I unearthed was big, beautiful, exciting and textured. I blossomed in that environment. In those foreign lands, I no longer felt foreign to myself. That quiet voice inside me that said, “go, explore” served me well. Distance and new surroundings gave me a new perspective not only of myself but of what was possible. I decided I liked exploring. I liked travelling. As most independent travellers will tell you, you can have some of your best experiences when you get lost. The other side of that perspective is that you can also have some of your worst. In surveying the unknown I discovered lots of good fits for me, but I also found myself lost, turned around, trying to figure out how I got there.

Read the full episode here https://journeyfrommeh.com/childfree-perspective-mothers-day/ Today is mother's day in South Africa and other parts of the world. I, myself, have chosen the childfree option. Not a perfect term but one that is growing in society’s vocabulary. My choice means that my personal narrative is not reflected back to me in the Hallmark cards or popular cultural narrative. The first time I had sex, I used 3 different types of contraception. Perhaps part of me was grateful for all the options available to me that weren’t available to millennia of women before me.  There’s that calculation that someone sat down and did about how many people had to exist for you to be here. That may be true, but let’s not romanticise it too much. Many, many, many of those people had no other option than to be mothers.  I believe it was during my final year of high school, in English class, that we were required to do an oral. I attended an all girls school and wanted to speak about something relevant to my audience. I chose to speak about the history of contraception and how the oral contraceptive pill works. My brother was studying pharmacy and provided me with the pharmacological info and the physiological impacts. I included little known factoids like it can result in additional ear wax being produced. My English teacher stood at the back of the class. Taking questions afterwards was an interesting experience. In my early twenties, I saw a t-shirt that had a pop art cartoon character on it. She had her head in her hands and the thought bubble said. “OMG! I forgot to have children!”  This delighted me. To me, it was an acknowledgement that there’s so much to do and be in the world and this t-shirt encapsulated those options for me. Later in my twenties, a friend’s mother, who had four children, told me that each child was the result of a different contraceptive method that failed her. She loved her children but felt she didn’t have the choice of a different life option for herself. My maternal grandmother was a midwife and had 10 children. My mother loved telling the story of how she was being wheeled into the delivery room and told her doctor that her mother thought she wasn’t ready to give birth.  The doctor asked, “and how many children does your mother have?”  When my mother told him 10, the doctor started removing his gloves and sent her home with the comment “your mother has more experience than I’ll ever have!” Turned out my grandmother was right. My mother felt that being a mother was the most important thing any woman could do. I feel differently. There are many reasons why I chose not to have children. I will not share them here. Not for any other reason than I expect you to respect my decision. I will not participate in justifying it so that it may, or may not, make it a more digestible decision for you. It frustrates me how people will insensitively barge into asking women why they don’t have children. When I witness this happening I wish my family and friends (who have walked a path with infertility) would just let the asker stew in their blunder. Instead, they often rescue them by providing more information like: I have many children in my life. And infertility is just one of many obstacles and complexities that may be encountered in deciding whether children are an option or a possibility. Just as I am more concerned about your capacity to love, rather than who you choose to love, I am more interested in your ability to respect and accept my choice than I am in fulfilling your need to know why. 

Read the full episode here https://journeyfrommeh.com/my-journaling-journey/ Is it just me or does your body sometimes arrive at your destination before your mind does? You know, you’re at the beach, but your mind is running through checklists...did I pack everything, did I answer my emails, did I switch the stove off? I’ve noticed this often happens to me. Most often when I fly somewhere. Less so when I do a road trip. Apparently on road trips my brain and body travel at the same speed. ;-)  This happened the first time I flew to Paris. There I was, green, nineteen and in Paris! Getting on that plane was one of the best decisions of my life and I followed it up with another great decision soon afterwards. I had been so focused on getting there - working and saving - that I wasn’t really sure what to do once I got there. To my dad’s horror, on his enquiry (days before I left my home town) “what is your itinerary?” I responded, “I arrive in Paris at noon”. That was as far as I had thought! I needed to transition from my work all the time mentality. My body was in Paris but my mind was still in work mode and my heart was stuck on all the farewells that preceded my flight. Ideally, it would have been great to talk to a friend, but I was travelling alone, didn’t know anybody and had just enough French to order a meal - the same one, over and over again. The conversations I wanted to have with someone were floating around in my head. Impulsively, I spent some of my hard-earned savings on a small notebook. Talking to yourself isn’t socially acceptable but writing to yourself is! The thoughts flying around my head landed on those pages. They were quickly followed by what I was seeing, who I was meeting, a million new experiences, my feelings, what I was learning and what I was trying to figure out.  There was so much I was experiencing and seeing on a daily basis that it was hard to keep up with my need to write.   When you’re backpacking like I was, time can feel elastic. I would spend a day sightseeing with someone that I just met that morning, and yet it felt like we shared a lifetime together.  It was as if the volume had been turned up on life! My pen skated across pages trying to record every moment, feeling, sight. I get my love of writing from my mother. She was a great letter writer.  Envelopes would arrive stuffed, straining at their glue seams to contain the pages, photos and newspaper clippings. Receiving a letter from her was like receiving a deconstructed scrapbook. The envelope was often an example of written crown shyness where she would leave just a small channel-like gap between the address and everything else she had to say on the envelope. “Love you”, “miss you”, “write soon” stickers and other decorations colouring the envelope like a wordy decorative creeper. The pages were crammed full of words - two sentences to each line. Borders were ignored - she used all the space fully.  One of my mother’s pet hates was when people didn’t butter toast right to the edge. She thought it was miserly. “Don’t you have enough butter to include the edges?”  She took that same approach when writing on a page - she had enough words to cover the margins, borders and every bit of available blank space. 

Read the full episode here https://journeyfrommeh.com/angry-reactions-mindful-responses-california/ If what I share adds some benefit to your life or touches you please hit a like button, subscribe, share or comment. It was a perfect Californian day. The children were swimming in the pool and the country club’s adult guests sat perfectly poised, ring side, on loungers. Bright white tennis outfits contoured firm figures and dark sunglasses hid stares, glares and the effects of the continuous stream of drinks flowing from the club house. I stood on the plush lawn next to the pool as the woman I au paired for circled me; pacing and shouting. Her raised voice punctuated by children torpedoing from the high diving board into the pool. It was Saturday afternoon and she had casually informed me that I needed to babysit on Sunday morning. It was her habit to give me very little notice when she needed me to babysit. This weekend, being Father’s day, I had assumed that the children would spend it with their parents and had made plans with friends. This was the first time I’d pushed back and I hadn’t anticipated the behaviour this would trigger. As she continued to berate me her two children joined the circle chanting, “You’re in trouble! You’re in trouble!”  I was painfully aware that all the sunglasses were pointed at us. She was fully focused on me and was pacing in time to her children’s chorus. Trapped by the bodies orbiting me, I waited for a pause in her temper torrent. Eventually she paused to take a breath. I slipped in, addressed the children and told them to get back into the pool, which they did. Her last words had been, “I told you that you have to be able to go with the flow”.Turning to her I said, “it’s easy to tell me to go with the flow when you’re always the one creating the current.” I went on to explain how I was affected by her behaviour - never being able to make plans because she might decide she needs me. As it turned out this was a turning point, and a moment of real insight for me, that changed my life. As a teenager I realised I had an incredible capacity for anger - a real temper.  I experienced the force of my ignited anger like a monster, or demon, awakened within me. It would rise like a Disney villain up my spine, stretching me until the pressure of the ignition burst out of my mouth blasting everything in its path; with the indiscrimination of dragon’s fire.  It felt like I had to unhinge my jaw to liberate the force of fury detonating inside me. Releasing that buildup of internal pressure was a relief. But, afterwards, I just felt unhinged. Growing up with a parent whose wrath I experienced like a napalm hose, I knew what it was like to be on the other side and the pain it caused. Being on the receiving end of someone’s behaviour and then watching myself acting the same way was traumatizing and so I tried to go a different route. I didn’t have the skills to address it and so I just shut it down. Put a lid on it and just avoided expressing anger. The Californian incident was the first time I had managed to feel my anger without it overpowering me. Also, I had managed to express myself in the moment without becoming deranged. 

Read the full episode here https://journeyfrommeh.com/the-tipping-point-between-fear-and-bravery/ If what I share adds some benefit to your life or touches you please hit a like button, subscribe, share or comment. Some years ago my husband and I went on a great summer holiday.  We stayed in the honeymoon suite in a lodge high on the dunes. We started our days with long walks on the beach. The rest of the day was spent rotating from the main pool at the beach bar, to the lodge pool and, finally, the splash pool on our deck. Delicious meals, ice-cold cocktails, oily massages on the sun deck and long afternoon naps were the tracks that our days ran on. At the end of the day, four course dinners under a visible milky way were followed by a wine-wobble walk back to our suite. We spent our trip back home debating where this holiday stood in the rankings of our top holidays. This holiday felt like “needs met”. Total body and mind relaxation and spirit restored. Days after we returned home we no longer felt relaxed and restored. This didn’t feel like the usual “coming down from a holiday high”. This felt more like realising we were the proverbial frog in the now boiling water. We had been wrestling for some time with our dissatisfaction with our lives but kept diminishing our feelings by telling ourselves things like: everybody feels this. It’s part of being an adult. We’re just feeling burnout or we’re probably having a midlife crisis. Or we need to do more of this or if we just added that to our lives we’ll feel better. This holiday was supposed to be part of our solution but it just highlighted how we could feel but weren't feeling.  We had our own business, which we’d started from scratch, and our days were focussed on our clients and 15 staff. We were often working 16 hour days so the only time we had to express our feelings to one another was during our early morning walks with our dogs. One of our other favourite things to tell ourselves was that we should be grateful for the lives we were living. Many others would appreciate what we had. But no matter what we told ourselves we just felt worse. During our sunrise walks with our dogs we started to fantasize about running away from what we had created and starting over. One of my husband’s favourite fantasies was to buy a plot of rural land and build a log cabin. At six foot six and built like a rugby player all he needed was the plaid shirt, an axe and a saw and he was ready for his new lumberjack life. We started to fantasize about running away I was concerned about what we’d do once the cabin was built.

Read the full episode here https://journeyfrommeh.com/discovering-fear-comes-place-of-love-doesnt-always-know-whats-best/ If what I share adds some benefit to your life or touches you please hit a like button, subscribe, share or comment. When I was 11 years old we moved from a town to a city.  Previously, I’d walked home from school but now I was going to have to take a bus. Actually, two buses. I was to catch any bus from the bus stop outside my school and that would take me to the bus station in the middle of the city. This was the fourth time I was starting at a new school. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was only half way through the total number of new schools I’d go to. My parents moved around a lot and I was the youngest of three children that moved with them. At the bus station I had to ask which bus went to the road at the bottom of the road of our new home. As it turned out, the road at the bottom of ours covered half the city. So, even though the bus I got on went to that road, it was the wrong bus and I was miles away from where I needed to be. The bus driver told me to stay on the bus in order to make the return trip to the bus station, where he’d point me to the correct bus to take. I was the only passenger on the bus all the way back to the bus station. It was a very scary trip to take. Nothing was familiar to me and the bus trip just confirmed how big this new city was.  This happened in a time way before cell phones, which meant that I had to rely on the help of strangers - armed only with our new address and the name of the road at the bottom of ours. When we arrived back at the bus station the bus driver showed me the correct bus stop where I was going to find the right bus to get me home. But, he told me, the next bus was not due for some time and I must come with him to have a Fanta Orange while I waited. I followed him over the big, wide road to a hotel where we sat at a table.  No matter how many new schools I went to, I was always the shortest in my class, and my feet swung far above the ground. I can’t recall what we spoke about but at some point he started talking about a room upstairs in the hotel. Inside me it felt like I split in two and my sister-self and I screamed into each other’s faces “RUN”.  I leaped off that chair and as my tiny shoes hit the floor I flung over my shoulder “I think I’ll just wait at the bus stop” and half walked-ran out of the hotel as quickly as my little legs could carry me.  I didn’t know why, but suddenly the multi-laned road wasn’t the scariest thing to face on my return trip to the bus station. Life. Changing. Decision. Something about the exchange made me scared.  I had experienced a lot of fear that afternoon already - another first day at a new school, being alone in a strange city, asking strangers for help, being on the wrong bus, being alone for hours - but that fear felt different. I didn’t know why at the time but I acted on it. My fear protected me. That’s the purpose of fear - to protect us.

Read the full episode and comment here: https://journeyfrommeh.com/facing-fear-with-vulnerability/ If what I share adds some benefit to your life or touches you please hit a like button, subscribe, share or comment. I am petrified of dentists. As a child, my parents moved around a lot and we never had a regular dentist that I got to know and trust. Growing up a dentist extracted the wrong tooth. He extracted the healthy tooth.  As an adult a dentist extracted a tooth that had an abscess beneath it. In case you don’t know, numbing agents don’t work when there is infection present, like an abscess.  I didn’t know at the time that I should have been given antibiotics and then, only once the infection had cleared, should treatment have proceeded. In 2020, during the first hard lockdown, I bit down on an olive and broke a tooth on the olive pip. Because of my fear of dentists, I ignored it and made excuses about not going to the dentist. Eventually an abscess developed beneath the broken tooth.  I knew from the throbbing on the side of my mouth that my days of ignoring this was over and I had to get it sorted. This was the worst kind of deja vu. More like a PTSD episode. The exact same situation that I had experienced before where I had been tortured by that arsehole. The thought of lying prone on that chair, under that bright light with hands and instrumentation preventing me from using my voice just debilitated me. Like Eskimos and snow, when it comes to dentists, I need more words for fear.  I decided to reach out for help and posted a message on my local community WhatsApp group asking what dentist in our area they would recommend. I also reached out to all our friends in our area and asked the same thing.  I then tabulated the results of my survey and chose the dentist with the most recommendations. Being the early stages of COVID no-one was going out except for emergencies so when I called the receptionist said the dentist could see me in an hour. What???!!! No, no, no, no, no!! I need at least three days to gather my strength. Also she informed me, due to COVID protocols, I had to wait in my car and they would come and get me from the car.  “My husband can’t come in with me?”  “No. He can’t come into the building.” Fuck! My big, strong 6’ 6” husband wouldn’t be allowed in the building - never mind in the room -  where I wanted him with his hands around the dentist’s neck ready to break it at the smallest squeak from me! Also, she added, they would all be covered in PPE which may be quite frightening to see and she just wanted me to be prepared. See? The word fear is just lacking in texture to describe where I was at this point. I knew I had to move forward. I needed help. I did recognise that preparing me and describing exactly what I was going to encounter - in these very new and strange circumstances at that time - helped me, empowered me with knowledge.