Spam Filter For Your Brain - Episode 110
As a photographer and as a coach, I spend quite a lot of time talking to people about self-image, about their confidence, and about their relationship with their body.
And something that I really notice a lot about people who are socialised as women especially, is that we quite often are prone to conflating desire with desirability. It's less about what we want and more about whether we're going to gain that external validation of someone else approving of what we want or, more likely, approving of us.
And when we could take that one step further. Actually, many of us have never actually, paused to actually get curious about what it is that we want, stop to ask what it could be, our own personal desires. And when it comes to romance, relationships, sexual relations, intimacy, the other end of this spectrum, and it is all along the same lines, is that we can mix up being wanted with actually something that we want. I think there are very few opportunities in our growing up and our socialisation for most of us where we get to experience, get curious and get to investigate the things that we actually desire. We're told that what we must desire is external validation. What we must desire is being chosen, it's someone else telling us that we're all right in order to tell ourselves that we're all right.
And this idea of being taught to look to others for our own personal opinion means that overall, most of the people that I speak to, have been touched in some way by this idea of being so dedicated to the pursuit of being chosen that we are not choosing ourselves.
You may recognise yourself in some of this stuff I'm saying today, and if you do, I just invite you rather than going, "Oh my God, I'm that person, or, I can't believe that I've fallen for this stuff, even though it doesn't align with my politics". If we can just extract the judgment from it a little bit and be willing to have the audacity to get curious with ourselves and for our own well-being and healing, perhaps there are some questions that you could ask yourself that could step you one step away from that, and maybe one step closer to yourself.
Some of those questions might be that if you had already been chosen, how would you act?
What would your life look like?
What would you be doing for yourself if you had already been chosen? If no one was watching, what would you be doing?
What is it that you're preventing yourself from dabbling in because you're worried about what other people might say, or not gaining the approval of other people?
And when you think about that idea of already being chosen, what if you had already chosen yourself?
If you had your full approval and you knew that there were no wrong answers, who would you be?
What would your life look like?
And what would you decide to begin from today that you hadn't dared try before?
I will leave those little questions with you. But if you want to pop any of your answers on an email to me, I'll be delighted to help you sift through some of the stuff it might have brought up.
And I'm sending you huge compassion for any busy thoughts this episode brings, and I'll speak to you again next week.
Comments