Coming back to myself
Them: I’ve been at the beach all day babe, we had the music going, everyone was there, the water was amazing. You’d have loved it.
Me: That sounds so good! I wish I could have been there.
Them: I wish you could have been there too… what did you do for fun this weekend?
Me: Oh, I had training and then I batch cooked my food and cleaned and did some other stuff and now I’m talking to you.
Them: Yeah, but what did you do for fun?
Me: erm… well, training’s fun and I listen to podcasts when I cook so…
And that, my friend, is how I realised I’d forgotten what it was that I liked to do for fun.
This uncomfortable realisation prompted me to put my researcher hat on (side note: I used to be an actual researcher) and set about doing some highly robust and statistically significant research into what other people did for fun with the idea that this would help me find out what sorts of things I might enjoy as “fun” (side note: the research was neither robust or statistically significant.)
While it was one thing to realise that I didn’t have much fun in my life it was another thing to think about why.
I think we’ve probably all heard stories about people who get into a new relationship and then suddenly start liking things they seemingly had no interest in before. The person who never cared about football (of any variety) but who now spends afternoons sitting in front of the TV watching The Match with their new partner. The person who used to be happy drinking any old coffee from which ever coffee shop happened to be nearby but now who only drinks a particular style of coffee and only from two particular coffee shops and then only if a certain barista is working that day.
When I see people I know doing this it really winds me up. I can actually feel myself starting to get angry and I want to shout “I know you doing really like that, stop pretending to like it just because so-and-so likes it.” And the reason I get so mad about it? Well, because it’s exactly what I’ve done in past relationships. And, annoyingly, I think it’s still something I need to watch out for in future relationships.
Let’s go back to some time around 2014.
I found myself sat on my bed in a hostel in La Paz, Bolivia wondering if I really did like solo-backpacking. This wasn’t my first solo-backpacking trip, far from it, and I hadn’t had a horrible time by ANY stretch of the imagination. I had, in fact, had a wonderful adventure through Peru and a little bit of Bolivia. I’d met and traveled with some great people and I had genuinely enjoyed myself as we shared experiences of camping, hiking and bus rides along extremely windy roads. In hindsight, that moment of reflection as I sat there on my single bed in my single room in La Paz, that was when I started to pull at that thread of wondering: What do I like because I actually like it and what have I trained myself to like?
What did I like?
When left to her own devises, what did Liz like?
The more I pulled on that thread the more I realised that I wasn’t sure anymore.
Somewhere in my late teen’s / early 20’s I had decided that being myself wasn’t good enough and slowly, gently, I hardened myself.
I protected my feelings of not being enough with a tough exterior, a “You can’t fkn hurt me mate” shell. I employed various props to help me in this creation: I took up smoking and I drank more than I wanted to. I wielded a double bladed sword of cynicism and hid behind a general scowl that gave me, I thought, enough of a veneer of “being a bit hard” so that I would be accepted as “cool.” It also served to stop anyone really getting to know me and that meant that I could keep the real me safe.
Side note: I’m not sure which parts of that were me naturally exploring myself and my developing personality, which parts were my way of dealing with depression and anxiety, and which parts were a way of being seeking to be both accepted and to stay hidden at the same time.
Over the years I morphed my persona to suit the situation and ignored what were, in hindsight, big red warning flags – self-destructive behaviour and a steady worsening of the depression and anxiety I’d been dealing with since my pre-teen years to name a few.
I hid the real parts of me further and further inside and on the outside I got myself into various situations that I did not want to be in and that I wasn’t sure how to get out of.
Eventually, after a particularly messy break up in my mid / late 20’s, I started to find pieces of myself again. A new friend introduced me to a different group of their friends and I found myself dancing around the edge of trying to figure out who I should morph myself into so that they would like me. This time thought it was different. This group of friends was a very mixed group, but the one main thing they had in common was the music that they liked. I don’t remember the first night I went clubbing with them all but I do remember a general acceptance of live and let live. I remember dancing my heart out in the middle of a dark and sweaty night club not giving a damn about what I looked like or what anyone thought about my dancing. I danced and danced and danced. No one was mean to me, no one made fun of me. They all just let each other be themselves and loved them for the person they were.
I think that was the first time I’d let myself just be me in a very long time.
That was over 15 years ago and I’m still finding out which parts of me are truly me and which parts are old armour that I’d forgotten about. And that’s why the “What do you do for fun?” question tripped me up because I realised I hadn’t taken that part of the armour down yet. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do for fun because I actually wanted to do it and what things did I do “for fun” because other people found them fun and I thought that meant that I had to do them too.
I mean, there are some things that I know I enjoy: reading, running, swimming (mostly), RPM cycle class in the gym to name a few, it’s just that I feel there’s more out there.
Trying out what I like for fun honestly isn’t always fun. Trying out something new by myself is tough – I’m rarely sure if I don’t like the activity / thing or if I just don’t like doing it all by myself… I mean, I’m pretty sure that having a friend by your side as you fall off a climbing wall would make the experience less frustrating and maybe even fun.
I’ve come a long way since being sat on that single bed in that single room in the hostel in La Paz. I’ve figured out that there ARE things that I know I like. I’ve figured out that it’s harder to like the things that I know I like when depression comes a calling. I’ve figured out that I can try something new a few times before deciding if I will award it the honour of it “being something I like”.
I’ve also had the learning, the realisation, that in my next relationship I should keep an eye out for professing to like the things I think the other person expects me to like and things that I think will impress them or get their approval.
But slowly, I am coming back to myself.
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P.S: I know, there’s a whole bunch of threads tangled up in all of this: There’s the lack of self-trust, there’s co-dependancy, there’s the desperate urge to be accepted and loved for who I really am and, there’s the deep deep wound around the fear that who I am isn’t good enough… but perhaps they are all stories for another day.
