Doubt

A strategy for survival

My heart and soul are hungry for something else. This modern culture game I’ve become “successful” at, leaves me thirsty for another way of being in the world. My sons already with tight defended boxes around them about how life goes. Becoming teenagers 12 & 10 years old looking to the outside to see how to be men.

My self doubt is the poison licking through the fire in my veins, suffocating any rouge embers of inspiration or clarity trying to catch alight, into a self-catabolic neurosis. I have all these strong feelings about creating something else for myself and sons, dreaming, longing and yet I stay. What is the piece I’m missing, to strengthen my backbone and get on with it?

It’s time to shift from being focused on self (without self-sacrificing) and get on with creating and living what I’m here to do. What am I missing?

How do I experientially land in myself the unimportance of the survival games I’m playing and shift to being in service of what I’m here to create?

Discovering at the core of my specific variety of self sabotage- is a foundation built with emotionally coercive language. The foundational make up of my thoughts and language patterns are laced with signatures of failure, try harder, compete, compare, must be valuable to the man’s measuring stick and above all else doubt myself.

Doubt my intuition. Doubt my capability. Doubt my experience- did that really happen? Doubt my feelings- know one else is having big feelings, it mustn’t be that bad? Doubt my authority- Maybe I’m wrong- there is always to sides to a story? Doubt my expression- use other people’s ways, words to language my own into the social norms.

Thoughts, narratives, stories slid from someone else’s tongue into my ears and found a place deep in my psyche. Lying in wait like a dormant disease, for the perfect conditions. To ensure the plights of the past are not only remembered but recreated to continue impregnation of high value culture capital being passed on to the next generation. What is high value cultural capital you may ask? Cultural capital are narratives and behaviours of great importance to the modern culture capitalist patriarchal system. Think of ‘capital’ as an asset society places value on.

Take a scroll through your Instagram or sit & observe in a public place to play & explore the idea of high value cultural capital. What do you think motivates peoples behaviour? What are the common threads you discover?

Sex? Power? Belonging? Money? Victimhood?

Without these wonderous ponderous questions added in to the monotony everything trucks along as “normal”, “nothing to see here”. Doesn’t it?

No, there IS something to see.

I’m tired of trying hard, I’ve made myself chronically sick on several occasions. Then I eventually knit myself back together, only to slowly but surely start spinning one plate after another until I end up like these performers below desperate for the show to go on. Addicted to not only the high’s but the low’s.

Finally the first plate smashes to the ground to begin the inevitable decent into crash and burn. After a good few days in bed fighting off whatever disease I have created to end the performance.

The level of normalised internal abuse and violence within me rivals any psychopath.

I am actively participating in a culture that celebrates and rewards me for be so good at self-abandoning. So good at putting what I want on the shelf so I can go to work and make them lots of money. Working hard, locking in, grinding, push, push, push. Winning apparently impressive deals, getting bonus’s for apparently impressive sales margins, achieving said success of the culture I was born into. Deliciously regular and stable income, providing abundantly for the needs and wants for myself and children, the car with all the bells and whistles, working so I can go LIVE life on holidays. Putting the ebbs and flows of my menstrual cycle in the basket of liabilities. The education of my children into the equally self-abandoned hands of the public school system and continue to funnel my money into the supermarkets to feel the bottomless bellies of my male offspring. The cost showing plainly in my bodies pain, my hearts thirst and my souls longing.

The generous eyes of my children looking at me, concern furrowed deep in their brows. Fear stirring up in their worlds as I ask them scary questions about culture and propose alternative ways of being, when all they are trying to do is belong as they enter teenager-dom.

But where to from here? A seemingly insurmountable task to not only create something different for myself but to open doors for said male off-spring to walk through on their own accord.

As I wade in and out of consciousness, at times brinking the edges of my own thought structures and blinders, to discover new ways of being in the world. Not centred around money or work. But of heart exploding relationships and projects lighting my soul on fire, my real work in the world starting to burst through the seams and catch alight. Then an attack of the doubts pulls me back into the allure and haze of the modern culture hypnosis. “Phew that was a close one” the chief surveillance office of my inner prison says to himself. The familiar comfort and ecstasy of providing abundantly for my family. My capitalist/patriarchal bones purr with pleasure knowing how capable I am, doing this all myself. Does this sound familiar to you?

Are you surrounded by people who pretend everything is good? Juggling all the plates, exhausted solo mothers neurotic, taking over responsibility and on the brink self-combustion. Solo fathers making really scary decisions to leave his 8 year old son at home alone because he has to work late. Phenomenally terrifying really, all fuelled in the haze of high value cultural capital.

Well for me this try hard, over achieve strategy is over-compensation for sure, from the “I’m not enough stories” that plague my psyche and are ingrained in my structure- as if carved into my bones. I’m pleased to reported I’m getting bored of this particular story. I am realising the only reason it still exists is not through lack of healing but from my intergenerational programming. Self surveillance, try hard and control ingrained into the very genes making up the DNA of my thoughts, all secondary to oppression under the patriarchy. It was a genius and necessary survival story, to increase my own culture capital value. Badass really….However, I’m learning my own flavour of bad ass now. If you have reached the bottom of this article consider this a sign from the universe herself, that you may use doubt as a way to smother the smouldering embers of clarity, building in your belly also. Slowly and terrifyingly your clarity is making its way to the surface. You can choose to keep imploding it inside yourself (and probably keep making your self seriously sick) to keep yourself small and palatable…. or learn to be with the energy, listen to the information and use it.

It is time for you to find your tribe of weirdo’s (like me and you) and begin your journey of reclamation. If you don’t know where to start…..Rage Club or Rage spaces! If you don’t have one near you fly to NZ and come to mine!