Approximate reading time: 10 min

Well, I am on holiday which means that I finally get to write the post I have been dying to write for a good couple of weeks now. 

But before I get into that …I have a slight amendment to make on my last post.

It seems in my previous ramblings I promised to start online dating by the end of February.

(WTF was I thinking?)

I have just clocked that my master’s research proposal is due on the 28th of February.

There is absolutely no way I am going to have the bandwidth to deal with THAT

AND

online dating!

It’s toooo much I tell you! 

Frankly, my head is spinning a little bit at the moment trying to figure out what my research question is going to be. There are so many different things that interest me…picking one and defining it into something tangible that can be researched feels a little out of my reach at the moment.

Neurotic Angel is having a field day reminding me that I’m not a proper academic and I’m way out of my depth. But I have really good noise-cancelling earphones that seem to keep her squawking at bay. 

I’ll get there! 

So no, unfortunately, I couldn’t possibly start any online dating until at least the first week of March!

It’s called loving self-care people!

(or the fine art of perpetual procrastination!;-)

SIDENOTE: Except you do realise that if I spend Saturday nights going on actual dates with real human beings…..I might not actually have any time to write a blog post every week?

Really, I am just thinking of all my devoted followers out there…

(All 13 of you!)

But on a positive note:

I don’t want you to worry about me.

My Friday night Chinese fortune cookie revealed what I have always known to be true.

(Granted my fortunes haven’t always yielded THE MOST ACCURATE results)

So there is always hope people!!!

So, this week I am looking after Nat and Snickers again.

I think I finally get why single women always end up owning cats!

They are just so adorable.

They follow me everywhere…they lie all over me….its like having your own personal theme song made up solely of purring.

Man, I feel so loved.

It’s funny watching their different personalities. Snickers is always the first one to come to me and she is definitely the more emotionally needy one.

Nat is cool calm and collected but has huge issues with FOMO.

She follows Snickers everywhere….and invariably ends up muscling Snickers out of the cool, comfy spot that she has found first.

Nat then falls asleep almost immediately while Snickers takes ages to sleep.

(Which will explain why so many of my photos are of Snickers)

She is clearly the more highly sensitive of the two.

(A kindred soul of sorts.)

Snickers is constantly listening and reacting to everything that is going on in the world around her. She also has to spend at least 10 minutes staring at me lovingly, with those gorgeous hazel eyes, before she eventually settles down.

It is almost as if she is trying to hypnotize me

 

OK now for my main topic of the week.

(Drumroll please)

I seriously and utterly loooooove it! 

(I think I should have been working with children who have autism, years ago.)

I’ll admit when I started at the beginning of the term my first day was a little hit-and-miss. I spent the morning in the reception/year one class.

It was their first day of school.

There were 7 kids in the class and 4 adults….

honestly it was mayhem.

The only way to describe it would be ‘wack-a-mole’.

No sooner than you got one child sitting the next was up again.

There was crying

There was screaming.

There were children continually running out of the class.

By 11 am my nerves were absolutely shot, my back was aching and I decided then and there….that there was no way in ‘Gods green earth’ I was going to cope mentally or physically doing this every single day. 

After lunch, I got sent to all the older classes in the school.

The transformation in these children was unbelievable.

I was utterly blown away by how lovely and calm the classes were and how engaged the students were in learning. 

Being a supply teacher for the last 5 years I have seen time and time again how children on the autism spectrum are so often not getting the correct support that they need in mainstream schools. Many of these children seem to

(because of their diagnosis)

have a free pass to just do whatever they want, whenever they want.

More often than not, the main goal becomes ‘keeping them in mainstream’ as long as possible regardless of the fact that they are not actually learning ANYTHING.

Honestly, it can be a little horrifying to see some of the things done in the name of inclusion.

One school I went to had a little boy in year 3 whose parents refused to have him assessed for autism. This child was nonverbal and clearly on the spectrum and spent his entire day at school just running around the building in and out of classes. Without a proper diagnosis, there was no funding to provide him with the one-to-one support he so desperately needed.

Frankly, the fact that these types of situations are even allowed to continue for so long is just a little beyond me.

To see these kids sitting down, regulated and engaged in learning was just so amazing for me. 

All I knew at the end of that first day was that I wanted to be part of that. 

So, I said yes. 

I work three days a week teaching history to all the classes.

It’s a relatively small school (only 7 classes) and the staff are truly lovely and supportive. 

Of course, there are some people that I would rather not have to see every day…

(Aren’t there always:-)

But there seems to be a definite visceral shift in me….

I was trying to explain to my therapist Konrad what it feels like…. 

In the past, it always felt like I was carrying around a huge internal spotlight that shone very clearly and very brightly on all the toxic, unhealthy people. It felt like my inner child was chronically stuck on high alert, with her main focus being to:

“Keep Gayle SAFE!”

She was relentlessly waving banners in my face with words like

“Watch out, be careful… don’t trust them”

scrawled all over them.

It was exhausting

Of course, I didn’t realise how exhausting it was because I wasn’t even aware of how much this was happening every single day.

This is undoubtedly one of the reasons I have felt so much happier and calmer by myself these last couple of years. The less people you meet…the less chance you have of letting toxic, unhealthy people into your life.

While I am so incredibly grateful for my time by myself these last couple of years I have always known that I didn’t want it to be permanent.

I knew that I just needed some space to heal.

These last couple of weeks in this school have just felt so different to any of the other times I have worked in other schools.

I still have my spotlight, except this time around it feels like the light has repositioned itself. It feels like my internal focus, now, is more naturally on the warm, caring friendly people at the school.

(Of which there are so many)

Of course, I still see the unhealthy people, but they no longer seem to have the power over me that they used to have. I’m not continually trying to figure out what it is about me that makes them so unfriendly or why they don’t like me….

I have to say that this feels pretty amazing….

I can’t help but wonder how different my life would have been had I grown up with this inner sense of groundedness. If I hadn’t spent years of my life trying to fit in and be what other people expected me to be.

If I had grown up simply knowing

I was enough.

I wrote a post in 2018 about an experience I had had with one of my earlier therapists, years ago when I started studying to become a life coach. Through my life coaching work, I was beginning to become aware of how loud and critical my inner voices really were. I was also becoming conscious of the deep polarity between the person I portrayed on the outside and the person I felt like on the inside. I didn’t trust that anyone I met would genuinely like me and I was secretly convinced that most people would be talking about me behind my back. I had such a deep level of disgust for myself and I was sure that everybody I met must have seen it oozing out of me.

I realise now that feeling was core shame

(a feeling shared by way too many humans on this earth)

but at the time I simply saw it as a ‘negative belief’ that needed to be changed.

So I followed all the belief-changing steps

(Just like I was being taught)

and I reframed that negative belief into a more positive one.

“I am a warm and loving person and people enjoy being around me”

For months I would repeat my newly created ‘positive’ belief religiously every morning and every night for about 7 minutes.

(The walk to and from my house to the tube station)

I remember very proudly telling my therapist that I was doing these daily affirmations and being absolutely furious at his response

“That’s good, but it’s not as easy as that Gayle”

So furious in fact that I ended my therapeutic relationship with him because I did not think he was ‘supporting me’ on my coaching journey.

In 2018 when I wrote the post I finally got how right he was.

There are no quick routes to healing childhood relational trauma.

There are no magic words repeated enough times that are going to change your attachment style overnight or rewire your brain to function differently.

There is no way to manifest your way out of core shame.

It has taken me 15 years to get to this realization.

But an interesting thing has been happening for me these last couple of weeks.

For some reason, I have continually been reminded of that old positive affirmation

“I am a warm and loving person and people enjoy being around me”

Except rather than this simply being words that play through my mind….it feels like the essence of these words have now become my reality.

I genuinely feel more comfortable, centred and acceptable in my own skin and it affords me luxuries that I never thought I could even have in the past.

Of course, what I call luxuries are quite simply basic functional human skills that all children should learn.

Unfortunately for many people who struggle with insecure attachments, this is not a currency that we were naturally schooled in.

(But that does not mean we can never learn them:-)

So, I call them luxuries because after spending the best part of 40-odd years not doing any of these things, it feels ever so slightly luxurious when you start to realise that you are indeed beginning to do them more regularly.

And you feel ever so slightly in awe of the relief that comes from doing so.

I can’t help but think to myself:

Is this what securely attached people feel like all the time?

Don’t get me wrong, this whole experience hasn’t been picture-perfect 🙂

There have been a couple of incidents that have shaken me a bit.

I have had to go back to religiously journalling and meditating every single morning before school. I often wake up with my anxiety boot pressing down on my chest…

(Neurotic angel still screeches in my ear.)

But this time around I can hold onto the fact that these feelings are not permanent…and that that is all my anxiety is

…’feelings’.

It’s like I allow them the space to be…but I don’t allow them the power to dictate how my day will go.

I feel resilient.

Like I have a very loving, supportive and caring internal mother

who continually reminds me that no matter what happens

I will be ok.