How do you keep your head above the ground when it is constantly being pushed down?

Not big pushes, you know? Gentle nudges in a downward direction, often not noticed because they are small and imperceptible. If they used a rubber mallet one would almost be grateful, because you’d feel the pain of the pounding and know that you are under attack. Instead, because the nudges downward are so subtle, you barely register them, and you dismiss your intuitive feeling that danger is close by in favour of holding onto your peace.

But these gentle nudges down have a way of gnawing at your sense of self without you realising that it’s happening. A comment here, a sigh there, a sideways look, words spoken in a discussion you were not meant to hear – all meaningful, but not meaningful enough to qualify as evidence of something tangible. 

Until you realise that it’s happening to you, you’ll oscillate between feel slightly off-balance and completely doubting yourself, and you won’t quite know why. The evidence in front of you tells you that you are competent, worthy, capable, lovable, and deserving of happiness and success. But there’s a part of you that does not fully believe it.

You’ll look for a wide variety of ways to ‘fix’ yourself – alternative medicine, yoga, anti-depressants, and they initially will appear to have a good effect. You’ll breathe a sigh of relief that the solution to your downwardly spiralling feelings lies firmly within your control. As long as you put in the requisite effort and take the requisite pills, you will be okay. Because it’s something you are doing wrong that makes you feel like you’re not quite enough.

Soon, though, the magical solution loses its effectiveness. You’re back to feeling down. Then you discover that behaving in a way that makes people comfortable does the trick. You make great efforts to be the ‘nice’ person. The likeable one who is always there to help. The one who goes out of their way to solve the crises of others. And it feels good and rewarding. But, in the moments of silent reflection, the feeling of ‘not being good enough’ comes back to haunt you. You give this condition a name. You call it ‘imposter syndrome’.

At some point as you mull over the current state of your state of mind, a thought creeps into your head: This is not me. This is happening to me. 

You’ll give this possibility some attention as you contemplate the reasons for the current fogginess in your head. The anger, or sadness, or lack of motivation. You’ll start to catalogue all the mini moments of downward pushes and consider if these might have had any effect on you. You’ll tell yourself that they did you no harm, because you dismissed them as soon as they happened. But you’d be wrong. As you start to list all the teeny tiny, imperceptible pushes downward, you start understanding their compounded effect.

You notice them as they happen and give them more attention. You recognise them for what they are. What good is yoga going to do you under these circumstances? How many pills will solve your problems? What other remedies are there for your general feeling of discontent? What do you do now that you know that the discontent that festers within you is not directly as a result of your own actions?

You’ve figured out that something is very wrong. But what do you do with your newfound understanding?

Life is a series of stories

I’ve been teaching my grade one to three students a simple storytelling technique since the beginning of this year. Answer the following questions, and in doing so, you will be creating a story:

1. Who is in the story?

2. What is happening at the start of the story?

3. What goes wrong?

4. How do they fix it?

Every Friday is story writing day and over the past few weeks, my students have started to remember the questions that need to be answered, and have started to, at varying levels, understand what I am asking them to do. We’ve also used this format for writing summaries of stories we have read in class.

This morning it occurred to me how much these four questions represent the essence of daily life. Are we not characters in our own stories and in the stories of other people, either playing minor or significant parts? Is there not that moment where a scene is set and then a challenge or problem is introduced?

In the middle of helping a grade one who was in a story of his own – everything was fine until Teacher told me I have to write a story – I realised that our lives are a composite of stories – characters; a scene being set; a problem arising; the problem being tackled in the hopes that it can be solved.

I saw the enthusiasm with which another student tackled the task: choosing characters, changing her mind. Choosing the setting, and gleefully changing her mind once more. I was impressed with the ease with which she solved the problem of creating a story, with the excitement and the light-heartedness of her approach.  

The experience lifted a weight off my shoulders. I was seeing that the fruits of my dogged insistence that this format of storytelling be learned over and over again until it was understood and properly implemented. And I was given a different perspective with which to view the things I have been experiencing in my own life. Every challenge or episode can be seen as a story; a small part of the bigger picture that has a beginning, something going wrong, and a resolution of sorts. 

Instead of seeing my life as a constant battle, I saw it for what it is. In an overall upward trend, there are regular ups and downs. With each challenge being dealt with as it arises, the trend continues upward. Each low is met with a higher high, which keeps the trend in an upward trajectory.

Today I was reminded by my students that the best way to tackle difficulty is to push forward and do what needs to be done anyway, no matter how uncomfortable it feels to do so. The discomfort doesn’t last indefinitely. And I was reminded that playfulness is an essential part of problem-solving. It feels counter-intuitive to be playful in approach when things are going wrong. But sometimes it’s a brief respite from the heaviness of a difficult situation. And other times, it leads to imaginative and out-of-the-box solutions. Either way, it’s doing something good.