Monday thoughts #4: inherent worth continued

13/05/24

Really in the weeds now. Words are slow and cutting on my tongue, but I feel compelled to write this week. Not to get subscribers, but for the soul.

Here goes:

I have been trying to convince people lately of two things - savouring and gratitude. 

Savouring is attending, appreciating & enhancing positive experiences that occur in life as an antidote to negative experiences. Gratitude is when you feel thankful for the good things in your life.

Someone said to me recently, “look at everything going wrong. How can you feel so much joy?”

My honest reaction?

“What gives you the right to tell anybody they are not allowed joy?”

My real answer?

Because I’ve just had the worst year of my life, and I know there is no longer time.

I had to endure something horrendous, and all I actually owned was the choice to feel joy, irregardless of what was happening around me and to me.

Because I see now that time is finite, because I know the present moment is all we have, because because because -

And then the quietest answer slips through the cracks, in my smallest voice - 

“Because I’ve spent most of my life not feeling joy at all”.

There isn’t time. We’re running out. I want to be grateful for everything, and know what it’s like to feel joy deeply.

Joy is something that belongs to us, something other people don’t have the right to take away. Often in this ridiculous world we’ve constructed for ourselves, joy is taken away, and for the most part, that’s beyond our control.

But then you get to an age where you realise joy will always be taken away. So then, choosing to find joy anyway, the art of savouring the moment, appreciating what we actually have in front of us, right here, right now, because we don’t know what’s coming next - or because we absolutely do - becomes an act of resistance, as the Idles album title goes. 

One of my favourite memories in my life is from 2017. Me and my friends went to camp in a forest, and we saw alien flashes of sheet-white in the trees, only to walk to a field with two horses to see forked lightning, a raging thunderstorm over Cornwall that saw us scrambling for our cars later at 4am in the morning. I was 23, then. The world was so brand new. We were all brimming with hope for our futures.

2024 now. Sometimes I laugh at the things I’ve experienced this year, but the ends of my fingertips are numb again.

Sometimes I get flashbacks to showering at pure gym with the flu, and the showers were ice cold, and I couldn’t tell anybody, because every time I told anybody, people would blame me, and that would send me into a total unable-to-function mental tailspin, so I just kept telling myself; push, push, push, the only way out is through. 

All my life, I have I accepted the treatment I thought I deserved. 

For me, lightning strikes all the time. There comes a point where you have to accept what the common denominator is. And accepting you are the common denominator of your own life is truly not about punishing yourself - it’s an effort to empower yourself, because the only thing, the only person you truly ever have control over is yourself.

Another horrible situation happened to me recently. It feels like blow after blow. And like an ascending spiral serving me the same god-damn situation for the umpteenth time, I understood something even more deeply.

Outward pain, outward degradation and devaluation, misogyny towards women…all forms of bigotry…come from severe shame and inner-wounds. The narcissists who walk this earth might look like they are ahead, and are successful, but they are actually living with an extreme shame-based mental illness. They are not actually ‘living’ at all. They do not feel alive, they do not feel blood pulsing through their body, because as children, they were never allowed to feel that. They were un-allowed joy.

So, back to that question - “how can you feel so much joy?”

Because in life, if you disallow yourself joy, the alternative is to die inside to the point where everyone around you is a utility, a tool and not a human being. And then things really start to rot. Maybe we’re seeing a mass-narcissism of the human race; maybe capitalism is just mass-narcissism. I don’t know.

I went back to that 2017 field this weekend.

And I sat and cried in it, so hard, over so much loss, so much change, so much grief, and I realised it might be one of the last times I’m ever in it. There are so many places I’ve stood in recently and thought, “this might be the last time I am here”. And in this field, I saw my imagined future, what I thought was, at least, the one constant in my life, my whole twenties, ten years before me turn to dust.

I am fighting my brain to find my inherent worth, at the minute. As I lose more and more pieces of my life, I am fighting my brain so hard. “This isn’t personal”, I tell it. “This is exactly how life goes”. I wasn’t worthy because of my band, I wasn’t worthy because I had a ‘job’ as a musician, I wasn’t worthy because I was in a relationship with a man, I wasn’t worthy because other people put hope in me, I wasn’t worthy because of my accolades. I was worthy simply because I was.

This is the idea of ‘inherent worth’. We are worthy simply because we exist.

And I only feel this in nature. I only felt it this week when I went and sat in the park and did yoga, and looked carefully at the tops of the trees. I only feel it when I hear the birds in the morning, and I only feel it by the sea, and I only feel it with my feet in the sand. Last year, I spent part of it in a van, and I had what I can only call a spiritual experience.

We’re worthy even when we believe we’re ‘bad’, even when excluded, especially when excluded. That is when people should band around you, that is when you are at your most vulnerable and need help. “Inherent worth is the idea that everyone has the same worth – infinite worth - by virtue of just being, regardless of race, religion, gender, health, status, wealth or any other external factor”.

If you get sick, or all your teeth fall out, you would still be you, you would still own the essence of you. It would still be there inside you, and nobody has the right to tell you otherwise.

We are worthy because we are nature. We are the very thing we’re destroying - ourselves.

So, I sat in this field with all these yellow flowers and this beautiful sun, far too hot for the beginning of May, and I bawled my eyes out. I thought, I want to be worthy just as I am. I want to find other people who see the world as I do.

As I cried, a horse in the field walked up to me. I stroked its head. And I felt peaceful. “This horse doesn’t give a shit about any of this”, I thought.

If I lose the ability to do things, if I become sick and unable to contribute to society, if I never write another song, if I never have another relationship, I am beautiful simply because I exist. 

I always had worth. I was always funny, loyal, kind, open to the world, empathetic, compassionate. I was always a good friend with good morals, I was always there for people. I have tried my best.

We don’t live in a world that values it. Good people don’t get ahead, and that is the over-arching grief of my life. Good doesn’t win. We’re hurtling towards global warming and world war three now, look around us, we didn’t win. I’m so sad, because I completely understand the pain behind the question, “how can you feel joy?”.

Well…here’s my proper answer, then.

Because there is still good left in this world. And not ‘good’ as in subscribing to some moral code, as all moral codes are all flawed, there is no perfect, there is no universal ‘good’ or dominant ideology, there is no real ‘truth’. By ‘good’, I don’t mean the false dichotomy of good vs bad. I mean ‘good’ as in…‘alive’.

Good means you get to feel alive, really feel alive and here. Good means you get to find peace. Good means you are gentle enough to be approached by horses. Good means you can feel the ends of your fingertips. 

So this is my promise to myself. I couldn’t change a thing. So I’m going to change. I’m going to allow myself unfettered joy. I’m worthy because I exist.

<3