This is me at 17. It was taken on New Year’s Eve, at a party I had attended with my then boyfriend and my close school friend, amongst others. That 17 year old had already, unknowingly, amassed a tonne of limiting beliefs and was going to get a tonne more over the following six months. Many fears that would take years to recognise let alone overcome.
The person in the picture with me (though he is cropped out as I don’t have his permission to use his image) is my then boyfriend. My first love. I adored him, quite simply. When I think back to those days, he adored me too. I just didn’t ‘feel’ it. At this point, I was coming off 7 years of trauma, bullying, loss, and a lot of pain that I had buried in order to get through. One of the things I had taken from particular events over those 7 years was that I was unlovable. That I was fat, ugly, and unlovable. I was none of those things in reality, but I had taken those thoughts, embedded them and was running the subconscious programme on them. So, I felt that unless I was ‘perfect’, my boyfriend wouldn’t love me. I was never truly myself, around anyone really, because that version of me wasn’t ‘perfect’ in my eyes. It must have been exhausting for him, because it is very difficult to love someone who doesn’t love themself. Who doesn’t feel the love you are beaming at them because they have shrouded themselves in this cloak of protection. It wasn’t just that I felt unlovable, but love itself was something I feared. He would go on to break my heart, 6 months after this photograph was taken. He cheated on me, thereby inadvertently cementing in my mind that love was something to fear because it caused pain due to my being unlovable. A lot of other things happened during those 6 months, including an unplanned pregnancy and medical complications from that which were traumatic and caused me an immense amount of physical and mental pain, the latter for decades. So, I feared sex as well, and denied my own burgeoning sensuality.
Maybe he cheated because he was coming to terms with the trauma of what happened as well, it was his baby too and perhaps he was as hurt as me at how it ended up. I don’t know, I never spoke to him about it. Or anyone, actually. Because I felt like a total screw up. Pregnant at 17, a cliche of our times then I felt. On top of it being an unsuccessful pregnancy, I was also struggling with feeling as though I had let my mother down, my grandmother and my entire family. That I was an embarrassment, something to be ashamed of. And I carried that for decades as well, which reinforced thereafter my need to be ‘perfect’. To be the person I wasn’t in order to live up to my perception of their expectations of me. I would not countenance behaving in any other way, and I suppressed anything that went against that behaviour. One of the things I did to get out my suppressed dreams and desires was to write. I would write stories of these women who were high achievers and uncompromising in what they wanted. There were times when I would prefer to write than go out with friends, needing to be insular so my soul could express who she truly wanted to be. I just didn’t make the link between those stories and me. That often I was expressing the woman I was becoming or innately was, but couldn’t recognise in myself. And I was writing about the love I wanted but was too scared to reach for.
These fears tormented my life for years, meant I suppressed key aspects of who I am for a very long time. Meant that I suppressed emotions of all kinds, never opened up to anyone in any way more than purely superficial (though I thought I was an open book!), and just generally felt thoroughly unworthy. I didn’t realise I was scared of love, of sex, and of not being ‘perfect’. It meant that I never really let myself go, never let the true me come out. And, I am convinced, this all ended up being a contributory factor for me having cancer. The stress I put myself under for decades had to find an outlet somewhere. Yes, I’d been to counselling just before my diagnosis and, yes, it had helped enormously. But it had only scratched the surface of my issues. It took cancer to start breaking through the ice rather than just chipping away at it. Then it took having a child to break that ice a bit more, that gave me a level of empathy that had always been there but which I had rigorously denied. It meant I let go of some of the perfectionism, some of the more controlling aspects of me. We were told at 20 weeks we were having a girl (upon reflection, the whole scan had been a disaster because my son was curled up asleep 99.9% of it!), and I had been determined to find out so I could ‘be prepared’ as I called it. Actually, it was about control. Well, as he has been doing his entire life so far, my son blasted that illusion away when he was born. I’d had niggling doubts in the back of my mind throughout the remaining 20 weeks of my pregnancy. It didn’t ‘feel’ right that I was carrying a girl and I kept wondering about having one of those 3D scans just to be sure. But I dismissed the idea.
Having my son started to erode some of the fears. I love him fiercely, and though at first I wasn’t sure about the emotion and felt as though I was an outsider looking in on my own life, I now know what I feel is an overwhelming love for him. And I now accept – and allow – him to love me. I know that sounds strange, but I was reluctant to allow it. That fear that something would go terribly wrong, I guess because since that first pregnancy I’d had 2 other unsuccessful ones. I had actually resolved that I wouldn’t have children, and had planned my life accordingly then my little miracle showed up, the one I wasn’t supposed to be able to have. That also shifted my fears away, because he was meant to be here, and be with me. It shifted my fears because I began to embrace my spirituality.
I don’t know, hand on heart, if I can say that I am free of my fears. But I am doing significantly better today than I was as that 17 year old girl. I know I am loved, and loved fiercely by spirit and my ancestors, as is everyone. We are never unloved in life. I know that I am an innately sensual being, and I embrace that because it is such a part of me. There’s nothing to fear from it at all I now recognise, nothing to be ashamed of about it. That awareness has also come through embracing spirit and working through the process of truly understanding who I am. And I know that I am far from ‘perfect’ and that it is that which makes me lovable. That if I was ‘perfect’ I wouldn’t be having this human existence, here to learn all the lessons my soul has signed up for. And I don’t want to be ‘perfect’ anymore. I just want to be me. I let myself go more now, I say more of what I think rather than bottling it all up. I equally know when to let things go because it’s simply not worth my time or energy to focus upon. Usually that’s when someone is trying to make me back into the square peg I refuse to be.
With a faith in spirit, in the divine, even if not an adherence to any religion, I have managed to work away at my fears. They may never completely go away, or maybe they have gone and I just don’t realise it yet. I just know that I am much less fearful, much more fearless on the issues that used to tie me up in knots. And life is that bit better for it.
Louisa Simpson 