I spend most of my time with me. Because I spend all of my time with me. And I have discovered that listening to what I have to say to me is incredibly important. As is being comfortable with spending time with me.
As always, when I first saw this post my egoic mind kicked in and started ruminating on who I spend the most time with. There’s the dog, which is a wonderful way to spend time. Then there is my family, including my parents. There is a particular colleague I work with most, and then there are more peripheral people. But I don’t spend all of my time with any of these people, the only person I spend all of my time with is me. I was not on that list of who I spend the most time with, and I realised that I should be. We should all see that we spend the most time with ourselves which is why it is so important to get to know who we are.
I will admit that, for most of my life I didn’t realise who I really am. I got snippets of me from time to time, like when the chips were down usually and my innate strength and resilience came to the fore, always surprising me by its existence because I saw myself as the opposite. As being slightly weak because I avoided confrontation usually (though I didn’t back away from it if it showed itself to me), and because I just generally thought I was. It turns out, I don’t avoid confrontation really it’s just that the issue I could turn into a confrontation isn’t that important to me, so I don’t mind walking away from it. But when something is important to me, I’m happy to take up arms (figuratively speaking). But overall, I haven’t really known me for most of my life.
How can I say that? Because I didn’t truly spend time with me for most of my life. Unless I was asleep, most of my time was spent in distraction. If I wasn’t working, I was doing something that created a ‘noise’ inside me. Watching television, for example. Reading, listening to music, talking to friends… whatever it was, I was always surrounded by some form of noise, some kind of movement. And I am not saying for a moment any of those things were wrong, I’m just saying that I wasn’t doing them because I was present in them but because I was using them as a distraction technique at a very subconscious level. I didn’t want to be alone with me.
Until life stripped many of those distractions away. My job went, my social circle narrowed, hours of my day that weren’t spent sleeping were also no longer spent ‘doing’. And I went into a form of panic mode for a long time. I would doom scroll on social media for huge periods of time, read online newspapers almost obsessively. Yes, I was writing my books but at the time I didn’t see those as a way of me being with me, I was doing something that I was enjoying. But they didn’t involve any noise, so when the messages of them and the silence became too much, I would switch over to social media or the news and while away a significant amount of time. To avoid being present with me. Maybe I knew that, at some level, it would mean that I would have to confront aspects of me, my shadow for example, and that was just a bit too scary. A bit too raw and real. I had, I now realise, spent an inordinate amount of time running away from my shadow just like many of us do.
When life strips away the distractions, though, you have no choice in the end to confront the shadow. That part of ourselves formed from trauma, pain, reality, that shapes our behaviours. At first, I didn’t have the energy to go through the process that would mean healing the shadow side of me. I wanted to ignore it, and pretend that all was well. But I learned that I’d tried that in the past, had thought because I had recognised that some of my shadow existed, I had dealt with it. What I had done, instead, was the opposite. I had allowed it to run rampant through my life by bringing it out and not addressing where it had originated from, not healing it. My shadow, which I think is also my limiting beliefs, stem from a traumatic childhood which led me to be a people pleaser and from there, to suppress some innate aspects of my personality. For example, I am not (nor have I ever been) Miss Organised as I have said before. But because I was raised by a mother who was, and who could not understand how her daughter couldn’t be, I tried constantly to fit myself into that mould and suppressing the real me in the process. I was told that I had my ‘head in the clouds’ all the time in a way that made it sound bad. But it wasn’t bad. It was an expression of my imagination and innate creativity, but I suppressed them so that I would pull my head out of the clouds and knuckle down to ‘real life’. All I was doing was creating a bigger shadow side and pulling myself further and further away from the real me. Hence the distractions, drowning out that voice that was trying to get me back to who I am.
What I am trying to say is that the person we spend the most time with, and the person we ignore the most is the same person – ourselves. How many of us are aware that we have tens of thousands of thoughts every day, that of those the majority are repetitive, and of those the majority are negative? And that that narrative is about ourselves. We speak to ourselves in ways we would never tolerate anyone else speaking to us, and the behaviour is so ingrained in us we no longer consciously hear it. And yet we spend all our time with ourselves. It doesn’t make sense does it? I wonder how many people seeing this writing prompt will even have themselves on the list of people. It isn’t selfish or arrogant to think that we spend the most time with ourselves and consider that in depth, it’s an act of self-awareness, and self-love. Which then allows us to go on and be kind, empathetic and loving to everyone else.
We can, of course, shift that around but it does take time, energy, and repetition. It can be exhausting, and so easy to think ‘I’ll just let that one slide’ but then you might let the next negative thought slide, and the next, until you are back to square one. And you will miss the fact that the real you, the true person you are is utterly magnificent and someone you will want to get to know. Someone you can think ‘wow’ about because you are someone who is just amazing. Some of what you are capable of, perhaps what you are destined to be, can be a bit scary or daunting. The purpose your soul has signed up for can be…WHAT?! But if you weren’t capable of it, it wouldn’t be your purpose, it wouldn’t be your destiny. That’s the part to remember. And that you are amazingly magnificent.
When we consciously spend time with ourselves, when we listen to our thoughts and what they truly are, we can become aware of how we have created the life we are living. How our expectations create what we expect to see at a subconscious level. I know that I was surprised to realise that rather than being the innately positive person I thought I was, I equally had a tendency to focus on the things I don’t have or focus on the negative message I might receive rather than look at the plethora of amazing things around me. It was a real eye-opening experience to realise that, but that in realising it and forcing myself to focus in that moment on all the positivity surrounding me, journaling about it after and allowing my free-writing to emerge, I started to deal with another shadow aspect of myself. Confronting it, accepting it in that moment, gently challenging it and then being aware of when that cropped up again. Until getting to the point where, when something difficult happened, rather than obsessing about it negatively I made the conscious decision to switch to a solution-focused mindset, to trust that there was a solution and to allow it to come to me by being in silence. Because it always does.
Spend some time with you. Spend some time in silence and just listen to the words running through your mind. Reframe and correct the negative ones, capture the positive ones and examine them in more depth. Listen to what your soul is telling you. Journal, free write and then read back what you said. Meditate, and listen to the messages, all of them even the first ones that pop up as your conscious and subconscious minds seek to fill the void.
Self-acceptance, self-awareness, and self-love are the best things you can give yourself. If for no other reason than you spend most of your time with you. And how much more harmonious life is when that is a beautiful experience.
Louisa Simpson 