I am writing a daily blog on the experience of being homeless as a means of trying to process my emotions around this and to take the lessons from it. If it helps someone along the way, that will make me very happy.
There is the saying – pride comes before a fall. I never really knew what that meant if I’m honest. I remember hearing it a lot as a child (I can’t remember why) but it was a favourite saying in my family for some reason. I didn’t get it then and until now, I still didn’t. It’s apparently from the Bible within the Book of Proverbs. What it means, in essence, is if one becomes too confident or arrogant then it is likely you will fail in whatever it is you have become confident or arrogant about.
I thought it meant that in trying to put on a facade, present a face to the world that isn’t true you end up failing. I did that. I remember as a teenager being at a school where there were a fair few children from financially very comfortable backgrounds. I wasn’t one of them, and I felt that difference quite a lot mostly because it was a cause for bullying. I determined that my son would not feel that way and consequently, I put on a good show. As my great-grandmother would say, it was all ‘fur coat and dirty knickers underneath’ or as others would say ‘champagne lifestyle on a lemonade budget’. It wasn’t quite a champagne lifestyle, and it was often not a lemonade budget, but it was all built on shifting sands.
It was a sense of pride, a sense of “keeping up with the Jones’s” that helped lead to the situation I am in, and I guess an arrogance that the money would continue to roll in no matter what. Combined with a sense of ingratitude for what I had. But I don’t think to the extent that the Book of Proverbs said. No, it was more about childhood memories (nightmares) that dogged me all my life at a subconscious level. It has only been now that I have realised this, that what I have been through has highlighted to me how those events have left a lasting impact.
It’s a behaviour that needs to be firmly left in the rear view mirror, beliefs that no longer serve me. That child in me that felt the lack in her teenage years especially, the bullying that she was subjected to needs healing. She needs to understand that it’s in the past, it’s no longer relevant anymore. That it happened, it can be forgiven and then it can be released. It doesn’t need to impact on life today.
Those experiences, and the root cause of most of those experiences, have led me to look for security externally. I’ve long felt that if I had a lot of money then I would feel secure, but the reality is I have had a lot of money relatively speaking, and I didn’t feel secure. In fact, I felt more insecure and spent a lot of times subconsciously ridding myself of that money. Through this process, in realising my limiting beliefs, I have realised that I don’t know what security feels like.
We are told in visualising and the law of attraction that we can only be successful in feeling the feelings we want to experience. To live in the end, where we embody what it is we want to achieve. How do we do that when we don’t know what the feeling we want actually feels like? Because we haven’t experienced it since we were a child? I now know that what I truly want is to feel secure in all sorts of ways. Financially secure, having security of tenure over my home, emotionally secure…but I simply do not know how that feels. How do I find it within myself?
My mother likes to blame my husband for the situation we find ourselves in, but I know it’s down to me and my limiting beliefs. That the experiences of life from the ages of 10-18 have created subconscious behaviours that have led to an inexorable decline into this situation particularly when combined with a vision for my life of writing and a lack of self-belief that I will be successful in that. I have focused on material outcomes that I want to manifest when I should be focusing on the emotional, the issue being that…I don’t know what the emotions I want to manifest feel like.
I don’t know where I am going with this, just that it is something for me to address. I’m not even sure how to do that but I will find out. And I will write about it.
Because I am soaring. I am thriving. I am succeeding. And I am secure.
Louisa Simpson 