I am writing a daily blog detailing the fact I and my family are currently homeless. I am writing to try and process my emotions about this as well as take the lessons to be learned from it. And if it helps someone along the way, I will be very happy.
When I lived in our old house, I used to wake up every morning and immediately be hit by a sense of anxiety. My parasympathetic nervous system has been in high alert, in fight or flight, for far too long so that now it has become ingrained in me I feel. I say that because for the past few days, I have been waking up and feeling that feeling again despite being out of our old house now.
Why did I wake up and feel that way? Why was I in such fight or flight mode? Well, I knew that every day I was there I was building up on debt. Every day I waited for the very shaky house of cards to come tumbling down on me as I sought to find ways to cling on to a property that I no longer even liked. I would feel physically ill if there was a knock on the door, and I barely left the house during the day so ended up feeling like a prisoner. I didn’t speak to anyone other than my son or my husband when he came home from work, and I was lonely as hell. My husband also increasingly hated living there and it was more and more difficult to take pride in something you had begun to resent. And it was seriously affecting my health, I am pretty sure that my heart attack was as a direct result of the stress of the situation.
I am no longer in that position. I am not living in the house anymore, we have vacated it never to return. Thankfully. Okay, we might be staying with a friend and not have a home to call our own at the moment, but I have no reason to be in fight or flight the way I was anymore. It’s become a habit, learned behaviour I guess. I apparently haven’t given myself the message yet that things are easier now. It isn’t as bad as it was where I jumped and panicked at everything, it’s just those first few moments in the morning when it happens. But I want to get over that, I want to stop feeling that way altogether for both my physical and mental health.
It’s often the case that we think when we have exited a stressful situation, the stress disappears immediately. That’s not true, especially if you’ve been in that stressful situation for a long time. It’s bizarre but I have added to my own stress by getting obsessed with winning the lottery. I would work myself up about it then get ridiculously upset when I didn’t win. Anything. I added to my own stress because being stressed had started to become a comfort zone. We do that completely subconsciously, get ourselves into a pattern that replays over and over so that it becomes comfortable in a bizarre kind of way. It becomes the known, and our brains seek certainty even if that certainty is a negative.
I also recognise that in my stress, I created the environment I found myself in. It is a truism that what we focus upon is what we bring to ourselves. And by focusing on my stress and anxiety, I brought more of the same to me.
I have significantly reduced my stress levels by cutting myself off from the lottery obsession. As probably counter-intuitive as it may sound, deciding to surrender to the universe and allow it to direct me via intuitive guidance is less stressful. It may sound more unlikely than winning the lottery even, but I know it’s the right choice for me. In fact, I think a lot less about money generally than I did before. It is also worth noting that my lottery obsession was based entirely in a sense of lack. Of desperation. Of need. No matter what I was trying to bring to me, working from those positions meant I was always doomed to fail.
In other news, someone my husband knows is going through something very similar to us. His business sadly collapsed due to his main client being taken over by a multi-national and them choosing not to use his services anymore. He is now worried about losing his house and is struggling financially. I wouldn’t wish this situation on my worst enemy let alone a man who struggles with his mental health anyway due to a serious head injury he sustained in an accident a number of years ago. However, my husband is able to talk to him, to give him the space he needs to talk about everything with someone who understands what he is going through. It is helping this man a great deal, I think, which helps us to see a positive in the situation we are in.
It has also brought home to me how close we can all come to losing everything material and how hard-hitting that is on us. How we attach so much to the material when, in fact, the loss of someone we love is far worse. But when that happens, invariably, we do not feel like failures. Are we failures, though? What is failure? It’s about something not working out, which happens, but how have we come to attach such negativity to that? Why do people judge others who are experiencing a failure of some kind? We are all just one (or two) disasters away from ‘failure’, that is something I have learned from all of this. That we can try and put as many safety measures around us as we can, but if it’s going to happen it will for whatever reason. Usually to teach us a lesson. To an extent, we have to lean into it, to not resist it. Because I have also learned that the old saying ‘what we resist, persists’ is true.
I am, though, soaring. I am thriving. I am successful. I am grateful.
Louisa Simpson 