9th January 2016
January 2016! Wow! I don’t think it’s still fully sunk in yet that we are once again in a new year. Once again another whole year has passed. And once again every time I need to give my date of birth I seem that much older!!
There are moments, especially surrounding birthday’s and New Year’s, where I panic. I panic that life is passing by too fast. I panic that I haven’t achieved anything yet. I don’t have my own house. I have bounced from job to job, started climbing the ladder of one career only to realise it wasn’t me and jumped off it again, tried another and just repeated the same mistakes all over again. Some years have been just one big vicious cycle and as I’ve hit another New Year the feelings of dread, failure, panic and disappointment all just try to come flooding back in again. I’m sure I’m not the only one. Well I hope I’m not anyway!
We live in a world where the bar has been set pretty high. There are standards. There are ways of doing things. There are unspoken rules hiding behind every corner telling us to be someone at a certain age, telling us to be somewhere at every phase of our lives. And if we don’t hit that criteria, if we fall out of the norm, if we are just that little bit different or have done things just that little bit differently, we almost automatically become immersed, by default, consumed by feelings of guilt, self-condemnation, anxiety and most of all – fear.
My New Year has already not started out the way I had intended it to. Since Monday the 16th of November until just 3 days ago I have been in and out of hospital 5 times, spending a total of 35 days as an inpatient due to a mixture of severe asthma attacks and vocal chord dysfunction. As sick as I have been it didn’t stop me from doing stuff though, and each time I was discharged it was just a matter of days until I was back doing life at full speed, which would then lead to the next attack followed closely by the next emergency admission back into A&E. And then Saturday happened. My body just collapsed and gave up. I’d been discharged and out of hospital just one day. I was found upstairs, completely unconscious, and once again I was rushed into hospital by ambulance. My body was so depleted, so exhausted, had gone through so many bouts of lack of oxygen and severely dysfunctional breathing and I had pushed it beyond the limit, past my reserves, that it just couldn’t keep going. I was out of it for literally days and when I finally came round with slurred speech and blurred vision and unable to barely stand or walk more than a few metres without almost collapsing again, I think I got my wake up call. I know it hadn’t been my first wake up call over the past couple of months. I’ve had some very hairy moments where I couldn’t get in enough oxygen and I know I’ve come very close to it really being ‘it’ for me in A&E a few times. But it was a big enough wake up call to really make me stop and think.
And that’s just it! In those moments it’s ok – we have an excuse – an excuse to not be living up to our world’s expectations of where we should be and what we should be doing. BUT, the moment we’re not in ‘hospital’ or ‘sick’ or have a legitimate ‘excuse’ by the world’s standards, it’s in those moments that the pressure seems to hit us in the face again – normally harder and harsher than ever before. I’ve been put on bed/house rest for 3 weeks to let my body completely recover. That was ok for the first few days! Because I could barely move without being out of breath. I looked grey and I was incredibly weak. But as the days have gone by and I’m feeling myself getting stronger and stronger, I’m sat at home, and I feel the uneasiness, the pressure and the need to be showing everyone around me that I’m busy being successful, and just the personal need of ‘needing’ to be busy and show that I’m fine, return all over again. Why?
As I’ve sat and really reflected on where it all comes from – I put it down to fear. A fear of not being accepted. A fear of not being good enough. A fear of being ‘less’ than everyone around me. Unsuccessful, useless, fruitless, ineffective, unproductive… a failure. Apart from us all eventually dying I think the second biggest thing we all have in common is fear. We all fear something. Whether it’s big or small, significant or insignificant. They exist. It exists. But what really is fear? The best way I think I can describe it is this:
False
Evidence
Appearing
Real
Yes bad stuff happens! Yes horrendous things happen. But fearing something or having a fear almost always comes from an experience you experienced or may have witnessed. But then continuing to have that fear of that ‘thing’ or that ‘something’ is based on a perception that is no longer there or the probability of it happening again is so slim it really is False Evidence Appearing Real created in our own minds to stop us from actually becoming free from it completely and being able to succeed in ways we never even thought possible.
I want to show you exactly what I mean in just one way that I have experienced this in my own life over the past few months. Like I said right from my very first blog I’m only gonna be real with you all. I’m not gonna tone things down or make them sound more rosy to try and paint a nicer or easier picture. It’s not who I am and I feel I can only make a real impact and help people if I’m honest in every part of my life.
At the age of just 12 I became ‘friends’ with an older man. I was groomed – for those who don’t know what groomed is (it’s when an adult builds an emotional connection with a child to gain their trust for the purposes of sexual abuse or exploitation). I fell into that exact trap. Before I knew it I was forced into a world of sex, porn, prostitution, trafficking and abuse. They got me hooked onto every drug possible which made it easier for them to use me in whatever way they needed to. But on the very first ever day they did anything to me I tried to run and they held me down, restrained me and forcibly injected me with heroine. And that was it. For 7 very long years I would take any drug voluntarily and even happily as it made me feel better and it took some of the pain away. But heroine? Oh I would sniff it, smoke it – no problem. But I wouldn’t go near injecting it. But that was where the problem lay. For the kind of work I was forced to do they needed me hooked on IV heroine. Injecting heroine has such a different effect to taking it in any other form. It eliminates any feelings of sorrow, regret, anger, stress, guilt. It washes away any feelings that aren’t totally and completely amazing. But with it I knew I lost control. I became someone else. The relief of all anxiety, fear, loneliness, every muscle relaxes, it’s a feeling of falling into a warm soft bed after you’ve walked ten miles barefooted on spikes or burning coal. And you’re probably wondering ‘why the heck was it so bad then?!?!’ Because of exactly those reasons. I lost control. I lost control. I lost control. They could do whatever they wanted. And yeh maybe at the time I didn’t feel the pain and was completely dissociated from any feelings at all, but like any drug or like anything – it doesn’t last. And the comedown, the anticlimax, the complete and utter crash when it starts wearing off is more painful than anything else I can describe. Because it’s not just the pain of the drug wearing off and the feelings returning harder and more intense than they ever existed before, it’s the pain that starts kicking in of everything you’re body has suffered and endured during the high too. And so from day one it became my ultimate fear. Needles became my irrational phobia. I was held down and forcibly injected more times than I’ve probably ever kicked a football.
The thing is, the fear never just left. Even years after I was rescued from my living hell, I could still not have a needle near me. There have been times over the past 8 years where I put my life in jeopardy, rather dying than getting life saving treatment because my fear of needles was that horrifically intense and real. And to me once again it shows that fear is False Evidence Appearing Real. Yes, once upon a time it was a real fear, but now it no longer is. Being in the critical care unit for so long over the past few months I came to know and trust the nurses and doctors like I’ve never trusted nurses or doctors before. And for the first time in my life I started chipping away and eventually breaking through the incredibly thick wall of my fear of needles. I still need someone to hold my arm because my body has instinctively learnt to pull away as soon as I know a needle is near, but I can now let people take blood. I can now let people inject me. It’s the biggest fear I’ve EVER overcome and through it I now know that I can overcome any fear.
For some this might be an extreme example but to me it’s an example for anything and for anyone. I use what I have learnt through my needle phobia in the smallest of areas of my life now. Daily. From the dark to enclosed spaces, from lots and lots of people in one place to spiders, from Brussel sprouts to mushrooms!! The list goes on and on but I know that every single thing has stemmed from somewhere or has branched out of something.
And hear me when I say this… Fear can feel very real, but if I really REALLY stop and think about it, it’s danger that is the real thing. Not the fear. Fear isn’t real. It’s the product of the thoughts WE create. Danger is what’s real, fear is a choice. When I knew what was coming, when those men were coming towards me, when I knew I was once again going to fight a losing battle and be injected against my will – that was danger and it was beyond real. But over the years I have learnt and seen and experienced not only in my own life but in so SO many people’s lives around me, that too many of us are not living out who we are and are not living our dreams because we’re living our fears. Fear is an idea crippling, experience crushing, success stalling inhibitor inflicted by only ourselves – and if we can learn to push through those fears and realise that the majority of the time those fears aren’t even real and are certainly not even actually there – man the possibilities for us are endless! What a sense of freedom!
So what’s the reality of fear? You’re not scared of the dark – You’re scared of what’s in it. You’re not afraid of heights – You’re afraid of falling. You’re not afraid of the people around you – You’re afraid of rejection. You’re not afraid to love – you’re afraid of not being loved back. You’re not afraid to try again – You’re afraid of getting hurt again. We don’t fear the unknown – we fear what we think we know about the unknown. Danger is real. Fear is a choice.
I’m sorry if I’ve blabbed on in this blog. It was just heavy on my heart this week to talk about this subject because it’s effected me so much in my own life for too many years. I hope we can start this New Year together in a new way. In a way more free than ever before. Let’s become fear-less people of everything and anything. Let’s make 2016 a year we look back on and go ‘Yeh!’ I did what I never thought I’d do. I’ve done what I never thought I could achieve. I pushed past that fear and it has taken me places above and beyond.
I’m ready! So ready! Bring on this New Year and lets absolutely smash it!
chibraley.com 