meetings with myself

On a wall at home I have a framed line drawing of two heads in profile. Out from the head on the left, two red arrows point into space. From the head on the right, two red arrows point inwards, into the mind and brain. For me, this drawing captures the healthy and unhealthy workings of the mind, my mind. Instinctively, and defensively, I’ll draw back into myself when things get hard, often to keep myself safe. Only through training and intellect am I able to turn the red arrows around to face outwards, and so to discover what I really need from the world and other people.

To the casual observer, when I meet with myself in a café, there’s no outward sign of what I’m doing. I’m a woman sitting on her own with a notebook and a pot of tea. But from where I sit, it’s much more than this. It’s a practice that I adopted, a while ago now, to bring order to my jumbled to-do list, and to keep me accountable to longer-term goals that otherwise elude me. Certainly, to the barista and wait staff, there’s no hint that what I’m engaged in is the monumental effort of keeping the red arrows in my mind pointing outwards, away from me and my little ego.

The most challenging part of these meetings, which I set up whenever I feel overwhelm looming, is not to take my phone along. On the face of it, leaving my phone behind feels wrong. What if I’m needed? What if a life-changing message comes through? Without my phone, how will I make myself look busy and pretend to be working? How can I distract myself if it’s just me, my notebook and a pen? But really I know that leaving my phone behind is key, and that if I don’t abandon it temporarily, if I don’t leave my dummy, I won’t be meeting myself but my phone over a cup of tea.

I have a meeting with myself, away from home, for all the reasons that other people do. I do it to think through my diary and the weeks ahead, and then, if I get this far, into the months to come. I’ve long struggled with structure, with putting in place the building blocks for my good-enough life (health, relationships, finance, work and housekeeping). And I don’t mean a five-year plan, which I’m unable to suspend my disbelief in for long enough to put my trust in.

I meet with myself in order to work out what my big rocks are, and to make sure I’m making enough room for them. At a practical level, this means things like ensuring I don’t make appointments in the morning so that I have time to write. But it’s not just organising and scheduling I’m engaged in when I meet with myself. It’s not just making lists and bossing myself around and peering over the parapet into the future. Because what I’ve learnt about myself, recently, is that there’s no point ring-fencing downtime for myself if I don’t know, if I can’t visualise, how I plan to use it.

Now that I’ve settled into the second half of my life, I’ve come to accept three things:

1) that nothing, except inertia, happens naturally.

2) that the more I focus on my strengths, the more my vulnerabilities shine through (as a young woman, I spent a lot of time and energy suppressing my vulnerabilities, whereas these days I sense the futility of this).

3) that my inner world is home both to my inner critic and my inner choir. My inner critic worships Getting Things Done and productiveness in general, and leaves little scope for creativity mainly, I think, because I never seem to get enough Things Done. It would sooner have me mow the grass than sit cross-legged on it, gazing up at clouds. Thankfully, I also have an inner choir of supporting voices, mostly from my past, that urge me on and counter the harshness of my inner critic that would rather I procrastinate my life away, waiting for the right moment that never comes. And it’s these softer, inner voices with which I share my meetings, drawing on their support, warmth and encouragement. Which means that although, from the outside, I’m sitting on my own in a cafe, from the inside I’m not.

It’s such a simple thing that I’m doing in my life right now, of inviting creativity back in. When I’m at home, at slack moments, this simple project feels gigantic. There are, after all, so many other things I should be doing with my hours. I should be checking my finances and mopping the kitchen floor and grooming the dog and hanging up washing and soaking legumes. I shouldn’t be embarking on a patchwork quilt that I long to make yet don’t actually need to keep warm at night (I have perfectly good blankets for that). It’s at slack moments like these, before embarking on an unlikely craft project, that I need the encouragement of my inner choir. And I need to have done this in advance. I need to have entertained and headed off any objections in advance, so that when I turn the sewing machine on, and find the thread tension running amok, I don’t give up in quick despair.

Being creative in my spare time isn’t something that I need to do. It isn’t in line with my basic needs for food, shelter and warmth. I do it because I want to and not because I have to. When I set out to make my home my own, when I lose myself in a project that may or might not work out, that might even embarrass me, I’m taking a risk. And it’s towards the end of meetings with myself in cafés that I put myself up to taking these kinds of risks.

There are other things, too, on my agenda. I sit down with myself to take the longer view. I might, during this time, think fondly of friends who I haven’t seen in a while, jotting their names in my notebook to invite them for dinner. Or I might think about a dish I’m planning to cook, tweaking it in my mind to simplify it, and so to reduce the stress I feel when I entertain, even around the kitchen table.

I also meet with myself to prise apart problems that, when I’m stressed, stick together like so much clutter. Just as when I stretch my body, pulling apart matted fascia, the glistening fibres that hold my frame together, when I sit down with myself, away from home and minus my phone, I can feel my creativity flex. It sounds odd to say, but by the end of the meeting I can feel myself taking up more space than when I sat down. Rather than thinking about who I am and what I am, and all that identity stuff, I like to think about what I’m up to in a larger, outward-facing sense. I like to remind myself of my values and of what I care about most. And I check in that I’m actually living up to my values, rather than falling in with other people’s.

There’s another thing that these meetings are helpful for. It’s as if, with each new year, I rediscover the difference between a resolution and an intention. My resolutions tend to be solid things, brokered by my superego (no dark chocolate at night, more aerobic exercise, that sort of thing.) They rely on will-power and corral me into actions that need to be repeated across time. Whereas my intentions are more soulful and are in line with what I’d like to be the case, even if I might not be in a position to make them happen. My intentions are inspired by hope, whereas my resolutions are driven by self-will against a backdrop of fear. And, it’s during these meetings, that I’ll soften a resolution into something more sympathetic and doable (doing x course some time soon, rather than enrolling in it and paying the deposit by the end of the week).

I like having meetings with myself to think about how I’ll spend the time that’s left over to me after my main work is done. Because when I don’t do this, when I fail to make plans for my spare time (perhaps reading something important, or starting a craft project), I tend to fritter it away. I have so many ways to do this which, at the time, feel not at all like frittering. I might potter around until it’s time to cook the next meal. I might lose myself in meeting someone else’s demands. Or, my favourite, I might wait for exhaustion to set in and flick on a screen.

None of these are bad ways to spend my spare time. However, they aren’t memorable and they don’t they challenge me in ways that push me to grow. Spending time on my computer, elixir that it is, doesn’t put down memory traces. In three weeks’ time, I’ll have zero inkling of what I did on my computer between 5pm and 7pm last night. Whereas, when I brush past a garden bed that I’ve worked hard on, I immediately recall how I felt bending over it, trimming the plants in it. And it’s the same when I draw. When I pick up my drawing pad, a few days after I’ve drawn in it, just looking at my last drawing puts me in mind of how I felt sitting at the table with pencils lying around, and of feeling relaxed and ready for bed.

If I had to sum up why I have meetings with myself, it would be this: to update my to-do list, to take a longer and kinder view of things, and to reassure myself that I have just enough control over my life to let it do what it does, until my next meeting.