What do adolescent rats, shame and the dark have in common?

I started my blog in 2006 as a way to share stories of journeys and experiences I was having in different parts of the world. My writing since depression gripped in 2014 was irregular and sparse as I struggled with a constant feeling of being overwhelmed. Since February of this year that has changed, and you have been inundated with regular posts from me. All of these posts have in fact been related to one journey, and that has been my internal journey. I went back this morning to reread the post I wrote on my 40^th birthday sitting in a wonderful farmhouse on the northern part of the Big Island of Hawaii, but in doing so I accidentally deleted the post. It is shocking that in this day and age information on the internet can be deleted and yet it has. I was sad for a little bit as words are so contextual and I can’t ever recapture how I felt that night as I poured my heart out into the post. But I put it in perspective and now frame it as a thought that sometimes we don’t actually know when a journey starts but we can acknowledge when it ends. The journey dear blog reader was that of me sharing my dive into my inner world; for me personally that journey does not end today as I share this post with you, but the writing of it in this forum does. What I will write of below draws on many thoughts of what I have written about over the past ten months, and I try to draw together the threads. I share this deep journey with you because as a species we need to talk more about mental health, empathy and compassion. It is wonderful that there is incredible medical support now for people in terms of physical health, and a healthy life style is considered a norm in most parts of the world, but we still don’t talk enough about how we are emotional beings as well as physical beings. I urge us all to think about how important it is for all of us to share and encourage our family, our friends, our acquaintances and our colleagues to share. What is the best way to foster removing stigma around emotional health and well-being? Well I contend that it is through storytelling as per my last blog entry. I cannot tell someone what to do or how to feel, but by sharing my own journey I can contribute to removing some stigma around talking about emotional health.

To my title for this post, it might seem like rather a strange one, but I assure you it will all make sense in due time. I think of my journey over the past year not as a linear path, but instead I envisage it as the peeling back the layers of an onion. I think of a lot of things in life as being made of layers: the layers of the earth we inhabit, layers of culture, the layers (steps) of solving a mathematical problem, layers of identity, the layers of the globe’s atmosphere, layers of sexuality, the layers of electrons in an atom, and so too are there layers to emotions. I am not a psychologist and so what I share with you in terms of my onion of emotions are not ‘scientific’ but they are my ‘onional’ experience. My journey through my layers started with anger and anxiety, then I faced fear head-on, control/managing is not an emotion as such but it was coupled with understanding fear, sadness was a sneaky one, and ultimately I find myself at shame. I have dealt with all I mention in previous posts (I include links if you want a refresher 😀) apart from shame and that is my focus here. As I sit with shame in order to understand it, I begin to see an ever-growing glow of acceptance of self that I have searched for for a long long time. The truth is the layers of our internal emotions around our sense of self are built over time based on the experiences we have in life. 

I am strong and always have been, and this is something I have always admired about myself, a gift of sorts. I now trust that with my strength must come vulnerability because that is where self-assured strength comes from. My vulnerability has given me the voice to be able to tell the story of my journey over the past 10 months through the posts I have shared. My vulnerability tonight as I shed tears writing this post, gives me the strength to know that in all life’s uncertainties I will be fine if I continue to draw from that inner core of acceptance of self. 

I preface the following by emphasizing that nothing said in the following paragraphs is to point fingers, lay blame or in any way give a sense of ‘why me?’; we are all made of stories, we are all built through experiences from the day we are born. We all bring our stories and experiences into how our onions grow, and in turn how our onion establishes how we deal with the world and our relationships in it be it as a daughter, a son, a mother, a father, a wife, a husband, a partner, a sibling, a friend, a colleague, an acquaintance. 

I had the most interesting childhood, I lived in a beautiful part of the world, I wanted for nothing materially. I was educated through a second language. We spent summers in Ireland and Canada. There was hurt, but it did not overshadow the joy. I was a Sudanese/Irish/Canadian kid trying to conquer the world (in a positive way of course). I discovered my love of teaching at age 8 by teaching the refugee kids next door because they weren’t allowed to go to school. I created adventure stories that I would insist on telling orally for everyone to hear – I had an early love of storytelling it seems. I embarked on adventures in our local neighbourhoods exploring the half-built houses persuading others to join me. I knew no fear and I knew no strangers (someone described me like that back in early 2012 before my health fell apart and I love it and am re-embracing it) in my adventures. I did well in school despite it being a second language. I found doing English class every day in the afternoon challenging when all I wanted to do was play, but I appreciate how important it was for us to study in both languages. I explored my sexuality from age 11 – innocently of course – with my first boyfriend Mustapha who was 13. It was curiosity and fun, and certainly nothing to be ashamed of. There is that word shame…

Life changed a lot from age eleven onward. Four became three. We lost our home in Sudan as the Middle East faced the First Gulf War. We moved to the UAE, then to Tunisia, then to Qatar, then I became one and faced boarding school. My sense of shame come from a dislocated sense of self. I was in a time of vulnerable adolescence, a time of great emotional change in any person and my sense of self was up in the air. 

My new favourite thing to do in Vancouver is called Nerd Nite – on once a month, it is a space for people to talk about a project or work that they are doing that broader society might class as ‘nerdy’. Anyways, in October one of the speakers studies the affect of stress and social isolation in the brains of rats – don’t worry I am not comparing myself to a rat! It was interesting but the part that struck me the most was how he talked about the importance of consistency in the life of adolescent rats in order for them to avoid stress, and how we can see this in humans as well. I sat a lot with that thought revisiting times in my own adolescent and I see a strong sense of dislocation. Constant moving was hard. My social nature sought connections from peers in constantly changing contexts. I started to develop a sense of needing to be just like everyone else (I talked about this in belonging), but that kept changing. I developed a fear of being alone especially in the dark – my inner compass was spinning. I developed a sense of body shame, that I was not physically enough. Boarding school was incredibly difficult, I was bullied despite trying to belong because I still always found I needed to be true to myself without knowing how to do that. 

Shame grew and was watered and fostered by trying to please others before being true to myself. I felt a strong voice emerge in my head which I only now recognize, a voice that told me I was always ‘second choice’, that people didn’t really want to be friends with me, that boys didn’t really like me, that there was no certainty in my relationships. Now back to that passionate strength, it’s a gift like I said. It got me through, university and onwards in my life have been wonderful. Except that shame, based on my dislocated sense of self, had embedded itself in my psyche. I have done so much in my life thus far: travelled, adventured, studied, ‘frienshiped’ (made up a new word for consistency), worked, loved, cried, laughed. The actuality is it never seemed like enough because I felt that I was constantly being judged, being measured, being compared, the people I cared about and loved were not certain about me. The shame manifested itself as sadness and as fear, and I developed a learned behaviour of trying to control (written about in a previous post) in the hope that people I loved would learn to love me as much as I loved them. 

Bicycle accident happened, health happened, death happened, depression happened, and that sadness and fear became anger. There it is, what psychologists call the tip of the emotional iceberg. There is so much anger in today’s societies because we do not take the time to sit, and truly understand ourselves. It is an inner journey and one we take alone. We can and should seek support, but ultimately it is about self. 

Where does the dark fit in? Well I indicated my fear which was most pronounced in the dark especially when alone. The weekend before last I drove an hour and a half out into the Fraser Valley to a centre that offers Darkroom Meditation sessions. Essentially you spend 24 hours in absolute darkness, including using the bathroom! The prospect a short time ago would have terrified me, but I was excited joining the six others as we entered the room Saturday afternoon. We were then in complete silence and darkness until Sunday afternoon apart from meditation chanting. The time was spent resting and doing intermittent meditation sessions. As I lay in the dark not even able to see my finger right in front of my face I asked myself why I did not feel that crippling fear I felt before – the answer was simply I was not alone and I never had been, I just needed to internally find me. 

My existence does not depend on whether another person thinks it is so, it is not depend on someone being certain that I am worth their time or love, it is not dependent on how much I achieve compared to another. The person I must impress, nurture, love, support and most of all accept is me. I am not advocating for selfishness (see two previous post on this – empathy and social capitalism), but what I am insisting is important for all of us to practice is selflove. The world around us does not happen for us and always there will be situations and people that do not bring joy into our lives, but it is how we project ourselves onto the world that is the most important detail. Imagine a world where everyone was mirroring the best possible version of themselves. There is no software upgrade possible for who we are – we are human full of emotions making us who we are – so all we can be is the best version of ourselves. 

I end by making a promise. I am making it to myself, but I am asking you to witness this promise. I promise to bring the stories of people who grew up in the Gulf States to a wider audience. I have heard many terms used, ‘expat brat’, ‘third culture kid’. I know my dislocation was uniquely my own, but I have spoken to so many who grew up in the oil rich nations of the Gulf who also feel a sense of where is home?, who am I?, where do I belong? I am luckier than many with options of where I can choose to live as many are from nations to which it is sometimes difficult to return. I do not know yet what form the stories will take or how they will be presented, but I am in a privileged position to explore that and I will.

I ask you to do something for yourself, look in the mirror and tell yourself that there is no shame in who you are because you are the best version of yourself. Once we all look inward for our sense of self, the people and the situations that do not serve us will become background noise to our symphony of life.    

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