Finding home...

And something strange happened!!

I’m going to begin this newsletter with the ‘something strange’ bit, as I don’t really understand what’s happened and why.

On a Saturday, I tend to scroll through Substack and save all the articles that pique my interest, so I can read them over the weekend; I used to buy either a Saturday or Sunday newspaper, but reading them feels like groundhog day, in that I feel as if I’m reading the same articles repeated every week. Scrolling through Substack last Saturday, I spotted a couple of very famous names (so famous I can’t remember who they are) and I kind of thought ‘whoa, I’m writing on the same platform as these people; how great is it that there’s room for small fry like me who has no interest or desire to earn a living from being here or feels pressured to increase subscriber numbers’. I love Substack for the connections it’s given me; I’m regularly in touch with a handful of people who inspire me and whose writing I look forward to each week, plus there are some writers who blow my mind with their knowledge, wisdom and generosity in sharing their writing here.

Feeling very grateful for my little shared community and the opportunity to share my own thoughts, I posted a short note saying this. I’ve read that to be ‘seen’ here, we need to post notes every 2/3 hours and have a niche for our longform writing, but I only post a newsletter when I feel there’s something I want to say and rarely post a note…when I do, it’s often a view of swans and their babies from our kitchen window! I’m not being disingenuous when I say I have no idea how social media works, so the response to my piddly little note is bonkers?!

Said note has over 2k likes and my subscriber numbers have increased by 100s every day since the weekend. You might be someone for whom that’s a normal response, but I really can’t figure it out. Part of me initially thought, does this mean I need to up my writing game, but no….I’ll continue writing what’s on my mind and post as and when. I never post on any particular day and my writing is usually inspired by someone I’m connected with on Substack.

You may wonder why I’m telling you this? As I said in the note, I love my little community, I don’t have a niche subject/s and I don’t feel any pressure to write at all; I’m just grateful to be able to share my thoughts, to learn from others and to connect with people through my writing.

My inspiration this week is Julie Bancroft and her piece titled ‘On discernment as a guide through midlife’ (June 13). Julie asked me in a conversation between us in the comments to this article ‘do you feel moving around has actually allowed you to feel more connected to self in the absence of a geographical anchor or do you think it’s almost irrelevant?’

We moved onto our narrow boat ‘Grace’ on June 19th 2021, so we’re coming up to our 5th anniversary on board. I’ve written previously about ‘who’ I was back then; clearly, how I behaved, how I thought and what I believed wasn’t who I was, but I didn’t fully understand that at that time.

I’d spent years overextending myself, pushing myself in an effort to (try to) be perfect; I had an overdeveloped sense of responsibility, I was almost totally disconnected from how I felt, I tried to control everything to avoid uncertainty, I was focused on external validation, I tried to fix everything and everyone because I couldn’t sit with the discomfort of my own or anyone else’s feelings….in short, I was disconnected from myself, very self critical, full of fear and I’m only just realising, full of shame.

I presented as confident, capable, empathic, kind, caring, in fact, someone who has life sorted, but when you’re constantly cracking the whip across your own back, always believing you need to try harder, to be better, there’s no place to rest and changing your home environment doesn’t feel like choosing a different life . Jon Kabat-Zinn wrote the ground breaking book ‘Wherever you go, there you are’ and that was my truth…I’d chosen a different home, but I couldn’t find home within myself.

I remember feeling untethered when I first moved onto the boat, and at that time, I looked outside myself for answers; did I feel so unsettled because we were constantly on the move or was it because we were away from family and friends? I wasn’t at all familiar with turning inwards to determine what I wanted and needed and much more likely to look around at what everyone else was doing to try to figure out where I was going wrong. Self abandonment was familiar to me, albeit in a subconscious way; emotional discomfort meant getting busy, analysing, trying to fix rather than just sitting with myself with empathy, compassion, kindness and patience.

Despite my seemingly idyllic lifestyle, the last few years have been challenging; It’s difficult to change what you’re not consciously aware of and gaining awareness is the first step in the process of letting go of what holds us back. At the very deepest part of me, I wanted to be happy, to feel at ease in my own skin, to feel light hearted and to be spontaneous, but carrying a ton of old crap around kind of prevents that.

So, going back to Julie’s question; ‘do you feel moving around has actually allowed you to feel more connected to self in the absence of a geographical anchor or do you think it’s almost irrelevant?’

Not having a geographical anchor encouraged me to find an anchor within myself, but I’ve had to challenge pretty much everything about who I believed I was in that process. I don’t need fixing, I don’t need to feel responsible for everyone and everything, not everything has to be done RIGHT NOW….I’m continuing my journey, both literally and emotionally and I feel more at home in my ‘self’ than I’ve ever done.

Five years on, I love living on our boat and I’m so pleased we made the decision to sell our house and pretty much everything else to do so; I feel more at home on NB Grace than I’ve ever felt anywhere, but I know that’s mostly due to finding home in my own skin too.

With love,

Karen x