It’s just so satisfying pulling weeds out some days. When the ground is soft they come out with ease. I can easily lose an hour. There’s a feeling of achievement when I look back at the area I’ve just cleared and it gleams back at me as if to say “Well done!”
I wish I could do the same for the weeds in my mind. Those prickly nasty thoughts pop up everywhere. There’s been a lot of them lately. I thought I was rid of them. I think I was. At least, my mind was clear for a while. But inevitably another season, another cycle starts, and they’re back in force.
“You’re not good enough. You can’t do that. What would other people think? Don’t say that. People will bring you down. Who do you think you are? You’re nothing special. You’re so stupid…” Aaargh!
“Serenity now!” I say aloud to nobody but me, remembering a classic episode of Seinfeld (Serenity Now, Seinfeld: Season 9, Episode 3). Weird how my brain works.
I take myself outside when the mental noise gets too much. Kick off my shoes Sit on the grass. I start pulling weeds out. One by one. My husband looks at me as if I’m from some absurd far away planet.
“What are you doing?” He asks.
“Pulling weeds out,” I say with a hint of sarcasm. “Isn’t it obvious?”
“Why don’t you just spray them?” He questions.
“It doesn’t work, they just come back again. You’ve got to get them at the roots”, I reply. It makes perfect sense to me.
“This will take forever”, he says as he leaves me to it. He knows me well enough by now to know when I’m having a moment.
He’s not wrong. I’m sitting on one tiny square metre of 98 acres of land. It would be absolutely impossible to get rid of them all with this method. I’ll just try to get rid of the big ones that are bothering me, I say quietly to myself.
The spray is like the medication I take. It works. I know it does, but it doesn’t completely stop the weeds from popping up again. Keeps them under control for a little while. Keeps me functioning and on an even keel for a little while. It’s a fine line between killing everything, including the good, and controlling the nasties. I’ve still got to get to the root of things though. Find out where those prickly nasty weeds came from in the first place. It doesn’t matter so much who told me I wasn’t good enough or how old I was at the time. It was that I believed it, and still do. At some point, it got stuck there in my mind and there it remains. The nasty prickly thought became a deeply held belief, like the one where I need to become a different version of myself to be lovable.
Our parents, the adults in our lives, do their best to raise us. The words they use to ‘calm our crazy’ are sometimes harsh. I pull myself up using the same words with my boys.
“Settle down. You’re too loud! Be quiet. Don’t do that! Why can’t you just behave!? What were you thinking?! Get to your room!!”
As a kid, I was too much, too loud, too talkative, too full of energy, too full of life and imagination. My parents were doing their best. Doing whatever they needed to do to get by each day. I fully empathise with this now as a parent. I was taken to see a child psychologist and diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) at age 4. So young. I started to internalise all of these weedy words about myself as being wrong and not good enough. I started to learn that I wasn’t allowed to display my big feelings. It’s like now that I’m an adult and I’m catching myself telling the same things to my boys, all of these hurts come up for me in that moment. I’m raging. The little girl in me wants to scream and kick and throw things. I’m having full blown adult tantrums. I’m angry and upset at them, for just being kids. But I’m agrier at myself for doing same thing to them, as I learnt from my childhood.
I take myself outside, with my bare feet on the ground, and I pull those damn weeds out one by one. Some days I spend a lot of time outside! It’s better if I can choose a time when I am grounded and soft hearted to pull those nasty weeds out. They may come out with ease if I take a soft approach. I can thank them for teaching me more about compassion. Thank them for teaching me about what lies beneath. I can start to understand why I’m so quick to defend myself in some situations. Why some words stick more than others.
There will always be weedy, nasty thoughts in my mind, just as there will always be weeds in my yard. I can focus on getting rid of the big ones over time, and I’ll just have to learn to accept all of the little ones. Most of all, a reminder to my kids and me…
It’s ok to be yourself. Some people will want you to change, but there is no-one on Earth like you. You are one of a kind, unique and beautiful. You are loveable just the way you are.
