Exercise

Yorkshire. Home sweet home.

- 3 min

Yorkshire cowsCows graze in the field opposite. The grass they chew is brighter than I remember, as if someone had added a little extra yellow from the paint box. Unlike the neatly mowed lawn of the house, the field is uneven, scattered with thick tufts of dark green and clumps of light brown that catch the sunlight and almost look pink.

I stare for a while.

For me, there’s nothing ‘normal’ about this setting. The clouds mask the bright blue sky, with a brilliant white that makes the ceiling of the study in which I work look dull. Bright fuchsia foxgloves grow on the bank of the winding stream, choked by something my mother calls ‘bindy weed’. She has a names for all the weeds which in no way represent their Latin counterparts.

The house smells of freshly baked bread: rich wholegrain spelt flour and the sweetness of honey. It’s deceiving, if you go into the kitchen you might be disappointed to see it’s been me at work rather than my father who actually knows what he’s doing.

There’s a comfort that comes with this place. The house is full of furniture from my childhood. Black and white faces with my nose or my chin look at me from the original black and white wedding photos. My sister and I dominate the coloured photos:  me as a grinning toddler, grinning child, grinning teenager and grinning adult, all with a scrunched up nose. These things make it feel homely, but it’s also the land itself. I can’t say why. I don’t know exactly. I didn’t grow up here. The land is just the right colour.

Our Yorkshire hills aren’t huge, but there are a lot of them. They look down on the valleys and the reservoirs. The roads, with their bends and dips are the sort that bring a smile to your faces as you’re driving along. I often wish that I had tough, strong legs to peddle up the hills like the Tour de Yorkshire riders.

Except, actually got some pretty strong legs now. I sometimes forget how much I’ve changed. I use to detest going on long countryside walks. Some years ago I recall the misery of clambering ungainly up a hill in the Lake District, feeling that it was entirely unfair that I was incapable of enjoying myself as others bounded up the hills in front of me, chatting and laughing without whining for another rest. I was unfit, carrying more weight than I do now, and my unused muscles were in shock.

Today, things are different. Yesterday, I took my bike out and within minutes was heading uphill past a sign that said 17%. I focused on my breathing – a trick I learnt from meditation – dropped down to the lowest gear and told myself that as long as I made a good effort to get as far up the hill as I could then it would count as a reasonable first ride out. I could always cycle a little further the next time.

I had the rubber clips to put on my cycling shoes in the back pockets of my jersey for when I needed to walk. Yet I never needed to walk.

I kept climbing, went around the corner and glanced up and saw the top of the road. At the top I kept on cycling, turning left and heading further up. Up and up I climbed until eventually the road flattened out. I paused for a drink, for my banana and to look out over the stunning view across the valley which is now my home.

If you’d told me a few years ago my life would look like what it does now, I’d not have believed it was possible.

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By Catherine Oughtibridge
Exercise

As if I would really write a blog post about American football?

- 4 min

Grief / American FootballThe Midget and I watched a film on the subject of grief yesterday evening. It was about American football which is a sport where they use their hands.

I shan’t pretend to understand the sport, or my sister’s interest in it. But like Quidditch and the MotoGP it’s infiltrated my life. My limited interpretation tells me it’s not a game of half measures. The culture of American football appears to be all-or-nothing. You’re in or you’re out. The key succeeding appears to be making sure everyone knows what their role is and making them perfect that role.

I’d make a terrible American football player. It’s not just that I don’t want to dress up in pads and a helmet that smell of sweat and blood. And it isn’t that my two X chromosomes make me comparatively physically weak. I’m hopeless at the cheering and the jumping up and down, I’d be uncomfortable with the level of prescription, and I’d be a bore on the bus as I get travel sick and hardly know any lyrics suitable for a sing-along.

There is part of me which dearly believes that if I would just pay more attention to the music and follow the rhythm to which others seem to wave their arms, legs and life, I’d fit in better and things would be easier. Maybe I wouldn’t find myself in a different country to the people I love struggling for a sense of belonging with my dreams of the future turned up-side down. I know though, this is a lie. Every time I try to control the situation and make people happy I have the opposite effect. I’m not the sort of person who can sit on the sidelines. I’m going to fight to play the game by my rules. I always do.

Control, and believing you have it, are apparently vital to well-being according to my current psychology reading: Me, Myself and Us by Brian Little. I figure the sort of control you have matters. For me, it matters that I have control over how I spend my time. I dislike a sense of urgency and the pressure that goes with it. I dislike doing things just because someone else, some-when, thought it was a good idea. For some it’s control of knowing things are moving in the right direction. The bank balance is creeping up and the job title shifts a little every now and again to accommodate the inevitable and necessary change in time. Grief happens when something suddenly snatches way our sense of control.

In the first few minutes of the film, almost the entire American Football team was killed in an aeroplane crash. The story was how do you rebuild a team and community. The grief is overwhelming and yet the remnants of the team that remain keep pushing forward. Not smoothly, not elegantly, but with fits of anger and bursts of uncontrollable rage. Grief hurts. It is individual and incomprehensible. Success had to be redefined because you can’t win matches when you’ve lost your team. You can’t be strong without a solid foundation and the foundation – the talent, the coaches, the faith – had gone.

The Midget is on a winning streak. I can see it in her grin, in the twinkle in her eye and the tone of her enthusiasm for life. It delights me to see her so happy. I’m less stable. I’m haunted by grief so my successes need to be smaller. They include recognising my pain and voicing it. Accepting I’m never going to know the lyrics of the songs being played on the bus and that’s okay. Knowing I’m a thousand miles away and most often alone but that’s where I want to be. Trusting the love in my heart isn’t a bad thing sent to cause me trouble but is my greatest strength.

Bad days are those where I can’t see how my actions can resolve my problems. When someone dies, gets diagnosed with a terrible illness, hurt or betrays you, you inevitably feel helpless. As much as you say ‘this isn’t my fault’ or ‘I couldn’t have done anything’, you can’t actually change the situation. The only thing you can do is choose to respond to the situation with faith.

The college football team lost a lot of matches in the years following the plane crash. When you suffer a significant knock back you can’t just jump back on your feet. The rebuild is a long slog. The team though was rebuilt, and as the credits of the film rolled round, the later eventual successes (the putting the ball beyond the right line and the winning of shiny things) were recognised as the result of the long stint of grunt work.

[The film was ‘We are Marshall‘ and is based on a true story. Yes, there was a delay between writing and publishing.]

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By Catherine Oughtibridge
Groundwork

We need each other: asking for and receiving help

- 3 min
we need each other

“The bottom line is that we need each other. And not just the civilised, proper, convenient kind of need. Not one of us gets through this life without expressing desperate, messy, and uncivilised need. The kind we are reminded of when we come face-to-face with someone who is in deep struggle.

Dependence starts when we’re born and lasts until we die. We accept our dependence as babies, and ultimately, with varying levels of resistance, we accept help as we get to the end of our lives. But in the middle of our lives, we mistakenly fall prey to the myth that successful people are those who help rather than need, and broken people need rather than help.”

Brené Brown, Rising Strong

The magic of conversation

I’m tearing a croissant apart, getting the buttery grease on my fingers. Opposite me sits my sister. She’s sipping her coffee and contemplating my expression as she battles for emotional control in that careful processed way that adults do.

She’s younger than me by only two years which makes her most definitely an adult. Yet, sometimes I struggle to see her as grown-up: I chastise her for leaving a light on, for being absent-minded about sun-cream or for being oblivious to her surroundings. She gives me a reprimanding look as she silently switches the light off, a guilty grin when she gets burnt, and an expression that says ‘well what did you expect’ when I ask her which way to go. Other times I’m in awe of how fierce she is. It seems to me that she will fight for what she believes in, quietly and unassumingly, with the strength of a whole herd of rhinos.

Sometimes she stuns me with her wisdom and insight. I can unravel in front of her and she picks up the sprawled threads of my emotionally distraught story and patches them back together. She lays it out in front of me and navigates as I turn it over and spin it around to see who I am. She watches me cry with an intensity that normally leaves her with tears rolling down her cheeks.  When I feel as intact as my half-eaten croissant, she shows me how strong I am inside. And I believe her.

Leaning on each other though is something we’ve had to learn for ourselves. The emotional dependence has taken longer to  develop than the logistical. It’s taken a lot of time. Death helped, multiple times. Me screwing up badly with communicating about heartbreak helped. Fear of what will happen if we don’t talk created an urgency that can’t be ignored. But joy helped too.

We talked about talking. Or, more precisely, we talked about not talking. Not talking kills. I told her about how I feel, and how I’ve felt. She flared between anger, hurt and glee. We marvelled at the faults in the fundamental beliefs we have about each other. Before, we didn’t have the courage or maturity to be candid with each other without causing hurt. However, in the past few weeks, we have learnt that we have both been excruciatingly wrong in our assumptions. We redrew a map of our relationship and recognized a vast unexplained, unexplored territory.

It felt, to me, like playing a strategy game for hours and wondering how you can possibly succeed with only one gold mine. Just as you’re beginning to think you are totally incompetent and a failure as a human being, or that the game is botched, one little foot-soldier stumbles across a whole mountain of gold hidden along that dark, unexplored map edge. You feel like a fool, but suddenly know you have the resources necessary for success.

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By Catherine Oughtibridge
Groundwork

On making a decision that’s true to who I am

- 8 min

busy-bee

[Before you think, oh no, Catherine’s going crazy with the writing, remember that the writing is the evidence I’m not going crazy.]

I have made a decision, but still every now and again I find myself doubting it. I wonder at what it is I’m trying to achieve and what it is that is driving me. My motivations are probably not all good, and that there are probably some faulty goals hiding within the good intentions. That said, maybe I’m underestimating myself.

Option One

Option one is to make certainty. It’s to draw a line. It’s to say there’s no looking back. It’s time to move on. Turn my back and walk away.

In a way, being about certainty and control, this is the safest option. It’s a sharp pain but then without quite so many triggers of what has gone before, the healing becomes easier. It’s no longer taking a risk but taking a decisive course of action.

Some friends advise me along this route although they hide from acknowledging the true amount of sacrifice they would be forced to make because of my actions. Cutting myself free can’t be done in a half-hearted measure. If I wield the knife, I break their toys too.

This is not what I would naturally choose as I believe a stronger healing comes through talking and working though problems rather than avoiding them. I want to grow and learn, not keep repeating old mistakes. It kind of feels rash and desperate to me just to run away because you’re too much of a coward to hurt a bit. So far in this decision taking malarkey I’ve found that even though not running away leaves me open to occasionally tripping up, it’s given me the opportunity to learn to laugh at the situation. Nothing heals faster than laughter.

Option Two

Option two is to numb, everything. Option two is not really an option but the inevitable place you end up if you don’t make a choice. It’s a pit of misery and despair. I refuse to go there again.

Since I can find humour in the situation and can laugh at myself, there seems no risk I’m going to head down this path. There is no need to worry about my mental well-being.

Option Three

Option three is what I’ve been trying to do. It’s the choice to let go of any control. It’s to trust that I’m going to find my way back to my feet without trying to stand. It’s to watch the trigger being pulled, feel the emotion as it hits and then, with great difficulty put myself back in front of the gun and relax.

This sounds hard, but it’s just a matter of iteratively improving your self-awareness. Since I’ve taken control of my happiness, rather than put it in the hands of anyone else, I’ve found that the time it takes to get back on my feet has become shorter and shorter. This weekend for example, I was laughing at a situation within less than 24 hours that not so long ago would have left me miserable for weeks. Just 72 hours later and I’m wondering why I bothered being so upset about something that on the grand scale of things doesn’t really matter.

Acknowledgement

I have to be able to acknowledge what it is I feel and think. The two often contradict but that’s ok. There’s no theory of everything when it comes to what’s going on with me. I can’t be understood by a series of beautiful symmetrical equations. I’m the sum of a whole heap of irrational constants and unrelated variables.

The contradictions are the interesting points. My feelings come from fierce self-preservation, the claws-out catfight to avoid pain, the struggle to find comfort and my values being thrown into the arena.

My values set me apart from other people, but my values also include a heavy weight of caring what others think of me. Getting to the point where I’m not making my choices based on other people’s values, but instead on what I believe in, is taking considerable time and will probably be my version of Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill for eternity.

Improvements are however noticeable. I might feel a mess right now, but in action I am focused. It’s not like my last months at work where I didn’t want to get up in the morning. My experience of forgiveness has illustrated this, as does the fact that I wake eager to live the day ahead and make something happen.

Still though, feelings of shame exist because of my thoughts about other people’s expectations. Like everyone else, I want to be seen as strong and confident. Instead I am very much aware that when I’m exposing my fears, sobbing on the floor, reaching out to friends with a bouquet of pain that I look neither strong nor confident, despite genuinely believing I am both.

The problem comes with the contradiction between what we grow up thinking strong and confident looks like and what the courage that makes both illusions possible actually is like.

When I look at my life now, and compare it to my life of the past I see how much more courageous I have become. Not only have I opened up more in the last few months to some of the people I love most dearly, but I have also been to Egypt, refocused my life on my writing and what I want to do and be, lived abroad for a considerable amount of time and much more. But when I imagine what other people see, I think of the mess that I must appear to be.

Wider social expectations are problematic for me too. I’ve made considerable mistakes trying to fit inside boxes when what I want is freedom and my own independence. My perfect day of today is incredibly similar to my perfect day of ten years ago. The only difference being that now I’ve got more experience to flesh it out with. It’s taken that much time for me to realise that I don’t need a piece of paper that tells me I’m clever, to possess a few square metres of ‘my space’ or to please anyone just for the sake of their devotion. Such awareness helps me understand what really matters to me, and what is worth fighting for.

Acceptance

The ‘not good enough’ terror surfaces. Like a jack in a box, it catches me by surprise. You can sharply slam down the lid to make it go away, but it eventually it springs back up. Instead it can only be conquered by looking hard and realising it’s a doll on a spring. It’s not real. Such fears of not being ‘good enough’ are just fabrications too.

Everything is impermanent. Even in my long ago moment of blackness when I was incapable of seeing that any change could possibly happen, change found me.

At that time, I did not have the strength to wield a knife. But by not wielding the knife I accidentally saved a friendship. (I also caused damage to numerous others.) At that time, I didn’t have the choice, I was too cold and numb to react in any way but that which in the moment seemed to give the most instant protection. If it had been a friend’s life and I was sharing a thought out logical opinion, I would have said take the knife with two hands and save your imminent self from all the future pain.

Not everyone gets such an option. Often the knife is plunged in for them. The bonds are severed. The friendships are torn apart. Being given the choice as a blessing.

I have to accept reality. It won’t always be so painful, but right now it’s going to hurt from time to time. I think of it like holding your arm out for a blood test. Despite the prick of the needle, you know it’s in your best interest. My veins though are tricky things. If you look at my arms you can barely see them. The nurse removes the needle and says they’ve failed to get any blood. They need to try again but with the other arm. Acceptance is holding the other arm out too, even when you know what’s coming, and that they probably won’t get any blood from the other arm either.

The funny thing is that blood tests never hurt as much as you imagine they will.

I’m working on accepting the difference between what I want and what I have, or what I think I should do and what I am doing. I also have to accept that other people are different and that I do not understand them, must not judge them and must not draw them any boxes. It’s letting go of trying to control others or myself.

I must move forward without wearing a mask.

Faith

Reading Erich Fromm’s Art of Loving I initially thought that what I was absorbing from the book was a lesson that love is a combination of ‘care, respect, responsibility and knowledge’. He describes love as ‘the active concern for the life and growth of that which we love’. Such a definition certainly helps me widen my understanding of love. It adds to my understanding from The Road Less Travelled by M. Scott Peck where love is described as the allocation of importance. To clarify here, I’m talking of love as that which I feel for all those people I can deeply about, not the lusty or romantic love of infatuation.

And then, in Fromm’s book, I came across a paragraph that struck me hard.

“To have faith requires courage, the ability to take a risk, the readiness even to accept pain and disappointment. Whoever insists on safety and security as primary conditions of life cannot have faith; whoever shuts himself off in a system of defence, where distance and possession are his means of security, makes himself a prisoner. To be loved, and to love, need courage, the courage to judge certain values as of ultimate concern – and to take the jump and stake everything on these values.”

Faith is important. It’s an action not just a state of being. It’s not a blind hope for a fantasy outcome it’s a belief that it’s worth it to love all those people you care for. This faith is an awareness that things are changing, and that if I keep my heart open for long enough, continue even though I might be played like a fool, keep breathing steadily through the pain, then the friendships I cherish more than anything else in the world, will not only remain intact, but will grow stronger.

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By Catherine Oughtibridge
Groundwork

On handling excessive emotion

- 6 min
hovel-forest

I’m intensely emotional. It’s the driving force behind my writing and my art and my love of people. That I feel so much defines me, but also causes me great strife.

Unlike a young child, as adults we’re expected to avoid expressing our emotions in their raw and unfiltered format. I can’t sit down in the street and throw a tantrum, I can’t cry when my ice lolly falls on the floor and I can’t just stamp my foot and shout if I’m asked to lay the table. Rapunzel says this is probably for the best as us adults don’t repair as well as children do.

Instead, as a sensible adult I have to find something else I can do with my emotion. A typical response is to numb. I do this with a cup of tea or a piece of cake for the immediate temporary emotions. I use travel and change to numb the fear of not belonging. I use being busy as a way to numb the fears of not being productive or having some great lack of achievements.

Alcohol, drugs, exercise, smoking, food, social media etc. All these things can be used as numbing agents. There are many more. Everyone has their own selection which they fall back on to make the pain a little less invasive.

Numbing though makes you boring. Passion, love and excitement dissipate when you numb. It’s harder to be joyous, to break into song or skip in the street. Certainly when I unchain a numbing practice from my life, let loose the tears and remember to laugh despite it all, I’m more likely to turn away from thinking ‘me, me, me’ and recognize that I’m not actually alone at all.

I can’t allow my emotions to make me too impulsive either. I can’t just snatch what I want without regard for what other people feel. If used right then emotions give me a way into empathy. I can harness my imagination to construct someone else’s shoes and feel my way into my best guess of their life without assuming that I understand them at all.

There are times though that you can’t afford to be your current overriding emotion. Yesterday, I really wanted to cry, but instead I needed to play the role of the dragon in the legend of Sant Jordi (Saint George). This involved being stabbed to death with a sword (child’s recorder) by the gallant Sant Jordi (small girl) riding his noble steed (rocking horse). I roared in pain, writhed in agony and rolled over dead to the sound of giggling.

Somehow, in such moments, you have to hold everything together. Knowing one’s life is falling apart, but postponing the reaction.

Bottling up emotions though isn’t the answer either. If things seem so bad you can’t talk about them, you’ve probably bottled up your self-worth and left an empty gaping hole of shame in its place. If you want to make a quick impact on your well-being, then take one of these things that you don’t want to talk about and share it with someone.

I’m prone to bottling things up. I can feel the father nodding as he reads this. It’s a natural instinct to hide everything to myself, but such actions I know eventually causes me greater pain. My technique to solve this is to tell a couple of friends at the point when I recognize that I’m hurting. Not necessarily to tell them details or try and reason out the situation, but to say, I’m hurting, I might need to talk later, will you be around. Are you willing to listen?

I schedule Skype calls or people to visit in that initial blow when I’m still in shock. I know that later I’ll need someone to be accountable to, someone who asks, ‘so how are you doing’ and most people are too polite to delve past my weak smile saying I’m fine.

There are people who are better at sharing things than others. This morning I heard a deeply personal story. It was one that is probably hard to tell, for the characters of the story are still being analysed. It’s a fountain of uncertainty that sends attacks of doubt and confusion. Another person might have struggled with the content, but the teller spoke out boldly and courageously.

It inspired me to tell a tale of my own, through some tears. Both of us felt a little less alone afterwards, and both of us were enriched by another perspective.

I cried. Feeling comfortable to cry to this friend means a lot. I can’t just cry to anyone.

Sadly, not everyone sees crying as healthy and normal. A certain person, whom I love very very much, but who sometimes lacks some emotional vocabulary, once told me quite insistently, “Stop with that crying.” What she meant was ‘Catherine, you need to broaden your perspective’. I needed her to understand that I wasn’t crying at the trigger but at the bigger picture, and she didn’t. Sadly I wasn’t capable of articulating myself. She walked out the room. I kept sobbing, now even more uncontrollably than before. I remember that incident very clearly. It was about football.

Tears are a common part of my emotional vocabulary. If I’m crying I’m probably being extremely honest about what I think I feel. I’m also unlikely to be making any sense. At such points I am not a reliable narrator of my own state of mine. I’m seeing it at its very worse and being overwhelmed by feeling too much all at once. The emotions are often conflicting. I lose all rationality and become fixated on whatever it is that I see as the magical antidote to my pain.

After the football crying incident, I barely ever cried. Then I had my heartbroken and I barely ever wasn’t crying. Then I pulled myself together. Life went on. Tears were intermittent. Now my life’s in a pickle again. Things are a bit rough and tears come whenever I have to confront certain realities I don’t wish to. I no longer cry alone. I no longer judge myself for crying either. Or anyone else.

Sobs happen, but they don’t suffice for most of my emotional struggles. To survive on the battlefield of my emotions involves talking, writing and art. To succeed and be happy I find takes doses of meditation, regular exercise, eating sensibly and talking about war wounds and battle scars much more often than most people seem comfortable with.

It’s taken me some time to realize that this is me. All these strategies are what I need, but it isn’t necessarily what other people need. Why I am charged with so much emotion I have no idea. It’s an unbeatable force. I do what I want when I want to because fighting against such an energy is exhausting. I write prolifically when I’m driven by emotion. And, I make crazy pieces of art at one in the morning when I am caught in something I just cannot not be.

Other people put much more weight on rationality and predicting results. Dreading the worst they fear to trust. There are choices made and decisions taken. Sometimes I wish I could take the reins in this way. Then I see the outcomes of such control and I wonder if maybe that’s not what I’d want at all. It would be being someone I’m not.

If I stopped spiralling out of control whenever I was hurt, sobbing and talking for hours, often repeating myself over and over again, writing rants and essays to try and get an empathic response, filling diaries, painting with my hands whilst seated on the floor, I wouldn’t be being me. It might be ugly, but this mess is me.

So is the melodramatic dragon slayed by Sant Jordi with a recorder.

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By Catherine Oughtibridge
Groundwork

The Myth of the Awkward Silence

3 min

From time to time, conversations land in one of two disaster zones. Everyone tries to speak at once or nobody says anything at all.

When either of these things happen, I find myself thinking about the art of conversation itself, and wondering why it’s gone wrong. As an attitude to have, this isn’t helpful. I realised (whilst supposedly meditating) that such analysis actually is a hindrance and becomes a barrier to actually having the conversation.

Too many voices

Sometimes there’s a rush, and everyone wants to speak at once.  Everyone has so many ideas and thoughts and corrections to add to the conversation. When I’m thinking about what you’re going to say it’s easy to lose awareness of the cadence of conversation and forget to observe the people around you enough to know who else is about to leap in on the same beat. Of course, it doesn’t really matter. I laugh, say go on’, or ‘you first’ and the conversation continues. The thought that I ought to be more aware is a negligible worry that dissipates with my fascination of what comes next.

When nobody speaks

Then, there are those other times when nobody speaks. A natural lull falls in conversation. One pattern ends and the next hasn’t yet begun.

There’s a slim line between ‘awkward silence’ and a comfortable pause. What’s more, the same pause in conversation can be both at the same time, but to different people. Once you analyse the situation and define it as awkward, you feel awkward and it becomes so. Anything that’s subsequently said feels desperate, difficult and unnatural.

Why conversation fails

Often, I feel like the sacrificial lamb that says something to make a fool of itself in order to end the forbidding silence. It can be easier to witter onwards than go back and look at why such feelings of awkwardness are happening.

Most often, it’s a case of being more concerned with how I’m interpreted by my companions than with what my companions actually have to say. With all the Buddhist teaching I’ve had recently I can’t help thinking ego, ego, ego. More people leads to more people to impress which results in more overwhelm and an overload of gobble-de-gook or conversationalist’s block.

No wonder I often find strangers, whose judgement I don’t fear, easier to talk to than my loved ones.

Other times an awkward silence happens because the conversation is edging too close to something I don’t want to talk about. Maybe something that I feel uncertain about, or that I’m acutely aware than I have no idea how to express in a manner that’s not going to get me labelled as crazy or will just end up leading to more awkward questions.

And sometimes it’s not knowing what to ask or say because I feel I should already know the answers, or because I’m worried it’s a question or a topic that’s boring or uncomfortable for my companions. Just because I want to talk, doesn’t mean the person I’m facing wants to hear about that particular whim at the forefront of my mind.

Mostly though, if I’m honest, it’s just me trying to protect my ego. I don’t want to take a risk that I’ll say something stupid, irrelevant or boring that is going to make my friends think less of me. And by doing so, by having such inhibitions, I’m selling myself short. I’m not speaking when I should and I’m latching onto irrelevant conversation topics just for something to say.

I feel awkward, and therefore interpret the conversation flow as awkward, when I put self-preservation above learning from the people I’m with.

To me, this is a profound and useful thought to acknowledge.

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By Catherine Oughtibridge