Witching hour symphony
First movement: allegro
I woke at around 3am this morning and waited. I’m getting kind of used to this now. When I wake in the witching hour (and I use the term deliberately), absent any alcohol the night before, it’s because I have some work to do.
It’s a peculiar feeling, to wake to this particular kind of energy swirling around. A strange mix of dramatic and, well, sleepy. The image that comes to mind is of James Herriot (a country vet in the Yorkshire Dales in the 30s, and a writer) being woken in his warm bed by the jangling telephone bringing news of some situation requiring his immediate attention. That’s how it feels to me. I wake because a call has come through.
I’m grateful I don’t have to get up and drive miles through the snow to attend to it. I just have to wait.
Second movement: andante
I let my thoughts roam and realised that I was, not for the first time, gently fretting about a mistake I felt I had made, or, rather, that I had been involved in, earlier this year. An important mistake, or rather a series of mistakes over six months or more, a whole mistaken course of action, in fact. Not obviously problematic at the time but fundamentally, terribly, cosmically wrong in retrospect – with consequences for me that I was searching for a way to undo.
At around 3.45am I briefly got on my knees and prayed for guidance, and oh my goodness, the answer came so readily: The universe doesn’t make mistakes. Spirit doesn’t make mistakes. The Divine Mother doesn’t make mistakes! And I am of them and they are of me - I am their expression, I am not a being separate from them, I cannot “fuck up” in a way that they did not envisage or intend. The different reality I was fretting after was never meant to be mine. The one that is meant to be mine, is mine.
I lay with that for a while and let myself feel the comfort and pain and humility of it. I still wanted the different reality, but I no longer felt like I’d stolen it from myself. That new understanding softened something in me I didn’t even realise I’d been hitting myself with.
I expected to fall back asleep then, but a short while later I felt a shift in the energy - I was going to say “in my energy” but I am not sure it was mine - and I got up to write.
Third movement: Minuet
I turned my focus to my relationship to femininity. I’ve written about this before recently, and it came up again right after my last somatic bodywork session so I made a resolve to focus on it at the next one, later this week.
Then a couple of days ago a friend sent me a song that included an image of a girl sitting on her boyfriend’s shoulders at a music festival, and that brought it up for me really intensely. Oh how I longed to be one of those festival girls, of the right height and build and energy to be romantically possible to a man, holding magical feminine power in my cuteness and fragility and whimsy.
And oh how I longed not to be me, trapped forever in this too-big body and this too-strong mind, this dull, isolating, commonsensical capable-ness.
The story I told myself hurt, like really hurt, and I made a mental note to return to and unravel it when I felt stronger. Or, alternatively, when the universe decided I should, which apparently is at 5am on a Tuesday morning.
When my brain is telling me mean stories like this, I go looking for the fear. What is it trying to protect me from? What belief does it have that explains why it thinks this story is helpful for me? My brain knows I can’t make myself any shorter, ffs - what’s the point of making me feel insecure about it?
Love is the antidote to fear, and I have so much abundant love. If I can find the fear inside myself, I know I can love it away.
So I talked to my inner children, writing as I went. I worked back through my life stages, checked in with myself at different times and places in my past. Nothing spoke to me.
But when I wrote the sentence, “Is it that my brain thinks if I am robust in my self-esteem then I will not find someone?”, bingo. it was like an arrow to the heart and I started crying.
Fourth movement: Finale
It took a bit of iteration and exploration and focusing, but I got there in the end. And as so often with this work, it’s just a deeper layer of what I already knew.
The “belief” I landed (and obviously these are subconscious, in-the-body beliefs rather than propositions to which I am intellectually committed) was this: If I am robust in my self-esteem, confident and strong, honest with myself about my power, unwilling to compromise on what I want and deserve, unwilling to feel inadequate or like I have to work for affection – then I will always be alone. Because when it comes down to it, I’m not actually loveable to men. If I want a partner, I'll have to treat myself like I'm not worth much.
So, the story in my subconscious goes, I have to make a choice: Do I want to love myself, or do I want to be loved by a man? One or the other. I have to choose.
I tell ya, if you have a big capacity for romantic love, and you hold that belief inside you? You’re gonna be getting in your own way a lot.
So I’d like not to have it anymore. If it comes from inside me, from someone who dwells within me and is trying to protect me, then I want to find her and LOVE HER SO HARD that I can soothe her and reassure her out of her fears, and she will agree to step aside and let me do my thing. I've done a lot of IFS work like this and found it really effective.
But I'm also making space for the awareness that maybe - just maybe - it isn’t a part of myself at all. Maybe it’s cultural trash, jetsam, malign and parasitic demons squatting in my subconscious who cannot be loved out of their fears because love cannot touch them. Maybe they tell me mean things not in order to protect me, but because tearing me down feeds their power. Beings like this have looked out at me through my brother’s eyes all my life, and hated and envied what they have seen. Maybe their echoes live in me.
If so, then my message to them is this: You are wasting your time. I think you are mistaken in what you tell me. I don’t think I have to choose between loving myself and being loved by a romantic partner. But let’s not argue about it, because even if you’re right, I still choose me.
Even if you’re right, I still choose me. I choose me and the universe.