Can you save yourself?
Seriously..... enough is enough
Quick note before the main post…..I’ve launched a new group coaching adventure, Be Brilliantly YOU - Living a Better, Bolder, Brighter life. It starts on the 12th February for 12 weeks… all the details are below.
How often do you abandon yourself?
As I explained last week, I’m writing weekly on where YOU define what enough is, thank you very much.
Because this is the year you say, enough is enough.
A year where you stop trying to be enough for the never-enoughers (those vague external controllers of our lives that dictate how skinny or curvy our arse should be, how aged we are ‘allowed’ to look, what clothes we can wear after a ‘certain’ age, how much of our life blood and emotional energy is given to others to be considered a Good Girl, what a good mother is, what a good wife is, how clean and tidy our house is despite us not being the ones to make the mess, how loud we can be, how sexual we can be, how selfless we should be and how selfish we cannot be).
It’s exhausting, pointless and disempowering, and frankly, we’ve had enough.
None of that mind-fuckery is real. It’s fast changing fashion. It’s outdated patriarchal bullshit. It’s social media mockery. It’s stick after stick after stick to beat yourself with. Sticks to beat YOURSELF with, despite there being plenty of pressure thwacking you already.
Pressure because women grabbed these new opportunities and possibilities that feminism brought us, and we fell over ourselves finally able to learn, work, expand and explore. But we did it before “society” reassessed what it would take to give everyone these opportunities equally, and provide the right supports and create the right balance of workload in homes.
That means amid the amazing possibilities, the immense pressures mean women are crushed in the stress sandwich of work and personal ambition AND carrying the excessive load for childcare, parent care, home care, house work, ageing in an age of anti-ageing propaganda and still being told who and how to be.
So, enough is enough.
Abandoned v abandon
I have a coaching client, let’s call her Amy. She’s 51 and exhausted from caring for everyone. She supported her husband’s career by shoving her own ambitions down, devoting her energy to caring for him, the four kids, the home and her extended family. As she is quick to point out, she feels very lucky. She has a good life. But……and this is a direct quote from our session last week:
“Because of all the output of caring, there is so much of my life for myself that I’ve failed. I haven’t done enough. I look around at everyone living their lives to their fullest potential - because of me - and I have this gaping hole where I want to feel more whole and reach my potential. I haven’t done enough.”
Having spent years, if not decades, striving to be enough for everyone else, she realises she hasn’t been enough to herself.
Hands up who feels the same way sometimes? All the time?
“I haven’t done enough.” She means for herself. She’s done way more than enough for others but now she’s in a place where the energy she has given to everyone else, needs to be directed somewhere else. She is working with me because she needs a new purpose, a new direction, and what she is realising, is a new way to invest in herself.
It’s only two weeks into the new year and I’m already exhausted. I loved Christmas having all my extended family stay for 4 days but the workload was immense, along with the general Christmas chaos of decorating, present-buying, mental-maths on who needs what and how to get it and how much.
So I knew exactly what Amy meant when she said she had stood in Supervalu doing the Christmas food shop and thought she might kill someone. Her husband (not a bad man at all) had texted her to say he was going for a couple of pints. She told me the wave of anger rose up in her so fast she thought she might spontaneous combust right there in the frozen aisle.
The panic, the pressure, the constant processing of thoughts and actions that needed done was overwhelming, while everyone else gets on with their lives. I know that feeling. So many women know that feeling.
And so I asked if what was really happening in that moment, wasn’t anger at the people, but a reaction to the pressure. (Anger is a secondary emotion. It is a result of a primary emotion.
I suspected it had nothing really at all to do with her husband going for pints. He’d be cooking later and “helped” her as much as he could (don’t you love that language, that somehow men are “great!!!” when they “help” but it’s really always the woman’s responsibility? Anyway that’s a different post for a different day).
And I suggested was it actually because she felt abandoned?
Her lovely face just jolted in shock. “That’s exactly the feeling!”
It’s a deep wound. Many women feel abandoned because we had to shape shift into a version of the God Girl very early on in life, abandoning a sense of who we really were. We can feel abandoned because we are relied upon, often at our own expense. We may also have felt it in our family growing up, but very much in society. As I wrote last week, we feel abandoned if we don’t see ourselves represented, if we don’t feel supported, if “women’s issues’ are lesser.
Women are abandoned all the time. Let’s look at menopause… half the population go through it yet no GP’s are trained in it and research into has been woeful. That’s abandonment.
Sexual, physical and verbal violence against women is a heavy cloud that casts a shadow over us all still. That’s abandonment.
No proper child supports, care, and equality in the workplace and home feels like abandonment.
The pay gaps, the pensions gaps, the orgasm gaps. All abandonment.
And the worst form of abandonment is the type we do to ourselves. We were taught to do it but now we must stop. Enough is enough.
That’s what trying to be enough for everyone does. It makes us abandon ourselves because there isn’t enough left.
So I asked her to add a word to that sentence “I haven’t done enough.”
The word is yet.
This is her time. This is time for her to design the measure for enoughness herself - how much care is enough? How much sacrifice is enough? How much energy will she decide is enough to output to others so there is enough left for her?
And so the first step of not abandoning ourselves is to flip it on its head.
The word abandon means desertion but also......... to be carefree, to be free from constraint. To live in wild abandon. The opposite of abandonment is support.
So every time you abandon yourself because you are striving to figure out what enough is for the never enoughers, flip it. “How can I free myself of the constraints?” Who are you trying to please? What measure are you using for how much you give and do?
Let’s go back to Amy, defeated by the horror of the Christmas food shop in Supervalu, fuming in the freezer aisle. Standing there, feeling abandoned by everyone she has invested in.
She told me she’d been standing there saying “What’s wrong with me?” in her head.
That’s the language of self-abandonment.
A question of wild abandon (being free of constraints) is not to ask “What is wrong with me?” but “what is wrong with this situation?”
Separating self from situation. That is always the first act of self-support.
Situation: Christmas can be a relentlessly hard situation, amid the merriment. The Christmas food shop is particularly hard. It’s brutal and I can’t imagine a person alive enjoys it.
Self: I am doing a hard thing.
So don’t abandon yourself there. Support yourself. Remember my mantra of thriving - when life (this moment, this experience, this challenge) feel hard, it’s usually because it IS hard, so the question of wild abandon, the act of defining enough, is now that you understand the situation is hard, ask yourself, “what do I need to support myself through it?”
Women know how to be kind, caring, supportive people. We just don’t do it enough for ourselves because we are constrained by the never enoughness of being all things to all people.
So what would you say / do if this was someone you loved?
You’d maybe say, this is a tough hour. You can do this but then give yourself a big treat afterwards and ask for as much help as possible.
That’s the question of abandon over abandonment: How can I make it easier and how can I support myself through it?
That could look like some, or all of the following:
Put on a favourite podcast or music that will make you feel alive, or held or amused or loved while you do the hideous shop.
Coach yourself by taking a deep breath and saying “I can do hard things because I’m a fucking legend who has done many hard things, but that at the end of this hour I will treat myself to something / a rest / a breather.”
Make sure everyone is ready at home to unpack - those who don’t do all the washing up.
Know that this will be over soon and that if something is missing NO ONE WILL DIE. Because whatever you do, it’ll be enough.
Because you are defining the measuring stick of enoughness. This is your time. Enough is enough.
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AND I am thrilled to be launching my new group coaching adventure starting on the 12th February for 12 weeks. Be Brilliantly YOU - Living a Better, Bolder, Brighter Life is for you if you are constantly saying “there has to be another way?!” I want you to know, there is.
You CAN have more fairness, balance and beauty in your life - to really live the vibrant life you want. You’ll be part of a small cohort of women, who while all have their own unique story, will also know how it feels to want to manage better, choose boundaries and live bolder days, and feel brighter amid the merry mayhem. I’ll take you all on a 12 week adventure where you will learn practical and powerful life-long tools, habits and empowering thinking. All the details are here. As always my paid subscribers get a 10% discount - just email me at alana@alanakirk.com.
And until the end of January, you can book my New Year Special Breakthrough 2025 - Your Year to Thrive. It’s a package of two empower hour coaching sessions plus a copy of my book Midlife, redefined: Better, Bolder, Brighter for just €250. (Normally one breakthrough Clarity Coaching session is €150). If you’re feeling stuck, need a change or want to get a grip on your life, this will give you the space, guidance and focus to make sure next year is YOUR year. As always, my paid subscribers get a 10% discount.. just email me at alana@alanakirk.com.
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