Gradually expanding your comfort zone

The secret to building confidence is to repeatedly take action that gradually expands your comfort zone. Over time, your nerves settle and feelings of self-confidence develop.
That is what it says here!

Awakening

I find it hard to settle on one particular metaphor to describe the process of awakening I have undergone since January, and continue to undergo as I transition (I think!) to a purposeful life. Even "awakening" is of course a metaphor -- an accurate but vague one, with many more colourful cousins. In the early days and weeks, when the fog had first lifted, I likened the feeling to rapture, and somewhat cheekily and rather crudely explained that it felt like I had unknowingly been walking around most of my life with my head up my ass. Such a posture would of course cultivate a sort of ignorance which would be invisible to the subject, until such time as he, as did I, manages to remove his head from the comforts of its prison and lifts it up to survey the view above the grass and take in the new, wider context. In some ways it is not so much a graduation from a pointless to a purposeful life, as it is an expansion of horizons, and of capacity, allowing a starved purpose finally to grow. In other words, ignorant life was not purposeless, it was simply governed by a purpose whose scope was in fact well-suited to the restricted perspective.

And peeking above the grass is really just the first glimpse of the bigger world out there. Even from way down here I can see that there are a whole series of higher perches with even broader perspectives up there from which to view the world around me. The sky's the limit!

External validation vs. self-validation

When things went south for me and S., we tried to get help. We asked my (now our) GP and it turned out his office mate did couples therapy so we went to see him a few times, maybe four times in total. Her biggest beef as told to him was that I did not know when to leave her alone, that she was prone to being overwhelmed by her own internal emotional tsunamis, and that I needed to learn to just get out of the way and let it pass. My biggest beef with her was that I was hurt by her capricious behaviour, I saw it as disrespectful and could not understand why she thought it was acceptable to treat me the way she did.
When we first started dating, when I was still walking on air, she really did behave like someone who genuinely cared about me. But the shine quickly wore off, and we entered a co-dependency spiral. I fell into the worst kind of validation trap, increasingly desperately seeking (and being denied) external validation from what ought to have obviously been such an unlikely, dysfunctional source. What I did not realise then was that my dependency on external validation is inherently destructive, and no amount of approval from S. would ever have been enough for me anyway. I have to learn to self-validate.

Brick Therapy

I am very fortunate to have my sister K. during times in my life when I am struggling. Not only is she an inspirational role model for me, but she is also a valuable advisor with keen insight. She has long been my one of my closest confidantes, and my only confidante in my family really. She is very charitable with her time when I need her, despite being the focal point of a busy family of her own, and regardless of how monotonous my lunacy must seem at times. Her attitude is very down-to-earth towards most situations, and she has little trouble seeing and cutting through crap to get to the heart of most things. Her advice to me thus tends to be of the "give your head a shake" variety. One of the things she has recommended for me several times in our recent conversations has been something she calls Brick Therapy. Curious enough about what that might entail, I googled it and indeed it looks intriguing from what I can understand. Even if I never have to resort to such radical therapy, it is reassuring to know there are always a few more arrows in the quiver.

Crowded

Yesterday was the national holiday, and I went with my friends PM and SC to a huge concert to see a big band at a former air base at the edge of the city. It was a whole-day holiday affair, being a Friday, and we did it up nicely with beers and an all-afternoon barbequeue on PM's deck before jumping on the subway and heading up to the show. And it was chaos by the time we got there -- we got split up when we exited the subway and headed for the shuttle buses, which were packed to the roof like everything else but which nonetheless got us to the show. Once we got there we were tied down in the beer lineups, waiting for the main act to come on, which they eventually did, and eventually SC and I were able to worm our way up to the absolute front of the crowd where we partied like we had no idea because essentially we had no idea.
It was probably the largest crowd I have ever been in, and an homogeneous one at that composed almost entirely of 20something working class and small town hosers. I was overcome by a similar feeling as had almost felled me the previous evening of being an ill-fitting outsider with no connection to the group, even though the group was so different. It is as if no matter the nature of the group, I want to belong, and I do not fit in.

Branding, part I: Future Ghosts

I mentioned that my friend LB, who coördinated the renovation and staging of my house for the sale, had started a couple of businesses -- in fact each time I see her she seems to have branched out into something new. When we first met she was beginning the home staging but by the time we reconnected in the spring and I hired her to stage the house, she had launched her "personal branding" business. I am possibly more of a candidate for a "life coach" than a brand consultant, but close enough, and her track record was unassailable, so once the dust had settled from the sale, both in my house and in my head, and I felt like I was ready for the next step, I asked her what she thought she could do for me. She arranged for me to meet her last Thursday for a drink after work at a fancy, members-only club in a trendy part of town near her apartment.

I arrived early, in my new suit, chosen by P. and test-driven a few weeks previously at the national policy convention, and found myself nervously and self-consciously nursing a pint and waiting for her on the sunny rooftop patio, feeling for all the world like the ultimate outsider among a tightly-knit clique. But before I could twist such superficial alienation into full-blown loners, LB arrived and I was back at ease, safe in the warm envelope of our the profound connection I find I share with her.

And with that simple blueprint unfolded a delicious and unforgettable evening, all within the tiny radius of a few hundred square metres, as we carved a path from roof, to patio, to bar, and briefly to her apartment, riding the intoxicating highs of her unarrestable and almost unlimited ambition for herself, and her genuine, infectious enthusiasm for me and my incredible potential. She laid bare for me the absurdity of my insecurity considering my advantages and my talents, and made such a simple, indisputable case for recognising that my only obstacle is myself. At one point she led me on a Dickensian tour of the ghosts of my past, present, and future, whereupon she walked me around the bar and contrasted me with the local barflies, whose refinement compared extremely unfavourably with mine, but whose confidence and thus track record nonetheless dwarfed mine. I was close, she took me right to the edge of the water and I could see the entire picture, but I was still frozen on the shore, on the sidelines.