And we’re here — Day 21 of my 21 Days of Courage and time for reflection…
I didn’t have an end goal in sight when I started out on this intensive — and intense — journey into some of the farther reaches of myself.
All I wanted was to arrive here — on the last day — having ticked the boxes the full 21 times and to have not gone off-piste too often.
There have been a couple of ‘this is way too difficult — why am I even bothering?’ days, and a few times when Megan Macedo’s prompts began backing up: just by postponing one assignment you can quickly face overwhelm as Day 1 gets subsumed by Day 2 while Day 3 is already in the wings.
Thankfully, we had weekends off over the four and a bit weeks of the challenge to catch up, and here I am. Job done. All present and correct and in the right order. I’m feeling relieved, of course, but also a little chuffed with myself because this really isn’t easy, even for someone used to writing against tight deadlines.
But here’s the key question: have I actually chiselled out anything about myself I didn’t already know? Specifically, anything that centres around my capacity for courage?
The most interesting revelation came, I think, from exploring the themes in my penultimate post, when I realised for the first time that I may well have been something of an outsider all my life and as an adult kept moving from home to home to normalise that — or even, possibly, to justify that.
I’ve never seen myself in quite this light before, but actually it makes sense: as an only child, you’re already a bit of an outsider because you can’t share in the much more common experience of growing up with siblings. So I didn’t understand what was going on between my friends and their brothers and sisters, and they equally had no real clue what my life was like as the sole focus of parental attention.
And because my parents did tend to treat me as a mini-adult a lot of the time and there was so little socialising, I now wonder whether what probably manifested as a degree of precociousness on my part didn’t further amplify the gap between me and my peers during my most formative years.
Moving on, I once again positioned myself on the edge of my peer group by confounding everyone’s expectations and dropping out of school at 17 rather than going to university. My friends all went in one direction, I went in quite another.
The circle remained unbroken for a while, but I do recall sometimes feeling like I was the grown-up now, while they were still some considerable way off. I saw the world through one lens, they saw it through another. Pretty classic outsider stuff, now I come to revisit this.
And then came the moving from home to home and never being quite able to shake off the mantle of outsider — or incomer, to be more accurate — no matter how much I tried. And I certainly did my bit wherever I went, taking in assorted clubs, groups, and associations, as well as doing all the usual child-focused stuff like dancing classes, sports clubs, Brownies, and joining the junior PTA and senior parent council.
If I’m honest, I never really minded being the actual odd one out — the soft southerner in Derbyshire and the weird English veggie in Aberdeenshire — as that’s exactly what I was. From somewhere else, short on a raft of shared experiences, and unwilling to compromise on core principles just to ‘fit in’.
I may even have been known to have worn that mantle with conscious pride at times, which probably caused my daughter no end of embarrassment, angst, and possibly a bit of outsider labelling by association. I can only hope it isn’t the source of any deep and lasting resentment, but that’s for her to say.
All I can say is that unearthing bits about ourselves in this way is like peeling an onion — you rarely get close to the heart of the matter in one go. So as I end this challenge I come away with deeper insight into the contexts where I do display courage and those where I maybe do not.
But I am aware I’ve only gone down another couple of layers and that means I may be driven to do this all over again…
Image: Umberto Shaw, pexels.com
My thanks to Megan Macedo for coming up with the devilishly clever prompts which underpin each day’s writing, and for creating such a fine group of talented, funny, and hugely honest fellow writers.
Thanks – I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading as you peeled off the layers…
Thank you for all of your posts Eugenie and trusting us with each of your onion layers. They have been so insightful, poignant, humorous, and thought-provoking, quite apart from being beautifully written and genuinely interesting. I hope you keep writing and sharing, albeit without the pressure and expectation this challenge has provided! Thank you for showing us so many ways in which courage is part of our make-up….
The onion doesn’t work, for me, because the point of the concept is that when all the layers are peeled there is nothing
Yes, we can discover who and why we are. We can also decide this but tbut the decision needs to be authentic. We do indeed make all sorts of assumptions about ourselves, usually unconsciously, and often wrongly, Hence your challenge, and congratulations.
One reason to be more conscious about ourselves, is that this releases energy. If we think we are other than what we really are or really choose to be, we will be in an energy sink – a vortex. If we go with our flow we will be within an upward spiral, energetic, empowered
Continue on your journey. You have much more to discover and to choose. We all have.
Love always Geoffrey
Thank you all. for your support and feedback — as I’ve said, it helps a lot to know someone’s actually not only reading but considering what you’ve written. Promise I won’t disappear down another existential black hole — at least, not for a bit… 🙂