2012
You can’t be a nurse anymore Mikey your brain injury was too severe’ the nurse said.
‘Yes I can just watch me!’ I said.
2024
Looking back on my conversation with nurse Ratchett was humbling. After all, she had been right. I wasn’t able to work as a nurse. But me being as stubborn as an ox, I’d spent the next 8 years in intense suffering before I was able to accept that.
I wanted to be a nurse because connecting with people through kindness and compassion gave me a true sense of home. It felt like home because kindness and love feel like core qualities for me.
To make up for losing touch with these qualities in myself, I’ve been on a few wild goose hunts over the years;
Alcohol binges
Drug taking
Obsessing over my appearance
Portraying myself to be someone really special and admirable
Becoming enlightened
..to name a few.
Some of this was great fun. But I kept coming up against an undeniable spanner in the works..
Whenever something in life would happen to me that was not in support of being special, enlightened, seen as attractive or muscular enough, I would use up all my resources to resist it and become miserable again
Even an idea or thought I’d have about myself that didn’t align with what I wanted, like ‘you’re not that muscly now’ or ‘that behaviour wasn’t very enlightened’, I would go into full on depression and meltdown mode.
I would resist the thoughts because they didn’t match up to the idea I wanted to believe about myself. And I’d spend years fixing the criticisms of my mind so I could live up to whatever version of myself I wanted to portray to the world.
So what is the answer?
There is no answer. Do what you want. Enjoy your life or don’t, neither really matters.
But guess what?
I’ve realised that nothing in life needs to change in order to find happiness, or contentment. Now thats the ultimate spanner to my obsession to be different to how I am.
It’s the resistance to what is that creates discord. My ideas on how life should be is what was covering the contentment and peace that is already here.
Seeing life as it is Iove.
And everybody has access to this.
Don’t think you can get your head around loving life as it is?
Then love the fact you cant love life as it is.
Don’t think you can love the fact you can’t love life as it is?
Then love the one who is not able to love life as it is.
Are you starting to see the simplicity of this? Nothing needs to be excluded. Simply choose to love to the best of your ability, as much as you can.
Try this on
The next time you think something about yourself needs to change, try loving it instead of resisting it.
If you cant love it, love yourself for not being able to love it.
If you find yourself still resisting it, love the one who is resisting it.
When we choose to love instead of resist, our mood changes, different neuro-chemicals and hormones are released and we relate to the world around us and ourselves In a different way.
It is pretty normal to choose a stress response over a more relaxed response for most of us.
But going into our old patterns of needing to change ourselves actually does the opposite. Our bodies go into a fight or flight response because we are literally trying to kill of a part of ourselves by wanting it to change.
We reject it. Ignore it. Try to destroy it.
That takes a lot of energy. This blog is the lazy way to accept your life as it is.
If these practices feel strained and aren’t effortless, we’ve lost touch with ourselves.
That’s all well and good, but I can’t love this about myself I need to fix it first, and then ill love it! If I love it how will it be resolved?
“We have become addicted to our own stress hormones, we are literally drug addicts” – S Tatkin (TEDTalks2024).
Some teachers and therapists say ‘really FEEL the love when you say you love yourself, really FEEL it in your being’.
Fuck off. If we could do that we wouldn’t need you in the first place.
Nothing I’m saying here is mystical or unachievable in this very moment. You don’t need to wait in order to feel the benefits.
You don’t need to be able to FEEL love on a profound level when you do this either. The words are enough on their own.
Just saying the words ‘I love myself for feeling like this’ is an act of love in itself. Your state will change. If you doubt this then give it a try. Then get in touch with me and tell me if I’m full of shit.
If in doubt, Love.
Even the willingness to choose these words over a more habitual and stressful response is enough for transformation of your life to begin to happen.
RIGHT NOW
Give yourself the gift of acceptance that we’ve all been taught to search for externally.
Get it from yourself before expecting to receive it from your partner, parents, friends, therapist, a large pepperoni pizza, or hatching plans to become insanely wealthy or even at the bottom of a premium bottle of gin.
Today I Ianded my first job in 14 years.
I’m now a professional actor, landlord, companion for the elderly and a badass love gangster.
I’m also none of these things and they don’t define me in the slightest. Because I have my own back first with or without them.
I can now choose to workout at the gym for fun, not because it defines me, it is not an identity to makeup for my lack of self acceptance.
I choose to be in a loving and devoted relationship with the woman I love because I want to, not because I need to in order to feel my self worth.
I choose to act professionally because I enjoy it, I choose to help the elderly because I feel a naturally calling to serve others, not because I need it as an identity. And now 16 years after setting out to be a nurse, I will actually have the time with people to provide exactly what I set out for when I first became a nurse.
I can be kind, but I also have the capacity to be a lazy, moody, bad tempered, selfish dickhead. It’s all welcome because none of it defines me. Welcoming all these parts as best I can is love, trying to be one and not the other is suicide. I am what I am. Warts an’ all.
If someone doesn’t accept something about me and uses it as a criticism, it’s not that important.
I already have my own back. I’m don’t need to go into a state of anxiety or stress based around needing to change myself.
And if I can’t accept criticism, I love myself intensely for that as much as I possibly can.
It’s simple practices like these that create the capacity for change within ourselves.
We don’t need to be perfect
We don’t neeed to change.
We don’t need to be a certain way.
The willingness to love in itself is an act of acceptance and self love. It will be enough for changes to happen. Trust me 🙂
Life as a love gangster 