Today I did not fail

Update on I will always fail

I have been continuing to fail for the last four years. 

I still spend a lot of time feeling vulnerable. Often it is because I am deliberately *making* myself vulnerable because I have enough privileges in life to make it less dangerous for me than it would be for many others. I have privileges like a great support network, strong personal faith, I'm White, my first language is English, I have had immense educational privileges. 

One of the ways I knowingly make myself vulnerable is when I choose to take something on knowing I will fail. I do it because each person who chips away at an issue brings the day closer when someone can tackle the issue and succeed. But it is difficult. At best, I feel like the fool in Shakespeare or the jester in the medieval court - someone not taken seriously or seen as a bit of a 'pet' or an eccentric but as a consequence is able to say things to someone in power that others could not safely say. At its hardest, I get sacked, marginalised, excluded and bad-mouthed as disruptive and difficult. And, being fair, both stories about me are true. I can be all those things. 

Last night, I had one of those moments where I realise how much burden I have carried over decades of being the difficult one, the fool, the distruptor. 

I received an email that almost broke me for a moment. And it wasn't one that added to the burden. It was one that made me aware of the accumulated burden because - for the first time - I felt fully seen and my role within a complex team genuinely valued. 

I hadn't expected the strong emotions - or as my occupational therapist and a friend with a younger child puts it 'big feelings'. My interoception and alexithymia are improving. I can't thank the NHS, friends and a book by Niamh Garvey enough for that. I can know recognise I am having a 'big feeling' and have tools to help me sit with the big feelings and gently explore what they may be and be curious about what made them such big feelings. That's another blog completely, one I haven't yet written. 

One tool I use is seeing if I can identify a time my body had a similar feeling. The only time my body had a similar feeling was when I won gold medal in the Welsh Open over-94kg* Olympic Weightlifting competition and stepped out to receive the medal. At that moment, I realised the burden I had carried all those years of traumatic school PE lessons and my scared, defient, bullied, eczema-covered, obese 12 year old self who had lied that she didn't care because she was a weightlifter. 

So today I am savouring the moment and feeling able to gently put to rest the stories of the past and add a new story. 

Today, I relax in knowing that, on this occasion, I did not fail.

* if you are curious, over 94kg is the athlete's weight, not the weight they lift. And an Open means people of any age from anywhere in the world can compete. I was 54 years old.