Emotional Sandwiches

by Sarah Ashley Neal

  Suppose someone else takes your confidence away from you; wouldn’t that be considered stealing? “He took my confidence away, when he said that”; “She won’t have any confidence left if you keep doing that to her”; “By the time she finished with them, their confidence was gone”. Any of these examples can apply to a multitude of scenarios and each one indicates that someone else did something to someone to take the confidence away from them. If someone broke into your house and took your valued possessions, they would be stealing something from you and possibly, a part of you emotionally. You may never get your valuables back, but in time you find the confidence to leave your home again, without checking the doors are locked… half a dozen times.

  Confidence is not something tangible that was directly taken so it is impossible to dial 999 and put a call-out for the police to look for a missing… well, what exactly…? It is, alas, something now missing from within you and you let it go. You look for a solution and a quick fix as you send out a search party to find Confidence, which took a leave of absence again. It probably went off to do some of its own soul searching, on sunny shores, under the influence of an ice cold Martini. Partial to enjoying its company on occasions, Confidence always clung on to the notion that it could be found anytime as well. I like to believe it can.

  I believe we can all make remarkable changes in our lives when we break old habits and patterns of thinking that are simply not working for us. As a first step, I suggest that you become more self-aware and realise that you can ‘choose change’ and choose change when it matters. Have a think about this idea and see how you get on. There is a lot to be said for learning to respect our emotions. Acknowledge they exist and then allow them the freedom to move around (in your head) with an element of fluidity, without causing havoc. If someone tells you that you can’t do something or it could be a tad difficult to change your life (or something about it), then if you are inclined to do so, you have the option to go and find Confidence and choose to change.

  Everywhere we go, we are surrounded by people who outwardly reflect a lack of confidence. We will meet people who may not have an abundance of confidence but you wouldn’t have known that, unless they explained. We don’t know what mysteries lie within each other’s past unless they tell us. Then, sometimes, all we can do is to help each other to move on to our next step and boost our confidence as we interact. It is no coincidence that we meet people at points along our path for this very reason.

  We have touched on having too much and too little confidence; we just need to consider that what you currently have may be just the right amount! If you are reading this section for interest and are in a great place in your life or, at the very least, have enough confidence to go ahead and do all those things you want to do, then you will be one of those people that others may look to for inspiration. When you have enough confidence and you don’t have to check into a toll booth each day, paying a price in order to access your path ahead, it frees up your energies for other matters.

  Remember, Confidence doesn’t differentiate between a good or bad situation as it is just the backbone required to make something happen or not happen. Even a burglar needs an element of confidence to ransack houses. Confidence really isn’t biased and seems willing to help anyone who is positive. In this case, it is a shame that it can’t break that rule and override the perpetrator’s level of enthusiasm in such a situation. Alas Confidence cannot get in the way of free will.

  How about you make this a rule: find the confidence to be you and not what someone else wants you to be. They may want you to be the person you want to be anyway! And let us not forget that we can also enjoy having approval. It is a lovely milestone to reach, when you have a friend or relative acknowledge your tribulations in life. At work, it is good to be appreciated as this just takes your confidence that little bit further on the dial and you clock up a few smiles that sit somewhere between your third eye and your solar plexus and it feels great.

  You give Confidence a ‘high-five’ and tell it, “Thanks for keeping awake this time, matey”.

  Confidence replies, without hesitation, “Thanks for not buying that comfy chair!”

  N*O*R*M*A*L

  The Puppeteer

  Let’s start with the bottom line: is it about being OK with who we are and being comfortable in our own skin? This is your outer layer of protection that can be worn with pride and no one else is going to wear the same design – you are unique! Your skin has ‘designer label’ stamped all over it with your own DNA taking most of the credit. Even when it gently breaks at the seams it has a tendency to repair itself – the wonder of nature!

  There is a key difference between physical damage to the body and emotional damage. It is hard to repair what you cannot easily see, becoming heavily reliant on exploring your feelings instead of looking for something tangible to fix. This is often why some of us find ‘emotional territory’ a less comfortable space to explore because it is easier to compute someone’s physical discomfort than it is to sit beside another who appears perfectly normal but is suffering in silence. We don’t always award them both the same degree of empathy and this could be an innocent oversight because you cannot see their pain. It is also a great excuse when you want to practise the art of emotional avoidance (you may not see their pain, even if you sense their pain) but you prefer to keep your emotions tucked under a rug! The issue with continually avoiding your emotions and refraining from getting too close to other people’s (heaven forbid you may learn something from sailing into uncharted territory), is that it starts to become your normal pattern of behaviour and the rug eventually becomes a trip hazard.

  OK, so what does Normal look like? The word normal is reflective of everything but… normal. The word has such a positive undertone that we could convince ourselves of doing anything or saying anything – if we considered it to be normal for us to practise in the first place. If we keep doing ‘it’ or saying ‘it’ – for long enough – Normal will pay us a visit and accredit our efforts with a stamp of approval. A new ‘norm’ is born!

  We want to feel normal in our lives, and we don’t want our own idea of ‘normal’ to be unduly influenced by what another person considers being normal – if we don’t actually agree. This is exactly why normal underpins everything we crave for yet everything we oppose. We want ‘normal’ to be right for us. We crave a silent space that sits peacefully in its rightful place, within us, extending Normal an open invitation to return at any time. Normal doesn’t always find its way peacefully into our hearts and minds, facing adversity as it stands up for itself, battling its way through the undergrowth to reach us, alone in the wilderness.

  We oppose ‘normal’ when it is just another ‘get-out’ clause used in society to overcome our differences practised by a majority to make two wrongs a right! What has become usual for us to practise or say may have been influenced by an event or what someone did or said at one time or another. Alternatively, we could settle with the notion that we are born a certain way and it must be in our genes. Now the latter concept really can get you off the hook: “It’s just the way I am, sir,” he said, as he sat in detention for the umpteenth time.

  Normal is involved in: what you do and how you do it; what you say and how you say it; what you wear; what you eat; how you live… and by now you are getting the gist. We are talking about what normal is for you. We really have to work towards getting this bit right as quickly as possible in life, so we can aim to live life to the full and with fewer complications. Call it ‘finding yourself’, for now, but the funny thing is that once you think you’ve found yourself, you are not sure how to be yourself, all of the time. The irony is that being you or true to yourself, is often saddled with the complications you had planned to avoid. When you get to the point in your life when you can look Normal in the eye and say, “At last, I have met you face to face…”, the next question tends to be, “How long are you planning to stick around for?” T
his is when you need your friend Confidence by your side, to give you the courage to feel normal.

  Let us assume you have reached this point and you are getting to know more about what makes you tick. As you start to put a few more jigsaw pieces together you will begin to see the bigger picture, reflective of your personality. You start to recognise your likes and dislikes popping up in different areas of your life on a regular basis. Then you notice your opinions are subtly dotted throughout as you begin to join them up, recognising pattern forms. It is this sense of familiarity that gives you the confidence to create your own recognisable brand and keep adding to your collection, securing your identity over time.

  You identify with pockets of ideas and concepts that hide in the grooves of each shapeless piece of puzzle until you fuse them together to provide clarity. Our values and norms come in all shapes and sizes. One person’s idea of a circle is more oval in appearance, but when you are drawing freehand it is unlikely that the circumference you drew will match an off-the-shelf template. Normal is a guideline. Once you have found the confidence to parade your entourage of differences in public, giving them artistic licence to stray from the guidelines and develop a style that you can adopt and call your own, then it is time to make your tick go tock!

  Just be yourself; you found the ‘tick’, so all you need to do now is build up momentum until you get the tock to kick in – all of the time. Maybe you are overcoming stage fright before going out to give the performance of your life and you are a little intimidated by the stronger characters on stage, with more courage in their emotional toolbox. You haven’t quite plucked up the right amount yet to give them a run for their money. Although you do have Confidence running behind in your footsteps, slightly out of breath, desperately trying to catch up with you in order to protect you from the emotional conflict it was predicting could lie ahead. It was right, as you resorted to sitting back down in a seat among the crowd, just as Confidence was finishing a 200-metre sprint on your behalf. It would seem you felt unready to showcase your version of the latest production of normality, until you rehearsed again. What a shame it can be such hard work to make ‘normal’ an everyday life practice!

  All of a sudden, you meet some of those alien-possessed mannequins. You may remember they were lost a while ago but have decided to crash-land on your path and pay a visit. Overnight, you say to them all with conviction, “Enough is enough. I don’t want to be like you”. Realising how tired you have become from fitting into one of those tiny theatrical seats, day after day, that look equally as tired and antiquated, your quest to finally stand out from the crowd moves up a gear – how liberating for you!

  When your ideas are constantly being challenged, do you feel you are being asked to prove something? It is natural to discuss ideas and perspectives as it can be a lovely and inspiring thing to do; after all we are doing this right now. It is an opportunity to share ideas, whether they directly relate to your own life experiences or not. It may happen to be one of those quirky moments that stop you in your tracks, during a conversation, because nonsense and psycho-babble collide with Einstein’s theory of relativity and somewhere in the middle you found room to consider another point of view! Hah! I don’t think everyone believed in Einstein at first, and some folk will have dismissed his ideas as just an overactive imagination.

  The world gets used to change whether it is as a result of a movement led by one man or one woman’s passion to make a change for the better, giving rise to a new meaning to the word normal. Are we evolving as a race so fast that we struggle as a society to keep up with changes at the same time as one another? Some of us oppose change, even if we cannot do an awful lot about it because the majority vote was cast; it can lead to an imbalance in how we go on to manage our emotions, once the change is made. Maybe normal is something you protect or hide, for fear of exposing yourself to ridicule until the desire to be normal, for you, starts to uncoil from within as you free yourself from suppression. At last you are beginning to get the balance right.

  Alas, at times, discussions surrounding our opposing ideas of what normal looks and feels like are safer to avoid. It doesn’t make you a coward. This is just for your emotional protection and may preserve your sanity as a result. It is more likely that you can end up walking into a one-sided interview that requires a correct answer and a compromise of emotional integrity before leaving completely drained, having had the life sucked out of you by a panel of emotional vampires.

  Sometimes we feel the need to explain our behaviours or reiterate our values, and on other occasions it really is just a waste of our energy. Does the act of explanation really do ourselves any favours, as we hope to feel more understood and accepted by society? And do we do it to make someone else feel more comfortable about who we are or what we are doing? Did someone ask you to explain or did you simply feel the need to justify your actions? Maybe you are still finding your tock and haven’t fully given yourself the consent to be the person you really want to be.

  If you feel like a puppet in someone else’s life it is invariably because you are acting like a puppet in your own! You learn to move your own strings in a certain direction until it becomes a natural movement – restrictive – but you set these limitations. Maybe when one of your strings snaps and you free yourself from your own restrictions you will find that your fear of being different will fizzle out, too. Your insecurities will become yesterday’s news. You have to find Confidence and break free together. Once again, it is all about giving yourself permission to feel normal; it will thank you one day.

  What was the point in finding Confidence on the dance floor when you continue to dance to someone else’s music without giving it a thought as to whether you like it anyway? You own the stage and you don’t keep sitting in the audience wondering when it is your turn to perform. Get up there and show them all what you’re made of – just be you. This is what tocking is all about!

  Whatever it is you start to do, and keep on doing, will end up forming a habit. Natural reflects a habit which is replaced by a norm and all your norms put together become your normal; whether it is the normal you planned on being is another story altogether and I will leave you to reflect on that thought.

  When darker behaviour crosses a line in society that was drawn to morally protect and keep civilised and uncivilised participants at arm’s length, Normal is called upon in an emergency to play referee. Normal, in this instance, will side with the majority vote and its good conscience will normally deliver a final and agreeable verdict. A majority vote in other instances may not reflect ‘normal’ behaviour, especially to the minority remaining who do not share their commonality of interest. If a majority vote was made up of any form of darker behaviour which put the minority in harm’s way, then this would be a good time to question when normal becomes OK to practise.

  Politics and religion attempt to keep to their own side of the seesaw in the playground of world affairs but they both throw their weight around so the balance is continually tipping from one side to the other. A little bit like one of those pendulum thingummyjigs that have a number of balls attached, all being more than capable of bi-directional movement as they pick up momentum. Each one shouts across to the other to ‘move on to their side’, taking it in turns to voice their opinion. They both may as well just sit in their own rocking chair and talk to themselves, getting the same rhythmical effect as they go back and forth as neither party tends to find that middle ground.

  It doesn’t even have to be about politics or religion. You could quite easily be sitting in a meeting at work, debating a family dilemma or haggling over your business plan with your bank manager. When one set of rules conflicts with another, you may have to add a bit of choice into this sandwich as a condiment and choose to agree or disagree. I didn’t say I was going to have the answers; I am still working those out for myself!

  A negative point of view doesn’t go hand in hand with a negative person. When you
talk to someone who has a different point of view and who doesn’t understand why you choose to do what you do or the way you do it, this is a normal side effect experienced from interacting with people along your path. There are benefits of mixing with negative opinions from time to time. I don’t suggest you intentionally seek out people who are negative, though, but if you come across them (and you will) then use the opportunity to find out something positive about them or about yourself to make the experience less… empty!

  A negative encounter can keep you focused. It can behave as a benchmark, so you can see how far you have actually come along your own path in life. It can put the zest back into what you are doing if you lost it or it can remind you exactly why you are doing what you are doing. We can endeavour to meet likeminded people but it isn’t about avoiding people who don’t necessarily share your vision; you are going to meet them every day, somewhere. Is it about making ‘your normal’ a life practice so that you feel more able to cope with being challenged? I reckon that is a good place to start.

  Talking passionately to someone else about your ideas and dreams and then noticing part way through that none of what you are saying is sinking in, you quickly come to the conclusion that you are not on the same wavelength. Whether it is their inability to envisage your end goal or it doesn’t appear to be interesting enough to them to warrant any further interpretation makes you wonder if what is represented on the X and Y axis on your normality graph doesn’t even show up on theirs.