Saying yes and saying no
Where the me in me survives
‘“Fathoms down, behind my eyes …’
Go on, she smiles. ‘Maybe it’s where
the me in me, survives.’”1
When you say yes to one thing, you say no to another.
There’s an opportunity cost involved in making choices, not least the time you commit you will never get back. But when I was at my loneliest, it was the opportunity itself that vanished. Each day looked the same, and many might pass without anyone to say a word to.
This was a world I found bewildering. I was in this unwelcome and unexpected situation, stuck in a town I didn’t know, and very alone. There was only cost, and I was paying dearly.
Loneliness is something you don’t choose, that is my experience. Choice is the main difference between loneliness and solitude. You can choose to exit solitude, but loneliness remains unbroken until circumstances change.
I didn’t understand this at first. Loneliness merged with all the other forms of emotional distress a sudden separation causes. If asked I would use words like ‘abandoned’ or ‘left’. But these are verbs, not nouns, and by focusing on those words I was emphasising the cause, not the effect.
It took weeks to fraction my pains into something clearer. Sadness engulfed me, but in the end, what was I sad about? The loss of a future seemed the best answer at first, though the future hasn’t happened yet. The future is only an idea, a dream, that’s all.
So that wasn’t the whole story.
Was it the loss of friendship, companionship, love? This seemed closer to the source. When I thought about friendship, companionship and love, I could see these were qualities weighted with the loss of a single, important relationship. I still had family and friends, even if none lived nearby.
The ache I felt included loss, but emptied of that single, important relationship, my life continued. I had not lost everything, I still had my health and the natural environments I walked into every day, the people who still liked or loved me.
Whatever I did, however, I was doing alone. There were questions:
Who was I staying fit and healthy for?
Who was there to listen to how my day had gone?
Who cared what I ate or drank?
Who knew if I made the bed, even got out of bed?
It took months for me to realise that loneliness was at the root of all my suffering. But once I understood this, there were remedies.
The stoic discipline of yes
Why stoic?
Because I first had to create the circumstances for saying yes.
If I stayed at home, hoarding my loneliness, ruminating about my spectacular bad luck, then tomorrow was already written. There would be no change in the pattern.
The first step involved becoming vulnerable, opening myself to the possibility of further rejection and humiliation. When my confidence is low, I find it hard to believe anyone could be interested in anything about me. It’s easier to stay at home and feel sad than to risk adding to the sum of woes.
This is a logical and spiritual dead end.
I reasoned this through. Just because I was alone today, didn’t mean there hadn’t been plenty of times in my life when I was anything but lonely. But if I was to change my circumstances, I therefore had to change what I was doing with my day.
This might sound entirely obvious. All I can say is that peering up at the world from the bottom of a very deep pit, none of it seemed straightforward. It took courage to clamber out and start trying. I felt vulnerable because the person I would become in this new life was to still to emerge. I was prior-me, not current-me, and the prior-me had been abandoned and felt sad. Rejected.
When I looked at the world through this rejected lens, I imagined everyone saw straight through me, as if the reasons (there are always reasons) for being alone were on show, that I would be judged.
Wearing a new suit
It helped to remember an old me, the work-me.
That me was there to be shot at as the CEO of several high profile public organisations. I learned over the years to accept the criticism, but that it was aimed at work-me, not the home-me. Both were present, but the home-me was protected by a suit of armour, the business suit I put on each day before leaving for the office. This dressing up symbolised the act of becoming work-me.
Over the years, ‘dressing for battle’ became a ritual. I left home wearing a shirt and jacket, and driving to work I prepared myself for the day ahead.
At the end of the day, the sequence reversed. The first thing I did at home was to take off my suit, and with it I learned to shed the worries and difficulties of the day.
Getting started
I started volunteering and joined a couple of local groups. The fact I was giving my time for free was welcomed.
Of course it was.
To get started, I didn’t exactly turn into work-me, but I prepared myself a shield. If I was not wanted then this would simply be a rejection of the part of me I volunteered. The mental dressing up trick allowed me to start building a new life in my community.
Congruence and authenticity
I’m no psychologist, but even I can see there’s a potential pitfall here. Who are all the me’s for a start? Surely they are all the same person. And if they’re not, aren’t I faking it, being less than authentically myself?
My answer is yes and no.
Yes, because as far as I can tell, I don’t have any serious mental pathology. I don’t think I have a split personality, and I understand these selves to be more like roles than separate personalities.
No, because I think circumstances change the way we are. If I am scared I’ll act a certain way, and this will probably not look like the same behaviour I show to the world when I’m happily among friends.
At the bottom of who I am, there are simply truths. These are my beliefs and values. It’s true that over time, these evolve, but at any moment, now for instance, I hold certain things to be true.
Beyond these truths, there are only circumstances. And circumstances change, as King Cnut will tell you.
From ‘The Bathysphere’ by Adam Cairns, a poem (unpublished).