Back in July, I wrote on here about leaving London, the place that has been my home and my deepest anchor for the last 16 years of my life, to take a big leap of faith to move to Milan to give it a real go with someone I’ve been in a long-distance relationship with. I mainly came here to see if we could really make it work but there was a small part of me that also wanted to test myself. I wanted to see how I could create another life, somewhere new and out of my comfort zone. If we are so often heavily shaped by the places we live in and the people with whom we spend our time, I wanted to know how this experience would change me. Who could I be here? What could I learn here? Now that I have an opportunity to reinvent myself, what do I want that to look like and what do I want to leave behind? I stated unequivocally that I wanted to challenge myself, but now I am here, feeling what it actually means to do so.
Over the last few months, I’ve been experiencing a daily kind of anxiety that’s been dancing on the edge of depression. I’ve let all my deepest fears creep in through my veins and they’ve been trying to control my reality as much as possible. The negative thoughts and fears start as soon as I wake up. They are with me in the shower, they are in bed with us and eat with us at the table. They scream “why did you leave your life, your friends, your beautiful home - are you insane?”. I’ve been having panic attacks and my stomach has been in knots with bloating so severe that for the last few weeks I have looked deeply pregnant when I am not. I have spent more days than I care to count this summer in a worried haze unable to see the beauty around me. The floor beneath me is crumbling away and I am clutching with every last bit of strength onto a single branch for dear life. The discomfort of big change gnawing away at my very being.
I am in a transition and I am grieving. I am learning that transition sometimes feels like “What in the actual fuck have I just done?”, like absolute terror and the greatest of curiosity bound together as one giant speedball of experience. I thought I had lived a life that had prepared me to be attuned to doing something like this (and I know deep down that it has) but I can’t deny that this time around, the process is hitting very differently from the times before. I am (and feel) older, overwhelmed, exhausted, and laden with both literal and figurative grief and baggage from living in a broken world on a dying planet. Time keeps getting more slippery in the way it has been constructed to make us constantly feel like it’s something we’re running out of. Despite my trying to reinvent my own measures of time, of success, of what a life deemed worthy feels like to me, all these years of conditioning and what it’s done to the inner workings of my mind are hard to shake. The ego-level intentions rooted in fear and my own unworthiness keep trying to take over to tell me that something is missing, that something is wrong.
I moved here because the person I am with is a beautiful person. He is so sweet and so joyous and we laugh so much every single day. After the last difficult few years, I felt like sweetness, joy and laughter are exactly what I needed. He shows me unabated unconditional love and care in ways I’ve never experienced before. But we’ve grown up in such different worlds, from different planets, and sometimes I fear they are too different. On days when we don’t see eye to eye, alone in this city and alone in my mind I look at him and quickly proceed to plan my escape. On those bad days, I find myself being hyper-critical and judgemental about him, mean even. Picking holes in him, his habits and his character, constantly listing all the things I decide he is lacking in, making the holes bigger and bigger. But like the sweet, soft person he is, he has learned to accept me as I am before I have and therein lies the problem. He can see through me and I want to run away. I walk the streets of this city and off the bat, it doesn’t feel like a natural fit for me, it never had, but something made me come anyway. On the surface level, it matches its reputation of being conservative, elitist and superficial. The lack of diversity and the visible racialised poverty is a real shock to the system coming from London. But sometimes places like this, the ones that make you work hard for it, where it’s not always so quick to be found, with some time and determination will reveal precious things in their depths. And as time goes on I’m starting to see that this discomfort I’m carrying isn’t just about the city itself, the relationship, or him. This is about me.
It’s becoming clear that I’ve moved to a new place but the ghosts of my past have followed me here. For the longest time, because of things that happened in my early life and the world I have been socialised in, I have felt unworthy. Not smart enough, not successful enough, like I was falling behind friends/peers, lacking in some way or another, never quite ‘good enough’. Working as a model for all these years has kept me working enough to live but also kept me in some kind of arrested development where the work itself hasn’t matched where I’m at spiritually in such a long time. Even though I co-authored a book on social media and can clearly see how it can wreak havoc on our sense of self I have not been immune to its effects. I’ve been afraid to really dream about what else could be out there for me because I haven’t had the confidence to leap. Instead of just focusing on how to become the most authentic version of myself I have been caught up in things that don’t actually matter and been left to perform a version of myself that was no longer true to me. I’ve been trapped in a cycle of reactivity that has meant that I am not seeing and feeling things as they actually are. I am experiencing life through my emotions and through my past hurt as if I am wearing glasses made from my conditioning that blur my everyday vision. How can I ever truly be an authentic version of myself while still wearing these thick-rimmed and heavy glasses? I don’t want to wear them anymore. I don’t want to lose sight of my higher self’s true nature and calling by creating a life experience that is not aligned with my heart. I want to show up every day as a more compassionate person. The type of person that listens deeply and pauses before responding. The type of person where I’m still honouring my truth but one that is more rooted in the person I’m still in the process of becoming. By learning to recognise the many egoic selves and masques I’ve been wearing for most of my life my vision is only getting clearer.
These days I am trying to garner the deep courage needed to invite fear and worry into the picture to walk beside me as a friend to help me embrace this total transition of everything: self, work, place, relationship etc. I often find myself doing things without understanding why till much later. Intuition and hindsight are sacred gifts and I am sure this move, this relationship and this newsletter all fall under those categories. Instead of shying away from this space when I don’t feel my best, I am sending this out as a way of honouring what it was and still is meant for: archiving the messiness of transformation, cultivating softness through hard times and embracing our full humanity. I am learning that to be tender with oneself is hard, full of fallbacks, and spirals but also so much humbling beauty.
Since this piece does reference our relationship, I read it to him to make sure I had his consent with what I was sharing. His response was “this is so beautiful'' and gave me a long hug which made me ugly cry in his arms. My fears and insecurities are seen and acknowledged but somehow they do not shake him and this is why I love him. Maybe I needed to leave London so I could actually hear the needs of my higher self clearly away from all my usual distractions, so I can really start to dream and shape what I want this new chapter of my life to be about. Maybe these last few months of sadness and tumult have really been about grieving the shedding of these parts of myself that are no longer serving me, grieving the end of one cycle so I can truly begin the next. Maybe this darkness I’ve been feeling is actually a place of creation like the darkness of the womb that I have crawled back into to be born again anew.
love,
naomi x
16. on sitting through the discomfort of change