Just Do It!
In 2018 after my dad’s death I lost the ability to physically cry and funnily enough, that year also coincided with the time when I heard a voice in my head that said ‘JUST DO IT!’.
I think I had been waiting for someone to rescue me near on my whole life. I can’t tell you the amount of times that I have silently screamed ‘help me!’ in despair whilst laying on my bed frozen inside of my body and unable to cope. Breathing through the weight of helplessness and willing for a way out of whatever cave of doom I was residing in. I have always managed to keep calm and crack on. To talk myself into reason, to do the right thing, but by the time it got to 2016, I was empty. Years of hanging in there had resulted in me slipping off the cliff’s edge, a heap on the dusty ground.
A more accurate metaphor would probably be a plane on autopilot. I was still moving, life was still happening, but I felt well and truly out of control! Me being out of control looks much like a humdrum state of going through the motions.
I became brutally honest, but no one was used to seeing me in this state and didn’t quite know how to take it.
‘How are you Rashida?’
I am weak
‘Oh Ok, nice to see you’
‘Rashida, can you do….’
No.
‘Rashida how are you?’
I’m not OK?
‘I feel so helpless to help you’
Oh so this is about you now, is it?
‘I want to get to know you more…’
Leave me alone, you give me the creeps
I was super prickly and my hypersensitive intuition had no filter. I would actually avoid people just in case what I actually thought popped out of my mouth. This also frustrated me, because I was so in control that I couldn’t even be out of control! I was so aware of the consequences of my words and not wanting to hurt anyone's feelings or do any irreparable damage and woe betide if I wasn’t there to help a loved one if they ‘really needed me’, the guilt of it had me in a choke hold.
I couldn’t pretend that I wasn’t aware of people's motives or that I didn’t detect lies and my ability to be diplomatic had evaporated into dust. So my solution was to keep myself to myself as much as possible.
It was really difficult and I am so grateful that I had my children to live for, but I also felt guilty that despite my efforts to shield them, they had to absorb the energy of a deeply unhappy mum.
Of course there is and are many things that contributed to the state I was in, but it was
whilst away on my 10th Wedding Anniversary in Mexico, that I came to the conclusion that enough was enough! I was so resolute that I had to stop allowing circumstances and other people, dictate my mood.
At that point I had been doing daily morning guided meditation to set good intentions for the day. This helped along with my prayer time as it helped to reframe my mindset by leading me to think about positive things instead of praying through my woes.
It was also during this trip that I learned of my dad’s diminishing health. What ensued for the next few months leading up to his death, felt like being face to face with the root of where my discontentment stemmed from. I was looking after someone who didn’t really want or see me and unfortunately didn’t know any better.
As fate would have it, I was the one who ended up running point with his care needs. It was truly an exercise of obedience to support him through his illness, but it was also greatly enlightening, helping me understand some of the potential root causes of my insecurities. I felt as though I was given a gift of understanding and through the process was able to look at it through objective eyes. (I had recently reread ‘What’s so Amazing about Grace' by Phillip Yancy, which opened my heart to being able to look at my parents through the eyes of grace- truly transformational).
Hearing things like ‘do you remember her dad didn’t even want to hold her in the hospital because she wasn’t a boy and now look at the one looking after him’ jolted me back to my younger years when I would hear this repeatedly. It had been decades, I think, since I'd heard it and didn’t even remember, but in that moment, I was catapulted back to the days when it was a mantra in the house. Luckily as an adult I was able to unpack this information as something that is probably stored deep within as an internalized feeling about myself but for the months around that time, I felt shielded from any real ‘pain’ and felt like I was getting wave after wave of revelation about my deeply rooted trauma.
I ended up going to Jamaica after my dad’s death for a short break before the funeral and it was on this trip that I got the clear message that I need to rescue myself. These places and people of refuge (at this time) do not exist, and if I want to be saved or if I want to do something I should stop being a victim and waiting for validation. I should- ‘JUST DO IT!’.
It was also the trip at which my tears physically dried up (I lost the ability to cry, still a work in progress), but it started me on a journey of shedding off my victims mentality and taking a bit of control of my life! I realised that I don’t need permission. I had been standing in the way of me. I had given people power over my decisions and mood and circumstance. I don’t have to bend and flex into shapes that suit others but inconvenience me. We can work towards a place of mutual benefit or I can say 'no'. Not in resistance, but with maturity and autonomy.
In order for me to survive, my victim mentally had to die. I am not in danger. I do not have to be liked. I am not responsible for anybody's happiness other than my own.
I knew it would take some adjustment, because I played a very convenient role in many people’s lives. I had become a resource, a facilitator, an enabler -all things, that under the right circumstances are not that bad. But for me, it was a killer.
My new mantra has become ‘Just Do It!’ or I ask myself, 'how can I make it work?'. I have the best teachers around me. People who do what they want to do, when they want to do it. Something that I once viewed as a sort of selfishness- but that was only the case when it was at the perceived expense of my liberty. Sure I am going to upset some people and some dynamics have had to change, but this is a new day.
As I continue to die to the victim more and more each day, the hard work of unpacking and healing continues. It is still a fight to be happy, it is still a fight to not slip into a victim mentality and give up. But when I feel like I have no motivation to keep pursuing my goals, these three words come to my aid. I pull my socks up and tell myself ‘JUST DO IT!’
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