What Crowded House taught me about anxiety, choice and freedom

Before Zoom and I (and, probably, Zoom and you) were the close colleagues we became, I had a first impression that really stuck with me. Everyone in my Teaching Creative PGCert was invited to bring an object along to the introductions. The result was not just a group of strangers, but a group of implied stories. 

This was mine:

Its true story isn’t what makes it so special (although, now I think about it, that too meant something about stories: I stuck up for it when it was being purchased for a theatre set, against a bigger and cheaper version. I offered to pay the difference and while it’s been borrowed back for another theatre outing since, we’ve been together almost as long as I’d been alive when it was purchased).

What makes it special for me is something I first verbalised in hearing these lyrics:

Well there’s a small boat made of china, it’s going nowhere on the mantelpiece / Well do I lie like a lounge-room lizard, or do I sing like a bird released?

Weather With You, Crowded House

The question mark is important bit for me. In our worst times, when things are at their most hopeless and overwhelming, we tend to feel least like we have choice. My most hopeless and overwhelmed moments have tended to be very lonely ones. In them, I’d seek external approval. Which often meant sinking further, because if the external opinions differed or didn’t sit right, I felt more alone and with more decision paralysis than I began. But there is a choice, and it’s not a dangerous or terrible thing that I’m the only one who can truly make it for myself. That’s why I love the question mark at the end of that. It reminds me that choice is always there, swimming beneath the surface of whatever’s going on right now. It’s why such questions as these are so powerful:

‘If I knew what I chose would work out absolutely fine, what would I do next?’.

We are not, the song reminds me, inanimate objects, which means who we are today is not the same form of us as yesterday or tomorrow. 

It also means our stories aren’t set in stone (or china). 

Which leaves me this question:

“Where in my life might my fear or anger be getting in the way of my curiosity…”

… about what I might be assuming about people or situations?

…about my own ability (or lack of ability) to be part of closer connection?

…about my own ability (or lack of ability) to be part of or positive change?

“If that assumption weren’t true, what would I do next?”

As I listened to the implied stories of the rest of my group, it struck me that objects we love relate to stories that are reminders of moments we realised, consciously or unconsciously, we could be more ourselves than we thought we could. When we stepped out of a narrower version of who we felt able to be, into a more expansive one. I’m thinking about that a lot as it’s the message of Passover — what does freedom mean to you and how can you be part of there being more of it for yourself and those around you? — but it’s the one I want to keep checking in with all year. So you might see that boat in my zoom background: it may be going nowhere on the mantelpiece, but it’s my reminder each of is here to go somewhere unique.

Join an online or in-person workshop this month

Build creative confidence and explore the power of your stories online, on the podcast or in person at writersgym.com and rachelknightley.com

TRIGGER WARNINGS: historic sexual assault, anxiety, blisters.

On an otherwise beautiful spring walk this weekend, I overestimated the capability of my sandals and myself.

I’d also underestimated the length of the walk, principle because it was made up of local, familiar places I consider ‘near’.

I might have got away with my good intentions, except a part of the towpath had flooded and we needed to go around. On top of the increasingly painful blisters, my anxiety’s favourite ‘proof’ that something bad is going to happen is that I don’t know how long it will take, don’t have any control over when it ends, or don’t have the power to get myself out of it.

Even more unhelpfully and more relevantly than I realised: this summer will be something like the tenth anniversary of my being sexually assaulted at the bottom of the stairs at Ealing Broadway Station. I was alone in a summer dress, visibly limping up to reach the handrail at the bottom of the stairs. My boyfriend of the time had gone on ahead, faster than I could. What happened was this: a man stood behind me, grabbed my arse and inserted two fingers up my vagina through my dress and underwear before passing me on the stairs and continuing on his way towards the ticket barriers.

What I did next was take off my shoes, run up the stairs after the man, leap the ticket barrier and confront him and his group of smirking friends. I asked why he’d done it. He shrugged. I took photos. He covered his face. I called the police (non-emergency number, because in my shock I thought ‘Car being stolen, 999, car has been stolen, 101’ apparently at some level consider my body an equivalent). As my boyfriend of the time and I left the station for our bus stop, we could see those men climbing all over the horse statue across the road from our bus stop. Luckily, that meant when I got through to the police and told all this, it made him very easy to pick up and arrest. (What also made things easier much later was he didn’t turn up for his court hearing, attempting to leave the country, and received jail time without me having to be summoned.)

A day or two after this and the police station interview that followed it, a well-meaning friend told me what I was ‘going’ to feel. Not what I might feel, or what they’d felt, but the false certainty I now recognise as an expression of not being right (as it can sound to people who think confidence and being right are the same thing) but being in pain. I might think I was feeling okay about it now, they said, but it would all hit me later, and I wouldn’t be okay. I didn’t disagree aloud. But I did privately consider the differences in our situations and responses. Saying The Thing (which I had done, in all the ways I could) had felt extremely different to not doing so for me, in all circumstances of life, and that had been in what made it feel not a choice to run after him, confront and report him. In that friend’s case, not reporting it had contributed to the potential haunting power of what had happened to them – which was, not that these things are a competition, worse than what had happened to me. I was and remain deeply grateful to myself in that moment for chasing him, and giving myself all the peace I could knowing that I hadn’t let it go and by default meant he might go on thinking he could get away with treating girls in my home town — potentially my own LAMDA students — that way.

But my friend was right: it did hit me this Saturday, ten years later, on this towpath, when I had a blister and my partner walked off ahead. And the sexual assault didn’t cross my mind. What upset (racket emotion: angered) me was that I was hurt and scared in a way I hadn’t felt hurt and scared by my ex doing the same thing – just before the assault. What I remembered was limping, being in pain and being alone.

And because I spotted the story I was telling myself, I spotted in time that I had a choice about how I responded.

Now is not then

Unlike my trauma memory, this time I wasn’t alone – literally or otherwise. My partner now is (very) different to the person I was with then, and while he didn’t understand what was going on, I’ve since Said The Thing so he knows for next time and I have the peace of knowing he knows.

Also, I I was with a friend – part of the Writers’ Gym community I’ve created – who knows from their own experience what pain and trauma can mean in the moment — and the importance of listening to what mind and body need. So, while my partner walked far, far ahead of us (literally deaf which is not his fault and living in a different physical world at six foot two to our respective five-foolishness).

In that moment, I could have fed my fear into ‘if he really loved me’ mode. ‘If he really loved me,’ my fear could say, ‘he’d not walk ahead.’ In other words, if he really loved me, he’d see the world exactly as I do, think as I think and not need a translation from my trauma memories to his immediate world. If he really loved me, fear says, he’d be a brilliant psychic.

I could have made my fear and pain my reality.

Instead, I chose communication.

Because now is not then.

And I am more me than I have ever been.

We choose what happens next

I said clearly what I needed, to my partner and to my friend and to the very nice bar staff who got me plasters and antiseptic wipes while we drank cider in full view of spring and Hammersmith Bridge.

Because it is spring, I thought. And it’s okay if the shadows mean we forget that sometimes. We are here now. And now is where we can choose what we learn, the stories we tell ourselves, and what happens next.

So, I was VERY far from being in ‘caption competition’ mode as I crossed Hammersmith Bridge on the way home. But then I saw the guy you see in the picture above. And seeing him meant current me was able to see beyond the pain and trauma response of the moment. So I took a photo of this stranger taking their plant for a walk as an investment in future me, for whom this will have been a spring day, even if I couldn’t feel it right then or there.

I’d love it if you use that picture as a writing prompt. Do let me know who you decide that person is. Or, if that person is you, thank you for being my muse in that moment, just when I needed an amusing muse o bring me back to acknowledging the power of the stories we tell ourselves.

Build creative confidence and explore the power of your stories online, on the podcast or in person at writersgym.com and rachelknightley.com

Caring what people think can sometimes slip into thinking we know. And deciding what that ‘means’…

You’re about to vacuum the living room. It’s the same room, and the same vacuum, and you’ve done exactly the same thing a million times before. Does the fact you still have to press start for the vacuum to go, mean you feel angry with the vacuum? Let down by the vacuum? Does it make you think surely the vacuum should have read your mind by now? 

What if the difference isn’t about sentience, but expectations?

This piece also appears on the Psychologies Magazine website.

In a recent coaching group, one of my clients shared a breakthrough. They’d had to repeat the same information to the same people over and over again. For the first time, they didn’t feel anxious or angry. They Said The Thing, over and over, as many times as it took until the thing had been done. 

‘But this time I didn’t make it mean anything about me. Before, it would have been about how upset they were making me feel, how much of my time they were wasting.’ 

This time, they’d sat with the repetition, the lack of control over what was happening and how long it would take. They said what needed to be said over and over again without taking it personally. 

‘The vacuum really helped,’ they said.

When we stop mind-reading, we start noticing (and even accepting) people as they are

It may not sound flattering – or appropriate – to compare every human being we ever interact with – from a beloved partner or best friend to a stranger at the end of the call centre line – to a vacuum cleaner. But this is not about dehumanising, or believing people are devices for our convenience. If anything, it leads to spotting when we might have done that in the past by accident and aren’t going to anymore.

When we stop defending ourselves against having our time disrespected, when we stop believing we know the thoughts behind the behaviour of others… in other words, when we stop mind-reading… we start noticing (and even accepting) people as they really are. 

Which, often, is flawed, busy, stressed, forgetful, juggling too many thoughts about too many other things to fully focus on this moment; doing their best against whatever obstacles are in their day. Just as the vacuum is limited by lack of sentience, every human being we come across is limited by lack of spoons. So whatever we think they’re thinking, they’re likely so low on energy and disc-space as to be thinking much less than we think they are.

Taking the ‘what does this say about me’ out of ‘what needs to happen’ 

Defending ourselves against apparent sleights can mean we create situations we’re avoiding. Taking the ‘what does this say about me’ out of the ‘what needs to happen’ gets things done faster, better, gentler and more authentically.

The politest phrasing of Hanlon’s Razor, which I first heard from my uncle many years ago, is ‘never attribute to malice what is just as adequately explained by incompetence.’ The busier, more stressful life is, the less any action is the result of active intention or choice:

Has a friend been in touch less? We could be tempted to ‘mean’ they don’t like us anymore, or are angry about a sleight we can spend time imagining. We can stop texting, take the perceived hint, and join forces in creating distance. But is that what you want, or what you fear? What if they don’t know more connection is welcome? What if you Say The Thing that you’re thinking of them?

Had a piece of writing rejected, maybe several times? We could be tempted to decide this ‘means’ the story doesn’t work, or we’re a bad writer, that the universe wants us to stop. What if instead of that false certainty, we change the focus to getting the story critiqued, or deciding we care more about our writing arc than the specific story and investing our energy in that?

Whatever example we’re dealing with, it’s all about asking ourself if it’s possible to accept uncertainty rather than leap for false certainty around what this ‘means’.

So that’s what I learn from my working relationship with me vacuum cleaner. That it isn’t someone else’s sentience that makes the difference. It’s our own expectations.

Next time I’m tempted by self-defensive-come-self-sabotaging responses, I’ll ask myself these questions first:

From the other side, is this about me or about something else?

Is this triggering a sense that something is happening again, rather than this being an individual situation or moment?

How could I choose to see it instead?

This piece also appears on the Psychologies Magazine website.