Fighting gremlins with pie charts

This week, I've spent many of my sessions talking to the gremlins in people's minds. Those sneaky voices that tell us we will never be good enough, brave enough, strong enough to make our mark on the world. We all have them, but oftentimes we need to learn new ways to deal with them!

I spent the first thirty years of my life in an ever-restricting quest to fold myself into the right amount of space. The goldilocks of being good - a good daughter, good wife, good employee, boss, colleague, friend, sister, neighbour and so on - not too much, not too little, but somehow perfect. I held myself to the impossible standards that I felt projected onto me by everyone around me, from those my nearest and dearest to the unforgiving gaze of strangers I had never met and would never see again.?

Then, as is often the case when you are trying to unmake your messy self into something artificial, everything fell apart. Or to be more accurate, I fell apart, and blew up everything about my life in the aftermath.?

Looking back at that first phase of my life, the truth is clear. This quest for perfection wasn’t motivated from a whole-hearted desire to grow and evolve - I was driven by a fear of losing love, based the conditional cycles of love that I had grown to believe were normal (even when they were anything but!) To stay imperfect would risk people seeing all my ugly parts, and the fear of what might happen to me when they did was too much for me to hold. Far better, I thought, to mould myself following everyone else’s expectations of me - losing who I am, but not anyone else.?

What I have learned since then is that I was by no means alone in this fear - it has insidiously wound its way into our minds and shapes the way our society functions.?

Are you doing bad maths?

I believe that we are all terrible mathematicians. From the dyscalculic to those with PhDs in number-based topics, the vast majority of us are doing really bad maths on a daily basis. I’m not referring to trigonometry, which I promptly forgot as soon as I no longer needed it to pass an exam paper - I’m talking about the inner calculations we are constantly doing to estimate our own value.?

The good things - moral actions, successful moments, acts of service and general niceness - go in the plus column, one point for every performative thing we do. The ones we remember, anyway. I’ve noticed that they can be particularly difficult to hold in our minds, and the ones we don’t forget have a sneaky way of diminishing over time if we’re left to our own devices.?

But the demerits are even trickier, because they often tend to be less about what we do, and more focused on who we are. The more self critical the belief, the more wrong we make ourselves.

I am a changemaker with a racing brain and chronic fatigue based conditions. In practice, this tends to mean that I have approximately twice as many ideas about ways I could create impact than I do the energy to actually put these things into practice. I have often wondered just what I could achieve if I wasn’t devoting a portion of my brain to pacing my energy and managing the pain that sets into my joints at about three PM most days.?

But when I was in the habit of value calculations, guess which side got more weight? Creativity was not prized unless I followed the idea all the way through from conception to it’s eventual execution, meaning that I gave myself a measly plus one for months of effort sometimes. But my need to rest? To pace myself? To nurture my body? Well, that was named laziness, and laziness was scored as an exponentially increasing, personality-defining character flaw of negativity.?

My value today = that report I wrote - every nap ever taken, idea deemed too effortful, task half-completed, day off required etc…

My chronic health conditions and the resulting fatigue were just one factor that the gremlin voice in my head used to label myself as “unworthy”. I am a woman existing in a patriarchal, capitalist society. I am bisexual and gender non conforming in a world where heterosexuality is the norm. I am nerdy, more likely to be found in jeans and a star wars shirt than a chic business-casual ensemble. I grew up with undiagnosed neurodiversity. I’m clumsy and covered in bruises that I mostly don’t remember getting. I speak like a southerner but live in the far north. I’m loud and blunt and often irreverent. You can see that - big things and the inconsequential - I weighted every “flaw” heavily and slashed them away from my value in my never-ending mathematical quest to be loveable.?

Trauma fed your gremlins...

We need to de-sanctify the word trauma. When you strip it of the gravitas that the faux capitalisation confers, I believe that trauma is simply the consequences of an experience that taught you the world, or the people in it, were less safe than you previously thought. Consciously or unconsciously, you take what happened and make a rule to apply forward in your life. You avoid x. You stop doing y. You speak less freely around P. You give up your friendship with E. Hide this part of yourself. Whatever action seems necessary to keep you safe in future, until a similar situation occurs again and that internal rule gets stronger, more restrictive or scarier.?Enforcing those rules is a brain gremlin's number one priority, and they always use the stick, never the carrot.

Most - if not all - changemakers that I know have experienced some level of trauma. Often it’s what brings our feet to the path of making change in the first place - we connect with our cause at some emotional level as a result of these experiences, and we say enough. Our lived experiences fuel the fire that keeps us moving forward, yet at the same time they are likely to be featuring heavily in those internal value calculations that we are making. Those rules we’ve made are likely to be impacting our changemaking in a very tangible way.

Here’s what I know now though. The parts of me that I called my “biggest flaws” and “ugliest habits” are my humanity. Most of us have them, and in moments of distress most of us have let them out into the world. We all make mistakes. They are formed through repeated trauma, but these days I adjust, and I try to learn from the moment to avoid it happening again. Most importantly, I give my humanity some love.?

Unconditional self-love is a messy business. It is easier to bring love to our quirks and explainable foible, but the things that really need our attention are those parts of us that we find the ugliest. Those parts that we shy away from, that we numb, that we’d do anything to deny. When we can be supported to bring those into the light, explore what is underneath them, claim them and bring love to them, then we unlock the next level of our power.

I am a woman and disabled and nerdy and neurodiverse and clumsy and a displaced southerner and a survivor of domestic violence and bisexual and I am loveable.?I have snapped at my partner in the last 24 hours and I have loved them incredibly well. I have a sink full of dishes and a to do list that will never fully be conquered and I am effective, efficient and bloody good at my job.

To move beyond value calculations is to hold all your contradictions with an audacious ‘and’, where before you’d subtract something. It is to breathe into the shadows, give compassion to what you find, and expand.?

Pie charts are the best!

When I started to explore how to move forward in a new way, the first thing I did was completely baffle my virtual assistant. She had seen that I had made myself a little graphic in canva that proclaimed “I am a motherf*cking pie chart” and she had questions. Mostly involving the word why.?

It is the metaphor co-created by a community of changemakers that I worked with a few years ago. We realised that to throw out value calculations left us with a mathematical gap - how would we appreciate our own value in the inevitable moments where our edges were tested and we wobbled in our self-love. How do you represent an ‘and’ mentality to yourself? Pie charts, obviously.?

Every time you add a new category to a pie chart, the whole does not change in quantity. 100% is still 100%, you just can see extra detail in what comprises the whole. Even better, the parts of you that seem so overwhelming - the “flaws” and rules that are still being worked through - take up less space as part of the whole. They are joined by your strengths, your loves, your passions and your achievements and suddenly they are only one small piece of the pie.?

Here’s the simple truth. I am loveable for one reason and one reason only - I exist. I am flawed, and complex, and full of contradictions. I am not the sum of all my pluses and minuses, I am an ever expanding, beautifully messy pie chart of qualities. All of them are equally valuable.

This is what I mean when I talk about the audacious power of ‘and’ - it is the very foundation of my approach and why I pepper the word audacious in more liberally than the first person to discover seasoning. Embodying an ‘and’ mindset does not encourage or expect us to become someone radically different, or even to show up differently, to have value. It recognises that we are all human, and to be human is to be imperfectly perfect.?

I am good enough, exactly as I am.

And so are you.

Want some support in calming your gremlins? Book a free chat... https://calendly.com/theaudaciousand/chatwithanna