136. They're not angry at you for saying 'no'.

Say it with me: 'no'

When you live in the middle of the countryside you imagine a peaceful life with no stressors and no more inner work to be done because seriously, what events could possibly happen to bring up more old-self patterns that need attention? The birds eating all of my baby zinnia seeds? The torrential rain drowning my cherry tree? Next door’s dog chasing the cows in the field making them moo a lot louder than usual while petrifying them? 

I didn’t run away to the countryside and I didn’t think my life would be perfect thanks to living here, but I do find it surprising when normal-social-human things happen to me while living completely isolated. A recent event completely wrecked my nervous system. Well, in all fairness, the event didn’t wreck me, I did.

This event, which I voluntarily involved myself in, required me to have an uncomfortable conversation, which is something I’ve not grown up with. In my family you were taught to avoid conflict at all cost and if you created conflict, you were a loud mouth and a pain in the arse. So now that I had to make a decision, my people-pleasing aka “be a good girl” parts were begging me to stay quiet.

In the past, I’d often wake up with my heart pounding in my chest, running to the toilet in a cold sweat, trembling uncontrollably and with a bottomless pit of fear in my stomach. The worst part is that I was used to it, that’s just how I was. However, I walked away from the lifestyle and the thought patterns that caused me to live like that and all of those nasty symptoms disappeared. So now that the old well-known symptoms were back thanks to this “have the conversation” dilemma, I genuinely felt like I was dying. 

I drank four cups of chamomile tea and put Bach Flower Remedies on my tongue every four hours. I also changed my t-shirt quite a few times, put my phone on airplane mode and sang Adele songs to try to cry and release emotion, which didn’t work. I felt like I was dying but I also knew that it was because I was stuck in my head.

This big event was simply a normal WhatsApp conversation in which I explained my position, my point of view, my thoughts but more importantly my needs. My needs. Those things actually exist, believe it or not. When you learn that confrontation is something to be avoided no matter what, you learn that you need to become a people-pleaser because otherwise your dirty little needs get in the way and start to pronounce forbidden dark magic words like “no” or “I don’t want to”.

As a kid I used to be an expert loud mouth. The biggest in the family, the person that took no shit, the person that got involved in her parent’s arguments when things got unfair, the person that defended the kids being bullied on the school playground. But I learnt, punishment after punishment, that you don’t do that. You tell the kid born in October as a libra, obsessed with equality and justice, to pretend she was born at the end of June, become a cancer and hide inside its shell. I eventually became an expert crab, so much in fact that the original libra part of me got locked away in a tower, forever trapped as a crab.

This event was an opportunity for me to either people please and do the absolute impossible to try to make everything work for everyone or make a hard decision and put my needs first. I woke up as scared as I was the day of my driving test, which I failed after ten seconds sitting behind the wheel. I knew that I had to send the message, be honest, be vulnerable, speak my truth and know that all of what I was saying was coming from my heart, the best possible place, and that I truly had tried in every way to please people but it wasn’t pleasing and it wasn’t working. I was falling apart.

The reply I got back was understanding and loving too, so everything was fine. But then my brain realized that this isn’t the pattern life used to follow. It was never that simple. After speaking up came punishment and being told I was a disappointment and that led to me being inundated by shame. My brain was unable to go down a new path of: I spoke my truth with love > the message was received well and understood > the reply was loving and respectful > there is no problem > everything is fine and you are safe. 

Instead my brain was saying: You spoke up > you messed up > they hate you > they’re replying nicely because they hate you > they’re going to tell everyone how much they hate you > everyone’s going to find out you’re a bad person > you messed up and they’re just being nice but btw > they secretly hate you. 

I was aware, every second, that my brain was really struggling to find a new way of working out this situation because it was so used to the old way being the right way. I kind of ended up freezing and embodied the “they hate you” thoughts because there was less restriction. I began to spiral, my head began to hurt, I wanted to throw in the towel and kept asking myself “why did I do this?”.

The reality is that everything is fine and there’s nothing wrong with speaking my needs. It’s actually vital I learn how to do it, and even more, it’s vital I practice how to voice them and give them the power they deserve. But it’s really scary at first. Everything feels so new, you don’t know how it’s going to feel. You have to break old mental patterns that are as strong as chains tied to your ankles. It feels like I’m re-teaching myself how to feel emotions and interpret them based on the healthier adult self that I am now. That’s great but also daunting.

No matter where you live, what you do or who you are, uncomfortable situations will happen to you and you’ll have to decide what to do with them and how to react. I gave myself an event to teach me a new valuable lesson but the birds eating my zinnias are a lesson of patience and resilience, problem solving too. The dog chasing the cows reminds me that I’m an empathetic person. And seeing the cherry tree look like a dead branch next to the prospering pear tree teaches me that sometimes, even when you do everything in your ability, things don’t go as you wanted them to.

There are things to be learned everywhere but we are the ones that decide how to look at the lessons and what to do with them. I decided to surf this wave and that too has consequences, everything may seem nasty at this minute with my shaky cold hands, my sweaty t-shirts, my swollen brain, my nervous stomach and the tears that are trapped inside my throat with nowhere to go. But that too is a part of growing and it’s not romantic but it is real.

STUFF I WANT TO SHARE ↓

1. It takes a lot of courage to speak openly about phone addiction and I really liked this piece by

   Arielle Velarion
   - “how to unf*ck your attention span”

2. I used to love going on long runs, then it got cold and started to snow so I stopped.

   Florencia Ornelas
   wrote a beautiful piece about her new relationship with running and doing exercise in general and certain sentences stuck with me and felt like a warm hug - “Healing my inner child through running”

3. Let’s all clap while

   carlota 🦎
   blows out the candles on her ‘she’s been writing for a whole year and reached 500 subscribers cake’. She’s my dear friend, my podcast buddy and my favourite laugh. - “hoy entreoctubres cumple un año”

4. To Tinder or not to Tinder. We’re hyperconnected and have never been more disconnected.

   Marta
   writes about her experience and how we all judge based on photos when it’s our turn to pick - “Fifteen years of rejection is a lifestyle”

5. Remember when you were at university thinking you were about to graduate and become a successful, important adult? Remember when you’d go home for summer break or Christmas and feel like a stranger in the town where you grew up? That forever town that felt like a constant limbo waiting for something, anything, to happen. Well

   M.Duritz
   wrote about it and made my bones chill from the bomb of nostalgia - “El redoble”

MY PROJECTS ↓

DIMANCHE OBJECTS shop run by C and I. We find cool, useful, unique and beautiful objects that deserve another life. Why buy something new when you can have something with history? Something made with better quality? Made to last and full of love. We upload 3 new objects every Sunday, keep an eye out on Instagram, Vinted and our website.

POMELO BOOK CLUB I needed friends, I craved friends, I wanted to stop being lonely and somehow meet girlies the same age as me also craving book-girly friends so I created an online book club and nowadays it’s a magical online space full of magical book lovers that fill my heart with book joy and friend joy every month.

PODA.SERVER is our newest project. It all started +2 years ago when we decided book lovers (including ourselves) needed our service, and seen as it doesn’t exist, we decided to create it. We’re slowly easing into the idea of launching it and showing it to the world so follow us over on Instagram to stay up to date.

FRAGMENTOS PODCAST en Spotify.

carlota 🦎

y yo cada mes leemos un fragmento de un ensayo, hablamos del contexto socio-político, hablamos de la autora y de su vida, de dónde surge el ensayo y lo traemos de vuelta al presente para ver cómo lo vemos ella y yo ahora. Tenemos 2 episodios publicados y el tercero está al llegar.

the best floor cushion ever made by vigas.works