Calm Before the Storm
It’s been a minute. I haven’t felt compelled to write for a little while. Mostly distracted by life and the arrival of my two new fur babies, who I am absolutely obsessed with.
It’s funny how whenever we feel like things are going well, or that things are calm, we assume there must be a downside to it. That something big is coming. Something that is going to completely rock our world.
It’s like we can’t have nice things.
I can remember driving in the car and reflecting on how far I had come. I had experienced really profound heartbreak and, after a lot of self-reflection and soul-searching, I was starting to feel better.
Then I received a call.
My Dad died.
It was as if the Universe was trying to mess with me. I hadn’t felt this good in so long and all of a sudden I was right back down to zero. It felt so unfair.
So now I had evidence that things can’t just go well. The moment they do, something bad will happen.
I have spoken to so many people who have a similar belief about life, and so when things are actually going well, they simply cannot enjoy themselves. Your mind has made the connection that there is always a drawback. Things just feel too good to be true. Your nervous system is now braced when you feel good and you cannot live in the moment of calm and peace.
But have you ever noticed when things go well and nothing bad happens?
No, me neither.
Because we are wired to focus on the times where things didn’t go well. It’s a survival mechanism.
Just because something happened nine times in a row, will it definitely happen the tenth time?
But sometimes we are so certain that it will because the evidence that preceded it is so compelling.
Something I noticed in myself recently is that when things are calm or easy, I don’t trust it.
I did this unconsciously for most of my life. I also wore size 11 shoes for most of my life until recently realising I am a size 10. So apparently I’m capable of overlooking quite a lot.
That is common for a lot of people, but what I noticed at a deeper level was that I would deliberately sabotage or shake up parts of my life to make things uneasy.
Which seems like lunacy, but it was completely unconscious.
There is a quote by Carl Jung:
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
So why on earth would I do this?
Because chaos and unease felt more normal to me than calm and ease. I understood chaos and intensity. I excelled in those environments to an extent. I was suspicious of calm and, most of all, my nervous system didn’t know how to be in those situations.
“We don’t always return to what feels good. Sometimes we return to what feels familiar.”
So I would take back control and deliberately cause disruption.
Sometimes creating the storm ourselves feels safer than waiting to find out whether one is coming. If something is going to go wrong anyway, there can be a strange sense of control in being the one who causes the disruption rather than sitting around waiting for it.
This is self-sabotage and something that we so often do just so that our Ego can be right.
I mean, it’s not like I killed my Dad to balance things out.
He just died. It was his time. It just so happened to coincide with a time when I was feeling good about myself.
But my Ego drew the conclusion that, “I cannot have nice things. I cannot feel good without losing something.”
The Ego is a tricky mistress and it always has to be right. So my Ego, in that sense, self-sabotaged my idea of how life is.
But self-sabotage manifests itself in all manner of ways.
One thing I have noticed in the past is stepping on the scales and thinking, “Oh wow, I have lost a bit of weight. Now I have some leeway to eat more crap.”
Undoing all of the progress I have made.
Or simply getting into a good bedtime routine, feeling well rested and then staying up until 1 a.m. on my phone.
I have also pushed away the people I loved the most in the whole world, just so I could prove the belief I had that everyone I love in time will abandon me.
When you’re right about something, no matter what it is, it feels good.
Being a certain weight is comfortable because it is what you know. Being tired most of the time is familiar because it’s just how you have always felt.
When people always abandon you, there is a tragic security to it.
So often we can feel more comfortable when things aren’t going well for us than when things are going well. If we perceive that things often don’t go right for us, then the calm is the unknown.
And the unknown feels scary.
When you are in the calm, you will often start scanning for the storm.
And you will find it.
An unexpected expense. A passive-aggressive text message. Something feeling a little off.
Your Ego steps in and says, “See! I knew it was too good to be true.”
But in doing that, we ignore all the times things went well and nothing bad happened.
The ordinary days where everything was fine don’t stand out in our memory in the same way. We remember the storm because it confirms what we already believe, while barely registering all the evidence that contradicts it.
Sometimes nothing is about to go wrong.
There is no lesson coming. No cosmic balancing act. No price you have to pay because you’ve been happy for too long.
Sometimes things are just… good.
Maybe sometimes it's just peace.
Much Love,
Sandy