Things to cling to when your world is broken

You know nothing, Jon Snow.

I thought I was awake. For years I was happily telling my clients things like: ‘The more you know, the more there is to know.’ I even got one of them to repeat 10 times, ‘I know nothing’. His name wasn’t Jon Snow, and I didn’t realise at the time that I also knew nothing.

What I have learned over the past two years is that thinking you know something is a recipe for disaster. Obfuscation has been, and still is, the name of the game. When you think you’ve found your footing they shift it until you’re sinking in a quagmire. You get out the planks and start to build a new foundation, and there’s a sinkhole. You quickly make a scaffolding around it and build a treehouse, congratulating yourself on your resourcefulness. Then the floods come.

The world that I thought I knew, whatever about you, has been totally obliterated.

This world is not of my making, it’s the one I was born into and assumed was the only one. The Matrix woke us up to the possibility that all may not be as it seems, but come on, we are not batteries for an extra-terrestrial race, are we? Ahem. Let’s not go there, not today anyway.

This ‘reality’ that we live in is the world I’ve been feeding my energy into for years, because I thought that’s all there was. It has shifted into something hostile and nasty and I don’t like it here. Maybe it’s me that has shifted, and the world has always been hostile and nasty. I don’t know. Remember, I know nothing. But I do have a choice - I can continue to fix and rebuild my house on this world-not-of-my-making, knowing the sands will always shift, I will always be doing repairs, questioning things and letting things go. And being disappointed. Perhaps the only way to stay here is to pretend that everything is okay, and that disappointment is inexorable. I think many people live like this. But what is the alternative?

This is where I am with myself today. I’m feeling like I would prefer to move off-planet and build a brave, new world, far away from here. But I don’t have a spaceship - do you?

Everything they told you was a story. Everything you think you know is based on a narrative. History is in textbooks and not what really happened, and is written from the eye of the victor. The news just telling us what they want us to hear, all twisted out of proportion to keep us distracted from our true potential. It all seems fake to me and I wonder why I never saw it permeating everything at this level before. Yes, I know all about stories and how they influence the outcome of things. I always remind my clients that the story they tell themselves about something or someone is not always the truth, and encourage them to drop their attachment to it as it influences their emotions and decisions. I suppose it was only a matter of time before I realised that we have been telling ourselves a collective story about the world, it has influenced what we built our lives upon, and that’s what is braking right now. For me, anyway.

The narrative is compelling, it has just enough truth, sensationalism and fear peppered into it to suck us in. I am exhausted from it all. For 2 years I have been asking myself: ‘Is this true? What about this? Why are they saying this? What is the true agenda? Is that guy, is he good? What about this one?’ At least 20 times each day. I’ve had enough now, and honestly, when it comes down to it, does it really matter? I cannot live like this anymore. I do not want to give this narrative, this falseitude any more of my soul, of my energy and my time. It keeps me from my one wild and precious life.

I guess I could try to create a brave new world, right here. But what does that even mean? It is brave because it takes strength to step away from the old world, from a familiar story, from everything we thought we believed, and yet stay here, right now, in the present moment with what we know is true. So that leads me to ask, what do we know is true? What do we actually know?

I can start by saying, ‘I know that I exist.’ Okay, good start, but how do we prove it?

My first attempt is - ‘I think, therefore I am’; but we are so much more than thinking beings. That’s what society has allowed us to believe for years, deliberately, so that we forgot all the other things that we are. It’s not right, it doesn’t fit for me. So perhaps: ‘I feel, therefore I know’, is closer to the truth. But are your feeling your own feelings, somebody else’s feelings, or are they manufactured feelings? (Yes, they can do that.) Then, taking into account the current astrological energies and the phase of the moon, and something called unconscious bias based on whatever narrative you’re holding onto at the time, plus collective/ancestral emotional leakage… It is difficult to clarify if what you are feeling really is what is in front of you. But you do feel something, so you do exist - is that enough?

How about this - ‘I breathe, therefore I be.’ Yes, I like this one the best. I be. Not good language though but it gets the point across. And it’s not about knowing anything, it’s just existing for the sake of it. Much better. I am a being. We are beings.

We are multidimensional beings. Some of us have switched off some of our dimensions, the world is designed to encourage us to do that, as powers that be prefer it that way. I always thought that we had a choice to stay switched off or to grow, but the deeper I go into this conundrum of what our world really is, I see that it is possible some people have been manipulated beyond their free will and may not have a choice to grow, or even are aware that they can. However, I digress. I’m no Jon Snow after all, for I know that I exist, and I am a multidimensional being.

What else do I know?

I’m still here. Wherever here is. Bring it into the present moment, here is wherever I am. Grand. What else?

• I no longer relate to people who pretend that the last 2 years didn’t happen and everything is find and dandy.

• I have difficulty with the idea that I can now book a table and eat in a place that wouldn’t have me as a customer last week.

• I am traumatised. I need time to process what I have experienced.

• I’m angry. About a lot of things.

• I don’t really hate it here, I just need some time to regroup.

• I have found some good people who, like me, are confused, exhausted, and emotional. These people feel like they are my new family. They are the people that reassured me I wasn’t going insane. People who said to me. ‘if you question your sanity then you are one of the sane ones’. That helped immensely. Especially as I had to repeat it back to them on numerous occasions.

• I know that I am grieving. That my heart has broken. And that not everybody feels the same way as I do.

I thought that humans were basically decent and kind. I know now that it is a rare commodity, like common sense. I pledge to cherish more deeply those people who are decent and kind, and in return, I will make more time and space for them than before.

I want to start again. I have children, and I want to build a better world for them. A total rebuild of my idea of what this existence is all about, is required. The tower has been struck by lightening, the structure has collapsed, and I’m going to sit in the ruins and think about it for a while before I begin a new construction.

I will build a foundation of my choosing, on a landscape that is not controlled by a narrative. (‘Good luck with that’ I hear you say!) Yes, it’s very ambitious. I will find a landscape to build upon where I answer directly to God and to nobody else. I was kind of doing that before all of this anyway, I just need to take it further now. It would be easy to just go off-grid, my husband and I could take our solar panels down to a little cottage and grow our own food, but we live in Dublin and my children are still at school. So I will start by taking some time to sit in the landscape of my heart. I will pull my energy out from all the stories I was feeding it into. I will ask the pieces of my soul that I lost over the last 2 years to return to me. And I will take the time I need to take to heal.