The thing I can't unhear now I've written it
In My Journal Lately
One November morning a thought came to my mind. I’ve been thinking a lot about money goals and the feelings that come up for me when I think about money, shoulds, reality, disappointment, where I can go from here, and how I’ll get there.
I had been wanting to spend some money on a thing for the last month or so. I had it all planned out. The day I’d go, the route I’d take, the morning planned. But something felt off in the days leading up to the purchase.
There was an ickiness around the spend. The fact I’d have no way to pay for it other than my credit card and no real plan to pay it off.
“I have to honour the feeling.”
The words “I have to honour the feeling,” literally came out of nowhere. I immediately grabbed a piece of paper to write them down and take to my journal later.
Even though I want it, I have to honour the feeling, because what else do I have? Where will ignoring it get me? Where has ignoring it got me so far? Further in debt. Is that the direction I want to go in? No.
The question that sits behind this for me, comes up when I think about other places of repeated failure. The places where I haven’t hit the mark, seen growth or change and keep repeating the same old shit. The hard questions I sometimes shyly and sometimes angrily shout on the page: WHY DO YOU KEEP ON CHEATING YOURSELF? If you really want something different, why do you keep doing the same thing?
That day felt like the first time in a long time that I chose to honour rather than cheat myself. That I started to etch in pencil, a different ending to the reality I’ve always lived.
There’ll need to be many more moments to get traction, and to double down on those pencil lines in indelible ink (does anyone remember doing that at school?), but that moment of honouring the feeling and keeping a promise to my future self felt like an important one.
Not honouring the feeling cheats me out of my knowing. That cheats my knowing out of taking action. The feeling is my compass and it directed me strongly that day. Ignoring it only weakens the signal and takes me away from the thing I want.
So I want to pay closer attention to the feeling. The feelings that are really the knowings and see what else they show me.
I don’t have a question for you this week. I’m hoping that if this was for you, then you feel it and you take those exact thoughts you’re having right now to your journal. Honour the feeling.