A pretty garden in the storm.
Gnomes and white linen frocks.
We’ve been lied to…we’re never going to be happy.
Well, not all the time. This perpetual self-growth, glorification of healing, please-go-to-therapy culture has led us to believe that there’s some final destination we’re striving for, and there’s not. This revelation has rumbled my innocent optimism these last few months and my goodness I’m relieved. We can stop striving and start being.
There’s always going to be triggers, chaos, lessons to be learned, wild disruptions – that’s the ride we’re on. There’s no eventual arrival place where suddenly we get to frolic in the white linen frock in the field of flowers and feel grand all the time. We’re already in the garden. And go with me here, I’m pondering aloud, I think the goal is make your relationship to yourself, and then your life, the prettiest garden you can. Go to therapy, do the things that feel good, say no, end relationships, lean into pleasure, follow your longings, quit – whatever you need to do to create this resilient, growing garden all the while knowing that storms will come and ravage shit, and assholes with lawnmowers will come in and rip up your favourite bed of flowers and you’ll have to replant them. The garden will never be finished, but feeling safe and satisfied and immovable in your garden is maybe the point.
You still with me in this garden metaphor? Have you popped on your dungarees and gloves? All of this feels so freeing to me. Maybe it comes back to controlling the controllable, or, ringleading your own circus and monkeys instead of everyone else’s. Which have been revolutionary notions for me the last few years. Here I was trying to avoid all chaos in my own garden, and over spending all of my energy because I could see what was about to go awry in your garden too.
Nothing wrong in my garden. Nothing wrong in your garden. That’s why I was here, right? To be of service and help fix all the gardens and make sure nothing ever went wrong. I thought this was how it was meant to be.
I thought this was loving. But what it is is exhausting and co-dependent. And also entitled, that somehow I’m an expert landscape gardener when I can’t even keep a fucking cactus alive.
I am a highly sensitive person. I read a great line yesterday that said it’s like holding an object except you have fifty fingers instead of five. You have that much extra input to deal with and compute in a world where most people are dealing with their five finger data instead. The more I learn about this, and my probable ADHD diagnosis, it’s making my capacity to be in my own garden, doing my own thing, so much easier. I love working out why I am the way I am. I always have. I love learning about how I work, how people work. I love unpicking the stories I’ve told myself and unravelling myself. In the past I thought I was a puzzle to solve, now, I’ve changed that perspective, what I imagine now is the image of the girl in the white frock in the garden is at the core, she’s at the head of the table of my me’ness, but the cultural bullshit, the rules, the chaos, the traumas, the insecurities, the childhood lessons reaffirmed in adulthood, the minimising and safety strategies to get on with it, are all in the garden too. They’re like loud garden gnomes that are making the girl in the garden quieter. It’s weedy. No one can hear each other because everyone is yelling, no one is listening, and everyone thinks they’re plans for garden management are the best. But I’ve been fucking weeding, and ploughing, and whatever farming techniques we want to throw in here. I’ve got a cute tractor and a wide brim hat, and I’ve got the master plan and I’m trying to live my cottage core fantasy delegating and co-creating with all of these gnomes at once. This isn’t just a Claire ramble – this is about Internal Family Systems in psychology, the multiple parts of ourselves, but I live for the story.
I need the story. I need the cute garden, and chaos gnomes in sequin outfits, and me in a white dress like my own far edgier, less creepy, way queerer, Snow White fantasy.
I think what I’m realising, and enjoying, is knowing that the peace doesn’t come from the garden itself, it comes from me. That my calm, my peace, my self-knowing, is rooted, grounded, and immovable regardless of what’s happening in life, or my neighbours garden. That is the goal. That storms will come, and caterpillars will eat my plants, and I’ll be okay because I like my garden, and I can just replant and rebuild. I know I can do that. There’s peace in that. And for me, peace is the goal.
I hope your planting seeds you love, my dear. I hope you know you’re the best thing about your garden. It doesn’t need to be perfect. Fuck the rules. Work on your own garden, not theirs.
Not my garden, not my weeds.
Let’s bloom, baby.
Love Claire.