Tag: Philip Dodson

Buried emotions that dance around the graveyard of my mind

Posted on by philipdodson

A lot of my life I have been deaf through talking when I could have chosen to listen, I have starved people of the oxygen to explain themselves and left them fighting to be understood. The fear of being wrong if I listened coupled with wanting to earn another badge of being right.

The attention was gained from hogging the mic, talking the loudest, I’m right.

This is part of the journey that is hard, this where I have been in the last few years, in an emotional dark hole inside me. Braving up to the demons, dragging those buried emotions out of the graves inside my head, where I thought they would all rest in peace and leave me alone. But they didn’t stay in their graves, they danced all over their graves and haunted me.

The last 6-7 years, maybe more intensely in last 2-3 years, and now, as an ongoing journey of rumbling with and digging deep into the emotions of the past, I have been unpicking the past and I have been re-writing the past, changing the narrative to the real truth, not some other ‘truth’ that I have been telling myself, that I have been conditioned to think by ‘them’. ‘Them’ being the others, society all the people who have no right to tell me who I am, how I should behave, think, act. I am now taking ownership of my story, I am now choosing to be the star in my own life film instead of being a frustrated extra.

That way I can become an even better listener and give people who matter to me the oxygen they need to be understood, to tell their story, to share their narrative.

In order to move forward, we have to go back and dig up the emotions that are buried in the dark places. We have to be brave enough to face them, understand them and write a narrative that moves us forward and serves us well. Talking badly to ourselves serves us and everyone else around us badly.

I have learnt to be kind to myself, empathetic to myself, to change my inner voice, to be brave enough to face the emotions and demons. I am still digging up more in the huge cemetery that is the dark corner of Philip’s mind. It is an ongoing journey and a big task as the body count has been high in my life, the corpses have piled high, like an emotional Battle of the Somme.

Was or is it easy? No. But it is a whole lot better than having those demons, untruths and emotions dancing around my mind and preventing me from being me and living my life.

You have to see pain and suffering with purpose, as Viktor Frankl did on an epic scale, and then you can face anything because the pain has a meaning.

Despair = suffering – meaning (Thanks, Chip Conley for these wonderful and simple equations).

The more meaning to the suffering the less the despair.

The dancing party for my demons and untruths is coming to an end, they are running out of songs.

Polish or polish not click bait and loneliness

Posted on by philipdodson

When we had one TV channel, we all sat and watched the only programme, whether it was good or bad. When the only way to know what the hottest music was, meant watching one show once a week and then listening to the top 40 on a Sunday evening, which always clashed with Sunday dinner, so you recorded it and listened to it all week. OK, so we did forward the odd painful track like the Osmonds and there was only so much Barry Manilow any human could endure before poking your eyes out to have a lesser pain.

On average we watch 3-4 hours a day of YouTube, Netflix, TV etc. That’s a quarter of our waking hours and then we moan we do not have enough time. TV used to be limited and often crap so we did other things like talking, going out for a bike ride, painting, playing music, making things and importantly, daydreaming.

But it brought people, families, friends, even strangers, together for shared experiences, good or bad, you could not fast forward and skip the ads, you had to watch them, the shit ones too, but now we can reminisce about the shit ones and laugh.

Life was connected because it was simple. Now we have more complexity, we are strangely more connected but in fact totally disconnected, cellular, we are in our silos, we are depressed, lonely, lost, overwhelmed and searching for worthiness on Facebook, Instagram, snap chat, or shit chat or any other life/time-sucking platform.

Ironic to write that as I post this blog on Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. You can always subscribe via the ancient art form of email to never miss another thrilling post.

We need to go back to simple, we need to go back to connecting with real people, like our families, our neighbours, our real friends, that is people who we actually physically meet and talk to. Nothing in the digital world can replace that. Even the ‘digital natives’ deep down know that.

We are not meant to be alone, with the only interactions being digital, we are not meant to watch a film on our own on Netflix while the other members of our family sit in different rooms of the house watching YouTube, playing PS4 or watching iPlayer. We are meant to sit and talk, discuss, listen to music together, watch something together, laugh, chat, disagree, hug, love each other, cry together, whatever it is, real is better than virtual.

The instant gratification culture came from endless choice, it meant we no longer had to stick with something, even as simple as a film, tv show, a game, whatever, we can always click on something else, endlessly.

Sure it’s great that we have choice, but it is also harmful in a far bigger way to be totally disconnected, lonely and overwhelmed.

We all quit our jobs to be self-employed and free, yet most freelancers sit at home rearranging their self-help books and polishing their Mac books sitting at their desks, lonely and depressed, missing the companionship of work colleagues. Yet we tell ourselves we are free.

We are free, free from human interaction which goes completely against all that humans have done for the entire time we have been on this planet.

The internet has created the ultimate choice, the ultimate connection. So why are so many lost and miserable? Well, it is because we are not connecting enough with real humans. We are not connecting with even our own family, let alone the neighbours, and even dare I say it, strangers. We actually spend so little time connecting with ourselves, instead, we surf through endless amounts of click bait, you know the ones that tell us what film star we look like and it always comes up with Angelina Jolie or George Clooney.

This weekend my mate Bernie, that is the 3rd mention in a row, shit I need to have more friends to talk about, maybe I could get off the internet a bit more and go and connect with real humans!!

So back to the weekend with Bernie, our joint families took a trip on the Bluebell railway, this is a tourist steam railway and the carriages were built in the 1800’s, so each compartment was self-contained, so you need to share with a few other strangers. OMG, a Gen Y/Z panic attack would erupt, to sit with people we do not know, are you kidding me? None of us had phones, OMG what?? So we were completely disconnected, I couldn’t even sit and scroll through all my social media apps to avoid eye contact or conversation.

Both journeys up and down the line led to an interesting discussion on whether there were other English words like Polish and polish, which are spelt the same, but sound different, answer on a postcard if you know of others, please. Then on the way back, unbelievably, Bernie and his wife Lorena, who met in and love Poland, got chatting to a Polish guy.

Then we spent the weekend listening to vinyls, doing art, walking in the woods, and connecting to real people, we went for Sunday breakfast at the local cafe, chatted to the owner, listened to one of the customers play Einaudi on the piano and we all left the internet behind.

No one died in the making of that weekend and we all felt like we had returned to a simpler connected world.

The Bluebell railway and real people make for happiness, inclusion, love and connection that is the perfect antidote to being together alone.

Polish or polish not click bait and loneliness. I can happily say that it is two years ago, nearly, I switched off every single notification on over 50 apps on my phone and never looked back. Well, it is still a painful process at times and I still suffer a bit of loneliness and surfing the net to soothe it. But the journey continues to even better.