9 Steps to Hearing Yourself

yes, even in our very noisy world

A tree I painted in early May this year when visiting London

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”

— Oscar Wilde

I used to be epically good at listening to everyone else but myself. Like so many people I know, especially women, I was raised to put others’ comfort above my own, to be polite at all costs, and to simply put myself last. I don’t blame my parents; that’s how they were raised, and how our society is constructed. I felt that if I made a wrong move, all of it would crumble around me.

The upshot of this was that, until only a few years ago, I didn’t know how I truly felt about anything. I had a lot of opinions, of course, and much of it was what I had been taught to believe, or it was a rebellion against it (which amounts to much the same thing).

Then I began an experiment: when someone would ask me how I was doing, I wouldn’t give my default response of, “I’m fine, thanks, how are you?” Instead, I would pause and take a minute to check in with myself and see – how was I feeling, really?

This was when it dawned on me, in a crushing-my-human-spirit way, that I had indeed been on some weird auto-pilot mode. My whole life. I know, I know, people look at me and think – oh you don’t have a home, oh you don’t play by other people’s rules, oh you do your own thing. But a lot of that was because I knew enough to not want to operate on the usual rules of polite society, but at the same time, I didn’t truly know what I wanted, so I just hovered in limbo for years.

It’s very, very easy to hover. To avoid commitment, to float, to be vague. Our short-attention-span world welcomes it, as does capitalism, which sits on humanity’s discontent. The more unhappy (and the more uncommitted) we are, the more willing we are to buy things in the hope they will help us feel better.

There is so much noise in our world. Newspapers are now more full of opinions, not facts. Social media is simply a depository of everyone else’s thoughts. It’s unavoidable. But if I don’t listen to myself, then I risk living a life that is not my own, but one that is put together by other people for their interests. And it becomes one of those things that can haunt us on our death beds.