notes

When I have time to myself, even moments waiting for the toast to pop, I can have beautiful embodied feelings of integration with my parts and connection with everything around me, but when I get into conversations with people I start to reach and merge.

Thinking about how I tried to present myself at the gestalt workshops. The feeling of cartilidge and threads snapping aparts as I experienced between wanting to merge and be someone who could do this. Trying to talk like them and not saying lots of things in case they didnt sound therapist-y.

Feeling things pulling, tensions moving between parts inside me and people I'm talking to. Between the experience of my bones and hormones and parts of people on my phone, on zoom, Instagram posts, guardian articles and mastedon posts. Particles moving to and from, energies twisting, filtering, transferring through the space between me and these others.

Exaggerating or being ott about things things - e.g. like saying 'gestalt changed my life' in my hello to the group. Needing to be the person who sees things from the most oblique, unusual point of view.

I'm always drawn to things that take me away from myself and where I'm from, Eastern religions, Sci fi, art, global politics… Presenting myself as someone who works in a cool gallery, has knowledge of art, philosophy, zen. Associating myself with these abstract, wierder, higher status areas of knowledge.

Instead of being comfortable as someone who is genuinely interested bevause I got so much out of therapy. Holding myself, or trying to hold myself like I already belong, around the table with a group of therapists talking shop. Joining in conversations I don't fully understand, trying to ask therapy-y type questions, mimicking words, phrases.

Ways of pressing myself outwards, occupying space between me and the other people in the group. Feels like an army holding me in and pressing against them with shields and armamants, misleading and misdirecting them with camoflage, surveillence and counter surveillance.

Can I find a way to talk from me not knowing? That acknowledges my not having the knowledge and experiences that others do. To talk from not being you, not knowing how you feel or what you know. To talk from the experiences of my bones, my not knowing what is outside my skin, without performing anxious empathetic curiosity.

OMFG I constantly forget I'm right here. Right in the middle of all my and other peoples expectations of who I should be and what I should be. I'm actually just this, what I am experiencing right now. Where does that need to escape where I'm from come from? I think I've been scared of suffering like my Dad. Suffering the anxiety and frustration of being so grounded he can't step back and so gets frustrated and angry. Suffering the injustice of being a working class man, treated like a tool, discarded by a business and government.

It's also probably my wanting to jump out of the queerness I felt my dad disapproval of. Jumping out of a body that felt angry with my Dad and all the men and boys I knew for being suspicious of me, for making me go play football twice a week when it was something I didn't want to do. Trying to escape the working class adage of, don't try and be something you're not.

My shock at my Dad's shock that I don't move, think and talk like him, expelled the feelings of being like him and other Yorkshire blokes from my body. My entire personality is based on not being my Dad. How does he feel when he sees me doing that?

Suddenly inside, I feel an awareness in me, a presence that feels like my Dad and his ways. Awareness's within me of how to be like they were as I was growing up. They're sat in a nook of the fox pub, Pete Swan is shrugging about some wierd new fad none of them can get their head around, revelling some peoples peoples ridiculousness, Paul Grant is telling me, I love your Dad, but my god he can talk.

I also feel my mum, having subtle chats in the kitchen to see how I am, making toast during the break of poirot.

My aunty's deb, nanna Smith and my mum creased up laughing about something daft in nannas hallway.

My aunty's deb doing an over the top Yo Neil as we cross in the street to embarass me in front of my mates.

It's like I've forgotten who I am and where I'm from, but I'm remembering now.

I'm feeling experiences, passed through my childhood relationships - as patterns of awareness repeating through my senses and in my body in the here and now.

I feel more solid, more here and more Yorkshire.

Age 47 I am realising and really feeling for the first time I am a Yorkshire man. I am the child of my father grown up into a man.

In the group discussion at the gestalt therapy weekend workshops I was trying to jump in to another place to be another self. What if I stopped using my ideas, words, gestures, movements and actions to jump away from my body, what I've experienced and myself?