I find myself in the most precarious of positions in that despite all my hones t proclamations and confessions, i am, for the first time, reticent to write about my personal experiences here. Today has been exceptionally hard and i’m emotionally bruised to the extent that i’ve been procrastinating when it comes to putting pen to paper. But i know what i want to talk about is too important to keep to myself because there are others out there who could benefit. Maybe if i open up it will help them to as well.

I woke up with a terrible sense of foreboding, as i tend to do when things suddenly crash in seemingly in an unexpected way. I came to accept that periods of suffering have a place and purpose in my life – it inevitably means that i am being called in by the Boss and it’s time for a very big spiritual lesson. My mum helped me to understand that to move on to the next stage wherever you are in your life, you need to take a step and be “in the right place”, i.e. trained, equipped, and to be wise enough. When you suffer, you pray. You cry out to the Father. When He needs you to come close to Him, he allows the crash to take place to call you in.

So mum and I went for lunch, and as is so typical of us, it was 2 hours of intense debate and very passionate conversation where she again chided me for my supposed lack of humility. This time though i didn’t buy into it. For a while now i’ve come to accept the idea of personal boundaries, and how generations of my family have absolutely no idea of them whatsoever. It has meant that i have walked over the boundaries of others and not enforced my own. We debated the nature of those metaphorical boundaries and how to tell them apart from “walls”, but to cut a long story short, i rebuked her for saying she would pray that i would be more humble, and instead told her to pray that i would learn the lessons i needed to, and that i would be wise enough to discern when to be strong and when to be sensitive.

What she actually meant was “diplomatic” and/or “sensitive”. I explained that i have been indirectly leading our family in a complete reconstruction of those personal boundaries, and when they initially enforced it can seem aggressive and unpleasant to those who don’t know what they are. Boundaries are about the rights you have as a human being, and where you end and others begin. The most flagrant abuse of them is with daughters – mothers make it clear to them that they should just “get on with it” and do not respect their rights to be angry, frustrated or upset.

What i love so dearly about my mum is her incredible bravery and honesty – i thank God every day that she was able to impart such gentleness into me. She wears her heart on her sleeve and can be so gracefully vulnerable that it’s painful to witness. Today she asked me if she thought she was childish and pathetic for putting her hands over her eyes when they had to ID my godfather in his coffee because she didn’t want to see. Without that, i wouldn’t even have the 1% sensitivity i have. Because of my love for who she is i can forgive anyone for anything and put down my anger if someone is vulnerable to me, no matter how bad or old their sin – i cannot lash out, and i am overwhelmed with compassion for them because i see her when they do. It’s what she would do, and what she taught me, albeit indirectly.

With every spiritual lesson comes a heartbreak. It’s not nice, but growth always hurts. My image today was of a surgeon working on a patient: being in immense pain and operated on by force against your will and lashing out, but ultimately seeing the calm doctor rising above his protests to cut out the cancer so he would heal and be better. My chest has been aching all day. I know what to expect when the crash comes now, and i go willingly. I accept that i am blind to what i need to know and be told, and that i just have to go to a peaceful place and get down on my knees and listen. Once i have come to that place, there is a period where it needs to sink in and then the world moves on a massive step. When you see suffering like that, it ceases to be suffering at all.

How come that doesn’t happen to you? There is a simple answer for that, and the wise will seek it out and understand it. It doesn’t come on a plate – it requires that you do something first as an act of your free will. There will be no invasion or blinding flash.

What i learnt today was about my own motivations and my wounds. I missed something so big that i can’t believe i didn’t realise it. It haunts so many of us.

I have misunderstood fear for anger, and have talked about self-worth endlessly. I have made so many mistakes in my life and it amazes me that i can acquire so much wisdom yet be so totally, utterly blind to the most obvious things. We know that addictions and maladaptive behaviours come from not feeling loved or feeling that we are actually worth anything at all. But i have always suffered something deeper that i could not explain or manage to simply put my finger on. I have always felt loved, although i did not realise how important it was to be told by own father that he was pleased with. I didn’t realise how important it was to be told someone was proud of you.

In my darkest moments i have told of how i have always felt forsaken. Left alone, forgotten and lost. Not inferior, not unloved, but left. I have never been able to understand how i could feel so desperately empty but know that i have many self-evident gifts that set me apart. I have never been able to reconcile how i can pride myself in the things i have but still feel so broken.

But it is not enough to be loved, to feel you are worth something or that you those you care about are proud of you. It is not enough to have just these things, because there is something else that is utterly crucial.

We need to feel not just loved and worthy, but to feel wanted.

You can have all of these things and still harbour the most terrible of pains inside. I have done everything i have done out of a wanting to be wanted. Everything i have built has been predicated on that and it has been my driving force since i was small. Hence that all i have created is built upon shall and weak foundations that could never be secure enough to securely stand in the long-term. It is so blissfully simple. Because it has driven me, who i am and what i do has centred around a very human need that i have never been able to acknowledge, yet is so profound.

I never felt wanted when i was young – my parents drummed into me that i wasn’t wanted and that they wanted rid of me. I’ve chased career positions and the adoration of women to feel wanted – by anyone, for anything. I am weak, and i am vulnerable, and it explains why none of these things have ever kept my interest for long. I have never realised or acknowledged it, but now i see it all around me. I have cultivated and harvested that feeling of being wanted en masse, on a scale i cannot contemplate. It is why i have suffered so dreadfully in relationships and in self-destructive repetitive patterns. I have been going around attempting to fill the void.

The need to feel wanted is most prevalent in women and their desire to be chased and beautified – it’s endemic in almost everywhere i go for a girl to be wanted, in fact it’s pretty much their life purpose in many cases. I’ve seen what they will sacrifice and compromise just for a brief taste of it. Being desired or courting attention is not the same as being wanted – being wanted means someone wants you around, not that they care or desire you. This need is so incredibly powerful and causes those fabled eating disorders and narcissistic behaviour you see in London City stockbrokers when they go on about their new Ferraris. It is addictive, but as with all false fulfilment it is temporary and you have to keep coming back for it.

I question this now as i feel genuinely happy for the first time in a very long time with Kelly. She has proved me wrong on so many things and just swung through any of the little tests i’ve put to her. It’s funny but she wrote on her Facebook about having a “warm content glow” about her and i realised i felt the same. I’m happy with this person, and our relationship is great. I just notice myself smiling for no reason (wtf is that all about?) and i love everything about her. It feels so weird. She’s my best pal in the world and the person i want to walk over to for a hug when things get bad.

She’s utterly hilarious, wonderfully witty and eccentric – we have shop assistants laughing in shock at our banter. She goes swimming with my nephew and is interested in being a close part of my family. She doesn’t stress out, doesn’t play games and she is just honest to a fault. And to top it off, she is fucking beautiful, with a body to die for.  She just lets me be me without judging me for it, even though i’m so useless at doing the same. The girl spontaneously drives across the country just to see me and puts finding spiritual faith in her goals list. More than that, she stands up to me in the most vulnerable and righteous way. The greatest truths are the simplest things.

We must acknowledge these things and let them go. I’m tired of how weary i feel despite having so much and i can’t go back in time to fix what i never had. I have the most amazingly unique life anyone could ask for but all my running around generating that wanting for me in other people’s minds always leaves me exhausted and unfulfilled.

This need is the root of all the nefarious behaviours that spring from it, and all of it must go. Everything in my life that has been built or driven by this need must be uprooted and replaced by a more solidified core. Those foundations must be strong and concrete, and i have to do what i do for the right reasons.

What happens when we do not receive what we need when we are young, or we are hurt or corrupted, is that we build a new idealised version of ourselves called the “False Self”. There comes to be 2 people – our true realistic self, and our false idealised self. The fact that there are two causes massive problems and the process of reconciling them is the basis for why we feel so confused and empty despite having what we want a lot of the time. It is entirely normal and typically human, and does not imply any kind of illness. But it is ultimately harmful and counter-productive as it is simply a survival mechanism.

We build a world organised around this “False Self”, but it is founded on a distorted view of everything and is in the wrong direction and misguided path. Those needs and things we crave drive us and determine our choices and successes. If you meet someone who has always made the wrong decision all the time all throughout their life, you can guarantee that they have allowed fear to make their decisions for them. Living a life where we are true and wise means we face the hard things, dismantle that False Self in a structured and safe way and become who we can be. If my life and future has been built around a False Self, it must be replaced, redirected and fortified. That’s a hard lesson.

In my faith, the Father will deliberately thwart that False Self and show you it to save you from it because He is the centre of your life and you derive all things from Him. You are in great danger when all you do is based on need, craving, greed and that False Self you create to survive. So for me when the world crashes in, i see it as a loving act rather than being bitter at my suffering. My Father has no need or desire to hurt me, but there are fires i need to go through, and i must walk through them if i wan to go any further, 99% of us don’t even get to the acknowledgment stage, let alone the fire bit. As a result, we stay in exactly the same place and go round in circles for the whole of our lives.

Change is so incredibly hard. My life is punctuated by change – every day of every week, and i exist in this constant storm of it all evolving and growing each time i wake up or walk down the road. Absolutely everyone preaches their trendy love of change, and they do it when everything is quiet and the same. 99.9% of them are obsessed with routine and are actually useless at adapting. Change is imposed by force and comprehensively resisted, because it is hard to step outside what we know and then consequently adapt. The end result is always positive, but the process itself is very painful. Those that live with change every day know it is hard so they acknowledge it. If anyone tells you they like change, the likelihood is they haven’t really experienced it, either because their life is dull or they deliberately avoid it.

So the question for me now is what becomes of this empire of mine now i know it rests on sand that will forever shift. But in my wanderings and wonderings in the gardens of my private space have answered my own question: to acknowledge these most personal of truths and lay down my own vulnerability, you act to disarm that which might have been a threat had you not faced it. Putting it here says to everyone who reads and listens that they are free to do the same without fear. For what can it do to me now it is out of its cage and laid bare, especially when it exists in all of us.  When i stand and rip it out from inside of me, i take away its power and own myself again. By that, there is nothing more it can do to harm me.

“A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants, so that they did not bear grain. Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up, grew and produced a crop, multiplying thirty, sixty, or even a hundred times.”