Reshaping our realities.

Part 1 - The Little Blue Monster

The realities we build

Fear is a powerful thing.

Not just because it makes us afraid, but because it can shape the way we experience our lives. Given enough time, fear can become the builder of our reality. It teaches us what is safe and what isn’t, what is possible and what isn’t, and before long we begin organising our lives around those beliefs.

The problem is that we rarely notice we’re doing it.

We simply accept the reality around us as ‘the’ reality.

At best, that limits us. At worst, it traps us. Crushes us.

I’ve done this more times than I can count. It was a path I began walking after traumatic events when I was seven years old. Events that shaped an existence built around surviving terror. But that particular story isn’t for here.

Today I want to share the first of two others stories

One involves a little blue monster from a breakfast cereal advert. The other involves spiders. One lovely spider in particular, in fact.

Strange examples I know, but both taught me the same, incredible lesson!

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The little blue monster

Join me, circa 1998, when not only did I smoke, but I smoked! Like a chimney. 20+ cigarettes a day wasn’t unusual. And I had been known to top that by 10 or more on occasion.

But the number isn’t really the point here. It’s the extent to which smoking shaped my reality. Every day revolved around a single question:

When and where can I have my next cigarette?

The first thing I’d do when I woke up was smoke. At work I’d have two cigarettes back-to-back on my break, sometimes physically gagging my way through the second one because I knew it would be a while before I got another chance. I’d even volunteer for jobs nobody wanted simply because they gave me another opportunity to smoke.

But somewhere amongst all of that, I began to realise I didn’t actually want this anymore.

More than anything, I didn’t want something else deciding how I lived my life.

Then a thought appeared: what if my life doesn’t have to be this way?

Until that moment, I’d simply accepted that I was a smoker, that smokers smoked, and that this was how life was always going to be.

But that question changed everything.

And so, on 10th September 200 - I only remember the date so specifically because of the still unfathomable events of the following day - I bought a copy of Allen Carr’s ‘An Easy Way to Stop Smoking’.

I started reading it that same evening and quit on that very first night!

What happened next fascinated me. People came crawling out of the woodwork to explain why it wouldn’t work and how the cravings would eventually get me. “Once a smoker, always a smoker”.

Well, nearly twenty-five years later, I’m happily report to anyone being fed such messages, that it is absolute bullshit.

I haven’t smoked once since that night! Not once.

And actually, I loved the process of quitting. I used a number of techniques from the book, and even made up one of my own: I borrowed the Shreddies monster!

Do you remember it? The little blue creature banging away inside your tummy demanding to be fed.

I made it the persona of my nicotine addiction. Every craving, every pang became evidence that this little nicotine monster inside of me was getting weaker and weaker - and essentially throwing a bit of a tantrum.

I imagined it growing smaller and smaller because I was no longer feeding it. And whilst it was playing a merry dance(!) inside of me, I knew that the pangs were absolute proof that my old reality was losing its GRIP.

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But smoking wasn’t the only fear that had quietly shaped my reality. There had been something else, far more intense. Far more sinister.

On Monday, I’ll tell you about spiders, a tarantula called Maggie, and another moment that taught me that reality is indeed ours for the RE-shaping.

And for anyone with arachnophobia, there will be absolutely no spider pictures in part 2, nor will I go into any graphic detail about them.

Got your back! ♥️

Until Monday 15th June…