Over the last 8 months I have subjected myself to a study and social experiment of the self. It has been a complete disaster, or overarching success whichever way you look at it. I now have a better idea of what I value and where I value it, but I have lost health and therefore wealth. The opposite to which I hoped to achieve, but hopefully a step backwards, to take the ones forward. It is within and without you. You as in plural. I’ve listened to a lot of The Smiths recently, as well as the Beatles but that’s nothing out of the ordinary. What they say and how they say is very fundamental to my recent mindset of existence, the Smiths that is. I have referred back to, and applied a business model to life recently, that I actually learnt way back when, during a time where I could not and did not, think for myself. More on that in a minute. But I have realized the power of not thinking as much, the power of intuition. When I let my intuition guide me, I feel more me. To put it into context, I’ve already written something so I’ll insert it here, a quote from a Russell Brand podcast :

“you see it in sport, you see it in art. No-one can do that. You can’t do that. Mo Salah, doing that, you can’t do that. Like that’s coming from somewhere, you couldn’t explain to someone how to do that.”…….I can’t seem to put this into words without sounding like ahhhh thats what every one says, perhaps I will find the words some day but this resonated with me greatly, especially as I was sort of losing my identity within teaching ahhhh thats it, well sort of, identity! not just in who you are but how you go about doing things. You have an identity there too; teach in your way, live in your way, act in your way – nobody can do that, your way of doing things is channelled from within. Obviously you learn from people and things, e.g. Mo Salah was taught how to play football, coached how to play, but his actual actions on the pitch and the way he moves the ball is channeled from within, just like the actions of you.

Acting and being, through intuition, makes me feel more at ease, I consciously tell myself and remind myself to use this power, with what seems to be every day. However, it has been tough as the other basic fundamentals in my life have not been reached, meaning an increase in, and heightened levels of, anxiety. Now I don’t like to use this word and I never have, because I hear it too often and never really understood what it was. Perhaps because I had lived the initial 20 years of my life with extreme levels of it, I didn’t know any better until now ; I’ve now lived with and without heightened anxiety. To repeat, I don’t like to use this word but it’s the best word I can use to describe how I have acted and felt upon acting within recent times. It got to the point where it was as if I went back in time and became the Harrison, circa first year of uni – only one person knows that version of me. It got to the point where I could not teach, coach, talk or explain with the effortless ease I had become accustomed too.

I have my suspicions as to why my anxiety has increased and my confidence depleted but it’s multidimensional and layered, I’m not sure where to begin. In fact, I am stumped – where did it begin… on second thought, that’s beyond the point, I don’t care when it began, I want to understand the cause, or at the very least put the cause down on to paper, or whatever this is, whatever this magic is I’m writing on or reading off. I think this is when I stop beating around the bush and mention Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

(I use commas to much).

Starting afresh, starting from scratch with only 10kgs of luggage to my name, left me right at the bottom of the hierarchy – fighting but not necessarily fighting – to achieve my basic physiological needs. I had no where to cook, no where to shelter with relative comfort, no fresh air to breathe! Without these there is no way I was going to climb the hierarchy and become a self actualizing human being in Dubai neither at work or away from it.

I initially put after that, ‘ My safety needs where actually hindering any ability to fulfill and address my basic needs – working 6am – 8pm, here there and every where only 1 day off a week, not enough money to simply buy my way out and over’. But this is not true, it stems back to addressing the basic needs which I never addressed. And I take ownership of this because it could have be so different quite easily, i.e had I budgeted, ordered a weekly shop direct to my door, made my space a sort of ‘home’. I didn’t do this because deep down, I knew before coming to dubai that this is when I was leaving. I lived a lie for 8 months. Lied to my manager, to the people and to myself. I knew it was temporary so why in my mind why bother – a deep rooted problem within me. Don’t get me wrong, it definitely had the potential to be more than 8 months but….Dubai.

I must stop and finish now with saying, that this is all my fault, I subjected myself to this deterioration but it goes to show and underpin how hard just simply being a human is, I had an element of safety with my salary coming in to which I’d use to patch everything over with but going forward it will be interesting to see how I cope and how I do. I now understand what to focus on and how to rebuild the self from here to self actualization. You can’t have it all at once and I well and truly was protected from this with my parents and university. I’m glad I came to Dubai, but I’m equally, if not more glad to be leaving. On to the next. HC x