I'm learning to read myself

I started recording my morning walks a few weeks ago. Caper out in front, the same loop along the bay. The point was to catch what I was actually thinking before the day shaped me into someone who had thoughts about things.

The first surprise was that most of what I thought I thought wasn’t there when I went looking. The second surprise was that the things that were there were not always mine.

Some are old. Long enough that I assume they’re my core beliefs, part of me. Some I picked up in a meeting room in 2018 and forgot to put down when I left the corpo world. A few are inherited from people I haven’t spoken to in years. From inside, they all read the same. Conviction, certainty, this-is-what-I-think, this-is-how-tinigs-are. And it’s hard to see if they are really mine or if they are just there because of where I spent my time. Some are there because the rooms I spent time in installed it while I wasn’t watching.

This is what the walks have turned into. A small daily attempt to put distance between me and my own perceptions, long enough to ask which ones I actually want to keep.

I moved to Helsinki, and over a few years the money got bigger than I had planned for. It was always meant to be a tool. Then it wasn’t, and I am still trying to be honest about when that flipped. I made sustainability compromises because the option I would have taken at home wasn’t there,then I stopped asking whether ite was actually available, and then I stopped noticing I had stopped asking. The Tuesday version of my life stopped resembling the Sunday-evening version I would have described on paper, if anyone had asked. I didn’t get weaker, I didn’t lose my values. The room I was sitting in slowly rewrote what it meant to live them, and I kept up with the rewriting because the rewriting felt like growth.

And I know I would still be there, not noticing, following along, floating, if I didn’t crash. Two years ago almost exactly now I started to notice things were not ok.

I spent two weeks in Australia travelling for work. It was a really weird experience because of the dynamics with the colleagues there, and it was the first time I had left home for such a long time. I was literally at the other end of the world. Because of the time zone difference, I had time for myself, and I noticed what I liked. That I liked to do the hard work on my own. That I liked to think, walk around, look at things. I liked certain aspects of my work and I think I was really good at those parts. But I also noticed I couldn’t do that work the way I wanted to when I was in the same place, in the same time zone.

And first I thought, which was absurd of course, that I loved Australia and needed to move there. I love Australia. It’s absolutely lovely. But it wasn’t Australia I was longing for. It was the calm, and the agency to plan my day out well, not be at the whim of what needs to be done and how it needs to be done. I don’t even mind what needs to be done. It’s the how, the prescription, the back-and-forth and politics of trying to get things done. It just wasn’t for me.

I didn’t notice that for a while. I came back, went back to the grind, and slowly, slowly I noticed things were getting out of control. It was the beginning of my burnout. The beginning of when I started to really see that this is not the life I want, this is not how I want things.

Then late in September I crashed. I really just crashed. It’s a funny experience, you feel so weird while it’s happening, and at the same time I kept thinking, this cannot happen to me, I am not that type of person. It was difficult to take distance from yourself, come back, regain the energy, and see that it’s not only the work. It’s the way I had structured my life. Always doing, always achieving. And at the same time holding these really weird goals: feeling that the things I was doing were good for me, when actually they just looked impressive.

After that, my vision of what is actually impressive changed completely. Now what I find impressive is living life on your own values.

There is a lot more to this story that, slowly, I will maybe share here. Or maybe not. That was when I first noticed how I had changed. When I started to build that distance.

I do not think this is a story about me. I think it is the default condition. The room you sit in long enough rewrites the version of you that lives there, and you cannot tell from inside because the rewriting feels like becoming more yourself.

What I have been doing on the walks is closer to reading than to leading. I have called the work of the last few years self-leadership. The word is fine, it’s start to be a bit of a hype. And in the end it actually points at the wrong end of it. Leading yourself is the downstream half, you can do it once you can see the direction, the move is usually obvious. You take the call, you say the thing, you change the job, you move countries. Reading yourself is the upstream half. Noticing the drift before the mirror moment. Sorting which thoughts in your head are yours and which were installed by the room you’ve been sitting in (soemtimes for too long). Catching a tool becoming a goal in time to do something about it.

The mirror moment, when it lands, lands the same for everyone I have watched go through it. You wanted all this. You have all this. So what. It is a late-stage symptom. By the time it arrives the drift has already been compounding for years, and most of the work I would have wanted to do was upstream of it.

The walks are not where I solve anything. They are where I notice. I haven’t fixed the money question (though I gave up the hustle to make most of it, in a way a different side of the pendulum), I haven’t moved out of Helsinki yet, I haven’t worked out what to do with the day’s first thought that I am pretty sure isn’t mine. What changes is that I see it sooner, and I do not always confuse seeing it for handling it.

I will be on the bay tomorrow. Same loop. Same dog. Reading myself..