Ep 144 The Labels We Carry Into Midlife: And What They're Costing You

On a recent Wonder Walk down by the Hull marina, I spotted a boat with a name painted on the side, which became the inspiration for this week’s episode.

The words that get stuck to us when we're small, and the surprisingly expensive project of trying to outrun them. 

I share the true cost of the labels we are often given without our consent and the one question that might just flip your perspective: what if the thing you were told was wrong with you was never a defect at all?

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Transcript

0:46

Hello, and welcome back to Rooted in Presence. I'm Carly, your curious midlife guide and founder of Still Space Hull, and we are now at episode number 144. So if you are new here, welcome, and to those of you that are returning, welcome back, and thank you for sticking with me. So this week's episode then arrived on a walk, as they often do, one of my Wonder Walks that I've just started doing recently. So if you are new here, if you haven't heard me speak of my Wonder Walk, well, it's exactly what it sounds like. A really slow, intentional walk where the whole point is not to get anywhere or achieve anything particular, but just to notice, and that's what I was doing, uh, this last few days just gone. So I was down by the marina in Hull doing exactly that, just noticing what I wanted to notice with a few people from the community who decided to join. And whilst on this one, there was definitely more of a focus on the boats that were moored up, um, on the marina, and one of them had a particular name that caught my eye, and that was called Slow Coach. And I just stopped and looked at it and thought, "Well, yeah, that's so me, isn't it?" It's actually what I do, slow coach. There's definitely two meanings sitting aside one word, and, well, yeah, both of them are true. And I just stood there for a bit, uh, smiling in a slightly unhinged way at this boat in the marina. And yeah, something else occurred to me, because the word slow, and even slow coach, has a much longer history with me than joke about my job title, and I've been sitting with that ever since. So that's where we're gonna go today So let me start with something I discovered about myself and my way of being and working quite a while back, and I found it quite funny at the time, but also kinda moving. It's kinda nice when you recognize yourself in, in patterns. And if you were to work out the three phrases I say most often, I think I must have been doing this as part of an exercise, I'm not sure, But I was thinking about what I say all the time, no matter where I am, no matter what's going on. So whether I'm in sessions, in the gym, in breathwork, even on this podcast, and possibly in my sleep, there would be these three things: slow down, take your time, breathe. And that's it. The whole crux of my vocabulary, I think. Decades of training, a degree, a decade in the NHS, various certifications, as these things do accumulate, and what comes out of my mouth most often is just those three things. Slow down, take your time, breathe. And I laughed when I first noticed that because there was a time in my life when being associated with the word slow was just about the last thing I would've wanted. 'Cause I was told I was slow all the time as a child, in my teens, even in my early career. It wasn't always cruel necessarily, or sometimes it wasn't exactly, uh, praise either. But sometimes it was just an observation by people passing, adults noticing the way I am. "That a bit on the slow side." That one, yeah. "Come on, hurry up. You're a slow coach. You're taking forever." And those words kinda get stuck, don't they? They can land on us when we're young and we're still working out who we are and what we are, and we don't yet have the equipment, the skills to hold them up to the light and go, "Hmm, actually, is that true?" They just... We just take them in, swallow them whole, and they can become part of the furniture of who we understand ourselves to be. And you might have your own version of this. I can bet that you do. Perhaps a word that got stuck to you early and it stayed. Maybe you've been told you're too much, too sensitive, too emotional. Maybe you've been called lazy or difficult, bossy, dreamy, away with the fairies. That's another one that I've had many times. Maybe you're told you just need to apply yourself better. But something somebody said probably without much thought that you've quietly carried for the last three or four decades, and I wonder if you've ever had that time to question it. Is it really yours? Does it want to be reclaimed? Something to think about there. But for me, it was slow, and actually slow coach too. And when I've stopped to think about it and really question it, kind of makes me smile a little bit because actually, was I really slow? I was actually quite a fast sprinter. I wasn't very good at PE at school, but the one thing I could do was run super fast. I would often get to the finish line, um, in my younger days before I really understood the rules about winning. So I would just stand there and wait for my friends to catch up, much to the dismay of my parents and PE teacher. Okay, I learnt a little bit more about competitiveness as I got older, but that story does make me smile. But when I think about it, it makes perfect sense for how I am now. And perhaps I could actually refute the whole negative connotations that come with being called slow. I mean, what was going on for real there? What I actually think was going on, I think, is that, well, I cared about the people around me. And in other situations, I was simply paying attention. I noticed everything. I wanted to look at everything properly before I moved on to the next thing. I wanted to understand it. I'd be interested. I'd stop and examine a beetle for as long as it held my attention. I'd want to know why to everything, and that takes longer than not doing those things. But it's not really the same as being slow. And there's a real irony here that I do sometimes enjoy, which is the fact that I have ADHD, which is officially in the literature, in the diagnostic manuals, an attention deficit. Now, if you are an ADHD listening to this, you might agree with what I'm about to say next because I think a lot of people I've spoke to that associate themselves or have been diagnosed with ADHD, you might already be smiling here. Because we know that sometimes that can be a bit of a misnomer, isn't it? It's not always that we have a deficit of attention. There's often enormous amount of attention going on, maybe too much attention on things. It's just pointed somewhere different from where most other people have agreed where we think our focus should be placed. It's a different focus, not an absence. So me as that child who was called slow, was actually a child with a huge amount of attention aimed at things that the timetable hadn't allocated time for, and this carried into my professional life. When I worked in the NHS as a dietician, I took longer with my patients. It was brought up during my student days that maybe I wasn't gonna make it because I wasn't producing the work fast enough. And yeah, it's kinda true, and there were times that was a problem in a system with a clinic list, a clock, deadlines, already understaffed. I can see why they said what they said. But the reason I took longer wasn't about being inefficient, it was that I really wanted to understand what I was doing. I mean, it was my own professional registration and my own clinical judgment I was needing to use here, not just fill in numbers for people that are setting the rules that haven't even done my profession. And I wanted to know what was really going on for this person in their actual life with all of the complexity of everything that's brought them into hospital. Before I start telling anybody what to eat, before I start making a plan without using all of the available information, all of the consideration for the context of where we were 'Cause otherwise, well, in my eyes, what are we even doing if we're not paying attention to everything available? Of course, that is my lens. You are absolutely welcome to take your own. But maybe that wasn't slowness. I was doing a lot. I was using a lot of attentiveness, and that takes time. And time is the thing that, well, in my experience, not many people want to give you So there's something I would really love you to hear, 'cause there is that bit that stops this being a little tidy story about reclaiming your gifts. I'm sure you've heard that one before. But this label didn't just hurt me. Trying to outrun it nearly finished me off. And well, what do we do with something I'm ashamed of? I wanted to hide it, to compensate. I worked harder so I could go faster, so I did. Professionally, I sped up. I matched everyone else's rhythm. I took on more, moved quicker, stopped stopping. I proved I wasn't slow, and for a while it worked. And that's the seductive bit, right? It worked well enough that I got praised for it, which is exactly how these things can get their hooks in you. Well, that's what happened to me anyway. But it didn't take too long before I hit burnout with that attitude. It didn't happen all at once. It didn't always show up in the same way, but gradually, and then completely That burnout meant that I really had to stop. And yes, I've talked about burnout on this podcast before, so I won't go over it all again. But I want to name that specific thread that I'm bringing to today's episode. A large part of what took me to burnout was running at a pace that was never mine, trying to disprove a word that someone stuck to me when I was small. So the cost wasn't the label, the cost was trying to outdo it, believing that the thing needed fixing, and spending years and a good chunk of my health trying to fix it. So I wonder genuinely and gently whether you've got a version of that too. Not just a word you carry, but the energy you've spent trying to prove it wrong, I mean, that can be a very expensive project, and often we don't even know we're running it So I want to offer you a reframe here, and it's one that's landed on the quayside next to the boat called Slow Coach. But what if the thing I was told was wrong with me is actually one of my most valuable things about me, just worn inside out? Because the attentiveness that made me slow as a child is now, quite literally, my work. It's the thing people come to me for. It's why clients say things like, "You've helped me join the dots," or, "Now I finally understand what's going on. I feel seen." That doesn't come from moving fast. It comes from the exact quality that got me told off in 1992. Slow down, take your time, and breathe. Turns out I wasn't broken. I was well-equipped for living my own life in my own way, just for a world that hadn't really asked for it yet, and definitely didn't know how to hold it yet either So I'd also like to offer, use that as a real question. So not as a slogan, but what if you're weird, you're too much, you're too sensitive, you're difficult, you're dreamy? What if that's not a defect you've been managing? What if it's a capacity nobody around you at the time knew what to do with I'm not going to pretend that's always true. Sometimes a thing genuinely is a struggle and needs support, and I'd never discount that. But I'd say it's true far more often than what we let ourselves consider. And it's certainly worth holding that for a little while before you decide you need to completely reshape it And there's a lovely bit of physics that sits underneath all this. I love it when there's a bit of science to go along with my musings. You might have seen it. I saw it on Instagram. You might have seen it on Facebook. I don't know. It's a video. Two steel balls released from the same height, one running down a short, straight diagonal track. The other takes a longer curved track that dips down and back up again, traveling noticeably further. And the one that goes the long way round arrives at the destination first every time because the dip lets it gain speed early, and then the speed carries it home. So the message in that, or what I take from it anyway, is that sometimes the longer route is the faster one. Sometimes the slower route achieves more And I see this constantly in this work that I do. Taking the time to understand yourself before launching into another plan. Resting before the burnout, before you are called to spend extra time recovering from it. Joining the dots, learning to read your own signals rather than outsourcing them to an app or a coach or a rule. All of it looks like the long way round. All of it gets you there sooner and crucially, gets you there in one piece But I also know I need to be careful here, and I want to be super honest with you 'cause, as you know, I often notice these patterns in the coaching world outside of my little corner of the internet. But that phrase, "Slow down to speed up," has done the rounds many times. It's everywhere in the coaching spaces now, and I don't want to just hand you a mantra with a bow on it because I think that the mantra can sometimes become just another performance. Before you can absolutely sit there doing your slow thing, holding your cup in two hands, Appearing to all of the world like a woman at peace while your mind is whirring through everything you're getting behind on. Performing slowness while your nervous system is absolutely galloping. So I say this with love because I have been that woman many times. Slowness as another item on the list, rest as a task to complete correctly, that is not what I'm talking about. What I'm actually talking about here is presence, which is a different thing entirely. It's not about the speed of your body, it's more like are you actually here for it? Are you here with your body? And underneath all that, the real thing, I think, is learning to trust your own pace, your own rhythm. Not slow for the sake of slow or not fast for the sake of being the fastest, but developing enough quietness in yourself to feel that, you know, what, in this moment, this task, this season, what is it actually asking of you? Until eventually you can feel your own pulse, so to speak. You know your own rhythm well enough to move without checking whether it's allowed, and that's slow living in my eyes. And yeah, I don't really teach slow living as such. It's kind of just my way of doing things. But what I do teach is discernment about the pace that is right for you, and there is a difference, and that really does matter. And actually, this is why my studio is called Still Space Hull. It's not Slow Space, and still isn't slow. Still is sort of where you get quiet enough to hear what pace this season is genuinely calling for. Sometimes the answer is rest, and another time you can sense it's really time to go wholeheartedly at full tilt at times, but not forever. As long as it's what is true right now, because if you're sensing that, you will also sense when it's time to rest as well And let me share something else too, because I know that many of you listening have a very different kind of life. I'm aware, very aware, that I have engineered my life to allow the level of slowness that I need. That is a choice I have made over years with a lot of deliberate effort, and it suits my particular nervous system and my particular work. But my level of slowness is probably not accessible to a lot of people in midlife, and I'm not gonna stand here and pretend otherwise. Because you might be caring for aging parents, you might have teenagers who need you at unpredictable and unreasonable hours. You might have a job that simply demands you match the pace of the workplace, and no amount of me talking about boats is gonna change what you do on a Tuesday. I don't expect you to overturn your entire life for this. And my slowness, it's not a flex, it's not a badge, and it's certainly not evidence that what I'm doing in life is better than what you're doing. It's just what I've needed and what I've built for now. So please don't hear this as one more thing that you're failing at. What I'd offer instead is much smaller. The feeling of slowness at just a few points in your day, not on schedule, although schedules are helpful if you need them. But that feeling, maybe that first cup of coffee gets to be drunk rather than inhaled. Maybe your evening skincare gets done with actual attention. And those of you using some HRT, maybe that's the thing you do as your ritual each night. Put your own hands on your own face, your own skin for 90 seconds, actually there for it. And I've talked before about the difference between a habit and a ritual, and this is exactly that. It's the same kind of action. It's the same 90 seconds. The only thing that changes really is, are you present for it? So choosing what's available in the busiest season of your life. It doesn't require you to move to the coast, live alone, or take up a wellness business. It just asks you for one or two moments of your day to be present, to live on purpose And what I found in all of this is that those small moments are where you start to hear your own rhythm again. And once you can hear that, you can start making different choices, if you want those choices to be different, that is. And not because someone told you to, but because you can feel what you need, what's true for you right now. So a boat called Slow Coach moored up on the marina on a walk whose entire purpose was just for noticing. Kind of funny when you think about it. That word has been used to describe what was wrong with me, and is now painted on the side of some boat. And although it gave me a giggle, it also made me realize the thing that I was ashamed of is the exact thing I've built a life and practice around. I wasn't slow, I was just paying attention, and it turns out that paying attention was never the problem. I was just onto it a bit early. So whatever word or label that you've been carrying, whatever you feel got stuck to you when you were small and has been quietly showing up ever since without your consent, I'd love you to pick it up this week and give it a little turnover. You don't need to accept it, and you don't need to fight it. Maybe just take a look properly and wonder, is this actually true? Or is it a gift that somebody just didn't let you have time for And if you'd like some company while you figure that out, that's kind of what I do, through breathwork, coaching, through the community at Still Space Hull, which is becoming a real place to land. Something to get quiet enough to hear own rhythm again. You'll find everything at stillspacehull.com and the coaching side is over on carlykillen.com. I will put the details in the show notes. So, final words to send you off on the rest of your week. Slow down, take your time, breathe. Apparently, I've been saying this my whole life, and yeah, I think I can see why now. So until next time, may you meet yourself with compassion, walk with presence, and remember, you already have everything you need