I think I’m having a panic attack.
It’s ok, it’s mild, it will pass. I’m coming to realise it’s part of the journey. Part of the process of facing the wild when you step outside a cage.
On Monday we started our home education journey, and officially took our five-year-old daughter out of school. It’s something we’ve been talking about for a while - I took an uncharacteristically long amount of time to make the decision. Normally I can’t bear to think about a decision for more than a few days; I know what I want to do straight away and I just want to get on and do it. (Why yes, I do have ADHD.) But it’s different when it’s your child’s future at stake.
It’s also different when your decision involves moving away from societal paradigms and expected ways of being. Doing things that you hadn’t previously thought were possible, that don’t feel “allowed”.
I have some form there. The last time I agonised over a decision, I was leaving the world of employment.
In this post, I wanted to reflect on how both of those decisions to move away from societal norms have been both the scariest and most liberating of my life.
The crumbling
I keep getting these waves of nausea. They’re accompanied by a tightness in my chest and a sensation that my internal organs are all falling inside me.
It comes and goes, and it doesn’t last long, but it’s a feeling of panic. It gets particularly intense when I have to tell someone that we’ve moved to home ed. At first I worried that it was a sign that we’d made the wrong decision, that my body was trying to tell me something was wrong. But I looked at how much happier my beautiful daughter is, how much happier I am, how well we are both falling into this new routine and how much more connected we are, and I knew that wasn’t it. Then I remembered that I’d had this feeling before. Five and a half years ago, when I left my job and went out on my own. With no savings and no clients. No safety net. When I had to tell people that I was stepping outside the standard 9-to-5 norm, and leaving the comfort (materially, at least) of employment.
It’s a dizzying feeling, this sensation I’m getting. Like vertigo. And I understand it now. It’s the feeling of all the structures of a standard, conventional life falling away, and being faced with the previously unimaginable immensity of the space around you. Once the walls of the box you were living in come down, everything you didn’t know was beyond those walls suddenly looks overwhelmingly, dizzyingly big.
For a while, towards the end of last year and at the beginning of this one, I kept pulling this oracle card:
The Crumbling. A sense that something needs to be let go to make space for new beginnings. Change that will be dramatic, maybe brutal. Things falling apart, falling away, but something else being revealed.
Those of you familiar with Tarot cards might recognise a similarity to The Tower. I also pulled that card in a reading at the end of last year, and I pulled the Death card in another reading not long after. Death is another card that signals endings and new beginnings, but with a more peaceful air about it. There’s more of a sense of natural conclusions, rather than the abrupt destruction of The Tower. When The Crumbling and The Tower kept coming up, I was nervous about what life had in store for me. I knew it was going to be a big shift, a reframing of life. And, yeah, the cards weren’t kidding.
But what I love about the Crumbling card is the glimpse of beauty behind the wall. Yes, the walls coming down is going to be scary and dramatic, but there’s something magnificent on the other side that will only be visible once those walls are blasted away.
Stepping outside the box
I resigned from my last ever employed job in 2018, the day before I was due to go back after maternity leave. I’d spent the whole four months of that leave (all I could afford - a subject for another post!) worrying about what to do. I knew I couldn’t go back to that job, knew that my mental health wouldn’t stand it, but I also couldn’t see an alternative. There weren’t many jobs around that I was interested in, and no one wanted to hire a new mother with a tiny baby. I had friends who were self-employed who kept urging me to take the leap - it was an ideal solution, offering me the opportunity to work around my child while taking control of the work I did and the way I worked. But I was terrified.
I’d never had any desire to work for myself, I was quite happy letting someone else take on the stress and responsibility of finding clients, paying the bills and keeping the lights on. Yet part of me must have been yearning for this lifestyle behind my back, even before I became pregnant - I remember there was an advert on TV, I think for bank loans, which told the story of a woman (not dissimilar in age and appearance to me) who was starting her own business and growing it from scratch. I guess the point was that the bank in question would support us in our dreams, but all I saw was this woman valiantly facing the challenges and triumphing as mistress of her own destiny. I told myself I didn’t want that life, but every time that ad came on TV I would feel a tug of envy in my gut.
Still, it felt too much to walk away from a steady job. I had been conditioned by society to think that this was the way it should be - working 9 to 5 (or 8 to 7, in my case, quite often), in an office, Monday to Friday. That was normal, that was what I was supposed to do. From a young age, my parents impressed upon me the importance of a stable career - dancing, what I wanted to do, was too risky; university was a much better option. (For my mother, who’d been pulled out of school at 15 by parents who needed her income, and then forced to work for most of the next 50 years at a job she hated, this was fuelled by a deep desire to see me more fulfilled and empowered than she had been.)
We all absorb messages from society constantly from the day we’re born about what’s “normal”, and about how undesirable it is to not be normal. You go to school, you don’t particularly enjoy it but you live around the edges, you go on to university or training, you get a job, you don’t particularly enjoy it but you live around the edges, you get married and have children, you don’t complain and don’t ask for help, and you save as much money as you can to hopefully be able to retire and then have a few years of fun and freedom before you die. It doesn’t necessarily sound thrilling, but it’s accepted, and it’s familiar.
The need to fit in
Human beings like to follow the herd. Back in prehistoric times, being rejected by the group literally meant death. We needed the group to help us find food, keep us protected from predators and nurse us if we were sick or injured. Otherwise, it was game over. That expectation is still with us, and we retain the sense of that desperate need to fit in and be accepted. We also hate change - again, to our brains that largely retain prehistoric programming, change means danger. We like familiarity, to such an extent that we will choose situations that are bad for us and make us miserable, but that we recognise, over those that are unknown. Anyone who, like me, has found themselves in a pattern of toxic relationships will understand that only too well.
Other people can also react less than positively to you going against the grain. One person told me that friends of theirs stopped talking to them when they chose home education. People feel threatened when you take a path different to theirs - if our choices aren’t made from a place of positive empowerment, then seeing other people make different choices rocks our foundations. I did what we were supposed to do, how come they get to do something different? What if I could have done something differently? What if what I was told was the only way wasn’t true after all? That can be scary to contemplate, so people put their walls up instead - they tell themselves that you are wrong.
All of this makes it intimidating to choose a way of being that hasn’t been given the societal seal of approval. And makes it stressful to tell people that you’re doing things differently. You’d think that all the ways that I’m different without having a choice - being neurodivergent, having a disability (I’m partially deaf), coming from an immigrant family - would make me comfortable with and confident in that difference. I should be used to it, surely? But in fact it only serves to remind me of the painful feelings of rejection and distance that I’ve felt throughout my life, making me more fearful of reoccurrences for myself, and also for my daughter.
But actually, the overwhelming experience I’ve had so far on this journey is of community. So many people have reached out to me to offer encouragement, advice and camaraderie. One of the things about having stepped out onto the fringes of society is that you’re more aware of the struggles of others taking the same overgrown and hard-to-navigate path. Freed from the expectations of society yourself, you’re also more able to openly accept the choices of others without the need of self-justification. Even the people choosing the mainstream have been less judgemental than I feared - some of the people I was most scared to tell have been incredibly supportive. Not everyone’s on board, of course, but I think a lot of the worries of exclusion I had were internalised institutional voices, not an objective reality.
It is scary, going a different way. I’m still scared. I think we’re all feeling ripples of uncertainty and instability this week. We’re finding our sea legs, unsteady in this new environment, still scanning the horizon to orient ourselves towards the north star. But we’ll get there. We know we’re going in the right direction for us. We’re following our north star.
Self-employment was scary, but it's been a success. I had two years of freelancing, during which I earned more working three (short) days a week than I had in full-time employment. Then I co-founded a business with my incredible friend
. That business has won multiple awards, employed a team, and grown revenue year on year. This year, we've already doubled last year's revenue. <brushes dirt off shoulder> In 2023, I was listed by f:Entrepreneur as one of the most inspirational female entrepreneurs in the UK. (Say whaaat?!) Best of all, every day we get to make a positive impact on the world by helping businesses build environments where everyone can thrive, and everyone can belong. We help businesses to do things differently.I was scared. But I did it. And it's working.
First thing this morning, I went down to the beach at low tide and stood on the huge expanse of dull gold, looking out to the sea, watching the sea gulls swoop and dive. I walked over fossilised waves, imprints carved into the sand. I picked my way through pockets of shallow water, realising when it was far too late to turn back that the water wasn’t half as shallow as I’d thought and that my thin canvas trainers were going to be no match for the salty liquid. It seeped into my socks, maybe into my skin. I picked up pieces of seaweed, and shells, and sea glass to take home for my daughter to look at through her microscope. I got as close to the sea as I could and thought, the horizon is huge, and that’s ok. I don’t always know the way, and that’s ok. It’s ok to just sink into it all, to let it carry me, carry us. It’s ok to let go of what I thought I knew, of the illusion of control, of the need to know the outcome. It’s ok to let it all unfold how it’s supposed to.
It’s ok.
I'm glad it's going well. School is such a structure in families lives and society it does feel weird when you step outside it. Hope you find your tribe soon.
I love EVERYTHING about this post! My husband and I have been considering home schooling, my husband way more than me. I have trepidations for all the amazing reasons you outlined. I'm so glad you took this leap! Breaking away for what's best for your family is brave and beautiful. Please share in future posts how it's going and what you've learned.