Assembling The Council

Learning to love and honour the former versions of ourselves

Firstly I’d like to start with a huge thank you to everyone who reached out after the launch last week!

I was super nervous and had almost talked myself out of going ahead with it, but hearing from so many of you again after ten years (!!!) has been such a glorious and heart-warming experience.

I massively enjoyed reminiscing in the DM’s with a few OG Scarphelia readers about the online world in which we met, when we were just little babies carving out our own journeys on the internet. The world felt like such a fertile, exciting place bursting with opportunity, and we were hurtling headfirst into it with blind naivety and open arms.

It’s had me thinking a lot about the younger versions of ourselves, and how they fall deeper in context as we get older.

A few weeks ago I finished My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante (which I’ll need to talk about in DETAIL another time) and felt so moved I ended up sending a long chain of voicenotes to one of my best friends in the world, Millie.

(It’s the kind of thing her and I always end up doing deep dives on these days, after first meeting as hot messes at 19 and 24 and gradually learning how to grow up together.)

And it’s something it feels right to share with you today.

Sometimes I feel like I can glimpse the previous versions of myself.

They’re queued up just behind me, like the wavy, refracted outline you get from standing between two mirrors. I can feel them there often, their hands on my shoulders, their soft whispers in my ear.

Despite them being younger and more vulnerable than me, I seek solace in them like ancestors. After all, I can only be older now because of the life they served and lessons they learnt before me.

They live on forever, operating behind the scenes of every choice and action in my present. They influence the motivations and intentions, the anxieties and excitement, the desires and pain that make life feel the way it does. The best decisions I make are ones that do not hush or silence any of these perspectives but hears out, honours and reassures each one.

I’ve come to refer to them as ‘The Council’, and communicate with them exclusively in lengthy streams of consciousness, either typed into the notes app of my phone, or in messy biro on notepaper. Whenever deep uncertainty about my future arises, I pitch it to this council:

Does my child self feel safe in this? Does my teen self feel seen? What fears does my adult self bring, and how valid are they?

At the best of times they sit extremely close, vibrating just beneath the skin, encouraging me onward into joy and discovery. New members are added all the time and sometimes, when nostalgia triggers a particular version she’ll step forth from the past, and as if the fabric of space and time stretches thin for a moment, I swear I can almost feel her cheek against mine.

But this act of unity is not something I’ve entirely mastered.

Because at my lowest, most afraid moments, I still sit alone.

I know they’re there somewhere, but it’s dark and the space between us feels immeasurable. I can no longer feel their input or familiar comfort, I just feel scared and alone and I don’t know what to do next.

This is something I experienced last year in it’s most extreme form, when I was 29 years old and was suffering so deeply. It’s something I’ll undoubtedly go into more on here one day.

But the part I figured out in these lengthy voicenotes to Millie, was that the council don’t just disappear when you need them most.

I’ve come to understand them more like a concertina.

There are always moments in life that feel like a big inhale.

The pressure of the air rises on the expansion, stretching us out and away from ourselves so much that we can no longer feel like we know who we are. The tension holds and we start to panic, unable to see the way forward, and feel like nothing will ever be the same again.

Until finally comes the exhale.

The instrument sings as all that air wooshes out from within the folds, and finally we start coming back into sight once more. The distance diminishes, the tension releases and there are the selves we know to be our own, all lined up and getting ever closer, as everything compacts and we come home once again.

There will always be those cycles of inhalation and exhalation, of expansion and contraction. We could always end up feeling the worst we’ve ever felt right after feeling untouchable on top of the world.

The most important thing is to know you always remain connected.

No matter how far you stray, you will always come home, so our divine duty is to make sure we are at peace with, and love, and accept, and forgive, whoever will be waiting for us when we arrive.

Learning to love all the things I’ve done, the people I have been and the mistakes I’ve made has been a rollercoaster ride that I’m still strapped into.

Overcoming how much you make yourself cringe is a lifetime dedication.

But when Millie and I chat shit over cheap pints then I see her stories about her high-paid neuroscience job, or I reminisce with old blog friends and see their young kids in their profile pics, I feel profoundly moved by the journey of growth we have already undertaken to get to this point.

We are made up of everyone we have ever been, and now have the chance to give them everything they ever dreamed of.

How magical is that?