New eyes

Marcel Proust wrote that the real voyage of discovery isn’t about seeking new landscapes, but about having new eyes.

I didn’t understand what he meant until I myself got some new eyes 👀.  And I don’t mean the bottle-bottom specs I’ve been wearing since I was 3!!!

For years I carried something I had unconsciously decided didn’t count. I told myself trauma belonged to other people. It was earned by people who’d been in a firefight in Helmand, or who’d seen the kind of things that obviously leave a mark. What I’d been through wasn’t “that”, so I stored it in a mental box labelled “not that bad” and got on with it.

I wasn’t falling apart in the way you’re supposed to fall apart. There was no unexplained rage, I didn’t reach for a bottle of wine every night, and there wasn’t a dramatic film-worthy unravelling, so I decided I was fine. If it doesn’t look like the film version, it can’t be real, can it?

Well, it turns out it absolutely can.

What I had (have?) was PTSD. It just wasn’t wearing the costume that I expected of it. It was there, quietly lurking in the way I drove myself.  It was there in the stories I believed about what I was and wasn’t allowed to feel. It was in how I turned up to my own life every day. And it was shaping what I thought was possible for me far more than I ever realised then, and like to admit now.

I only saw any of it because I stepped onto my own personal development journey, and that journey gave me my new pair of eyes 👀.

We assume personal development is about learning something new. Another book, another course, another clever framework to bolt on and, of course, sometimes it is.  But more often the real development isn’t the information at all. It’s our sight. One day you can suddenly see the thing that was there the whole time, running the show quietly in the background, steering you without you ever knowing.  Like a silent, but often malignant, autopilot that’s been programmed all wrong and without you knowing it.

The stuff we can’t see

A blind spot is a slippery thing because by definition, you can’t see it. You can’t think your way to it either, because the very thing you’d use to go looking is the thing that’s compromised. Complicated huh? This is why so many of us stay stuck while working incredibly hard. We pour our effort into the part we can see, and the real handbrake is sitting somewhere we’ve never thought to look.  Didn’t even know what there.  

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not telling you that you’ve got PTSD. I’ve no idea what you’re carrying. What I am telling you is that most of us are walking around with a version of this. There is something we’ve quietly, usually subconsciously, decided is just “how I am.” It could be something we’ve never once questioned, because it’s always been there, like a poster on the wall we stopped noticing years ago.

This work isn’t only for people who are on their knees. It’s a myth that you have to be in crisis to go looking. You can step onto the journey not because something’s broken, but because you’ve got a quiet feeling there’s more. More of you and more life than the version you’ve been living.

An invitation, not a fix

This isn’t me telling you there’s something to fix. You’re not broken, so there isn’t. It’s an invitation to see differently by trying out some new eyes. Who knows what blind spot you may be carrying.  Who knows what potential you may be stifling.  Who knows what limiting belief you are holding as true that is founded on something old, borrowed or bestowed.  Who knows what new version of you is waiting in the wings to be revealed.  Who knows what success may be lying in wait for you, just over the hill.

If any of that has touched on something, or if you’ve got the itch that says there’s a version of you waiting behind something you can’t name just yet, it’s worth being curious about it. You don’t have to solve it today, but you do have to be willing to look.

If you’d like to know where I started, drop me a message. I’ve got a free taster I’m happy to share. There’s no strings, it’s a gentle way to try on a pair of new eyes and see what you notice.

The voyage of discovery  was never really about the landscape, it was always about the eyes.