There is someone inside, I can’t be bothered to be.

I was lying by the pool last week on holiday and this phrase dropped into my brain with such clarity and purpose, it felt like the way song writers describe their creative process.

I once hear Pete Doherty say it took about 30 minutes for him and Carl Barat to write Can't Stand Me Now because it just appeared ‘in the way these things do’. I'm not sure I have ever experienced it before - I mean, I did write a song when I was 7 called ‘Just a teenager in love’, but I had to work really hard at the lyrics, so I'm sure that wasn't delivered to me by the collective consciousness because it simply had to be put out into the world.

So I was lying by the pool in some state of shutdown from the realisation that a toddler holiday really isn't a holiday at all (seriously needs a rebrand!), and I needed to wildly reassess my expectations of the 7 days that lay ahead, when my brain shouted at me

‘There is someone inside, I can’t be bothered to be'.

And honestly? It felt like the most honest and true thing I have ever said to myself.

I - like you, I am sure - spend an inordinate amount of time berating myself for not getting up early to exercise, not consistently take the supplements that I spend a fortune on (and I know help), or not following through on the big plans I have for my business at - and only at - the weekend

I tell myself if I wanted it enough I would do it, I remind myself I have done it before, I taunt myself with toxic social media posts by people who clearly just wanted it more than me, and I promise myself that it will be different tomorrow/ next week/ next month. 

And none of them work.

I found some comfort and reasoning in my ADHD diagnosis; ahhhh, so it's because my prefrontal cortex is under developed and I don't have the executive function skills of someone who's is fully developed. That makes sense!

And it does. But it doesn't help the guilt and shame I feel for the ‘disservice’ I am doing to myself by not being a reformer pilates going, collagen drinking, social life having, 8 figure CEO who splits their time between the UK and LA because their global team needs them…

And now I have the truth, because even writing that sentence fills me with the type of nausea I had on day 4 of the all-inclusive hotel buffet, and the same desire to scream ‘BUT I DON'T WANT THAT!'. 

I never wanted that, even when I had a version of it - sure, I thought I wanted it at the time, and I loved everything that came with it… but ‘it’ - I never wanted.

We are fed such bullshit all day every day, with hard-to-distinguish-between information and opinions that we never asked to see forced into our eyeballs, demanding an estimated 35,000 micro decisions and context switches EVERY DAY, and it feels like it's never been harder to exist online and keep your sanity as every swipe flicks between an influencer selling you a fake tan, children dying in warzones, a dog dressed as an old man, a local Tesco being robbed, a political rally, a trend, another trend, another trend… 

Our brains are bombarded, and our lives so busy, it's hard to engage in critical thinking to assess which of the soundbites we have shouted at us throughout the day actually belong to us and which don't, so we are all just becoming a homogenised version of A Person who lives A Life and buys Stuff. 

But I don't want to be A Person who lives A Life and buys Stuff. I want to be me, and experience my life in all it's glory, spending time with the people I love so hard that I could burst, and if admitting that the pretend person inside me that I bully myself to surface doesn't really exist - or isn't the true version of me - allows me to do that, then I think that means I win!

I believe we are currently living through a collective reckoning - I don't have any scientific evidence to back this up, but anecdotally, almost everyone I speak to is feeling a monumental shift as they wake up to the fact that we are sleepwalking into a future we didn't sign up for, with brains that are being dumbed down by the chemicals we digest, the content we consume and, well…. ChatGPT. 

If any of this resonates with you, then here are some practical things I am doing that you might want to try to:

• Consciously consuming.

  • Rather than scrolling, I am trying to observe what I am watching, and using the ‘not interested’ feature ferociously

• Taking a beat

  • Instead of letting my chimp brain run the show, I stop to ask myself the right questions.

    • Is this true?

    • Is this helpful?

    • How is this making me feel?

    • What could I do to change how I feel?

• Asserting agency

  • Remembering that I get to choose - I have full agency over my life and can engage that privilege at any time I choose.

If you're feeling this too then I hope this makes you feel less alone, and empowers you to engage your own agency over your life.