On the Edge?

Yesterday I read a tweet from Professor Carol Campbell, someone I admire very much in my professional life. She spoke about having taken a leap in 2023:

“Well I took the leap in 2023, it was a lot of planning, hard work and stress but absolutely worth it to enter 2024 in a different place and looking forward to new adventures ahead.”

The tweet has been reposted a lot and used as a call to others, particularly in the world of female educational leadership, as a call to action….

Over the last 30 years, I have leapt and jumped a lot. Like the 10 lords, a lot of my leaping has been to the tune of others. I have leapt over obstacles that appeared insurmountable and probably should have been. I have jumped off edges when staying on safe ground would have been better for me.

I have rarely jumped ship, preferring to stay and try and find solutions to difficult situations instead of walking away, often putting the needs of others before my own, all in the name of “service.”

And on occasions, I have been pushed, rather than leaping of my own free will. Whether the people who provided a “helping hand” were doing so from a place of care, I will never know. But for the record, I didn’t like it. I am very scared of heights and being pushed into the abyss before I was ready didn’t give me an adrenaline rush…. It left me petrified and traumatised.

I was back at my parents’ house this week and found some of my old school books. it seems that my fear of heights goes back further than I thought….and certainly to May 1976 when I wrote this revealing little piece:

I am fully aware that “feeling the fear and doing it anyway” as advocated by Susan Jeffers in 1987 (ironically the year I took the most foolish and ill-judged leap into the unknown of my life to date) can help us to overcome irrational fears that would otherwise keep us in our comfort zone and perhaps prevent us from achieving our full potential. As a head teacher, I know all about the need for children to take risks and be challenged and stretched to work in their zone of proximal development. But I also know that this risk taking and stretching is only ethical when children are supported by adults (both in and out of school) who understand what they are doing and provide the individual risk assessments and safety measures around each child to ensure that they feel and are physically and psychologically safe as they learn.

I have done a LOT of work over the last year on my own learnt and lived sense of safety. An amazing Parts/Internal Family Systems therapist has helped me with this and I have begun to see that for many years, I survived as an adult by risk assessing and trying to make things safe for everyone else but not understanding my own internal sense of fear and my need to constantly leap further and higher in order to try and prove my “bravery”; a quality I clearly saw as more important than any other in a fundamentally unsafe world.

As an aside, I always suspected that, in spite of my lovely mum’s assurances that I was an exceptionally clever child, school wasn’t a particularly happy place for me. Finding my old school books provided another clue as to why.

February 1978. I was 8 years old.

Oh Lena, what a mess…..

Anyone else see the irony? But by May, I’d learnt to apologise for myself. For my mistakes. For being a mess….

Safety is what matters to me now, more than ever. So right now I’m not planning any leaps. Or jumps.

I want to be and feel safe. I want to do a job where I can make a positive difference without putting my health at risk. I want to make sure that my family members and friends get the best of me. And I want that for us all.