Day 15 – The Thing That Didn’t Exist Until It Did
For years I didn’t know I had a pattern of overriding myself. It wasn’t a concept I could name, or even something I thought of as a Thing. It was simply how I’d been conditioned in my family, at school, and in life generally. I pushed through tiredness, overrode discomfort, smoothed over conflict, made myself smaller or quieter or more agreeable so that everyone around me stayed calm enough for me to feel safe. I certainly didn’t experience it as a habit. I might even have thought of some of these behaviours as my personality.
This pattern didn’t exist for me until it did.
The moment of awakening came at a family gathering. I noticed with fresh clarity that it was the women in the kitchen, bringing plates, making tea, cutting cake, chatting. Some small part of me decided to watch what the men were doing for a change. So I sat with them on the sofa while sisters and wives and children brought tea and cake and cutlery. The men chatted, held babies, and one even fell asleep. Unimaginable for me. Sleeping at a party!
It was so uncomfortable to be waited on, to receive and not do in my usual ways. Despite the emotional discomfort of this new path, I decided to stay a little longer. My whole system simply said No to getting up and going into the kitchen. Not dramatically, not with fireworks, just a quiet, immovable refusal. I sat on the sofa, stunned. I wasn’t injured. I wasn’t ill. I was simply stopped.
And in that stillness, something became visible that had never existed for me before: the habit of overriding myself. Not the action of it, which I’d been doing for decades, but the awareness of it. The seeing of it. The recognition that this wasn’t just how I am, but something I was doing and on some new level – a choice. And in this new moment, how uncomfortable I was to simply stay and not go into my habit.
“The things that don’t exist are the most difficult to get rid of.” FM Alexander
I agree. You can’t change what you can’t see. And until you identify something, you don’t even know what it is, let alone how to edit it out. Until that moment, I had never seen this habit as separate from me.
Once I did, everything shifted. Not all at once, not dramatically, but quietly, like a tide turning. I began to notice the micro‑moments: the tightening in my chest when someone asked something of me, the way I’d say yes before I’d even felt my own no, the way I’d rush to fill silence, the way I’d push through fatigue as if it were a moral failing.
Awareness didn’t make the habit disappear, but it made it impossible to pretend it wasn’t there. And that changed my behaviour in ways I didn’t expect. I started pausing before answering. I started noticing when my breath shortened. I started asking myself, “Do I actually want to do this?” I started letting myself stop.
And the surprising thing was this: the more I stopped overriding myself, the more space there was for choice. Not the frantic, urgent kind of panicked choice I used to make, but the quiet, grounded kind that comes from being in contact with a more authentic version of myself.
This realisation has shaped my teaching too. Of course, I no longer assume that a student’s personality is fixed. I look for the habits that don’t yet exist for them, the ones they’re living inside without seeing. And I know that my job isn’t to force change, but to help them glimpse the things that have so far been invisible. Because once they see it, as Marjorie Barstow said in yesterday’s writing, they can make the change without any trouble.
The hardest part is always being invited to see ourselves differently, without wrongness or a knee‑jerk correction. Observation is one of the hardest skills. Self‑observation seems harder still. Fortunately an Alexander practitioner can help guide you to noticing for yourself when you’re ready, and when you have enough skill to stop, redirect your attention and then see if there is something new you’d like to choose.