#033 The Self-Discovery Pause | Louise Rapley

Louise Rapley, guest · [02:14]It wasn't something that I actually, that was on my radar at all. It was strange the way it happened. In 2020, my partner and I had the most amazing trip to South America planned, and we had booked everything, and everything was paid for, and then COVID happened. And so, of course, we had to cancel it, and we were sitting in the difficult place that everybody is so familiar with. Is this the end of our lives? Will everything, anything ever be normal again? What's going to happen? And so the first step was The holiday is, is off the table. And my partner said to me, you know, we're really disappointed. We'd been looking forward to this for a long time. It was something very special that we were promising ourselves, but I would like to see if we can turn this disappointment into something beautiful. And, what he said was that he wanted to take the money that had been refunded to us from the holiday and use it to create a space for me to take a sabbatical. And, that was quite a shock on so many levels because I'd never thought of taking a sabbatical before. And now he was offering to fund that for me. And I had a whole lot of resistance to that idea, just simply because I was brought up with this conditioned idea that I must always look after myself because if I didn't, nobody else would. One of the worst things one could be to the family I grew up in was a kept woman. It was even worse than being with mutton dressed as lamb, which is the other thing, the other mantra from my childhood. So this idea of being a kept woman was, very difficult for me to take on, but I got used to it progressively, and I accepted and thought, what a wonderful opportunity this was.

Louise Rapley, guest · [04:31]first part of my professional life, I was a high school French teacher, so that was a seventeen-year period, and then this second seventeen-year period, I'd been a textbook editor, and I had Become, you know, transitioned from being teacher to editor while I was in the middle of what turned out to be a very long and very unhappy marriage. And so textbook editing had seemed perfect for me because I could just dive into it. I could exist in my head instead of in my feelings. I could numb myself to what was going on in my life and I could just work and work and work. And so those habits had persisted, even though I'd left the marriage and was now in a very beautiful relationship, those habits of working, of seeing myself as only being worth something when I was productive, those still persisted. And I still had all the bad habits of taking on way too much work, of having absolutely no boundaries with my clients. You know, the world of textbook editing A publisher will say, right, we have this project we'd like to offer you. it's, history, grade ten, we want you to do this or this. And then they tell you the proposed fee and you either accept it or turn it down. And in my case, I never turned anything down because I just thought I had to take on everything that was given to me. So I was permanently in overload, and stressed with far too much work and very bad habits of working for very, very long hours without ever looking after myself. in fact, I had the really bad habit of not being able to stop because when I stopped working, I could actually feel how exhausted I was, and I didn't want to feel that. So it was easier to sit at my laptop and to keep going until I absolutely had to stop. Than to look after myself and listen to my body or feel whatever I might be feeling. Much better to just be in my head and, cut out all that, what I probably viewed as nonsense back then.

Louise Rapley, guest · [15:32]Yeah, I'm just remembering one of the most difficult things for me about doing just that was that I had so much freedom, and I didn't know what to do with freedom. I didn't know what freedom was, and I found myself wishing that I could just have a boring old textbook to edit. Because then I would know what to do with my day, instead of having to start from scratch and, and find a way myself. So getting into the groove, yeah, long and slow, and it, it felt like I moved through cycles that kept on repeating themselves. So I would get an idea that I wanted to write about, and I would start writing, on the first day of a week, and it would go fantastically, and then on the second day, I would have an even better writing day, and the chapter, whatever it was that I was working on, would be really taking form. And then I would get to a point where I felt satisfied with it, but now I wanted to move on straight away to the next thing, because that was how I was used to functioning. And having to take the time instead to say, wow, I've accomplished an incredible amount this week. I'm really pleased with what I've written. Now I have a day to just be. So maybe I go back to Kirstenbosch or I go wandering off in the green belts, which is something else I love doing. Or I sit and do my jigsaw puzzle or I read or I watch three episodes of my show on Netflix because I can't actually bear being with myself for a moment longer. I had to learn to do that. And then the, the, the cycle would keep repeating itself, not necessarily neatly in weeks. Maybe I would not get another idea for a week or so. And then I would feel huge amount of guilt that I was wasting this time that I'd been gifted. I also, I don't know if you had this experience, but I felt a lot of guilt about the privilege of being able to take a sabbatical.

Louise Rapley, guest · [32:37]That piece of work that I did, the extended piece of work of looking at why I made some poor, very poor choices, that was, that was fundamental to my growth, because what I discovered Was a part of myself that I call little Louise, at the child me. So, as a kid, I had some stuff happening that was, that was really big to handle. The, the biggest issue was my brother. He was two years older than me. I was the youngest of five. And he was a blue baby, so he had learning problems and behavioral problems. And eventually when he was a teenager, it, it became schizophrenia. So, I was living with some very troubling, frightening behavior. And I didn't have the support that would have helped me to deal with it properly. I was really, I really felt lost and alone, even though I was one of a big family. My parents didn't have the time to give energy to me. I was the quiet little girl who behaved. All the energy went to my brother. And Little Louise sort of found her ways of coping. Number one, numbing, go into head, think, don't feel, catastrophize, over-dramatize to try and get attention. Because if I kept quiet, nobody paid me any attention. If there was an issue and I overreacted to it, maybe I would get a bit of attention, usually not terribly positive, but, any attention is better than nothing. and what I had to realize through writing my memoir was that Little Louise was actually the, the, the dominant aspect in my personality still. Of course, I was able to be adult Louise for long stretches of time, but when there was any kind of crisis, I defaulted to Little Louise behavior. And it wasn't helpful. It didn't work when I was a little girl, and it certainly didn't work in my twenties or thirties or forties or fifties. And really starting to pull that behavior apart, to understand what it created it, to understand what the payoffs were for it, to see it in action, to actually recognize it. I mean, I can now, I was in a conversation last week, and I could suddenly feel little Louise come over me. Adult Louise had disappeared. I could feel the panic and the, I just wanted to burst into tears. That was very much little Louise behavior. I could feel that happening, and I could say, just hang on a second, I need a minute to gather myself. And then I could move back into the adult person. But I only learned to do that through my writing, through, through my memoir. It took a hang of a lot of practice and it's taken huge self-awareness and, and developing an outer witness, but it is the most incredible gift to have today.

Louise Rapley, guest · [36:23]Absolutely no way. I had been doing some, some serious inner work, for a few years, but this kind of transformation takes headspace. It takes reflective space. It takes being able to have a night where you barely sleep. And you sitting journaling, sorry, I'm going to change from you to I, where I barely slept and I was sitting journaling at three o'clock in the morning because I'd had such a horrible dream. You can't do that on a regular basis and then sit down to work the next morning. But having the urgency of work removed meant I wasn't panicking at two o'clock in the morning and saying, I'll have to go to sleep. how am I going to cope with tomorrow? I could say, I'll take a nap tomorrow afternoon. This is important processing that I'm doing. I'm going to honor it and do it. So no, there's no way I could have. I think, I think if I hadn't had my sabbatical, and perhaps this transformation would still have happened because it was happening already, but it was gradual. I needed, I needed a gap. I needed a space to let it all be. And to go into whatever place it took me, and to explore that place and to, and to come out at the end with a deep understanding of myself and a compassion for myself and for my family, for my parents, and for the possibility of a huge amount of healing of my relationships, not only my relationship with myself, but my, my family relationships. Could never have happened without a sabbatical.

Louise Rapley, guest · [39:04]Well, what happened, the way my sabbatical came to an end was that this memoir really had taken on a life of its own, and it insisted on being in a particular format, and I got the idea that the story, particularly the way I've healed the, the, the issues with my sexuality, would be very helpful to other women specifically. And so I wanted to publish this book. And so I sent it off to a publisher, and I requested a book report. So this was a publisher, you know, one had to pay to submit a manuscript, and then for an extra fee, they would give a book report. And of course, you talked about the fantasy earlier. So here was my fantasy that the publisher would say, oh, this is amazing, I want to publish it. and next second, I'd be in demand as a podcast guest, and, feted all over the world by women who, who found answers in, in my wisdom. And of course, it didn't turn out anything like that. The reader's report was quite devastating to read. her feel, the publisher's feeling was, well, she summed it up, this is not my cup of tea. And she found the stuff, the part where I'd focused on the beautiful growth, she wasn't able to see that because she was getting so hung up on the, my introduction was a chapter contrasting two sexual acts of the same kind, but one from back then in my past and one from now. And I think that was just too shocking and too graphic for her, which I really get now. When I wrote it, I think I was quite naive in thinking that it would find an audience and that she was, would be a receptive audience because I'd got so comfortable with my sexuality that I was sort of assuming everyone was. And that was a very big mistake. So I was really grateful in the end for her, somewhat less than excited response to my manuscript. She certainly didn't To publish it. And I had to go away and say, well, now what? My dream, I'm at the end of my sabbatical, my dream's gone. I could, of course, have submitted to other publishers, and it's very possible I would have found someone to publish it, but it just felt that that would be the wrong thing to do.

Louise Rapley, guest · [48:23]Very much so. You know, I found, for example, last year I was offered a project. It was a proofread of a French textbook. And I thought, so now I can use my skills, and, and I absolutely adore French and really miss, I, I used to love teaching French. I really miss using it in my life. So I thought, oh, fantastic, it's a textbook, but I can draw on a skill that I enjoy. Well, I, I, it actually didn't work out, and after a couple of days, I had to say, I'm sorry, I'm not able to do this. I'm not able to perform your brief. This is my very bad habit of perfectionism kicking in. Whenever I was working on a manuscript, I would take it as my responsibility to transform it into something magnificent, no matter how badly written it was in the beginning, or how not suited to purpose it was. And with this particular book, this French pre-free, they just wanted me to do a final check for errors before the book went off to be printed, and I couldn't. My, my teacher self was there, as well as my French self, and it was going, hang on, this exercise is at a far too higher level. The book's been at a kind of baby level, and then suddenly there's one chapter that is at high school level. This can't work. They weren't interested in hearing that. They just wanted me to find the mistake, the spelling mistakes. I couldn't do it. And I had to accept that, a, a very big, lesson for me, my perfectionism. I have to learn to harness it when it's required, and in this case, it wasn't required.