I wrote down my fears that night, and my beliefs, and it felt good, as always, to tell the truth. And the truth is, I wasn’t going to do things like that anymore—go to places like that mass, places that made no sense to me, that made me feel weird and sick and as though I was doing something wrong.
I was no longer going to fight to define what God was, and what God wasn’t. Instead, I was going to start small. All I had to do was continue moving forwards in the direction of my heart’s deepest longing to stay connected to the grace and the truth that I knew did actually exist, because I could feel it.
And I wasn’t going to pretend anymore that, just because the Catholic Church was full of good people, it had the right to tell me what was good and bad. I already knew what was good and bad. I was going to live according to my values.
For now, I was not going to wrestle with the religion of my birth, not going to try to be a good Catholic, not going to suppress, or even speak, my opinions, to make other people feel comfortable. I would no longer keep pretending that this religion, and the way it was practised in the modern age, made sense to me, just because it made sense to my parents.
I would let them be them and me be me.
This would disappoint them, and I hated disappointing them. But I was not, and never would be, a good Catholic.
There—I’d said it. What a relief!
And so, from that day forwards, I committed to keeping my faith rather simple, and rather practical. Where I could do good, I would. If something made sense, I would adopt it. If something made no sense, I would waste no time trying to work it out, or excuse it. Where I could find thoughtful answers, I would take them.
As my recovery progressed, and my moods stabilised, I became braver in my determination to live true to what I knew to be right and wrong. I gave myself full permission to untangle from what I felt as the heavy expectations of my childhood faith, and to explore spirituality and meaning and philosophy and wisdom in whatever form took my interest. Thanks to Caroline Jones, and her ABC program The Search for Meaning, I had become interested in interfaith dialogue and had started to look for the common good in all paths, to listen out for perennial philosophies, the places we agreed—and that was how I first fell in love with the stories of author Jack Kornfield.
Jack had once been a Buddhist monk living in a cave. Now he was a Buddhist monk living in New York. His writing had such humour and wisdom and life on the page, I was hooked. Like so many other writers I’ve never met, Jack Kornfield would become my teacher, and his lessons would light the path of my recovery.
My favourite chapter in his book A Path with Heart was the one called ‘Naming the emotions’, which contained an exercise called ‘Naming the demons’. Jack explained that peace could never be found by running away from difficult emotions; it could only be found by sitting with them, and letting them pass through us. He said that when we meditated, the trick was to observe our emotions and then name them in threes (for example, ‘anger, anger, anger’ or ‘lust, lust, lust’). It was a bit like training puppies, he said. We needed to train our mind, to tame our thoughts.
This theory made sense to me, although I was no good at the practice. Everything I felt was still so entangled. Most of the time, I was very much working on instinct. Whenever I went beyond that in my search for The Correct Name For This Feeling I would find myself trapped back in the ping-pong of anxiety, and my fear of getting it wrong.
At a certain point, it occurred to me that, yet again, I would need a workaround.
Ron had once said to me that perhaps this whole breakdown had been about giving my head and heart a chance to catch up and create language around what really were incredibly complex early childhood feelings and experiences, and their long tail. This was, in a way, like a very poorly orchestrated yet highly essential system update. Because so many of these feelings occurred around the time I was just learning language, they clustered together, and I really didn’t know how to untangle them, which is why I called them the Bad Feeling. But through my work with the FAFL exercise, I was beginning to understand the benefits of being able to simplify and name my experiences. Maybe I needed to apply that same attitude to the Bad Feeling?
And so it was that one fateful day, after failing yet again at this exercise of naming, naming, naming, I decided to do something weird: I decided to put a little distance between me (Clare), and that voice of worry in my head, that inner critic that had been at me since I was a child. I decided to give that voice a name all of its own. I named him … Frank. Not sure why—perhaps because it was the first name that came to mind. Could have been any name. But Frank it was.
When I heard the bad voice, felt the bad feeling, I began calling it out, challenging his authority. At first, I
