Hiding Your Difference
I have spent my life hiding my difference, judging it as my wrongness - and I don’t want you to do the same. It’s a hard path to tread when you can’t feel free to be yourself.
Feeling wrong
I have a saying: unless we’re willing to acknowledge our difference, we can never recognise our brilliance.
I dropped out of boarding school aged 15 with a drug and alcohol problem. I scraped 5 GCSEs and continued on my path to despair. After a childhood feeling wrong, different and, to be perfectly frank, bad - I entered my teenage years full of rebellion and self-loathing. I put myself into situations that were unsafe and unkind to me. I jumped into relationships to escape home and continued to increase my drug and alcohol habit to shore up my justification for not committing to myself. Also to control every aspect of my life. Most people don’t realise that the most powerful function of substance abuse is its ability to shrink your life and make it more manageable and controllable - crazy huh?
The illusion of control
My entire life has been about control - how can I hide or minimise my weirdness, my difference, and never let anyone know how wrong I am? That’s quite a basis for a life isn’t it? And yet I believe that this is commonplace. I believe that half of the population is playing this game. Ok, not with drugs and alcohol but with many other and varied forms of distraction. ANYTHING can be a distraction from committing to your life.
Fast-forward to age 28 and I finally did it, I hit rock bottom. I closed the door. I lay in my bed with the curtains closed and didn’t leave for two weeks. I vaguely remember my husband coming in with food (which I sometimes ate) but not a lot else. God knows what he went through at that time. And in that cocoon I made a choice - a powerful choice.
Choosing life
I decided to live.
I began from the ground up to build a life. I chose and chose again. I began to explore self-help, esoteric teachings and exploring me. I was happier, I was beginning to commit to me. I also learned how to play the game of life successfully. I used my ability to mask in order to become successful and respectable as I saw it. I wanted to bury who I’d been SO deep that she would never be found again.
And never once did I see myself as having a problem - because actually I didn’t. This is the life I have chosen for myself, none of it needs to be judged - if a single iota of this life of mine were any different I wouldn’t be here, now, in the amazing position of shining like a mirror to reflect your brilliance.
Because it’s your brilliance that matters to me. I know I have spent my entire life trying so hard to push through everything I thought was wrong about me.
Achieving amazing things, yes. From being in that darkened bedroom in 2005 to achieving a 1st in English Literature in 2009; becoming a secondary school teacher for Teach First in 2011 - teaching in one of the poorest areas of Bradford; instituting and managing a North of England hub for First Story in 2012 (whilst ALSO teaching full time); then qualifying as a hypno-psychotherapist in 2016. You can see that once I’d committed to living, I really began to live!
Still hiding my difference
Yes, I began to live… but I decided to ‘hide my workings’. Pretend I was normal, never let anyone know how different I was or how hard it had been for me. I remember someone on my hypnotherapy course telling me to keep quiet about my earlier ‘life-style choices’ because it might be frowned upon. I didn’t question this - it mirrored my own inclination to keep hiding.
So what changed? When did I stop hiding me?
When did I begin to create without a safety net? When did I begin to create FOR YOU instead of myself? My whole life changed the moment I chose to COMMIT TO MY LIFE 100% And this is what I’m here for. To show you that, whatever problems you’ve faced in your life, however wrong you may think you are (or have been), however ineffective and overwhelmed you feel at times, you are here for the most valuable of all reasons. Nothing less than to BE the future that this planet requires.
You are the future - don’t hide!
You are the reason I keep going. I know how hard it’s been, and I know that we need you. Exactly as you truly are and I’m here to reflect your brilliance and show you what no one EVER showed me - how to be a leader. Yes, you are here to lead by showing up as the true glory of you every single day. And we do it together. When we all show up together and contribute to each other then we are UNSTOPPABLE. Is it time to be the support you’ve been looking for from everyone else? Is it time to receive it?
How can I serve you?
- Jessica Summers, July 2020 -
Jessica Summers Hypnogenics
Hypnogenics™ combines the glorious energy you're being, with the energy we are being together. It has evolved from energetics, empathic coaching, and hypnotherapy. Read more about this transformative process HERE
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