A dream with a message — self care

Last night I had the strangest dream.

It was a crazy workshop that was being run by Johanna Rothman, although a lot of other folks from Twitter were there.

In it we had to walk across a ledge which ran for ten metres along a wall, but was only about a foot off the ground. It felt like something out of Takeshi’s Castle.

As a group our goal was to walk from one end to the other. At occasionally breakpoints, you had to press a button to activate a cloud of pepper spray in front of you before walking through it.

People found themselves getting hurt. People tried holding their breath to walk through, they would close their eyes and cover their mouth. All these things helped a little, but they still found themselves coughing, spluttering, and needing to throw water in their eyes, and just having to get down to recover.

There was a ten minute break where most people went to splash water on their face, and we were up to do it again. A couple of people decided that they were going to either gently push the button to not trigger the spray, or avoid pressing it altogether. The remainder of the group told they they were breaking the rules, and they HAD to trigger the spray. Otherwise they were cheating.

In the end, no-one made it all the way through. In the debrief the instructor asked why no-one made it to the end, and everyone said it was because the pepper spray made it too difficult.

But the debrief went a little like this, “yes, I told you to do that. And you did it to yourself once, and you found it hurt. But then you kept doing it to yourself. In the end who am I really that you would rate what I want over your own wellbeing?”

I found it a very powerful message — just before bed Gitte Klitgaard had promoted a story about how we’re optimising ourselves to death which had a cautionary tale (and hence probably why I had the dream). Our desire to please or to push ahead will mean we’ll often override what should be common sense to please someone in authority — similar to The Milgram Experiment. What’s worse, and factored into the dream, when someone takes the right course of action and tries to be sensible, we have a mob mentality that if there’s some kind of rule, even though it hurts people, we need to enforce it.

Far too often we feel guilty for putting our own wellbeing first. It’s not good for us, and it’s not sustainable.