“Hush up” – cherub, Chapel, San Anton Palace, Malta.

Three years, ten months and three weeks ago (though who’s counting?), I received my first ever, though maybe not my last, piece of hate mail.

I had recently graduated from life coach training and, replete with derring-do and gung-ho, had sent out an email to everyone I knew telling them about the new venture.

A week or so later I received in the mail a brilliantly drawn cartoon – a page of drawings of people saying really mean things about me. Hooray!!

I have to say that when I read it the bottom dropped out of my world somewhat.

The letter was anonymous – I still don’t know who sent it. There was a return address but it didn’t make sense. I like to think of myself as Sherlock Holmes with a side of James Bond, and I’m sure I could have got to the bottom of who sent it, but after a day or so of compulsively perusing my contacts list and Googling this and that, I decided to let it go.

I do not want to live in a state of suspicion and paranoia, and here’s the thing – the whole affair said way more about the person who sent it than it did about me, unless I attached to what it said and chose to believe it.

Which I did and didn’t.

Some of the claims and statements were so patently untrue as to be laughable. Others hurt a little more and that was my signal that I had internalized some inaccurate self-judgment.

As the wonderful Martha Beck says, nothing unkind ever turns out to be true, and nothing true ever turns out to be unkind.

I learned a lot from this experience.

I grieved.

I raged.

I whimpered.

I decided I didn’t care, but then realized I did, deeply.

I observed with awe the astounding degree of self-righteousness I can attain – I made my correspondent profoundly wrong and myself, the plucky victim, right.

I decided, with piety and longsuffering, that I had forgiven the writer, but – oops – still harbored evil thoughts toward them.

I noticed that I felt afraid – it seemed like a very mean attack and, as someone who is the survivor of a violent assault, it triggered something painful within me.

Sometimes I had glimmers of freedom from this whole tangle – I admired the stellar ability of the artist, and how brilliantly they’d managed to get inside my head. But that made me wonder if it was someone I knew well, and then I was back on the treadmill of intrigue and obsession.

It took a while for me to crystallize the meaning of this for myself: it had no meaning. It was a random mean act by someone who felt like being mean that day.

And yet it pointed to something in me – how painful it was to think that I was disliked. I wanted approval. I wanted to be liked.

When I received the anonymous letter, the most disturbing thing was that someone’s dislike of me sustained them during the hours it must have taken to create this work of art, perhaps never stopping to consider what its impact on me might be, or perhaps relishing the impact.

Recently I spoke with someone who did not respond as I wished her to when I told her about a revelation I’d had. It took the wind out of my sails and I was becalmed, I caved in, I fizzled out.

I’d had something big that I wanted to say and, when I felt unheard and unsupported, I internalized that perceived judgment and decided not to speak – not to use my voice in this way that felt like everything to me.

It is so easy for me to translate my desire not to be disliked into a decision to dilute my words, my message – the things I am here to say that only I can say, because it’s my truth and it’s what my heart and my soul and the essence of my very being stand for.

In this desire to be liked and approved of is an attachment, what Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron names, in Tibetan, shenpa – the hook. It describes the way we react almost involuntarily to habitual triggers, and we close down.

For me, to think I am not liked hooks me in that way, and, to relieve my discomfort, I criticize, complain, veer into self-righteousness or victimhood – then I judge myself, and before I know it, I am no longer present, no longer able to respond to what is in front of me and within me.

And I start to believe what isn’t true – firstly, that there is anything there but my thoughts which, hint, there isn’t.

And secondly, that it matters what anyone may or may not think of me. That that’s more important than my actual desires, goals and vision.

This world is full of things that want to shut us down – to mold our voices, police our tone, separate us from ourselves and each other, blame, victimize and oppress.

Shall we allow ourselves to be silenced and made invisible?

We are stronger than that. We are more whole and clear and wise and loved.

The antidote is presence – to return to this moment – and to remember WHY – why what I have to say is important to me, why I choose to live, work, and behave as I do. What the foundation of my very being is. My deepest desire is to be congruent with that.

Come hell or high water, I will continue to speak my truth.

Want to work with me on finding your voice? I have a 90-minute session that will help.