My night with Madonna

(Notes from mind control, a nightmare, thoughts on self-worth...this is my first Substack article).

It’s 2.13am.

I woke up from a dream where the ghost of Madonna is tormenting people, causing them to act out strange kinky scenes from her Sex Book. It manifests in my dream mind as a kind of BDSM puppet show on a global scale – Madonna a ghoulish Wizard of Oz. The dream was like an alien-mind control movie but darker (nothing Will Smith would be involved in, more Blade Runner) – dystopian and disturbing, night time cityscapes. It ends, as I stir, with what I guess is an intervention where I call her out on the need for her ego to die with her mortal body, “Let your spirit rest Madonna!”

Writing this I don’t know if this makes my ego bigger than hers (dream Madonna obviously, this has nothing to do with the real Madonna). It seems pretty incredible to call Madonna out, even in a dream….even if she is taking over the world with BDSM.

My partner is wrestling around, scratching his legs in his sleep.

My own legs are fidgety and have that odd feeling where you’ve been lying in a way that is restricting blood flow.

I have that weird limbic sensation that my dream is trying to communicate something to me. This leaves me anxious – the messages and details of it are fading fast, as dreams do. I am also anxious in the alternative that believing this makes me mad. I lie in the dark trying to both remember the dream and somehow forget it and feel calmer.

And now I am here.

Having had countless nights of insomnia and having written large chunks of my book in the middle of the night, it’s become rarer (recently) for me to be up like this. Partly I am relieved, not having hours and hours up in the early hours and days, staggering through each hour. And I also know that these hours were when I connected to myself and my words, when I had the hours outside of my regular life to produce something. It wasn’t pleasant but it was purposeful.

I don’t know how this works.

This is my first Substack.

I feel I should introduce myself. What intersection will I place myself on? How do I want you to know me? What labels will I use and which ones will you end up giving me, if you are here?

Well – headlines. I’ve written a book about self-worth.

Why it matters, how to find it. And how it opens up a personal power that is healing yes but also, I think, world changing. It’s hard to hold hope and see that things could be different in our world but I suppose that’s a bit of what I experience all the time in my job as a therapist – that awful things, pain and depression and self-hate and despair and trauma and things passed down through generations can shift and something beautiful can grow. I look at our world and my therapy clients and I see that a lot of the systems, culture, corporations and noise of our world that keep us hustling for our worth and never feeling enough, rushing around in anxiety and stress.

My book is an argument and a pathway for how we might claim our power back from the bullshittery of the modern world if we could truly come home to ourselves and live with self-worth.

I think self-worth is revolutionary.

It’s revolutionary for people who find more of it, it changes individual choices and boundaries and lives and relationships, it shifts work places and communities…what is our crazy world if not a network of individuals and their feelings, thoughts and behaviours? Change has got to start somewhere and I think our inner world and our relationship with ourselves is the place to kickstart a revolution.

Maybe my book can’t change everything.

But I believe it could change a lot for someone.

And that someone could be many, many people.

I’m Emily. I’m a therapist. I’ve also had a lot of therapy.

And I can’t sleep so I am here.

Reading back through this I can see I feel conflicted – I feel I want to move forward, perhaps part of me wants to do this on a grand scale. It’s not beyond me to realise that, I am the Madonna of my dream and with my book that I wish was being absorbed across the world, changing minds and lives…

…so I am apparently an ego-maniac, sociopath.

Or a repressed wannabe feminist icon.

I did watch the film Freaky Tales before bed. Perhaps this is part of it.

It’s also relevant that my friend has died. That might be the ghost part.

And before I went to bed I was messaging my friends about meeting up on what would have been her birthday – 16 February.

So, I am a therapist, with a book I want to publish, and my friend died.

Her dying (and it was the process of her dying, the knowledge it was coming, the fear and pain, the overwhelm my distress caused around my work and family life – I have two sons, also divorced and living with my partner) accelerated my book.

I had so much from my own therapy and my practice that I wanted to share with as many people as possible – concepts and ideas that I know can move people towards a better relationship with themselves (e.g. understanding that we all have Shitty Factory Resets and our own stuck patterns, or Velvet Prisons) – but then I started writing about emotional pain from inside it.

And the book tilted.

More accurately, my life was flipped over and my mental health was shattered.

The book had to change.

Scap that.

I chose for the book to change because, in all the things I know this is a biggy…

So much suffering in life cannot be avoided.

But so much suffering comes from believing we are broken, different or failing when we are feeling.

I decided not to write a book from the safe distance of healed professional. But stand in the shitty solidarity of a total mental health crisis – panic attacks, self-harming, sobbing despair and vicious inner-critic. I wanted to make it count and blow apart a sanitised, safe world of healing, because that’s not how it is when it is bad in your head.

My night time mind was full of ghosts and a book and a woman who wants to change the world, one mind at a time.

Here I am,

A woman who feels inspired and full of purpose and empowerment.

And simultaneously, lost and doubting and gaslighting herself.

I have never known how to start my Substack. This seems as good a way as any.

As far as I can tell, being human is a daily experience of polarities. Routine holding mystery. Hatred bleeding into beauty. Despair and connection. Thoughtlessness and conscientious duty. Boredom, love. Wisdom and doubt,

I believe that a truly successful human knows themselves deeply.

Chooses wisely.

Understands that they are a wonder of multi-faceted contradictions wobbling through a life of vulnerability.

Connects deeply – to themselves, others, the world.

Wants to experience meaning, create a bit too and leave more of it behind, when their energy is out of their form and onward to others.

I don’t know if any of this will land.

Or if anyone will read it.

I know nothing about Substack but something about life.

And, did I mention I have a book?

You can find me on Instagram – it’s a bit less “middle of the night, fever dream ramblings”  over there but more frequent. Nice pics, you know the drill

I work with people – I am normally fully booked for therapy but am running a programme this year out of my book – it’s called Claiming You – so yep, there’s that too.

Please say hello.

I would love to say hello back.

2.50am – so for now, I will say good night (fingers crossed).

With love,

Emily