Living a Story

"All the darkness in the world cannot drown out the light of a single match."

Walls

I have been angry and frustrated recently with the walls people have around their hearts.  With the walls I have around my heart.  I have been frustrated with how difficult it is to put down these walls.  I have been frustrated that the people I long to be close to have not put down their walls.  But I think I understand.  I understand that as innocent children we had to construct these walls to survive.  I understand that when we were at the mercy of others, when we could not control our circumstances or how we were treated or who we were around, we had to do something to survive.  And so we built walls around our beautifully sensitive hearts.  To protect us from the pain we didn’t know how to cope with.  To protect us from the confusion and sense of powerlessness.  Our walls helped us survive.

More than anything, I long to connect with people.  I long to share my heart and listen to theirs.  I long to be open.  To trust.  To be known.  And I get so angry at myself when I can’t do these things.  I get so angry at myself when I shut down or throw my walls up or hide.  If I long to share my heart with people, why can’t I sometimes?  Why do I find myself fighting against myself?  It’s because it takes time to realize I am safe now.  It takes time to realize that not everyone wants to hurt me.  It takes time to realize that some people love me and some people will stay.  It takes time to put my walls down.  These walls that helped me survive.  These walls that protected my heart when there was unimaginable pain and tragedy going on around me.  These walls helped me survive.  Over time I will learn how to put them down.  Over time I will learn how to let people in.  I already am.  I am learning to trust.  I am learning how to open up.  It is taking time, yes.  But I am learning.  I am growing.  I am learning that some people want to be let in.  I am learning that some people are safe.  I am learning that I am worth being known.  You are worth being known.  I am learning that to heal, we must put our walls down.  We must take that risk.  And I am learning that the risk is worth it.  I am learning that, as I open my heart, I am feeling the pain and grief I avoided as a child but that I am also beginning to feel whole.  I am beginning to feel connected.  I am beginning to feel loved.  So I will give myself grace.  And I will continue to try to put my walls down.  And it will take time.  And it will be hard.  But I believe that, in the end, it will be worth it.

What if I Cry?

I have been feeling this week.  I am not typically a person who cries.  I used to when I was younger.  I would cry all the time.  The smallest things would hurt my sensitive heart and I would not be able to stop the tears from flowing.  I eventually started picking up on the cues around me that this was not a good thing.  I must be strong.  I must keep it together.  Crying is a weakness.  People will think less of me if I cry.  People will think I am too sensitive and overly dramatic.  So when I was 8 years old, I shut it down.  I shut my heart down.  I built a wall inside of me that kept my tears locked away.  If something hurt my sensitive heart I learned how to disconnect from it.  And so I stopped crying.

I am 28 years old now and I am beginning to learn that it is ok to cry.  I am beginning to learn that it draws people to me and connects me with them.  I am beginning to learn that people want to be with me in my tears and sadness.  To me, crying is the most vulnerable thing I could do.  It is letting people completely into my heart and completely into my pain.  When I cry it feels like I am really letting people see me and that terrifies me.  If I am around people and I start to feel my tears come up I immediately shut down.  Not because I want to but because I have been doing it for so long that it has become an automatic response.  It was a survival mechanism when I was younger and though I want to let people in now this automatic response often prevents me from doing so.

I have been trying to shift this automatic response.  I have been trying to allow myself to feel when I am around others.  I have been trying not to shut down my sadness.  And this week something terrifying happened.  I cried.  In front of people. I started crying and I could not shut it down.  Something had touched my sensitive heart.  Something that triggered painful memories.  Something that made me so very sad.  And the tears started flowing.  My heart has been shut down for so long and it is now starting to wake up again.  And there are many tears that need to be shed.  Tears that I have kept locked away for so many years.  Does this scare me?  Yes.  For someone who believes that tears will scare people away, the idea of allowing others to see them terrifies me.  But I want to cry these tears.  I want to finally let them out.  I want to heal.  As time goes on, I hope the automatic response of shutting down my heart won’t be so automatic.  As time goes on, I hope that I can let people in to this most vulnerable part of me more and more.  The people I cried in front of this week still love me.  They still care about me.  They still want to be friends.

Is it ok to cry?  Is it ok to let people see my tears?  Is it ok to let people see my sadness and pain?  I think it is.  It terrifies me and the scared child inside of me says that it is not, but I think it is.  I think it is how I heal.  I want to heal.  I want to let people see this part of me.  And so I will give myself grace.  I will give myself grace when I cry and I will give myself grace when I shut down.  This is a process.  Healing is a process.  I am learning.  I am growing.  And my heart is slowly coming back to life.

I’ve Been Sad but I’ve Been Brave

This blank page in front of me is my respite.  My escape from the world.  The one safe place I can express myself.  I long to express myself.  It has been too long since I have put pen to paper.  Now that I am sitting down looking at this blank page I am not sure where to begin.  Is this something I am going to post?  Make visible to the eyes of others?  Or am I going to keep it safe?  Hidden where no one can see it?  My dream is to make it visible to the eyes of others.  Allow them to see me.  Allow them to know how I feel.  To provide a place for them to be seen and known as well.  But I am afraid.

I’ve been weighed down with sadness today.  Deep, deep sadness.  It’s part grieving, part distorted thoughts, and part fear.  The grieving comes from things in my childhood.  Deep wounds that I am just now beginning to address.  I am going through a season of mourning the things that I lost.  Mourning the things that I never had.  This weekend was a weekend of authentic connection for me.  I have a special group of friends and together we sat down and took the time to get to know and listen to each other.  It was refreshing.  It was healing.  It made me sad.  It’s one thing to never know what you have been missing.  One thing to never know what was lacking your entire childhood.  I didn’t know what I was missing.  Now I do.  Connection.  I was missing connection.  Vulnerability.  Authenticity.  I am finding those things now and though they are so healing, they are also causing me to feel so sad.  When I was younger I didn’t know that these types of things existed.  I didn’t know that life could be so much deeper and richer.  But now I do and this awareness is causing me to grieve the deep emptiness I felt as a child.

I have also been feeling afraid.  I am afraid that I am going to lose this connection to others that I have just begun to find.  I am afraid that my friends are going to leave me.  That they are going to change their minds about wanting to know me.  That they will be just like others in my past.  It’s one thing to never know what you were missing.  It’s another thing entirely to become aware of it, to begin to taste it, and then to have it ripped away from you.  This is what I am afraid of.  The amount of pain that would cause.  I’m not sure I would survive that pain.  And so I find myself wanting to pull away.  Wanting to put my guard up.  To protect myself.  The thing I long for I also fear.  Connecting with others is one of the most healing things.  Being seen and then rejected is one of the most painful things.

This is what I am grappling with today.  This is what I have been grappling with the last few weeks.  Trying not to get lost in the sadness.  Trying to be brave enough to risk being vulnerable.  Allowing myself to feel what has been coming up.  I’ve been sad today.  But I’ve also been brave.

A Beautiful Mess of Darkness and Light

Who am I?

That’s a question I like to avoid

That’s a question I don’t know the answer to

Who am I?

I know I’ve been hiding for a long time

Hiding behind a façade that I’ve perfected

I know I don’t want to hide anymore

I want to be seen

I am not often seen

In a family where perfection is expected it’s hard to be seen

What would happen if I were to show you who I truly am?

Would you accept me?

Reject me?

Would you be disappointed in what you see?

For I am not perfect

I am actually broken

I am hurting

I am lost

And I’m not sure if it’s ok to say that

But I’ve found that I like myself more lost in the brokenness than I do striving for perfection

I think I’m beginning to find myself here

I spent a long time refusing to look inside myself

I was afraid of what was in there

I was afraid of who I was

As I look inside yes, it is dark

Yes, it is scary

But it is also beautiful

There are beautiful parts of me I didn’t know existed

It’s funny how when you admit you are broken you start to see yourself for the first time

It’s funny how when you realize you have nothing you start to find what you’ve been looking for the whole time

I am broken

I’ve gotten lost

And shame haunts my heart

But I will not hide anymore

It’s time to show you who I really am

A beautiful mess of darkness and light

Fighting to find my way

And one day the sun will rise

The sky grows warm with hope

It’s time to open up my heart

Who am I?

I am not perfect

I am a living, breathing, thinking, feeling, dreaming human being

And I am finding that in the imperfection there is more to me than I ever thought there could be