They All Fall Down

I try so hard to keep painful things tied up in pretty packages. I smash them and squeeze them and force them into tiny corners of imaginary boxes and then try to cover them in the colors of strong and brave and better-than and eventually I can convince myself that they no longer exist and can’t hurt my anymore.

I do this over and over and they all fall down over and over and I never learn – it’s excruciatingly frustrating to the people who love me, I know. It’s exhausting, I know. I hurt myself more trying to forget things than I would just talking about them; at least talking about them would get them out of me. It is just so hard to convince myself sometimes that it won’t crush me – that talking about things that hurt won’t smash me; that they don’t have to be bigger than me forever.

Obviously, all the stupid boxes fell down again; I just don’t have it in me this time to shove everything back in again.

I don’t want to pretend that huge events in my world didn’t happen. I don’t want to be angry anymore. I don’t want to be afraid or ashamed of decisions I made at a time when there were no other options. I don’t want to be sad anymore that there were no other options; there just weren’t. I want to heal. I want to believe that I deserve to heal and stop hating the me that did what had to be done. I want to be the person that was not there for me then – now.

So.

Just how, exactly, does one go about doing that?

On Being Afraid

I hate it when I realize I am afraid of something. I hate that there are things lurking around in me that control my actions (in inaction, as the case may be) and dictate my every-next move without my permission.

To my computer-geek mind, these unaddressed fears are like a computer virus in my brain. Just sitting around inside my head, waiting to trigger a detrimental reaction; activating pop-up bitchiness and eventually shutting down my whole machine self. {Who’s the biggest nerd you know?}

The other night while I was knee-deep in justification as to why I had not yet gotten off my ass and gone to volunteer at the crisis center like I said I was going to a month ago, my husband said “what are you so afraid of?” and it all came out in a blurry, snotty mess.

I’m afraid that someone might need me. Someone might need to tell me their story and I might have to listen to it. Someone might have a story that I get, you know? Like mine. And I might have to relate to it. Like at some point, what if I need to tell someone my whole story? Like my whole story? And what if it doesn’t make any sense and someone makes the things that happened seem unnecessary or unjustified? What if someone somewhere says that what I did was wrong and thinks I am a bad person for it? What if I am a bad person for it? What if the grief and mourning and hurt was all unnecessary? What if someone says “and then what?” like the story still doesn’t have an ending?

And that’s what it was. I was frozen by the fear that my pain was unnecessary.

What bullshit.

I went in this afternoon. No one asked me anything I couldn’t answer. I didn’t get hit by a truck and a meteor didn’t fall on my head. Nothing exploded and no one punched me in the face or threw rocks at me.

I’m going back tomorrow.

Weird.