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?