Wall

I have a journal given to me by a college boyfriend. He wrote on the inside, "So that you may speak to yourself if not to me." I remember when I dated this particular boyfriend having things I wanted to tell him, having deep emotions I wanted to share with him and feeling a quite physical red brick wall blocking the words from exiting my mouth. After we broke up - for many reasons, including my inability to deal any longer with him pushing me to talk (because I just couldn't at that time, as if he was asking me to walk outside the dorm, place my hands on the wall around the campus quad and push that wall over). I wrote two stories around that time in which walls played a big part - one was a monologue in which the speaker built a brick wall as she spoke and the other was a short story in which three girls go out to play beyond a wall around their house and beyond the wall is a labyrinth of other walls.

When I met Michael, I explicitly remember feeling freer with him, freer in not only playing and hanging out and enjoying games and food and time together - a relaxing - but also freer in talking. I did not feel the pressure to speak only as if I had everything together.

I have not quite pieced out where my fear of talking comes from - some of it is personality (I am a green after all!); some of it is family circumstances in which there was not room for strong emotions and possible really bad consequences for such things; some of it is lack of practice; some of it is fear of scaring people with my past and with my authentic self; some of it is being self-consumed, so in my head that I can't get out; some of it is perfectionism and always wanting to say the right thing; some of it is not realizing just what is normal, especially for women (for all those women I know who have told me or written about how they feel overly-emotional, overly-complicated, a basket case - thank you).

At our Wednesday counseling session, which was one of those sessions that started out innocent and with some joking and too quickly came to the edge of thereallydifficultImightfallapart, I realized that as much as I talk more now, as much as I have opened up my life to others, as much as I have pushed that wall over, I still suck at talking, and particularly with Michael. Too often I am not present in the moment but lost in my head, thinking ahead, having followed a rabbit trail of thought and let hundreds of extraneous things enter a conversation that only I can hear. Too often I don't mention things because I don't want to talk about them (refer to top ten lessons learned in last two years - hiding doesn't make life better) or am afraid to talk about them - letting the emotion overwhelm, letting another see me overwhelmed, possibly hurting another with my emotion (side note - somewhere I picked up that emotions can be weapons), and, especially now as Michael and I work through things, I fear talking too much about hard things.

During one of my Tuesday nights with Ardis and Shari, we shared with each other strengths and weaknesses we see in each other as friends. This was a good exercise in vulnerability for all of us - being truthful with each other and receiving truth from close friends with openness. Shari and Ardis said that I can come across as too independent and closed off, not sharing more of my life with others. To them I asked what that sharing looks like because I am only beginning to see.

Because I thought I worked so hard on talking more, I am partly devasted in realizing that I have only climbed a small portion of this tree. I want to be able to look up with hope and gratitude, realizing how much of this tree that I had not seen in the past, how many of the leaves, the branches, the way the tree shades and shakes.

(The picture is of a Roman wall built 2000 years ago in England. Walls can stand for a long time, testiments to protection, boundaries, human achievement or privacy, inequality, war. As I have been encouraged to do, I need to gently accept this part of myself even as I want my wall to just freakin' fall down already).