The House of Closed Doors

It’s easy to walk down a hallway of your mind, brightly lit, and avoid the closed off rooms you pretend don’t exist.  I have been doing this for decades.  The way I am seeing myself lately, and the way I describe my fears to my husband and friends now is of opening doors.  Sure, this is probably an age old way of looking at one’s self.  You open doors to opportunity, when one door closes another opens, etc.

In the past, I’ve felt that when I got a glimpse of some dark part of myself, I’d immediately divert, avoid, shut off.  Only recently do I fully accept that dark thing is still there.  It’s not going anywhere, it’s housed under the roof of Me.  I used to think that if you avoided dealing with some emotion, it would run off and never come back, like a wolf hell bent to race out of a trap and be free off in the woods where you’d never see them again.

Well well well.  That wolf isn’t running anywhere but around my subconscious, unbeknownst to me.  Here I go on this voyage of self improvement and realize that this angry, vicious, dangerous being is right here, right now, all the damn time.  It’s why I can’t open up, why I don’t want to be vulnerable, it whispers in my ear “you can’t do this.  Don’t be weak.  Don’t show them.  Stop right now.”

So how does this wolf image I just conjured relate to the house of me with closed doors?  I just know that when I get close to this emotion, I want to slam a door to it.  Each motion is deliberate:

• My hand is on the door knob (I’m talking to someone and a topic arises)
• I grip and turn the handle (maybe I’ll look inside this emotional memory)
• Push the door open (uh oh am I really doing this?)
• The hallway light creates just enough to look in the room (a mess of shit I don’t want to deal with)
• I slam the door shut and avoid (nope nope nope change the subject)
• What I saw was this trapped wolf in a room, surrounded by the other discarded emotional memories that I didn’t want to deal with, directly because I couldn’t face that wolf directly.

OK so WTF is this wolf anyway?  I’m already self judging here, thinking it’s a stupid way to describe this.  A damn wolf.  OK here’s where I’m going with this.  Pardon me if I sound like I’m hesitating… I am.

Room #1 is an emotional memory of my 5 year old self running through the snow in my bare feet, pulling my 3 year old brother with me as I try to find a neighbor in the trailer park who can get me back to my mom.  We had just climbed out of our bedroom window because my dad had beat us and locked us in our room.  I didn’t want myself or my brother to get hurt anymore and I was so afraid of when my dad might come back, what he might do, and yell and hit us some more.  This is what created my angry, protective wolf.  The one afraid of being trapped and waiting to get hit, of watching my brother get hit more.

This room has that memory at its core.  Surrounded by it are all the times I was afraid of being trapped, of asking for help I knew wouldn’t come from people who were supposed to care for me.  In this house of Me, whenever I felt like I had to wait in fear, helpless, I chose to throw that feeling in the room next to that Wolf and WALL IT OFF.  DON’T LOOK AT IT.  IT DOESN’T HELP YOU TO CARE.  JUST PROTECT WHO YOU CAN AND RUN AWAY.  THE ONLY PERSON YOU CAN PROTECT IN THE END IS YOURSELF.  YOUR DAD HIT YOU, HE’S SUPPOSED TO LOVE YOU… FUCK HIM.  RUN AWAY.

This broadened into anyone who I might care about.  Just stop, don’t care.  They could hurt you, and then what?  Barefoot in the snow again.  Just run away now before the beating happens.  As I got older, anger layered over it.  Just get angry, why the hell did this have to happen to you anyway?

Even better- don’t care, so you don’t feel trapped.  If you care about someone, you’re back in that room, one of them is the one you’re helping get up and out the window, one of them is about to burst through the door and hurt you.  So don’t get close to someone you might protect, and don’t get close to anyone who says they care about you.

Oh and now that you’re old enough to know never to talk about this with anyone, lest they pity you, just go ahead and get angry about it.  You can’t talk about it anyway, they just change the subject. So why open the door to begin with?

Let’s pretend that door doesn’t exist.  Let’s pretend that wolf was never born.  Let’s pretend all the memories of every time you avoided opening up to someone never happened.  Let’s pretend this whole room doesn’t exist in the house of Me.  Let’s pretend I’m a whole and complete person with this house of closed doors, of dark rooms, with no stacks of regret piling up, festering up this otherwise gorgeous house of happiness I think I have.

But I don’t see the undertones of all these wolves, how they whisper in my ear, how they breathe and steal my air, how I now can’t enjoy even my fully open and brightly lit rooms, because I hear them behind those closed doors.  Silently I feed each of these hungry wolves, afraid to face them and really turn on the lights, go to the window and let other people see inside.

Now I see how these closed doors have closed Me off.  How they take up room and inhibit me from being wholeheartedly happy.  How I hide these rooms from people, how I can’t even tell someone and I write it here to figure it out.  Stepping into these rooms has been one of the scariest things I’ve done in my adult life.  More scary than learning to ride a motorcycle, more scary than jumping out of an airplane, more scary than volunteering to go to Afghanistan.  Facing my own damn self.

How did I do it?  Lots of things, but mostly having a mindset of being open to cross that threshold when I notice I’m afraid.  How do I know I’m afraid?  I want to change the subject.  Run away.  Slam that shit shut and hide it far the fuck away.  How do I know this?  I sweat like crazy.  My heart pounds.  I feel like I can’t breathe.  Get away.  There’s a line, I can’t cross it.

Let’s go through opening the door again.

• My hand is on the door knob (I’m talking to someone and a topic arises)
• I grip and turn the handle (maybe I’ll look inside this emotional memory)
• Push the door open (uh oh am I really doing this?)
• The hallway light creates just enough to look in the room (a mess of shit I don’t want to deal with)
• FUCK FUCK FUCK THERE IS THAT THING I DON’T WANT TO SEE
• OK your heart is beating and I’m frozen and I can’t move
• Take a breath (yes I know you’re not breathing)
• Take a step.  Say something that wolf doesn’t want you to say
• OH YES YOU’RE DOING THIS HOLY SHIT STOP NOW
• Keep saying the THING (it’s ok if you’re talking fast and rambling)
• Focus on saying the WHOLE thing
• HOLY SHIT I’M SCARED IS THAT A FUCKING PRICKING IN MY EYES DON’T CRY GET AWAY
• Well fuck my voice is breaking and I can’t talk anymore or I’m talking so fast oh I forgot to breathe get out get out get out
• PRETEND LIKE EVERYTHING IS FINE AND SHUT THAT DOOR AGAIN YOU FUCKING IDIOT
• ok shut the door and regret everything you just said.  Until you realize you took a damn step and now have to deal with that.  At least you said something.
• Sleep for 12 hours straight
• Wake up with a vulnerability/shame hangover.
• Thanks you fucking self help idiots.
• .
• .
• .
• Well shit I think I feel better.
• .
• .
• .
• No wait I feel worse
• .
• .
• No wait I feel better.  Let’s open that door again, slowly, with someone by my side.
• This is exhausting.  I think it’s worth it.  I hope so.
• Get after it.

 

Ships Are Meant to Sail

When you pray to God and he answers your prayer, you might not like what he has to tell you.  I realized that a few weeks ago and am living through the repercussions of that still.  But I do know that when God speaks to you, you better listen.

It wasn’t a big booming voice in the sky.  It wasn’t like the biblical stories I’d heard growing up Catholic, it wasn’t a single “AHA” moment.  It was a string of events between me and people I met, people who I now know were the shining light he put in my path.

This hearkens back to my post about running in the Bastogne.  It was an unreal experience for me, and now looking back I realize it was my best form of prayer.  I was running in a beautiful nature setting, trusting in Something and letting faith guide me.  It was meditative, and it was transformative.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but God was showing me something about myself I didn’t even know.

The key moment of that half marathon honor run was when I dropped to my knees right on that battlefield and thanked every soul who came before me for that sacrifice.  Tears ran down my face as I thought of each soldier who would never come home, sons and husbands and fathers who gave everything.  Yes some gave their lives, but some gave something more intangible.  They gave the rest of their lives to that experience, to relive it, to remember it.

Months later I’m at a meditation retreat outside of Tucson, Arizona.  It was at Miraval resort, a place devoted to helping people with self-development, exploration of your true potential, that kind of thing.  My meditation teacher, Jill Wener was doing a Tapping session with me, also known as the Emotional Freedom Technique.  I didn’t really know much about it but watched a quick video and had no idea how tapping parts of my body was supposed to help me, but I was willing to give it a try.

I walked into it feeling very raw and emotional, which is unusual for me.  Through a series of meeting other teachers at the resort, journaling, and thinking back to some intense conversations with friends, I met with Jill and let her know that I was on the verge of tears and I didn’t know why.  I am not one to be emotional, EVER.  My key traits tend to be logic, discipline, hard work, results, progress…. vulnerability?  Heck no.

Yet here is Jill, open to helping me answer some question.  I don’t even know what to ask anymore so I have to pick something.  I guess I’ll go with “Should I get an MBA or should I do a fellowship in Integrative Medicine?”  Pros and cons to both, and a very logical thing to discuss, or so I thought.

So we begin the tapping . She poses my pro/con list back to me as if it was my consciousness talking to me.  It was weird hearing my thoughts being spoken aloud by someone else in a non-judgmental way.  Looking back on it, it feels like she was a mirror to my snarl of thoughts, showing me how to unravel it.

The concept of intuition comes up.  I tell her about how I followed my intuition in Bastogne and it led me to an amazing experience beyond words.  I feel tears welling up again.  She asked a simple question “Why did that make you cry?”

I hadn’t thought of really, really why.  Now with me sitting here after a few days of working on personal development and feeling like I hadn’t developed at all, this question pushed me into a sudden realization.  Running and remembering made me cry because of that sacrifice.  Because I have the highest respect for that sacrifice.  I hold it in such high regard because I haven’t made that sacrifice.  I feel like I’ve come up short in being as noble as those soldiers were.  Yes I served in the military but my destiny was not to give my life on the battlefield.  My service lies elsewhere and I’m still working on that, however…. I got emotional because I realized I hadn’t given My all to the people I love the most.

I have been holding fast to the idea of putting down roots, making this final decision, using logic all the time though my husband hasn’t been happy.  He’s been saying why and I haven’t been listening.  The truth is that it scares me to act on emotion.  To do away with logic and trust that God will take me where I need to go.  To have faith in my husband, to put his happiness really, really first.  Even if his happiness does not make logical sense, the fact is that he is unhappy.  I love my husband with everything I have but I have not put his happiness first.  I haven’t let myself be that vulnerable.  I built my fortress around concrete ideas of why he should just get used to my ideas being better.  Of course I did everything I could to build a beautiful palace for him in this fortress we built.  To him though, it’s still a prison.  This place.

For the first time, I realized the problem was ME.  When I follow my intuition, take a leap of faith, trust in God, that is how I get to my own true self, my own true happiness and my own true purpose.  I don’t need to fear emotion, I should embrace it.  That is when I felt the most alive, the most raw, when I let my walls down and allow myself to feel to the depths of my soul.  I realized I don’t do this anymore.  I need to do this at home.  Be open.  Be vulnerable to blind faith.  It scares me.

So there in that session, taking slow deep breaths to recollect myself as this realization hit me, it felt so completely Right.  It all was laid out before me and I saw how God was telling me this through my experiences and all the people who had pushed and spoke to me in a way that I would finally Hear.  But I only had to look within to see it all along, to ask myself just one layer deeper than I thought I had- that one question “Why did that make me cry?” Because it reflected on ME.

In the weeks since that moment I have had up days and down days.  I won’t lie- for me, crying is a completely exhausting thing.  I left the session reeling and slowly felt my basic self quickly return.  Anger.  I don’t want to feel the uncomfortable truth- getting fucking pissed off is a much more comfortable place to be.

My head can be a foul mouthed place to be, just know that IT WAS ALL CAPS AND IT WAS LOUD AND I WAS SUPER DUPER MAD AND PISSED OFF AND OH YOU BET EVERY OTHER WORD WAS A SWEAR WORD AND I AM CENSORING MY REAL MIND FOR YOU DEAR READER.  JUST KNOW THAT RIGHT NOW THERE’S A TON OF 4 LETTER WORDS SCREAMING BETWEEN THE LINES HERE, GOT IT?

The real kicker is though.. when God speaks to you, you better listen.  Even if you don’t like what he has to say.  Seeing that mirror of your snarled thoughts clear up and feel like you’ve dived too far deep in a vast ocean of denial and have to come screaming up for air.  This ocean I’d been sailing looked pretty good until now.  Now I realize what’s beneath the surface and where this ship is meant to sail, where the current has been trying to take me.  So I gotta pull up my anchor and follow the stars, trust the winds, and wave goodbye to the safe harbor we have come to know.  Wherever that takes us, I give to God.