Be Careful When Exposing Yourself
Strumming mental chords in the minds of others doesn’t always result in sweet music.
Life forges a protective cocoon around you. A callus. Over time you set up walls around certain memories. Around specific events. You defend against it. Defend against attacks. Defend to the point you forget you’re even doing it. It becomes second nature.
Your heart and your soul are delicate, so you fight to maintain them both. The king and queen of life’s chessboard. One is the most powerful, the other the key to everything.
I have experiences I’ve set up walls around over the years. I’ve forgotten about some of these walls, and yet walls well built are walls that remain.
Breaking down these walls can be liberating. But there’s no guarantee on what stands on the other side of those walls.
Sometimes It’s Time
I bet you have a few memories, events, even conversations, you keep hidden. Hidden from the world. Hidden from your own memories. It hurts to expose them. To relieve them.
Some of these memories might come from childhood events. Being picked on or teased. Sometimes unrelated events can compound those memories, and so you build the walls taller. Dig them deeper. Expand them wider.
When I was maybe eight or nine, kids at school thought it funny to call me Gayson instead of Greyson. “Hey, Mrs. Ferguson, do you know you have a gay son?”
The laughter. Lots of it. In surround sound.
As an eight or nine or ten-year-old in the early days of the 90s, that was about as devastating of a thing you could be called. Being different meant you were an outcast. At the time, that was the ultimate.
It hurt. I cried. I built up walls.
As an early to mid teenager, I had people from church say they thought I was gay. I’m not even really sure why. But that they, “prayed extra hard for me.”
Maybe someone from elementary school told them the nickname.
The wall went higher.
It doesn’t bother me now. Just some things that happened in my past. Little things. Little things that hurt but I grew from.
When I see some of the people who once called me that, grown adults with children and careers, they dig into the past and use the same nickname.
They find it funny.
I never did.
Exposure
I write about lifelong experiences. Things I’ve been through in the past. Failed relationships. Death. Things we’ve all experienced.
People tell me it must be therapeutic to write about such events. It’s often not a question.
While it can be, I do it for two different reasons. The first is it helps me understand the event more. What went into it. Why it happened. Every time I write about a particular event it peels back another layer. I learn something else. It’s self-discovery more than therapeutic.
Years ago I blamed my ex-wife 100 percent for our failed marriage. That is no longer the case. I don’t blame her at all. Life happens. Things could have been different. But they’re not. Do I wish things would have gone along another path?
Does it even matter?
The second reason is that it connects me with you. Maybe you’ve gone through a death in the family and I’ve written about similar experiences as your own. That connects us. It lets you know you’re not alone. A failed relationship can be debilitating. It can put you on an island, away from the world. But there’s something comforting knowing there’s another person on the island next to you.
Breaking down those barriers and walls that protect our hearts and souls helps with all of this. It helps with growth and it helps us learn and connect.
It can also leave you exposed though.
Honestly, I was sitting down to write something completely different today. A travel piece. But a comment on another post drew my attention and devoured my thoughts.
When I saw the article the comment attached itself to I knew it wouldn’t be an uplifting one. It instructed I needed deep psychiatric help. The comment went on to craft an entirely incorrect assumption of my past, my present, and my future.
All because I shared a story about my former crumbling marriage.
It wasn’t as bad as the “never procreate,” or “you need to die” comments. Those caught me off-guard when they first arrived, but strumming mental chords in the minds of others doesn’t always result in sweet music.
This particular comment didn’t hurt or cause me grief, but it did make me stop and think about exposing ourselves and waiting for the world to respond.
Breaking down those protective barriers can help you learn about yourself. It can help you grow and overcome moments in memory and time you never thought you’d be able to move past.
But it also leaves you vulnerable. And it’s impossible to know how you will react to an attack on your vulnerability until it happens.
If you are like me and you have those defensive walls constructed, I want to tell you it’s okay to take them down. By wrecking ball or brick by brick. Much of the world is accepting and understanding. Just know that a portion of it is not.
So love and learn more about yourself. It might be therapeutic. It can be revolutionary.
Just be careful.
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