Protective walls

By guarding yourself from others, no one will know you. That way, you’ll be safe.

Thats the narrative I’ve feel I’ve been instructed to operate with while navigating this world. Trust, in this world, is naivety. It’s for the weak and gulible.

This world isn’t benevolent.

Though this makes perfect sense to me now, I know there was a point in everyone’s lives where we didn’t think this way. I think back to when I was a little girl, and opened my world to anyone remotely interested. It would be cynical if that wasn’t what we did. But somewhere along the line, we get institutionalized. Stopped letting people into our lives so easily.

And it’s not a bad thing to guard yourself. After all, our lives are precious and our truths are precious. It’s our duty to protect the sanctity of our truths so that we can preserve the close relationships and identities we do have. We rely on trust and longevity before we divulge information about ourselves.

But what happens when you don’t share parts of yourself with anyone? When you’ve taken on so many personas, become so many different types of people, that you stop recognizing yourself?

What happens when you start to minimize yourself, making yourself small so others can find you more approachable or likeable or won’t “leave”. You try to become universally likeable. You’ve reached a point when the risks of being yourself seem to outweigh any benefit authenticity comes with. That’s a hallmark that you’ve been burned for being yourself.

You don’t deserve to be a blank canvas, moulded or influenced by whoever comes around you. You are not a shapeshifter, expected to assume a different identity or selectively divulge hobbies and intricacies to each person you meet.

Isn’t that just…. exhausting?

That’s the precursor to devaluing yourself, not wanting anyone to become threatened or uncomfortable with who you are and what you want from this life. You operate in the world for them: their wishes, their dreams, their ddaily affirmation.

And before you know it, you are gone.

Your authenticity begins to evaporate under the intensity of what you envision is the whole world’s glare. That’s when it’s natural for your walls to start coming up; you paint a picture on the outside, a narrative that is comfortable and carefully crafted, and one that is mobile enough that it can be changed periodically without people noticing.

Behind those walls, you are crouched. Waiting. The chisel, the TNT, the shovel – the tools to break down your walls – are with you waiting for you to pick them up. Bu you won’t reach for them. You’ll be “stuck” with every tool available to get you out.

Even after this minimization of yourself, what if your biggest fears still come true? After all the accommodating, you still get left?

This is where I find myself. Unfortunately.

But not necessarily just unfortunately.

It’s a terrible feeling to watch people you’ve invested so much life and time and energy and worry and care just leave.

Thoughts swirl in my mind: how could they do this to me? What did I do to cause this? How can I fix this? It’s irrevocable shame. There’s a voice in my head that tells me any adverse feeling I experience is in my control to reverse. So I am in control or responsible of everything I experience, and thus I can reverse any feelings I don’t want to experience. Including other people’s neglect.

But in all these conversations, is the person other’s know you to be really you? Or is it that prim and pretty ever-changing portrait they’ve come to think is you? Suddenly, you realize you were never actually in the equation. You sidelined yourself before the story had ever started.

I guess that could initially be comforting. They didn’t leave you, they left that image you’d curated for yourself. But that’s even more sad. Because continuing to live like this will mean accepting that you’ll be a shadow in everyone’s life.

I’m now reaching a point in my life where I’m seeing how human it is to see others through rose-tinted glasses. This is something that social media is wonderful at perpetuating. We put on fronts, stand up our painted walls, and crouch behind them. We allow everyone to misunderstand everyone.

I have a particular qualm with my tendency to become small. Stay anonymous and live quietly. Stay convenient. Never take chances so that I’ll never have anything to regret.

Why scale down your worth to make yourself convenient or likeable? People will leave anyways. What’s the point in silencing yourself when regardless of which persona you take on next, no one will get to see you?

Having lost a couple relationships these past couple months, I’ve hit an existential crossroads: what was the point of my silence? Many of my connections are transient, at best. Their time as a guest in my this season of my life is over. I find myself feeling shameful that I didn’t get to know people as well as I could have, simply because I didn’t want to open myself up too much. I didn’t want to be too porous, too readable.

I thought that going abroad would help with my fear of being too porous. In a way it did. I had this acute awareness that I’d be gone in the imminent future, and so there was no point not being loud or not making mistakes.

But it also showed me how much fear I have surrounding the temporariness of my existence in this world. I’d talk to a kind person at my run club for example, and a deep sadness instead of an urge to live loud would come over me. I’d spend so much energy pondering how I shouldn’t be telling others that I’m from abroad, about to leave this country in a couple weeks, and want to take a picture with them so as to never forgot that moment. Those opportunities are now gone, and I regret approaching life and business as usual. I wish I understood the gravitas of what was happening to me, and understood that I’d soon look back on this moment and have it all be a blur. Now, I have no reminders of those random conversations with nice people or the nice walks to my temporary home. I don’t remember the struggled meals and burned pots and dessert ideas I tried to come up with. I don’t remember what the wind chimes sounded like, nor what my roommates voice sounds like. They still exist but they are….. gone.

And with all the “being left by others” I’m experiencing lately, I’ve come tor realize that my abroad story and regrets translate into the life I lead everyday. It’s scaring me straight.

I’m realizing now that my biggest fear is the reality of my existence. That I’m temporary on a permanent world, a world that doesn’t wait. That keeps spinning, evolving, changing, and which has a clock that doesn’t stop ticking. My mortality necessitates that I’m a temporary blip in this world. Knowing that I’m destined to be erased from this world, why should I erase myself from it because I am too afraid of being “incorrect” as a person? My reservations that keep me in silence are those metaphorical walls I mentioned earlier.

I’m practising finding comfort knowing that at some point, a majority of people I’ve ever and will ever meet in my life will leave regardless of what happens in our lives. I’d rather live vibrantly. But it’s hard to do this. It takes practise. But I’m optimistic that I can. I can live without evaluating or thinking so much.

Rather than imagine the mistake playing out in my head, I can make it in person and apologize for it. Or rather than go through the entire decision tree to assess the cost-benefit ratio of confiding in someone, I can trust that I have the capacity to speak my unbiased truth. And if I make a mistake, so what? I feel I ought not to be so afraid of being an inconvenience or hurting someone that I paralyze myself. My world deserves colour and loudness and – where necessary – regrets and mistakes and tears. It deserves to be a story with a plot and with ups and downs, one that can outlive my mortal temporary-ness.

I want to learn to be grateful for the pocket of people and places that I was born in the vicinity of. I’m grateful that my circumstances and existence have allowed me to meet. This tiny sliver of the world is my whole world. For that to happen, the walls need to come down and my heart needs to swell with the magnitude of my existence. It’s time to realize our time to carry out our purpose is limited, and the world won’t be a better place unless we give parts of ourself to it.