the great wall of anita

I started this post several months ago.
This is how it started.

Last week I cried.

Finally.

And this may sound odd to you, but I was so relieved to finally be able to do that.

Recently, visiting with that friend of the heart, the topic of my wall came up and perhaps it is time to finish this post .. or try.

Why do we as human beings build walls around ourselves? I know it isn't the way it is suppose to be, but sometimes it is the only way we can survive. 

Somewhere deep inside each of us, whether you admit it or not, is the total of our life experiences. It doesn't matter if we've grown up, matured and are no longer the same people we were .. the experiences are woven into each of us. So are the responses to those experiences. Instinctively, we head straight back to those responses when a similar situation arises.

I remember very well nearly losing my mind in grief a number of years ago. It was the most traumatic experience of my life to that point and it was difficult to keep the thread to sanity. While many of my responses came from much further back than that, it was that experience that probably started the building of a wall. Not just a wall that looks like a white picket fence, but a wall that was reinforced steel or concrete. Or whatever you reinforce. Nobody was getting in no way no how. I couldn't afford to let that happen again.

Then life just added more challenges and more trials. Please don't get me wrong. There are many joys sprinkled in among the challenges. There are so many blessings and moments of happiness .. or the trials would be overwhelming. In the last several years, they were what I considered biggies. And even though there were a few select people in my world with whom I could share, for the most part I could not. It had to be kept inside and quiet. Do you have any idea what that does for the wall? When you can't talk? When you sit in a room full of people and want to scream your story and you can't. So you talk about the inane things of life. You talk about the equivalent of the weather and it all seems so incredibly trivial. It seems like a waste of time because your gut and your heart have serious things going on. All you want to do is talk and you can't.

No, I haven't been told by anyone that I can't talk. No one person or group of people said I had to keep my mouth shut. Sometimes, the story isn't yours alone and you don't have the right to share. Sometimes, there might be an ongoing process in place that requires discretion.

At what point then does it seem useless to spend time around other people? I don't mean useless, because there is much more to life than just my issues. There are many things to share with others and joys to be had. But it gets easier to just be alone. That isn't a bad thing either. I am very happy alone. I have many things to keep me occupied. The problem is that along with way I've lost people. I have not picked up the phone to call friends and my phone doesn't often ring.

I finally had enough. I walked an emotional line that was level straight. No ups and no downs. It was like being medicated without pharmaceuticals. I had learned to self medicate by burying things so deep you couldn't get to them. Easier that way, right? Not exactly. Eventually it comes out somewhere. It has to. In a gall bladder. In a hip. It finds an outlet. It was time to start figuring it out. It was time to start taking those steel walls apart and hopefully someday, view the wall as a picket fence.

I spent hours on the phone doing some emotion code therapy and I started to laugh again. I could cry again. This road isn't over for me but there is progress. The wall isn't gone but perhaps there is a chink in it. While we were in North Dakota in March, I made an appointment to see someone who also does the same sort of thing with some added other stuff I really don't understand. As difficult as that first step was ... it was amazingly unbelievable. I have to say that grief poured from the depths of my soul. That road hasn't reached its end yet either. It needs more energy than I can give it right now, it needs to be taken a stretch at a time. Or as this process is often referred to as the peeling of an onion .... one layer at a time.

At some point, I have learned a few other things. How very hard a road can be. For the most part, my road has been filled with some frost heaves. There has been no major earthquake damage on the road I travel. No tsunami has wiped out my road completely. While I try to navigate the frost heaves of my own heart and mind, I struggle to to help others find their way through the crevices caused by earthquakes in their lives.

Take care of yourself my friend.