There's a little voice deep within, just begging to be heard. It knows what you've been through and it knows where you're headed. It understands the parts of you that are swept under the rug without conscious consideration. The parts that hide away from the sunlight and live their days without a glance in their direction. But eventually that voice gets loud, so very loud that you cannot ignore it anymore, and the parts of you that hide in the dark crevices of your consciousness are revealed, slowly but surely.
I do believe that I felt things purely and deeply at one point, I do believe that I allowed myself to feel the entire spectrum of emotions. But that's where I went wrong. I believed they were something that not only could but should be controlled. Contained. Commanded. I was so very wrong. But I do remember feeling things, that I cannot deny. A heart full of emotions, a mind full of confusion trying to understand and control them as they flowed through me like an endless stream of fire. Then one day I felt too much. I felt so much that I turned it all off. I felt the end of dreams come crashing down, shattering into a million useless pieces. I felt my physical heart burn to ashes. I felt my thoughts give up and my body give in. I felt the weight of the world and I dropped it to the ground without second thought. I felt too much and I didn't want to have that God given ability anymore. So I closed my heart off and sealed it shut, until further notice.
Time went by. Never, not once, was I fully numb. Rather, my heart contained what had once sought to destroy it and once my heart was sealed nothing new was to enter, nothing old was to exit. Like a deer in headlights, my heart's boundaries froze without sound. Just panic. I searched and searched for a cure, holding the walls up with my broken fingers. Days went by, weeks, months. Nothing in, nothing out. I held onto the hurt like the heavens were falling to earth. Worse than that state was the fact that it became normal. So much so that I began to look past the walls and the militia viciously protecting them. It didn't phase me, not once, that my emotions were always the same. It didn't have the chance to sink in because there was something more sinister at play than just denial. My mind was in charge and it was a dictatorship. The protection was ruthless and became the sole purpose of my thoughts. My mind took over for my heart, intellectually processing emotions, feeding my brain the words and pictures that went along with them but never allowing me to feel them. I was a prisoner inside of the walls I built, at the mercy of the mind I gave it all up to. I was in survival mode for over a year and I was never aware of it.
But then something changed. My path was detoured and I went for the ride. I ended up in a strangely comforting place surrounded by incredible people, all actors on the set of the play that intended to bring my heart back into control. To tear down the walls that kept it from freedom. I was engulfed with reasons to care, reasons to feel, reasons to love. I was taken into the arms of angels and begged to breathe, resuscitated until I drew in that first breath of air after a long time of suffocation. But my mind was still winning and the walls were still up. Even worse, I believed they were coming down. Maybe they were slowly being chipped at, slow enough to evade my awareness. But the real test came when I was given all of these opportunities to open and I couldn't receive them. I just couldn't, no matter how much I wanted to. Like a scared little bird who was trying so very hard to jump and fly, I kept my eyes shut so tightly and told myself I could do it. I began telling myself I was doing it, out on my own, breaking out of the fragility of the egg and discovering my own strength. Profound and destined. But I was still perched on the edge of the nest, only watching the sights of first flight from the inside of my mind.
It wasn't until those opportunities to open my heart and burn down the walls left my life so quickly that I finally broke free. Maybe it was the heartache from being plucked out of something great, something real. Maybe it was the breath of fresh air once I realized where I was. Regardless of the cause, the concrete walls I spent so long building, slab after slab, ripped down with the force of a lifetime. The dam crashed and the river flooded the valley, putting the angry fires of my mind out, filling my heart and soul in an instant. I floated. Nothing remained but the raw emotions that were there the entire time, trapped under the weight of an eternity of survival. It was only then that I saw the manipulation, the chains, the mode I was living in. I was fighting for my life to escape and I had no idea how deep I was. Not one.
It has been only two months since I bulldozed the arena around my heart that I spent so many months building. In those two months I have seen life through new eyes, felt things I've never felt in my entire life. All the while wondering, is this what I've been keeping from myself? Is this what my heart vowed to give up on that hot summer day, the infamous day that my concrete walls were built? Is this what I couldn't bare to take on, what was sure to be the straw that broke the camel's back? Each and every day since I realizr how lucky I am to feel things so purely, so openly and unrefined. I feel connected to each moment and each experience grounds me closer to this life. Tough emotions will come and go, but I take the time and the courage to process and experience each and every one because that is what being alive means. That is how we grow.
I did what I needed to survive, and I will stand by that decision always. Never regret the strength that saves your life, no matter the cost. Although I missed out on a year and a half of living life with an open heart, experiencing and feeling the highest and lowest, the most beautiful, the most extraordinary things life has to offer, I will always know how necessary it was. For without the destined war between my heart and my mind, without the survival and protection, I would never be where I am today. Feeling the sun on my skin and the song in my heart. Feeling the love that dwells at each and every corner, the beauty in it all. I now shed a tear for the beauty rather than the pain and only because I surrendered to the pain first. Now it holds nothing over my head and I am absolutely, completely, and utterly free for the rest of my days, to feel with the entire existence of my heart and soul in this most wonderful life. And that, I will never regret.
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