Untying Bows

Hey Alexa, play This Is Me Trying by Taylor Swift and dim the lights. I’m setting a mood.

Grab your wine, guys, because this is some sociopathic admissions with a pinch of growth. And who doesn’t love a good gift? Well maybe, it’s not a great gift.

I pack away my feelings in gift boxes wrapped in bows. They look beautiful from the outside. They look well put together; strung out in careful words with some whimsical poetic touch. If you unraveled the bow, and slid the lids off, you would find nothing but a seriously chaotic mess. Untidy at best. A mouse trapped in an endless maze with no net return for the jobs she does.

Eighty percent of the time, I love the mess. Mess builds character, right? God knows I AM a character, at least. Lol. But I hate (and I say this with every cell of my body) I HATE the boxes.

Each box fits into their respective slots on the grid. They never cross. They never touch. There is no intermingling; no entangling with the parts of Me.

My mom used to say that there were separate parts of my life that never crossed. I became a different person for each situation I had to be. Which, quite frankly, for a nine year old is exhausting. To become an adult as a child, and to know how to handle your emotions when you’re supposed to be learning is exhausting. But sometimes, life just happens that way, and you cope.

I’m not going on about it in a way to discredit the few adults I had as a child, but most of the ones I trust came in my late teens anyway. To discredit my parents who tried. To discredit the good times I had as a baby. Its just nine year old me tied bows on boxes as a unhealthy coping mechanism that I’ve never stopped using. I acknowledge. I pack. I tie the bow. I put it in its designated place. I control who I am, to control the out come of situations.

When I was nine, I had my first round of therapy. This was very court threatened as I like to call it. My therapist was mostly wonderful but she asked me to describe myself, I don’t think she was ever prepared for the spill I gave her. I told her, verbatim with a touch of censorship for the feelings of others, “if this were the wild, if we were wolves, I’d be the alpha. I’m in control.” Which lead to a series of other discussions with my birth givers that I was 100% not present for. However the boxes are controlled. The need to be in control is… heavily weighted. I can’t think of a time where I demanded to not be in control, to be on the same level, to not have authority issues in general. To respect the understanding of mutual understanding itself. It’s hard. To be so vulnerable to hand off control and respect to the person its handed to. (Spoiler: this is me trying.)

I have never let those boxes touch. I can lie about each separate box with a straight face and I’ve done it for years. My own husband casually informed me that he knows I could lie about massive things and never falter on the front lines, never give it away. Because again, the boxes don’t touch. It’s easy to lie when parts of your lives have never met. It’s easy to adapt to a truth when truth is circumstantial to the person you become in specific situations.

Its easy to set aside boxes after they are wrapped, and lie to yourself about the person you are. It’s easy to lie about the things that have impacted you. It’s easy to lie about what you do and do not feel. It’s easy to lie when you don’t mean to. It’s easy to lie. Period. It’s only after the truth is admitted to the own voice inside your head, produced by the never ending waves of electricity, that it becomes hard.

There are things I will never admit. There things I will never say first. And when I do say them first, I tend to make it a bomb; a foundation and justification for leaving the box behind. It’s an edge on a mountain that I love, where jumping down, doesn’t seem nearly as bad as what could happen when someone comes along and realizes they can push me off. There are views I will never share. There are bridges I will never cross because too many times I have been led to believe I was meeting someone in the middle to only find bombs left by other people waiting to explode. Too many times I’ve been in the middle of the bridges when those explosions went off, and I was left burned and suffocating somewhere in the bottom of a river. Too many times where I said I felt safe crossing, only to have my lungs filled with water. And honestly, I am the only person allowed to steal my oxygen now because of it.

I refuse to allow people to box me. I refuse to allow them to pull back the boxes off their grids and throw them into fires. But there are moments that do make me feel out of control, its normally the big moments; the big emotions. I normally set them in their boxes more gently; visit them more often. Untie their bows and tie them again; become familiar enough in order to desensitize the situation. Say it over and over again in my head to make me believe it, until it stops being a big emotion; until it stops feeling real. Sometimes, I’ll even say it aloud just to make the constant pounding of the truth go away. To prove to myself that it doesn’t matter.

I may not be able to unfeel things but I can certainly control what I feel at the end of the day. I can participate in the denial, acceptance, or neutrality. I can turn the emotions all the way down to get through them.

However, I am learning that sometimes there are people in this world who won’t mislead the safety of the bridge. There are surprising moments in this life that leads individuals into being better than they were. There are people who can talk you off the ledge with just a few words and the energy they emit without ever knowing ledges loom. There’s people to share the views with, without starting a full out war. There’s peace. There are people who are the safety in your world. There are safe spots in life you can trust wholeheartedly, unconditionally, indescribably.

When you don’t put the blame of the population down onto specific people, you may just be surprised once and awhile. While you may be terrified of the switch of the consistency, the change is normally what you need the most in order to pursue the growth. It’s a type of relief, solace, and crushing feeling all at once; its oxygen on a hard day. It’s the only thing keeping you together when the plates clide. It’s a cast signed with love around a heart with too many fracture lines. It’s everything important, and beautiful and needed.

It’s difficult to find the places where you can unpack your boxes, untie your bows, and peacefully sit in the mess. Its difficult to find the place where words don’t lose all their meaning the more you say them to yourself. It’s hard to find the people who can meet you in the middle without the threats. It’s hard sometimes not to automatically leave the unknown for the comfort of your independence.

And trust me when I say while getting to those places, the baby steps are the hardest. The most painful. The ones where you bear all the weight, while not moving far; and they are the most important (the most beautiful, the most needed.) Untying the boxes are more important than how pretty the bow is. Finding out what’s inside the box, is more beneficial than forgetting the box. Allowing a person to hold the weight of their own actions, as opposed to others, is more important than the lack of acknowledgement to yourself. The acknowledgement towards yourself is more important than back burning yourself.

So I’m baby stepping my way to trusting myself, and trusting the Surprises, to see what it’s like to be unboxed.

Loving you forever.

Faultfully,
Gabe 🥰