That place

Life sure is strange, isn’t it? We’re born into families that are made normal to us through continual exposure, then when we set out into the world, we meet others who were raised completely differently. That doesn’t make it wrong, just different.
How we were raised has such a tremendous impact on how we manage our lives. How we respond to problems as they arise and how we interact with the other humans around us.
Our upbringing is our foundation. Bad foundation= a house that can’t stand.

That’s where ego death comes in if you’re willing to recognize that life just isn’t working.
I think in our culture we’re taught to hang onto whatever we have because it’s something, it’s the dream, it’s at least the aesthetic. It looks nice when you can arrive to the big family gathering with all 3 children in tow, polished and washed, wearing new clothes, and you managed to hide the bags under your eyes with the expensive makeup. It feels good— somewhere. But often it doesn’t feel good on the inside, that place you avoid going. The place where everything gets stuffed because if you crack the door open, it’s going to be a flood of uncontrollable emotion, and every single thing you didn’t say to him the last time he insulted you. Or jammed with all those times you held your breath because she made you feel small in front of her father again because you’re not as “successful” as him.
It’s that place… And it’s overrun with the things we don’t talk about, and we’d like to pretend it doesn’t exist. It’s that place that often fuels our addictions. It’s that place that was already there before you got into the relationship, but it wasn’t as sensitive because you learned how to protect it.

Why do we hide this place from those we love? Maybe when we were young we were taught that love hurts. Or that the people we love the most need us to be stable and unemotional, because they were unstable and unpredictable.
I know why I hid it. For the reasons above and more. I hid it because if I came undone, who would pick up the pieces or pick up the slack? In this busy world, I think this is what stops most of us.
“What if I crack it open and it’s so uncontrolled and unbridled that I don’t recover? Or what if I hurt someone?”

Can I ask if holding it in is working for you? Maybe now it seems like it is but are you happy? Are you at peace with the heaviness in the air around you and those in your life, filled with the things neither of you say?
That place— is a cemetery. It’s filled with all the incompletions from situations where you couldn’t react or respond the way your body/heart/mind needed to. That space is filled with *life interrupted* and it is building up. That’s the pressure, that’s what we continually turn away from, that is the very space that drives our persona and insists upon the distance between us, and other humans. That space is the space you don’t want anyone else to see, not even yourself.
That is the space we all must go. It follows us in under handed and backdoor sort of ways. The unfounded suspicion in the new relationship. The secrecy that you live behind, because the less people know, the less they can judge. The smile that when you’re alone, turns to tears. That space eventually turns into an ache that can’t be pacified any longer until we gently open it up and embrace all the things that crawled into there to find solace and hope that one day you’d return.

Every time we hold back. Every time we choose silence. Every time we pass it off as just a joke, when we knew it wasn’t. Every time, we abandon some part of ourselves that knows we deserve better. That knew even as we were bewildered children, being treated in ways that hurt us to our very core… we knew then, but we couldn’t say a damn word. After silence we became numb.
When you look back, you realize that’s how you got here. You went numb because you once felt too much and feeling hurt like hell.
But we can’t wall ourselves in, closing up all the windows and doors. There is much life to be lived and a good place to start is in that place. The place where life was incomplete, help it feel complete by viewing it, by giving it understanding.

Wasn’t that often what you wanted in the first place? Understanding and to be known? How can we ask that of others when we are unwilling to know and understand ourselves? I know I did…