We all protect ourselves somehow. Every one of us learned techniques over the years to keep ourselves safe. We learn skills to prevent injury, whether emotional, physical, or mental. We’ve been hurt, we’ve made mistakes, we’ve learned and moved on.
But sometimes we don’t move on. Sometimes the hurt is too deep, or too scary, for us to process and move past. Sometimes we lock the pain deep inside, in a place we don’t need to deal with it. And then the skills we learned to protect ourselves now hold us prisoner instead. Rather than letting our pain go and continuing to grow, we hold our pain to us and can’t relinquish it.
The skills that protected me at first became unconscious habits preventing growth. They still kept me safe, but they also prevented me from processing my emotions. I was locked in a cycle of pushing emotions away instead of allowing them to run their course. I shoved everything into a crystal jar deep inside. The jar begins to crack, to spill over, and I frantically tape it back together.
I keep getting hurt- it’s a natural part of life. Everyone gets hurt. But generally people process their grief, learn from a mistake or an injury, and move on to the next life lesson.
I, on the other hand, take that grief, anger, sadness, anxiety, and shove it down. I don’t allow it to happen. I refuse the emotion.
One time, an emotion hurt so much I wasn’t able to process. Maybe because I was a child and didn’t know how to handle something so overwhelming. Maybe because someone I trusted hurt me and I felt betrayed. Maybe because I didn’t know how to vocalize my emotions and let them happen.
So I became scarred. My body/mind panicked and shoved the emotions away, locked them in the crystal jar. I could see the emotions there. They weren’t gone forever. They were locked away, but any wrong move could crack the jar and let the emotions out.
I grew. I learned. I could probably handle the emotions now. But the panic I felt as a child, when the emotions first happened, came back anytime the emotions swirled in the jar, anytime there was a hint of weakness, a chance the jar would crack.
Eventually I avoided all emotions. Anything too emotional brought with it a chance of the jar overflowing. I learned to avoid anything causing sadness, anger, fear, stress. I also avoided joy, happiness, excitement. Any emotion was too much.
Life became deadened. Flatlined. Emotionless. Stifled. Anything else brought chance of the locked away panic escaping.
The jar festered. The emotions and fear fed on themselves, grew, a diseased, bleak despair. The jar continued to stretch and take up space, draining emotional energy. Eventually there was nothing else- there was a jar full of festering emotions, and a person frantically holding the jar shut.
The jar cracked. It cracked and cracked, shards splintering off. I taped it together, glued it, held it with my hands. My hands bled, my eyes cried. The jar wouldn’t hold much longer.
I needed to retreat from the world, because the jar was too tenuous to fix with any outside distractions. Anything could set it off. Such a precarious balance needed absolute isolation. I managed to keep the jar together.
Only by avoiding reality could I also avoid my emotions.
Eventually I grew too weak and dropped the jar. It shattered. I was overwhelmed. The emotions from childhood reared their ugly, hydra heads. Over the years they had grown and worsened, fed by every other emotion I’d avoided. Emotions held at bay for over a decade rose up and swamped me completely.
I lost myself. I lost everything. My hold on reality slipped, and there was nowhere to catch myself in sight.
Eventually, through effort I didn’t even know I could expend, with incalculable help from family and friends, I pieced the jar back together. It would never be the same.
The jar was splintered, full of holes. It wouldn’t hold any emotions for long. I had to learn how to handle things in the moment, while they were fresh. I couldn’t push everything away like before.
I had to relearn how to live in reality, with emotions I’d never dealt with before. My longest running coping mechanism had failed, and I almost didn’t survive the fallout.
Life changed, in most ways for the better.
But sometimes I dream about that crystal jar, strong enough to hold the things I struggle to deal with. Sometimes I long for the flatline of emotion, never feeling anything too deeply or strongly. I long for the bliss of knowing nothing can hurt me. The freedom of not needing to be brave, never needing to face things head on.
It’s funny, often people think I’m energetic, hyper, exuberant, distractable. I react quickly, I flit through several emotions in a moment. I move from stimulus to stimulus, hardly stopping to focus on a single idea. The truth is I find it easier to release my emotions immediately, to feel them fresh while they happen and not cling to anything after.
I try not to hold emotions close to me, at least the smaller ones. My new defense mechanism is to feel quickly rather than deeply, to process on the go, to not avoid anything purely by habit of feeling it immediately.
I think it’s healthier, although I’m sure I could still improve. I would like to eventually dip into deeper emotions again. But for now I like the quickly shifting emotional standpoint of living on the surface. After years of deadening everything, it’s curiously refreshing to feel everything quickly and all the time, not letting anything linger.
Fiercely Fluid 