09/20/2024
I'm doing a writing class where we write an essay daily.. today's was about boxes, if you feel like reading... "How I longed to fly out of that box"
There was a time when I believed all boxes needed to be destroyed. A box represented containment, authoritarianism, my father, my childhood, the cage around my heart. It meant rules, regulations, someone dominating over me.
I vowed never to have anyone contain me or control me and a box represented confinement and reliving my childhood, void of freedom.
To break out of the box that confined me not only in the parental evangelical christian upbringing but also confined me within the walls of my own self.
My voice was stuck in my throat. My emotion was welled up in a permanent edge of rupture with no rupture in sight, simply a pressure of containment. My expression resided in my art, my writing, my room where I had forest green walls, dolphin images and beautiful elements to decorate my external internal environment.
I felt safe there in that box that I created for myself.
To be stuck in the box of self was like being a vo**ur on the world around me. Where my mind would be the constant narrator as I would take in the world from a transparent bubble that did not allow me to engage.
I wanted to for sure. I so wished I could talk to my classmates, be part of the cool crowd, say something witty at our cafeteria lunch table, but the thought would arise, get recycled by 100 judgments and by the time it passed all the authorities on the edge of my tongue, my throat would tighten and as I was about to spit it out, the conversation had already shifted and I was too late.
So I was quiet. So quiet that one time when my mind wasn’t patrolling my words, when one phrase accidentally slipped by the gatekeepers without being triple checked, I responded to a general inquiry at our cafeteria lunch table. Who was that singer that sang that 1 song? I said it, just like that “I think it was so and so”. My voice, an unknown audio sound at the table caused everyone to stop mid air and look at me. Jenny the sister of the popular cheerleader, says “oh my god, that’s the first time I’ve heard you speak.”
We were already towards the end of our sophomore year in high school and after months of subtly sneaking into their lunch table group, I said something.
The box.
I remember the toilet box. The toilet stall I used to hang out at lunch time when I couldn’t coerce my way into chatting with my classmate after our history class as she headed her way to to the lunch table.
This was my technique. Keep holding up the conversation with her after class and keep walking towards the lunch table and just casually sit down with them as if it was perfectly natural. I knew no-one had invited me, I was too ashamed to ever dare asking to sit with them at lunch.
I couldn’t imagine sharing with anyone how desperately alone and isolated I felt, that would have been death itself.
The days that she was absent, I had one other option. I was slightly friends with a girl in the mormon group. We really didn’t have anything in common, I can’t even say we were friends, but we occasionally talked in class. I did have the fortune to occasionally find myself at their table, they weren’t the cool kids. The clicks were the popular kids, the mormons, the punks, the skaters, the goths, and the loners.
I was an unwilling loner. Rather than suffer the shame of sitting by myself where every student who walked by could see me alone. How disgusting and unworthy was I of a person to be alone at lunch. Rather than bear that fateful deduction. I would hide in the bathroom for the entire lunch period.
I would sit on the toilet, lift my feet so no-one would know I was there and just be still.
I would hear the girls come in, brushing their hair, doing their makeup, chatting about boys and I would try not to breathe.
I don’t even remember if I ate my lunch or if it would have drawn attention to the closed stall making noises. The embarrassment would have been beyond manageable if anyone would have caught me hiding out.
I recall one of my forced toilet lunch breaks. My friend from class with her long blond hair that she would toss back and forth from shoulder to shoulder took off a little faster than usual from class.
She joined up with the group of the cheerleaders and football players near the stairwell in the great hall. They were circled there, chatting, laughing. I came up behind her, to say hi. Her backpack and back towards me.
I touched her on the arm and I remember her nudging me away and pretending that I did not exist.
She kept laughing with the others as I slithered away, invisible, undesirable and full of shame.
Living with the shame of feeling unwanted, undesirable and unworthy was the norm for me.
Only now as I look back at age 46 do I realize how excruciating it is to live with that feeling daily. The clenching in the heart.
For the longest time, it felt like I had a cage around my thorax.
I dreamt of the day the door would open and the bird inside me could fly free.
That cage was my prison, I wanted and desired to be able to express myself, to say what was inside of me, to have someone actually listen. But I truly believed no-one cared. I would start fading out mid sentence because I simply thought no-one was following, anything I had to say was uninteresting.
Telling a story, keeping peoples attention, being witty, interesting enough for them to follow! That was unheard of.
I admit it. Drugs helped me get out of my box.
At the age of 16 I ended up meeting a girl who changed my life forever. I’d say that she loved herself, hearing herself and having a sidekick who was available to accompany her on her whims.
She was my idol. She had blond hair, was a model, painted her room in forest green, loved sunflowers, crystals, new age stuff, boys and went to raves.
For some reason she liked me and we became great friends.
Candyflipping. The combination of acid and ecstasy to the beat of trance music, wearing baggie dickies, sesame street short shirts, lollipops and vans on our feet. Our hair was in braids or in little dollops to the sides of each ear, we were the baby ravers, exploring way too many drugs, creating raves in abandoned buildings. Peace and love in a techno modern era. Cuddle puddles and cute names.
If my mother could have known.
On ecstasy I could feel myself open, I was cute, I was loving, I was open. I could dance. I could explore the music in my body and let it dance through me. All the constriction in my chest and in my tight body would unwind to the ripple of acid dancing through my body. I would liquid dance, where my body would become waves and ripples moving from one arm to the other. I could completely let myself be free.
I could speak and others would listen.
I caught a glimpse of a greater force in the universe that was bigger than the confines of my body and my story, I belonged to a much greater matrix of life. I belonged somewhere.
My drug journey’s didn’t solve the previous 16 years of self deprecation but they did open the door towards the long journey of awakening. I’ll use the word awakening as a way to describe the moment when all the darkness and the shadow and compression falls away and it is just you and the light of your being that finally come into relationship.
I continued to fight the box of my upbringing and my own mind. I pushed myself out of the box in innumerable ways over the next years, pushing against the edge of fear because underneath I knew that was the only way to break through.
From traveling, to street performing, to modeling, to sexual encounters, to trying all sorts of experiences, drugs, cities, places, people, cultures, spiritual practices, I kept working at the onion layers of my protective barrier around my heart being able to fully fly.
I would experience moments of freedom at times.
I remember standing on my partners head in a circus performance show in Orvieto in Italy. I had a quick change costume where I would unbutton my black and white striped shirt and a golden dress would ripple down covering both me and him, making for a 12 foot tall woman.
I would open my arms wide to the circle crowd of 400 people piled in on the church steps in the middle of town, as they would cheer.
I held them under my control. I could lift a finger and 400 people would respond to it. I was no longer the controlled, I was adored, loved, praised and beyond all control.
I truly delighted in being able to manage my audience, I would see someone pick up their cell phone, get distracted and I would call them out in a comic way. I had everyone that watched me under my thumb, I did not tolerate distraction, I held them with my eyes, I held them with my presence. I was finally interesting, beautiful and talented.
I never saw this as control until now. I thought of it as simply being a performer, the art of captivating attention and holding it through feats or theatrical suspense.
I realize now how much I needed to finally feel in control, to feel like I was my own authority. Being the authority holding the space around me was healing to the parts of me that had lost any right to her own authority.
Over time, once my need for feeling agency and control finally filled, I felt less need to be the center of attention. I felt less need for people to call me Bella and Brava… I began to find my own value within.
My focus shifted and instead of wanting to feel validated, I wanted others to have a life transforming experience…
I shifted my focus by desiring other to feel as free, accepted and loved as I wanted to feel.
I imagined my audience dancing with each other at the end of the show, designing an event that wold move them, make them feel joy and connection.
I fabricated ways to make my audience experience these moments. Over time I began to create shows that allowed one to travel into the character’s I would portray. Exalting their vulnerability, their absurdness, their talent and their madness. I let myself express myself through them to my fullest capacity.
Every time I would feel the energy in my body to do something strange like jump over the barriers in the streets, swing around a lamp post, yell out loud, I would push myself to do it, awkwardly and fully aware of other’s eyes on me. I don’t know how much joy I actually got by “being weird” due to my constant awareness of other’s eyes.
I wanted to be the epitome of perfection, full expression and that no-one could say anything negative about me. I was my own favorite critic, more seering than a branding iron. I was good at checking myself to be perfectly prepared.
When I learned to stop burning myself up, I would find someone else to blame, the Americans, the Italians, the French. The world.
My box had expanded in the appearance of outwardly self expression yet I still lived within the box of my own judgment.
Now at the age of 46, I still catch myself swimming like a mermaid deep in the ocean, wanting to show off.
Then I remind myself why I do this, it’s for me and why do I care what a Japanese tourist with a full face mask, floaties and a flourescant pink floating noodle around their waist thinks about me?
Over time, between the shedding of different skins, I learned the practice of embracing the idea that I’m not perfect and never will be.
Recognizing that the more light I let shine from my box, the more outside criticism I may be subject to.
I have proven to myself many things, my worth, my capacity, my resiliency, my courage, my inner and outer beauty.
I’ve gotten to a point where I’m not afraid to look someone in the eye. I remember at age 16, sitting in front of my house in my friend James, beige VW bus.
I was so timid and quiet my eyes were always downcast.
People would often tell me I should smile more. I wanted to strangle them and say, “you have no idea what it’s like to be me.”
James asked me to just look at him in the eyes. They say eyes are the windows of the soul and if I showed him what was inside me, I was sure that I could not be loved.
There we were, in his VW bus. I distinctly remember the smell, the smells we aren’t aware of when we sleep, cook, and exist in a 12 ft square box.
I was required to look at him for what seemed an endless amount of time. The tears began to pour as if he could see into that deep dark box of my being and see the depth of loneliness and existential grief that trapped my heart into a metal box.
How I longed to fly out of that box.
Since then, I went on a lifetime journey to fully open myself up to being seen, forgive myself, accept myself, to let go of the idea of perfection, to feel like I belong somewhere in this world.
Then one day I realized the heavy clamp around my thorax wasn’t there anymore.
I could breathe. I was free to just let my naked wounded strong self be seen. There was no more shame. I didn’t have anything I needed to hide. I was free of my box.
And slowly as if a century of confinement in the dungeons of my fortified castle finally disintegrated, I was allowed to let myself fly.
