We all have them. They are an inextricable part of human life, yet we desperately try and hide them just as we frantically try to hide the embarrassing potty-training photos the family loves to pull out when meeting a potential beau for the first time. However, experience recently taught me that this lack of acknowledgment serves no greater purpose other than successfully cultivating a bubble of isolation around ourselves. It is a bubble impermeable to logic, reason, and love, and that breeds fear, anxiety, and depression.
Several years ago I fought the confines of my own self-created bubble after developing an irrational and ridiculous relationship with food. My reasons? It was freshman year and for the first time in my life things were just not going according to plan, no matter how hard I worked or how much I planned. Injuries, dismal track performances, and a hatred for my major left me grasping for something tangible that I could control, and that something turned into food.
I pushed my closest friends and their concerns away, and I turned off the logical side of my mind. I heard people talking, I even heard what they were saying, but it didn’t penetrate me, my bubble made sure of that. And me, was I talking? Not really. I lived in a world of my own, and managing my irrational fears in the least obvious way became a full-time job. The best thing I can liken my consciousness to would be the feelings one has upon waking from anesthesia; your mind is slightly numb, your thought processes cloudy. People are talking at you, and events are happening around you, but you yourself are just sitting there, watching, observing.
Three years later my bubble hasn’t completely dissipated, but the walls are more malleable than rigid, and each day they weaken a little more. The key to my recovery? I don’t know exactly, but I believe it has something to do with the power of voice. With the relentless support of family and friends, and the desire to live and be better, I somewhere along the way found my voice and I started talking. The talk was dark; full of illogical self-doubts and insecurities, but the clincher was that the more I talked, the more I heard the ridiculousness of each fear and doubt in every word, every sentence. Physically hearing the words slice through the still air ignited my spirit, and empowered my mind to push past my dark and leering demons. I could once again take a deep breath and drop my shoulders, letting the tension flow off of me as the streams of water sluice over one in the shower.
I took my skeleton out of the closet and liberated myself from the ever-constricting bonds of insecurity, and I accomplished things I never thought possible. Thus, in a spirit reminiscent of Halloween this past weekend, considering emptying your closet of any skeletons you may be hiding. Once you do, you open yourself up to a whole new host of feelings and sensations, and although scary, they are extremely revitalizing.
[...] a life that is more malleable than rigid, and I am reading to peel away yet another layer of my plastic bubble. Though difficult, especially as I begin to feel better and my breathing normalizes, I am going [...]