It's been a very emotional last two weeks or so. It has probably been longer, but something in me broke a little bit the last couple of weeks. I'm not entirely sure what it was or why it happened when it did. I just hit a point that the tea pot I'd been trying to contain it all in started to whistle too loud. I didn't explode...much. Just a slowly rising whistle that got too loud to ignore. When I tried to turn the heat down underneath, the knob just wouldn't turn this time. Instead of pulling out my tools to fix it, I just let the whistling go on. And it was emotional. Angry, sad, crazy, loud. I just let it go on. Because it needed to boil over.
And it did. And now it's quiet again. And I have my tools out. The knob is moving again. The heat is bearable and the tea pot is intact. The whistling is just a haunting echo that is teaching me yet more wisdom. I suppose it was necessary. It always is.
But in the whistling, I learned. It's odd the things you learn in your most vulnerable moments. It's not what you expect to learn. It's not the big answers to the pressing stressors that caused the whistling to begin with. It's the subtle notes under the screaming high pitches that teach you. I don't know what to do about the big questions. Those are still simmering. But I did learn.
During the course of the last two weeks, I said some very honest things. If I wasn't so exhausted from all the noise and the heat and the lack of ability (or maybe will) to turn it down, I wouldn't have said them. I wouldn't have just blurted out the words. I'd have considered them taboo, or at least private enough that I only ever needed to say them to myself. I trust myself most of the time. But when the boiling starts, I'm not to be trusted. So, I said them out loud.
And it was scary and awkward. I expected to quickly regret it. I expected to be admonished or punished for letting my inside come outside. That's the way it's always been. Emotional honesty thrown at toxic people who answered with poison. Toxic people were all I had. And it was exhausting to try to detoxify myself onto people who didn't have any room to absorb it. They were too full of poison.
But, something has changed. Even some of the same people who were formally poisonous became absorbant. New friends, whom I feared wouldn't understand and therefore would not accept the beautiful swirling mess of me, saw my vulnerability. They didn't grimace or turn away or kick me when I was down. They didn't exploit it. They didn't criticize it. And when I admitted, far too honestly, that I was afraid they'd do just that, they comforted me. They acknowledged the mess and accepted it for what it was. Without judgment or anger or the all too familiar abandonment. They just comforted me.
No one told me what I wanted to hear just for the sake of it. No one laughed or ridiculed me. No one punched me in the gaping hole that I showed them in my character. No one was upset that I let the super hero cape fall off my shoulders. No one ran from my naked emotion. No one minded at all that I was so honest. They just comforted me. They cared. They expected nothing more than who I was at that moment. And it was incredible.
I often think about how easy things must be for people who haven't had the kinds of trauma and rich experiences that I've had. People who just move around with ease and never worry about whether they'll be attacked or derided or diminished simply for being. How does that feel? To not be on guard. To not have that nagging hypervigilence. I've only ever felt that way once when I was far away from everyone and everything familiar. But it came rushing back in any time I came within hearing distance of anyone I formerly knew.
I also wonder about people who just hold it all in. They've had the trauma and the rich experiences. They've heard the whistling so long that it's a part of every day life and they don't even hear it anymore. I wonder how those people survive every day with complete ignorance of their loud dysfunction. I guess ignorance is bliss. They seem ok with themselves, even if they don't seem ok to me.
But, I'm neither of those. I'm comprised almost entirely from a collection of my experiences and the wisdom gained from the acknowledgement of them. I'm acutely aware of the whistling. I've learned how to quiet it and learned that sometimes I might need to be driven a bit mad by it. I know me extremely well. And I know that I can trust me now, even when the heat gets too high and I go a little crazy. I know how to be honest with myself.
But there's something new I learned in the last couple of weeks of emotional rawness. It turns out that I can be honest with some other people too. I can spew out even those darker parts and still be accepted as more than just those parts. I can be vulnerable and not expect to have salt poured into the painful spots.
Maybe that's the wisdom of choosing people to have around me that are a bit safer. A bit better. A bit less toxic. Or maybe it's my perception that's changed. Maybe it's the world's. Maybe it's both or nether. All the same, I'm grateful.
And the whistling as subsided. The knob is fixed. Everything is being properly regulated again. Decisions need to be made, but they can be made in quiet, as slowly as they need to be.
