I Hoard My Thoughts
Tell me your story
We are so much alike
Sitting on the outdoor rug
huddled around a gas fire set in burning coals
it’s June and it’s cold and wet in this Seattle garden
We are all outside, as the boulders, hummingbirds, fig trees, and windchimes keep watch
With eyes that shout and hearts that hide, we cry yell scream dance writhe stretch, and sigh.
We are protected under a large canopy, adults who have lasted this far with our pain.
Searching in the dark spaces for where our trauma ends and our true selves begin.
I have become lost in my own brain.
The thoughts I have are the thoughts of a thousand months and then ten times more than that.
They are bumper cars and monster trucks and shooting stars and fireworks and rushing rivers and rockets during take-off.
These thoughts of years upon years upon years.
The build-up like plaque in your arteries, like plaque on my teeth, like wax in our ears, like dirt under my nails.
I am a hoarder of my self-punishing thoughts.
I can no longer find a path to the front door. The thoughts are so old, they stink. They cover the ground beneath my feet.
Piles of ancient anxieties that at one time felt so new and real to me. Now they serve no use but to take up space, so much space, in my mind/heart/body that I am suffocating under the weight of them.
It’s a metaphorical suffocation of course but then why do I feel like I could literally drill holes to release the pressure: one in my heart and the other in my head?
I imagine the release: a giant hiss of hot air, smoke, a white tubed thick cloud hovering and slowly dissipating.
I envision the feel of the cleanse, my shadows sucked away leaving me lighter.
I no longer want to heave around the rotting heaps of garbage thoughts I spend my time ruminating upon, trying to recall the reasons why I first fell in love with this darkness, a survival tactic that has long since lost its purpose.
I wonder if I’m ever going to find the “me” behind the mask.
I wonder if I’ll ever feel comfortable in my skin.
I wonder if I will ever stop feeling afraid.
These thoughts, the probing and mean-spirited questions, that have moved in, kicked up their heels, and taken up space with their sly, knowing smiles, enjoy watching me squirm in my discomfort.
I have allowed the viciousness to stay long past its welcome, leaving little room for the answers that reside deep in my body, waiting for their turn to rise and shine.
And so I am knotted and untethered.
I inhale and exhale with the rattled breath of an asthmatic, my mouth perpetually clenched, the iron tightness of abdomen/rib cage/heart-inside-my-chest.
I’ve built a rock wall that keeps me straining for escape, heaving my body over and over against a barrier that thinks it’s keeping me safe.
Where is the castle of soft, sparkling sand to sift through my fingers and knead with my feet, an homage to flexibility and to the beauty of impermanence?
I swing between the two as I find my way back to a time when I knew beyond knowing that life only exists in this moment.
Many days later, I stand crying in that same Seattle garden with a group of people and desperately try to access the anger I feel I am owed. From a lifetime of resentment tamped down as deep as it gets.
Month after month, I try to find the anger. To daylight it. To hit my way into it. To scream my way toward it.
All while I hide the darkest parts of me. Hide from my people. From myself. Try to find a way out.
But the anger doesn’t come and the trauma overtakes me. Until I collapse, not ready to face the darkness. And then one day I am on the tiled floor of a bathroom in an Airbnb in Mexico City having fainted and given myself a concussion. And I am still not ready to find my way out.
The next day I text my family about the fainting and the head injury, with lightness and humor. No one gets the joke.
I acquiesce. I say yes to the bright spotlight they bring to this conversation. It shines into my abyss and feels embarrassing and humiliating. But it is the truest thing about me at that moment.
I offer a trembling and messy yes to the people who love me most, to embrace intense treatment for my oldest wounds that have never healed.
I slowly learn to sweep away the relics of a time when I was taught I could not survive without near-constant self-criticism and self-hatred.
I nervously attempt not to run from the thoughts and feelings of fear, anger, anxiety, or sadness. They are not entirely unwanted guests who must move out to make room for compassion and self-love. They simply need to take up less and less space as I allow for the whole of me to grow bigger.
I give them air and allow them the space to breathe. But not to propagate or overtake. To simply be.
I don’t need to hoard these thoughts that hammer my mind and build a blockade against the hurt (they don’t) or because of the terror of being seen.
I am a story. You are a story. We are stories we write for ourselves. We don’t need to fall prey to those thoughts that were birthed in our worst moments. They are not the whole story. What about those thoughts that arrived in your best?
