The Weight of the World

I've been chained to an idea for several years.

It shaped the way that I thought. The way I lived. And it shaped the way I interacted with the world around me. My parents, my husband, and my close friends can all attest to the truth of this statement.

I'm going to spoil the ending for you...this idea was unexpectedly shattered to bits tonight, but I think that's ok.

As reflected in my previous post, this same idea brought several aspects of my identity into question, especially recently. It did always had a way of doing that. It was back, of my own doing of course. Unveiling my vulnerability. My weakness.

It made me question the very foundation around which I have built my life...and without giving away an indelicate amount of information, I want need to write about it.

I fell in love with an idea. For years. No matter how hard I tried to move on, it lived inside of me, and I kept it safe because I have been afraid of losing it.

I didn't really ever want to give it up. Effortlessly, it defined me. I surrendered myself to the belief that my life would always be incomplete without it. After so many years, it still mattered more than I am proud to admit.

I guess I thought that as long as I believed it, it would be self sustaining. Little nothing else would matter as much as long as I kept it alive. It would shock you if you only knew. It sure shocked me. I refused to let anything else touch it. As the years passed, I polished it, and kept it safely tucked away from the harm of those who tried to taint it. Pretending, when the time came, that I had completely given it up...willingly, in fact...that I had given up. I smiled gracefully as I paraded on my own personally paved road through hell.

Because I lied. That's right. I lied.

I have never been as addicted to anything else. I never stopped believing in it.

It was taken away from me. I stood at a crossroads sincerely unsure of what to do when I realized it was all a dream. A fantasy. I'm still a little shocked, but at least the apathy that has only increased over the years has gone away. I am feeling again, and it's a definitely different than how I would have had it, but I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I believed in something that simply was not true. The weight of the world was taken away from me. I was freed. Unwillingly, but nevertheless, free. Freed from regret and confusion. Because I know. There is no doubt anymore. I doubted it all for something that just wasn't there. I had been wrong.

It's that simple. A little anticlimactic, I know...but that's the truth. I think know I would have believed it forever if the idea hadn't been taken away from me. I would have always wandered, and made my way back to it. I would have changed my life to suit it.

I hesitate to write about this because I have never felt capable of adequately doing this post justice, even thou it's been a long time coming. I imagine many more will follow...with perhaps less ambiguity, or great. But I needed to put into words the feelings I had this night...the way I'm feeling now. I need something to accompany the devastation, the relief, the fear, the confidence, the tears, and the smiles. So bittersweet.

Because my life changed in a moment, and while the world around me looms on, my world was changed. In however small a way, I need that to matter.

And so, I write.

__________

“Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before. Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening. Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed” (Alice Walker).