And I’ve been good too long, let me be wrong.
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A couple of weekends ago, I excitedly reached into my freezer hoping for the last remaining spoonfuls of Alec’s Palm Beach Banana Chocolate Date Shake ice cream to help me shake off the dust (no pun intended) of a long and defeating week, but instead I was hit with a giant vacuum-sealed block of frozen soup that fell from the top shelf directly onto my foot at a troubling angle. It hurt so bad that, after recovering my ice cream (priorities), I wept like a school child for most of the rest of the evening.
Fortunately, it isn’t broken, but the tendons in my foot and lower leg are severely swollen, so I’ve spent most of the last two weeks holed up on my couch. Needing something to do, and with the promise of a Jesse McCartney cameo, I decided to watch Greek for the first time.
I became a fan of the show so quickly that I was almost shocked by my own obsession. What I thought would be a shallow series about partying turned out to be such a funny and sweet representation of community, forgiveness, coming into your own, and learning how to love people who are different than you.
However, there was one scene that unexpectedly sent me into an emotional tailspin. In it, Cappie, one of the main characters and resident babe on the show, wraps one of the younger characters in the most loving, protective hug as she heads off to New York. Suddenly, I felt the pang of loss and the desire that I have always had to have someone to protect and look out for just me. It brought me back to being a kid and watching Matt Camden on 7th Heaven take care of his sisters. I haven’t had a lot of that in my life, but I’ve always wanted it.
When I was little, I had a nanny who was an absolute nightmare. For the purpose of this writing, let’s call her Sara.
Sara lived with us for roughly a year (honestly, it might’ve been less, but time feels longer when you’re eight) and wreaked havoc on me and my siblings. My mom was working a lot at the time, and Sara was particularly good at acting like a star employee in front of my mom and terrorizing me when it was just us.
On several occasions, in my signature dramatic tone but honest storytelling, I tried to tell my mom that I hated Sara. In fact, I was insistent from about two weeks into her hiring to her last day that she should be fired. The problem was, I had also been the one to beg for her to be hired in the first place (her acting skills fooled us all that day), which diminished my credibility.
Eventually, my mom witnessed enough things for herself that she fired Sara. I still occasionally reference something that happened, certain my mom knew about it, only to turn and see her shocked face (like the time Sara’s stalker camped outside of our house… or how her friend with untreated schizophrenia hung out with us most days… or when that random person woke up in our home… or the covert trips to California Pizza Kitchen to see Sara’s secret boyfriend even though she was engaged… or, worst of all, the unreasonable 4pm dinner times that still haunt me because who eats dinner at that hour?!). My mom often responds to these stories with, “Excuse me, what happened?” before I half-jokingly remind her that I tried to tell her.
These stories are mostly funny now, but my reality of living them taught me an important lesson: that people won’t believe me and won’t step in to help me when I’m hurting. Because of this, and other similar examples, I learned at an early age to take care of myself and not waste time on other people. However, what started as a way to protect myself has turned into a way to close myself off to the world around me and the people in it. I’ll give you a couple of examples.
Six months after being diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes at nine years old, I decided to be the one solely responsible for my care because I didn’t trust anyone else to do it for me. I advocated hard for this, and my parents and medical team ultimately relented. Overnight, I became my own doctor, nurse, nutritionist, and caregiver, and have accepted little help since then. I was a kid, yet already unwilling to let people help ease my burdens.
When I was eighteen, I had a friendship with a boy that completely upended my world. I loved him as a friend, and maybe more than that, but I never took advantage of the opportunity to tell him how I felt because I was too afraid and too fearful of what would happen if I cracked myself open enough to give that piece of myself to someone else. So, I didn’t say anything, and I spent years regretting it.
More recently, I’ve struggled to forgive my brother-in-law because I don’t trust that forgiveness will keep me safe. For those of you who aren’t familiar, almost three years ago, my brother-in-law, whom I previously had a close sibling relationship with, entered my home uninvited while we were away and placed a hidden camera in my bedroom closet for his personal use. He came over to comfort me the evening I found it, intent on finding the “bad guy,” only for me to learn the next day that he had come over not to comfort me, but to cover his own tracks. I haven’t seen or spoken to him since.
I struggle to forgive him for what he did and for how he has handled it since, but I also struggle to forgive him because I worry that if I do my story won’t matter anymore and my pain will have been felt in vain, almost as if forgiveness would give everyone a free pass to just move on and forget. Sometimes, I feel like clinging to the pain and the gravity of the hurt is the best way to protect the version of myself that this happened to. It’s like I jumped on top of her as she fell to the ground to shield her from falling debris, and now I can’t let her go.
The other thing Greek made me think about this week is how much fun I’ve missed out on by spending so much energy trying to stand in the gap of protection I didn’t have by constantly trying to protect myself. The truth is that approach doesn’t work (I still get hurt), and it also prevents me from living according to the title of this blog: freely.
I had a friend in college who was my opposite in pretty much every way, and I judged him for it initially. Thankfully, we were forced together in our senior year, and I grew to really love him… and forgive him when he said something horribly inappropriate about women or recounted his drug-induced exploits. I didn’t agree with much of his decision-making, yet I admired his freedom. He didn’t take life as seriously as I did; he just lived.
Growing up, I always figured I would get where I was going first, and then I would have fun and make new connections. I was goal-oriented, as they say, but my goals often led me away from living real life. It’s funny because this is so counter to what I encourage in other people and also counter to my travel philosophy, where I usually embrace all the new connections and things that go wrong along the way because those are the stories we remember.
Sometimes I worry that I’ve missed my chance to be a kid. I grew up so fast and closed off so quickly that now sometimes I look around and grieve the freedom I lost by being so tightly bound to my own safety instead of recognizing that life is unsafe no matter what. I think the reality of approaching 30 is also starting to hit me. I’m more aware today of the seemingly competing desires I have to have fun and live brightly, but also settle down and have a family. It just ends up feeling like a lot of pressure and sadness, too, for the choices I didn’t make.
I don’t have an older brother to protect me, and the one time I thought I did, he hugged me with a knife in his hand. But I’m not going to find those people in my life to be protected by and protect by living in my own shell. I have to continue down this journey I’ve been on of letting my walls down enough for others to step in and carry the burdens with me. Yuck.
I’m not that eight-year-old girl anymore, yet I feel like her every day – still afraid that it’s not worth it to let others in or myself out. As I step into the rest of this year and this season of life, I’m eager to continue taking you on the journey of un-learning what I’ve always known while continuing to pursue a better, freer, more joyful story.
Until next time xx
Titular Song: Let Me Be Wrong by Jensen McRae
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