On Hitting Walls (and Letting Go).
Posted to Medium’s P.S. I Love You on June 27, 2020. Link here.
A few weeks ago, I was let go from my job. I’m aware this doesn’t make me unusual, especially not now; I’m also aware that the job hadn’t been the right fit for some time. I didn’t shed a tear when the news was broken to me over a video call, when the faces of four executives stared at me as I stared back, caught off guard with a messy ponytail and the early morning light in my eyes. I didn’t cry, but I couldn’t stop blinking.
I’d already felt like I was barreling towards a wall. Dull bricks were laid with each frustrating meeting, with each week that went by unresolved; I felt my bones contract, I braced myself for the hit. With the recession swirling up, looming and sneering at me through my thin little bubble, I knew it was inevitable. There was no way to jump ship when the sea around me was evaporating into itself.
A few months ago, I let go of a relationship. It wasn’t so much a letting go as it was a messy, slippery fumble; I tried walking away with my head held high, yet despite his siren song not even being in tune, I kept going back. It was a terrible sham of a thing, full of hangovers and heightened emotions, slurred words and desperate attempts to scrape them back at sunrise. Stale breath and shaky hands, half-empty cans and hazy mornings. I couldn’t distinguish if the anxiety I constantly felt was because of him or the comedowns; in truth, they were one and the same.
He was, like my job, not the right fit.
It ended when I finally hit the wall, when the pain became so palpable that I felt it in my throat and in my lips, when the disappointment in myself rang like unrelenting alarms and rendered me paralyzed. I went silent for two weeks and when I finally called him, I told him it seemed like the only way to just . . . Finally. Stop. He told me how glad he was that I’d called and how he’d never want to lose me entirely.
I remember the ease with which he spoke, how he didn’t put up a fight. I wondered if he’d seen the same wall and if he, too, had pummeled into it nonetheless. I wondered what had stopped him from jumping overboard.
When the world shut down, just several weeks later, I thought of how close we’d been to entering the new reality while still in our old one; I wondered if I’d have stayed if we’d still been together. I wondered if I’d have stood at the wall’s base and instead of retreating, already bruised and bloodied, I would have tried to scale it.
I thought about how many walls I’d felt around me and what my role had been in constructing them. I wondered why they felt so impossible to avoid despite seeing them from so far away and what, if any, differences there really were between them.
There will always be walls. There will always be moments when you know when it’s too much or it’s not enough; when even though you know to steer away, you’ll still end up at their base. Sometimes, you’ll have to hit them. Sometimes, you might have to keep hitting them, keep banging your skull against them, sounding the alarms until they become too much to bear.
Sometimes, a wall might be pulled away from you, leaving you suddenly exposed. It won’t come with a bang, just a soft thud. A thump. It will linger all the same.
There will always be walls, walls to hit or to retreat from; neither option is easy but they both can be necessary.
I’m more interested now in how to savor the space.
When the meeting showed up on my calendar with no warning, I knew what was coming. The bricks were suddenly gone. There was just open space and an evaporating sea. Despite the challenge, I’m treading. I’m facing the tide.
When I separated myself from my lover, I knew what was coming. A different kind of pain, but one that left me room to grow. One that left me free to be open. Pain, yes, but more so reprieve, on the other side of the wall.
