My memoir (shelves and boxes)

 Hey guys, been a while since I wrote constructively about my thoughts, so this is me trying to lay it out perfectly, I hear it helps push out negative thoughts. 

So I titled this - shelves and boxes. I heard these terms, 'a sheltered child, and a hothouseflower', last year, they stuck, they stuck because they pretty much described me. But I've never really described me in my words. My thoughts, my decisions and my reality (why not, go big or go home). 

I've always been tidy, it's something I picked up as a child. I'd never never leave my plate at the table, I have a knack for arranging things and some people say I have OCD. I mean just cause I can't sleep if I feel a place is untidy, or because my favourite downtime is cleaning doesn't necessarily mean I have OCD (or does it?). Being tidy is an all round thing for me. I tidy my thoughts too. I have shelves in my head. Shelves are where I put files or portfolios of thoughts that are negative, traumatising or glazed with grief and pain. Unfortunately I have a lot of shelves. Boxes are thoughts I often tend to recollect and mull over. They're thoughts about books I've read and the writer's panache. Thoughts of stories I'm trying to develop. Thoughts of people and how they've touched my life. Thoughts of what my take on loving God means and thoughts of whoever I'm in love with. Oh yeah and thoughts of movies, I think there should be a course that is all about deconstructing movies down to the original writer's thought. I also have a lot of boxes, but they're only ever open for long spans of time. There's one that never closes though, and after much rummaging through it, it tends to end up on a shelf. 

"Sheltered child" -

I say sorry a lot. It feels like an innate characteristic of mine but it's not really. I don't want to be sorry all the time. I grew up in what this woke generation would term a "toxic home". People always screaming, people physically abusing each other and emotionally torturing each other. They claim they did it to give us a stable home, but this is not about them, it's about me. My parents love us with the entirety of their being. They've gone above and beyond to make sure we have the best. I am not an ingrate, I recognise and appreciate that. But they've done a number on us too. They've tried to live their failed lives through us. I have tried to repair their failed life through my years of living and it has been exhausting to carry a weight no one asked me to. They provide everything we need, they've never let us know what hustling or struggling is because they did that for us. The very first time I left home was for camp. I know the value of money not because I've made much myself but because I've sat through many years of parents racking their brains to reconcile what we need over everything else. Prioritising us over everything including self. From feeding, to fees, to utility bills. Never having savings accounts, only living life a day at a time. So I learned contentment, that what you have for now fixes the problem of now and a bird in hand is perfect.  My parents strife and struggle to make sure we don't. But the thing about growing up is that, we all have to struggle at some point. 

"Hothouseflower" -

A person who is very fragile and vulnerable as a result of having been sheltered. That pretty much sums up the children my parents have raised, or that's what an onlooker would think. I have a very feminine aura. From my gait, to my mien and sometimes to my behaviour. It just happens. But being sheltered did not make me fragile and vulnerable in the sense that many would expect it to. It made me build walls. Forts even. I understood the quote, "fragile, not like a flower but like a bomb". So I tried to live my life to fix the mistakes I thought were glaring in my parents' lives. They seemed to be too temperamental so I thought to never ever get angry. I'm human this isn't at all possible, so I bottled up that emotion. So instead of getting angry I learned to withdraw, stay away from what causes wry. They seemed to never speak to each other, to be vulnerable with each other, so I said whenever I started dating, I'd be an open book with my partner. They seemed to never have friends, we could go years without even a visitor, so I became an accommodating person, overly friendly even when it felt uncomfortable. But with these seeming mistakes I tried to fix, did I build my own personality? Yes. Yes, I did. Does anyone truly know this person? No. No, I believe not. 

The walls I built were to protect me. Me. The child who loves family above all else. The person who would give everything including the clothes off of her back just to feel loved. Me. The person who groped for love so much that she lost touch of self. I give everything to feel something, because deep inside, there's an emptiness that keeps growing in depth and width. Being sheltered, my parents did not think to explain what grief was, or how change can affect a person. I think that in that aspect I was unsheltered, left to figure it out myself.  My first singe at grief when I was 9+. My grandpa was the fulcrum in my life. My dad was working to keep the lights on and send his teenage wife and toddler to school. My grandma was busy being disciplinarian to her other female children and my mom. And my mom was a teenager living with a bunch of new people, going to the university and shuffling between learning how to be a mom and being one. But my grandpa knew all of his different roles and acted accordingly at each one. He knew exactly how to be everything I needed him to be (he understood the assignment). Sadly, after he passed, everything assumedly went back to normal. Everyone else being everything else but not everything I needed them to be. So I sought for love outside, since inside I had to fit into so many other roles that I forgot that love should exist there too. I mean I know that my parents, and my grandmother and aunties love me. They may never have said it, or began to say it this year with fear and concern in their eyes, because they finally see who I've become, but I've always known. I mean there's a difference between knowing and feeling, but I had always known. I might not have felt it, but I knew. 

The first shelf in my head is grief. I created it after my grandpa passed. That wasn't exactly when the hole appeared but, it was when I felt it first. He died. No one thought it wise to talk me through it because no one expected me to understand and if I'm being mature now, I'd say because they all were grieving and avoiding the topic too. So I didn't tell them that I wasn't sleeping, or that some nights I couldn't raise my head up and look outside the window without having palpitations (I know what it's called now, but then I would have described it as - without my heart pounding against my chest like I would pound against a door if I'd ever woken up to find that I was alone).  I didn't tell them that I was feeling lonely even with my cousins around, and my grandma so desperately trying to fill his shoes for me. I didn't tell them that I now hated God because I prayed and cried for him not to die but he didn't anyway and so I didn't understand what the bane of our belief was anymore. I learned not tell them things. The second shelf I created was pain, pain has a box too. Grief might have kept me awake at night but pain saw me through the days. The pain of having to get out of bed and run through chores whether you're well rested or not. The pain of having to eat the meals that you thought only your grandpa knew how to make, only to discover that it is common knowledge, just everyone else was too busy to do it for you. The pain of having to bite my lips everytime I wanted to say something because I felt every other person had something more important to say or do. So I built walls. Forts even. I said I would never complain even if I hated something. I would never say no because I knew what feeling neglected felt like. I would say sorry because many times I needed to hear it but adults rarely apologise to children. I would absorb everybody even when I felt the certain urge to always run and hide when there was a crowd. 

I met a boy. He was everything. Then I let him in on every emotion that I felt and he listened. He was rough around the edges but he was determined to make us work. He died. Then I created a shelf called trauma. Because grief comes from loosing someone you love but trauma comes from wanting to die because you know that that's the only time that you might feel peace. It wasn't so much in this boy's listening or wanting to be there for me and shelter me just like my parents had, but in finding someone who saw me. Who looked right across from whatever he had on his plate and chose to be there for me. It was about him knowing how to be everything he needed to be and everything I needed him to be as well. When I needed a friend. When I needed a lover. When I needed a counselor. When I needed a pastor. I found that the hole wasn't widening, it had its depth and it did get deeper with the tussle relationships can bring, but it did not get wider, I knew its breadth. Then I met a man. He knew what stage of grief I was in. He knew how to cap the emptiness. He was soothing, but pain cannot really be soothed if it isn't treated. Pain can only be pacified for so long, you need to heal from pain. I did not know or understand his own pain so one day, he left. Then I created another shelf - rejection, because I did not know why he left and I did not grasp the magnitude of my emotions. All that I felt was rejection, and for a woman who had known years and years of negligence because of her choices, I had to call this a new name. It wasn't my decision to allow this new form of negligence so I called it rejection and then the cap fell off  and the hole widened exponentially and the depth? Call it the Bermuda triangle. 

When people die, or you experience loss, its the human thing to do - you try to find God. You try to find understanding, but some humans also blame God. I blamed him for my grandpa, but I sought to find him when Fay died. And when Paul left, I sought for him even more. When we don't feel the presence of God or when we don't feel worthy of the presence of God, we pickup counterfeits (vices). I picked a lot of them up. And if I'm being very honest, I might have always had them or some how had them engraved in my subconscious without noticing. My first box is the love of God. I have always wanted to understand that phenomenon. I felt to love a person or being, meant an active relationship with them. I mean communication to and fro, explaining feelings, shared trauma and just being there for the other partner, but how can I be there for God? I always wondered when I heard people say things like, "God told me to..., the holy spirit said..." I wondered why those things never happened to me. Did I not love God? Or did He not love me? Was it my sins that separated me from His love? Or what was it? Why did I not love God enough?

My second box was movies. Deconstructing and making them in my head, or in writing, always was a joy. I watched with so much attention to detail. Learning things that people didn't quite get. Things that made me feel superior to others when it came to the art of movies.

My third box is of lovers, it's a box that never really closes. Most of the files in this box have found their way to the shelf called pain. I still have an open file in this box, sadly its headed towards the shelf too. 

My final shelf is suicide. I have fought this thought off for quite a while. I sometimes envy the dead. They do not have to keep up with shame, another shelf that is full to the brim. They do not have to deal with not understanding purpose. They do not have to deal with falling short of your expectations, of people's expectations. I envy the fact that they can just lay still, their heart stops throbbing, their body stops, their mind stops, they're totally aloof. Is it insane that I want to die but not the final death that comes with judgement but the type where I can lay still, mind, body and all my shelves and boxes to be totally aloof of who, where and when. To be in a plane of conscious unconsciousness? It might be weird but I'm mostly tired of living like this. In shame because I have somehow not become, in fear, because I want to transition but I'm afraid of asking for help because I fear rejection more than anything else really. Static because it seems life is happening to everyone else, but my problems are still the same as three years ago. But mainly, I'm tired of being tired. 

My shelves and boxes have known a steady raucous this period. Files have been mixed up, and oddly I seem to be missing a few portfolios. I have imploded several times and might be on the verge of an explosion, but I've done my favorite downtime activity- I've cleaned house.The decisions I've made are final. My shelves and boxes are neatly placed.