This is the story of a secret so excruciating, so overwhelming in its magnitude that all you want to do is let it go. Each day you dream about releasing it; giving it, and you, the freedom you so desperately ache for. And each day, for reasons you wish you didn’t have, you grasp it even more tightly, examining it from all sides to ensure its safety, and tuck it even more deeply into the dark.
The heaviness of the unspoken and unshared is a burden that is painfully exhausting to carry. Making it worse is the need to pretend that you’re not carrying that burden at all. Some days, you can feel your secret bubbling up inside of you so dangerously fast that you clasp your hands over your mouth to keep it from rushing out. Other days, it doesn’t even make it past your throat.
You try to convince yourself that you can continue to live with your secret. But it is soon clear that the longer a secret marinates unspoken in acidic guilt, the more potent it becomes. And so, what started out as a tiny seed of discomfort germinates into a pit of shame, its insidious roots thriving in your gut, making themselves at home in the darkness and isolation you’ve begun to cultivate.
Your self esteem, relationships, and mental health, have been ensnared in shame’s roots as well. You question your worth, your value, your talents. You doubt your ability to be a friend, a lover, a parent, a spouse.
Depression moves in slowly, bringing with it colerless days, hopelessness and inconsolable crying. You push the people closest to you away. Crushing anxiety threatens you with unexpected panic attacks and racing thoughts. At times you are non-functional, struggling to keep up with life’s constant needs. Ice-cold guilt washes over you each time you think of the way you’ve compromised your values to keep your secret-the lies, omissions and manipulations of truth.
Your secret shame is a clenched jaw, an upturned stomach, tight muscles, a throbbing head. It emerges as dizziness, nausea, tremors, fainting. Your body is chronically ill and fatigued, trying with all its might to purge its invaders.
In your desperate need to forget, you reach out to whoever or whatever can help you do so, willfully blind to the dangers or consequences that may arise. You lose control, swept up in a storm of self-sabotage and regret. New secrets emerge, one more dangerous than the next, and the cycle begins once more. And so it continues, on and on. Until you and your secrets are so indelibly intertwined that you can no longer tell where it ends and you begin.
And then one night, in a moment of desperation, you allow yourself a flicker of a dream. You wonder how it would feel to share this secret, to let it go. To unclench your fingers one by one until the burden you have been carrying for far too long is released into the arms of another. And it makes you smile. So you choose to let your smile linger for a bit longer instead of rushing to frown.
And the next time you dare to dream of letting go, you choose to nurture that tiny flame of optimism instead of extinguishing it.
There’s no question that the waters remain choppy in between these small islands of hope, but still they possess the power to transform.
Until the moment you feel strong enough to reach out to that someone you trust. And it’s when that person reaches their arm right back at you, that you are able to hear the faint click of an unlocking door, leading to a world in which you are no longer alone.
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