I've been thinking about this post a lot ever since I read it and after a couple intense conversations this week, I decided to try my hand at drawing a bit of my feelings. I'm not an artist, have never been an artist, will never be an artist. I think that this image would actually be a lot more successful if I'd had scissors, glue, and thirty magazines and been able to collage it, but the baby was napping and all I had was a notebook and pen.
The picture depicts a metaphor my mother and I have been throwing around for the last ten months. My mom says that the weight that I carried, and continue to carry, acted as walls that I put up to protect myself from the world. When I first started on this process/journey/diet/whatever last August she warned me that it was not going to be easy to take these walls down. And she was, as usual, incredibly and painfully right. Each wall has been made of a cement mixed out of my worst fears, deepest insecurities, scariest thoughts, most heart-breaking anxieties. Taking them down has required me to melt this cement with heat and sunlight and false bravado, a belief that the longer I stare at it, the more likely it is to go away.
Two of my walls are down now and the world outside my personal bomb shelter is a scary one. I keep chipping away at my third wall but I'm also looking over my shoulder at the dark forest all around. There are predators out there and right now I have nowhere to hide. I can put my remaining walls at my back if I need to, but that doesn't feel particularly safe either.
I hope that someday, this metaphor will shift and the world outside will be something welcoming and beautiful. I hope that one day I'll throw away the last few bricks and stand up into sunshine, and feel glad that these walls are no more. Right now it's like I've traded stale, trapped air for arctic wind: I can breathe better but it hurts a lot to do so.
So... here is the picture I drew about that.
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