Guardians of the Threshold

A few weeks ago after church, I had someone come up and encourage me about a talk, a.k.a message/sermon/teaching, I had given earlier this year. (You can catch ithere, if you’d like!) We talked about some of the tougher things we’ve gone through in life, and she made a comment that’s been rattling around in my head ever since. It went something like, “I have to tell you, years ago, I saw you with your cute little family out to dinner, and I was going through a rough divorce, and I remember thinking that you had everything going right for you. I guess it just goes to show, you really never know what people are going through.”

Amen, sister.

We know that we’re all pretending to have our shit together, all trying our very hardest to just look “normal”, to not get left behind. We’ve read enough books written from the throes of peoples’ heartache. We scroll through memes and poems and quotes on Instagram that mirror back to us our own struggle. We resonate with comedians’ jokes about the hard and sucky parts of life, the parts we’re not comfortable enough to talk about but everyone’s experienced. But the thought remains…”If people really knew about <insert your deepest, darkest fear/secret/thought here>, I would lose everything.”

So, we push down, and stuff down, and suffocate ourselves. We cover over our insecurity with rigid religion and rules and judgement, stay in unhealthy relationships, work harder, do more, confess less. Because it’s too scary to step out from the crowd and show our true colors, especially if we think those colors might dissolve the camouflage that connects us to our herd. All the while, on the inside, we are slowly poisoning ourselves, and each other, with these pressures to always know THE answer, to never let anyone see us make a mistake, to always be doing or saying the thing we’re SUPPOSED to be doing/saying…ugh…it makes my chest constrict just writing about it.

But this is what I think. I think we need to turn this struggle, this tension, into art. Our heartaches, our challenges, our triumphs. Let’s talk about it, all of it. Let’s write it, paint it, grow it, dance it, sing it, tatt it. Let’s open up, and create love out of it, so not one more person is left to feel alone. And let’s do it, despite the fact we will most definitely get some things wrong in the process. Because, by now, I’m sure we can all resign ourselves to the fact that we don’t know what the fuck we’re doing, but we’re all trying our best. Every step I take is another edging towards some form of an unknown, some arrangement of circumstances I’ve never experienced, some challenge that not another single person on this planet has experienced from this exact angle.

(And I’m now realizing that I just wrote myself a permission slip to start writing and putting my shit out there again, even though I have no idea what I’m doing…Ha. Funny.)

So, here I am, back to creating, writing, processing some of the stuff I’ve been struggling and working through, in hopes that someone out there will feel just a little less alone.

These past few months, there has been a gravity and loneliness that’s settled at the base of my chest, sometimes caught in the middle of my throat, almost as if it wants to speak to me but I’ve been too afraid to hear it. And I can pinpoint its start back to a few weeks after I gave that talk I mentioned earlier.

Now, I have to take a second to acknowledge some progress here. The fact that I’m aware of the sadness and have language to describe it in my body…huge progress. And I’ve gotten to a point in my personal growth where sadness and grief no longer MUST be debilitating. Our little family has had a really beautiful summer (full of sun, camping, swimming, road trips, lazing mornings, late evenings, laughter, friends…lots of good stuff) despite some of these heavier feelings I’ve been carrying. I’m learning how to hold heartache and hopelessness in the same space as deep gratitude and love. I’m able to hurt, yet still look into my daughters’ eyes with awe and wonder. It has not always been this way, and I still struggle to not isolate myself during these times of sadness…but baby steps to wholeness and healing, right?

But this talk, let me tell you…I toiled over it, over every single word. The content was acutely personal, and working through what I was going to say and then speaking it out to real, live humans was an exercise in validating my own experiences and affirming that I believe my voice matters. What this process produced was another form of healing and settling for me. It was a summation of a lot of internal work I’ve done over the last year, and it was another step forward in setting myself apart as my own person, with my own thoughts and experiences. And as I sat up there in front of hundreds of people (twice!), I had many moments of, “Oh my god, I can’t believe I’m doing this, and I can’t believe it’s going well!” Then afterwards, for weeks, I received such amazing, positive feedback and encouragement from people who, by some miracle, saw themselves in my story and resonated with the call to dive inward, towards pain, to find their own healing.

And then…the emails and messages slowed to a trickle…and the distractions faded…and I was left to process my processing…and I got really sad…and it just…stayed. But WHY? I mean, I had done this amazing thing, this thing I would have never thought possible a year ago. I had overcome so many fears, did what I set out to do, and created this beautiful work…so these feelings have felt out of place and their persistence in sticking around has thrown me a little bit.

So, as I do now, I talked with my therapist about it. I asked him about these feelings of loneliness, fear, and anxiety that I haven’t been able to shake since giving my talk.

He said, “These are your Guardians of the Threshold. These are the voices that tell you, ‘You have trespassed, Lisa. You have stepped out too far, and you need to come back to safety. You’ve become too free. You’ve said too much. You are too exposed, too vulnerable.’

We are the cartographers of our own lives. We create a map out of our life experiences, up to the boundaries of what we know, as a tool to guide us in the future. But when we go past what is knowable, past the boundaries we’ve previously set, the Guardians of the Threshold ring the alarms to retreat back.”

I’ve always called this a vulnerability hangover. The thing that happens after another layer of yourself is revealed, first to you, and then to others…others who hold the potential to reject you. When the deep truth that lives in your belly (something kept to yourself because you’re unsure what this truth may require of you once it lives outside your body), slips past your lips, and wide-eyed you fight the urge to cover your mouth.

And this is what happened to me. This is what was causing my unease and anxiety since my talk. I laid out my shit, to everyone. I exposed to my people, my tribe, my community, a lot of the things I’ve been scared to talk about, because I thought these were the things that made me different from everyone else. These were the stories that formed the little girl who thought that her particular brand of pain made her some type of misfit. For a loooong time these stories, and the pain and loss woven through them, were me…and there is still a part of me that is held captive to that little girl’s fears.

This is my continuing struggle, to free myself from her narrative; from her visceral compulsions and their decades-old muscle memory, from her survival-like pull to be taken care of because that little girl only knows of the time that she could not survive on her own.

These Guardians of the Threshold, these voices that tell me I’ve gone too far past what is safe, too far past what is acceptable to others, will keep those fears alive and thriving if I’m unaware of their intonation. If I’m running on auto-pilot, these guardians are perceived as little more than warning signs that impending failure, humiliation, and loss are ahead. From this view, all forward motion stops and my only option is to retreat back to safety, back to the familiar, back to everything that has brought me survival thus far.

But if I’m awake and have set my intention on shedding the layers of false self until I return home as a whole, healthy, and individual human, then these guardians become a part of my development and a sign of progress. Basically, they show up when I’m actually doing something, and that’s good!

To progress forward we must acknowledge that we’ve posted some ‘No Trespassing’ signs in our lives that are based on generations-worth of supposed-tos, and outdated fears that were created and reinforced by earlier versions of ourselves. If we want to move past these groundless boundaries, to come fully alive to who we are and unlock the freedom that accompanies a life lived grounded from a known self, we must be aware of these guardians. And more than that, these guardians must be met, not surrendered to. The fear must be acknowledged, invited in for coffee, and asked, “What are you here to teach me? What to do you require of me before I can pass? ”

The path isn’t a straight line; it’s a spiral. You continually come back to things you thought you understood and see deeper truths.  ― Barry H. Gillespie  (source: Instagram meme)

For me, at this time, I believe these guardians have required some grieving and letting go before I can pass this particular threshold. (I plan to write more about this next time.) It’s not the first time they have required this of me, nor will it be the last. It takes time and repetition to undo some of these fears and patterns.

An example:

My 9-year-old daughter has been learning to make her own breakfast (a baby step into stepping out as her own person). One morning she burned her finger badly on the toaster, and for the next weeks she conveniently wanted food for breakfast that didn’t require a toaster. (Her guardians were diligently at work, laying out her map, showing her where she had crossed a boundary and how she literally got burned for it.) But last week, I made her, for good or bad, use the toaster, because the idea that she would never use a toaster again is ridiculous, right? We took it slowly, talked through the lessons she learned when she hurt herself so she’d know how to do it better next time, and it was a success – no burnt fingers. BUT she’s still scared of the toaster. The next time she uses the toaster, we’ll go slow again, and again and again…until one day, she won’t be scared of the toaster…because it’s just a toaster.

So, this blog is me using the toaster again before I’m afraid of it forever. It’s me facing my guardians and refusing to retreat, refusing to lock down. It’s me, opening up, speaking it out loud…again…because I can’t be the only one.

Signing off, in solidarity with anyone who understood a lick of this…

Lisa