I’ve always wanted to work in museums. Curated collections defining the ways we make meaning of the material and spiritual realm. An inquisitive spirit forever in pursuit of understanding the why, I loved to look out of clear glass picture frame windows watching the animated art of life and the postured works stilted behind the glass guard of a museum case. Though, in museums, there was a felt distance as an observer without an intimate relationship to the archive. Connections felt similarly, like the rare works housed in these ivory towers, welcoming few and inaccessible to me.
The silence of galleries carried over into my connections; flattening the tense verbal chatter of conflicts and smoothing it into neutral tones and generic polite platitudes.
“You always…”
“You never…”
“How come we don’t ever…”
“I’m always the one to…”
I used to love to wax poetic on what wasn’t right, what didn’t work, and why I wasn’t pleased. A pre-mortem planner. Always prepared for never to come.
“I wish we could do that…”
Anxiety crept up my neck willing me to wade thorough the peace to dismantle the dam of expected disappointments. The pressure used to give me heart aches. Unconsciously springing my own leak kept the pressure manageable. I was bleeding indigo, a deeply blue watershed protecting myself. But indigo stains, for better or worse, leaving streaks on past loves, likes, and maybes.
Chronically somebody’s maybe, a pillar making shape of my prison without a floor. Not quite what they wanted but adequate enough for the moment. Their apathetic distance ground salt into the sores on my hands grasping for grip on the walls.
“Try harder.”
“Be more understanding.”
“Do better.”
Self critique is a skilled surgeon extracting personal accountability and growth. But as with repeated cosmetic procedures the eyes begin to develop a dysmorphic lens. The eyes beholding you become the truth teller, the authority on what it feels like to be in your body.
“If I had just said this differently…”
“I shouldn’t have said anything…”
“I’m too much…”
Criticism evolved to become my mother tongue with notes of veiled sarcasm. Turning toward looked like an emotional contortionist bending to fill the gaps of care, of compatibility. Resentment looked onward at these loves, likes, and maybes for they leaned into the sinkhole expanding across my back. I constructed a bridge for them, drilled into the dense earth of my spine so the weight of their needs wouldn’t collide with my internal pressure and consume us all into a blackhole.
Who was hurting who? According to the eyes beholding me, I was always misunderstanding, misinterpreting, and overreacting. I was too little and too much. I was shadowboxing with their reality then showering in their ambivalence to cleanse the threat of abandonment. Bowing my head in their rainfall made the emotional temperature shifts easier to endure. A poor student of mathematics but a creative problem solver I learned shrinking reduces the area mass. Condensing my vulnerable space coupled with a reduction in the rate of conflict accounted for a sum that mitigated the impact of the ambivalence rushing from their mouths…mostly. I unconsciously rationalized to prevent harm and to protect was to wrap my petals around my heart’s nectar as a flower does in the evening to the chagrin of nocturnal pests. I would let gravity call away the leaking indigo from the tip of my tongue and let it pool in my hands. I learned to stop bleeding on those who hadn’t hurt me but I had yet to learn to shunt the unraveling ribbons of crimson from the source.
“What is the deeper unmet need?”
“What is the wound they’re activating?”
“How do I self soothe?”
Curiosity disabled my anxious reactivity. It flooded my understanding with hues on a spectrum I couldn’t envision before. Illuminated by a new sun, my petals became translucent, their opacity yielding to new ways of being. Bouquets of spectral color brought diversity of perspective, gave the indigo oozing in my palms a new meaning. The scarlet liquid rolling along the hills of my knuckles from shadowboxing their ambivalence seemed less contentious now. These crimson loves, likes, and maybes meeting my indigo blues now cast the purple luminescence of wisdom. The lavender peonies tattooed on the side of my heart bloomed.
“Be curious.”
“Assume best intent…with discernment.”
“The chaos is being ordered without my intervention.”
Discerning nuance replaced catastrophizing distortions, either or beliefs, and relinquished agency. I had been in the observation tower and simultaneously the floor-less cells of my own panopticon curated by lived experience. Reorienting to the world outside, I learned to trust the earth was set, I was prepared to scramble its boulders, swim its seas, and stroll its expanses. The terrain would change but I was a capable curious wanderer. My loves, likes, and maybes rose and fell in my vision like the peaks of the Shenandoah mountain ridge. Though, my feet never left the ground as I trekked our connections to their natural ends and beginnings. The cultivated intuitive relationship to self was the soil that nurtured and purged what was and wasn’t for me. A steady curious love, it is.
“Name what you need.”
“Trust patterns.”
“Vulnerability is earned, not an entitlement.”
I arrived meeting myself with my own archives and praxis. I was moved to change by the lessons learned, gleaning new colors from my wavelengths of loves, likes and maybes. I often would have rather been seen through museum glass than risk the delicate integrity of the meanings I’d made of the world being exposed to the elements. Making apologies used to feel like betraying my resentments of self sacrifice.
And yet, curiosity killed the cat rooted in self abandonment and fear and the satisfaction of fulfillment brought life back. It was an ego death ritual, cycling until the lesson was learned.
cover image: on the other side of everything (2021) calida rawles