For years, I’ve been speaking to close friends about “moving to the next room.” My trepidation about leaving behind those that won’t come with me, my stagnating and returning to the smaller room, my dickering around in the doorway hoping and cajoling those I want to come with me. My fear that by moving into a new place I would be abandoning others, that I would be alone.
Strangely, I’m beginning to feel a bit of release from the strangle of those fears. I acknowledge there are people I’d like to DRAG, bloody and screaming, with me—I want them to come through so badly. Through the door, “into the next room,” which I have discovered opens into a blooming garden. I want them to see, to see it’s not so scary. But these are precisely the words that I myself need to hear, and believe. That it’s not so scary out there.
And that I’m not going to feel lonely.
Because, I don’t. I feel enlivened, actually. Curious and slightly unsure of what will happen (strike that! — entirely unsure what will happen!), but it isn’t enough right now to turn me back to the small place.
I’ve been reflecting, too, on my recent break-up. How when I think I’ve hit the floor of my grief, a trap door opens to slam me one floor lower. When I consider returning to it, I slam down again onto the hard reality beneath: that I tried so f*cking hard to make it right, to make it fit. And each time these hopes, these ruminations arise in me, I am hurled again like clay onto a wheel, slammed, remolded, returned. “No, Molly,” it echoes. “No.”
Ouch.
I’ve also noticed that in the last week alone, my door for new potential partners is apparently wide the f* open, because it’s letting in all kinds of wow-totally-and-completely-not-right people. So, clearly the door is open for someone new but I could use some massive refinement of my “Law of Attraction”!
I know that the ultimate doorway here is the one into the next room, out into that garden, where I will be leaving behind the relationship that hurts so much to make right and the people who are incompatible in so very many ways.
Because what I’m coming to understand is that I must close the door behind me. And this is something I’ve been avoiding for as many years as I’ve talked about said door. I’ve left the door wide open so that I could come back in to the small place and see if my loved ones want to come with me. I’ve left it open so that I could grovel and beg and tear the arm off in my pulling of them to come with me.
I’ve not wanted to leave them. And, importantly, I’ve been afraid that without them I’ll be alone in the new place, or at least (as is on my mind!) like a new middle-schooler arriving to class and wondering who, who among you will be my friend? Who among you will be my peer? Or be my friend-guide just that step ahead of me, pulling me along into the new world?
As I stand on the threshold of this new place all nervous and twisty-handed, just beyond the reach of my smaller self, the bigger part of me knows I must first imperatively reach behind and pull closed the door of underbeing.
The unseen makers of the laughter that I hear and the bathing, liquid scent of magnolias in the new world before me will have to be enough of a sticking place to which I affix my courage until I find another hand to hold.
Damnit. Deep breath. Here goes. …
Owning Voice 