Being Bold

When the world you inhabit as a child feels unsafe because you never know on what day which emotions are going to strike the wrong chord and the reaction could be a crushing blow – not always physical – usually verbal or emotional – to your wellbeing, you build a wall of self-protection. Not a physical wall, one that is internal and only you know is there. You build it slowly, adding one brick at a time with each hurt, until all that is visible is what you can see if you look up. It’s more than a coat of armor; it is a fortress built to insulate your heart.

You learn that when you are vulnerable and you allow yourself to let that wall down, even just a few bricks because you think, you hope, you pray and you want desperately to believe that enough time has passed and surely, you can come out of hiding, it is never really safe. Because the one that has been your tormentor has been lying in wait for you to re-emerge. And once eye contact has been made you know you were safer with that wall of bricks around you.

Years later you understand that the wall still exists. Oh, you have knocked out some of the bricks so that you can see out but no one has ever really been able to see inside the fortress, to see inside your deepest soul. Until the day you realize that the tormentor has been gone for a very long time and you have yet to meet anyone else like him whose sole reason for being was to keep you small. And you realize that you kept yourself small because you had never learned to or been able to believe in yourself.  You had never stood up and said “I’m here and I have value and I am worthy” for fear that you would be ignored or worse, rejected.

And only recently did you begin to kick down the rest of the bricks and step forward from the fortress that was now just rubble and broken bricks. You threw handfuls of them in a show of victory, and just to be sure they were far enough away that you couldn’t begin to put them back in place. You let the sunlight warm your face and your soul. You felt empowered.

And you learned that vulnerability is not a weakness but can be your strength because you’ve decided to be bold, to stand tall and to assume all the space you deserve in the world. You realized that the possibility of being hurt still exists without that wall of defense but it’s worth taking the chance. You know that you can trust your heart and your intuition in that vulnerability and that you were never small, that you are worthy, and that the only path forward is to walk past the wreckage of the fortress you’ve left behind.