I have a wall inside of me that I think is made of concrete. It has taken me 17 years to recognize it, 18 to acknowledge it, and 19 to write it all down in a Voices article for The News-Letter.
This metaphor is not original, nor is it completely specific to me, either. I think there are little walls inside all of us. Some are made of straw. Some of sticks. Some of bricks laid so carefully that, no matter how hard you blow, they still stand, stubborn and resolute. I think mine is made of concrete. But maybe I have never checked, never tried hard enough to knock it down.
Bear with me as I try to explain the wall. It is my first time attempting to write about it.
“Vulnerability” is not a positive word to me. It feels much too raw, too visible for it to ever be anything other than uncomfortable. In some ways it is beautiful, but, to me, it is disconcerting, and picturing myself in its shoes does not produce a very pretty mental image. I do not think those shoes would fit. Thus, I leave vulnerability’s empty shoes to the Cinderellas of the world, to anyone brave enough to try them on.
The wall is not vulnerability — it is the fear that jumps up whenever vulnerability appears. It steps in when vulnerability tries to drape its coat around my shoulders and fit me into its pretty, open-toed shoes. The wall is not the consolation that I do not have to try them on; it does not comfort me when I wonder what might have happened if I let vulnerability in just this once. Instead, it is the fear that the shoes will not fit, that when I finally wear vulnerability’s clothes with pride, they will not look good on me.
The wall and I coexisted for a while without much regard for each other. I noticed it for the first time in my sophomore year of high school, and, even then, I only saw it when one of my friends pointed it out to me in conversation. I do not remember the moment or the context when the wall was brought to my attention, but I do remember the questions. Something along the lines of, what about you? What makes you insecure? What do you stress about?
Subtle, I know, but they had a point. They shared what made them insecure, what made them angry, why they had a problem with this girl because she was rude or that guy because he annoyed them. So, what about me? I tried to respond properly. I told them about abstract things: my academic stress, the guy who didn’t do his work in my lab group. I told them about my music taste and even my political opinions. But there was — always — something walling off the real answers. My ability to express myself in the personal realm, on topics that were not detached or uncontroversial, was limited. Maybe it was then that I realized it always had been.
I have not yet learned to transcend this wall. It pops up in college when I grow close enough with people to talk about more personal things than just school and majors, and sometimes it becomes visible not just to me but to the people around me, too. Sometimes they ask me questions about myself, and sometimes I tell them things, and then I stop because to share too much is to be vulnerable.
But, I believe that writing about the wall, acknowledging its presence and learning to consciously find those little footholds in its otherwise impenetrable surface are the first steps to crossing it entirely. That, if I acknowledge the beauty of vulnerability’s open-toed shoes, maybe one day I’ll be brave enough to try them on even if they don’t fit like I want them to.
I have already made progress. It took me two years, but I finally learned to say “I love you” to my best friends and to hug them goodbye. Another year until I started telling bits of lore about myself that I would typically be too self-conscious to share. I’ve made it this far already. And, if these are the footholds, the wall might not be so insurmountable after all.
Lana Swindle is a sophomore from Princeton, N.J. majoring in Writing Seminars. She’s a News and Features Editor for The News-Letter. Her column views her everyday experiences from a different perspective.
