Making Room - Part 2: The Cage

Part 2 of the “Making Room” series. If you missed the first post, you can read it here: Making Room - Part 1: The House & The Ghosts

I didn’t know how to fully exist in that marriage.

Some days I made myself smaller.
Other days my emotions filled every room.

But if I am honest, I learned to shrink myself at an early age. I’ve never felt lovable exactly the way that I am.

When I was young…
I was too much of a picky eater for people to love me.
I was too high strung.
Even my existence was too much for my brother.

The message in my teenage years was:
“You’re too ugly.”
“You’re too fat.”

Again, I was too much and not enough.

In adulthood, the message became about stomach issues and anxiety.
They are too much for anyone to deal with.
Too inconvenient.
Too much of a downer.

It is why I hide away in my house.
I hide my heart.
I hide the parts of myself that feel hardest to love.

Because for so long I believed if people saw those things, they would leave.

The message I carried out of my divorce was that it costs too much to love me.

No matter how hard I tried. No matter how many loads of laundry I did, or how many times I said, “I love you,” or how many times we were intimate, I started to hear internally that I was too much.

And in all the tiny disappointments of ordinary life — the wrong hamburger meat, the lack of energy, and wanting to Netflix and chill most nights instead of always doing something — I also heard in my heart that I wasn’t enough.

And this pattern - that internal dialog - trickles into everything that I do, honestly.

Corporate America loves an overachiever who believes nothing she does is ever enough.

I stayed in a job for ten years doing a lot of work that was never really mine to carry.
I organized a train wreck and turned it into a machine.

I gave it everything.
Nights.
Weekends.
On-call hours.
Nine months out of the year.

And instead of letting me grow, they kept me there.

Not because I couldn’t do more.

Because I could.

They kept me there because I was useful in the cage. And after a while, I started to believe the cage was where I belonged.

Then one day…an extremely disruptive, terribly executed, re-organization brought me an unwanted but unexpected gift: a new boss.

She saw me with different eyes and asked the question no one else had asked:

“Why are you still doing this?”

“Because you can do so much more.”

That boss? She let me fly.

And it felt like freedom.
Like breath.
Like running without limits.

I’ve moved on from that job, but that reason is why I love what I do now.

I get to fly.
I get to do what I was made to do:
organize chaos and get shit done.

As for me?
I’m learning that I’m not too much.
I’m learning I am enough.
I’m learning that the spaces I was trying to fit into were just too small.

Excerpts from journal entries, February 2019