The invisible lines between the various parts of my life woke up blurry today. I am far from a master at it but I’ve done this tight-rope dance before. A few days back, after a vallant attempt to combat my tendancy for winter isolation, uncomfortable thoughts and emotions started to creep up on me. I could feel it, as I had counteless times before, first in the pit of my stomach.
Emotions that could be called “vulnerable” ones, such as sadness, anxiety or fear aren’t anyone’s favorite jam. Historically for me, they have been cause for the development of an emergency escape plan. Not only did everything in me scream “run,” when I felt pain, it was most important to get away before anyone saw me in a state of what I viewed as personal weakness. It felt much safer for me to retreat to the solitude of my own darkness, often not treating myself very kindly on said-“retreat.”
In the darkness of my own thoughts and emotions, no one can see me trembling from the inside. My stomach churns, my teeth grind and my head often aches as I take cover from the thoughts that take up space in my brain:
To do lists a mile long that have not been started, adolescent sons, missing brothers, ailing loved-ones, college credits, fear of failure, hope for the future-woah, I still have not begun that to-do list.
It is not long before I have crossed so many lines in my head that I am not sure where to begin with untangling them. When I try to picture the boundaries of these lines in my mind, they represent a ball of yarn that a kitten has had free access to until nap time. By that time, I drop down into “real-life” (the present) for a moment and realize I should probably be doing something productive (full-time college while parenting is no joke) but which priority in my web of worries do I attempt to tackle?
Damn, I feel like I’ve BEEN tackled at this point. My head aches from the teeth-grinding and my stomach doesn’t know if it is hungry or needs to purge. Alas, there is no time to worry about such trivial symptoms, I am STRONG and I have that to-do list bellowing at me to stop being so…vulnerable.
Professors sure do like to make you think. I know, that statement seems an over-simplified one. We must work our minds like a muscle to gain knowledge. It would stand to reason then, that any good instructors’ goal would be to stretch our minds to bounds they haven’t exceeded before. Recently, my already stretched to the max mind was thrown into overdrive by a seemingly simple question posed to me in a class I am taking for my Mental Health Degree. (Class name withheld, confidentiality) It was less of a question really and more of a thinking point. Our professor wanted us to start thinking about when we, personally, felt “safe” in our personal lives.
After pondering this question in my mind for several days, I began to consider that I may be over-thinking the concept. I’ve been guilty of lacking focus a time or two in my life, so I’ve learned some tricks about reigning myself back in. Researching is a skill I first learned from my mother that I have trained myself to fall back on when I am craving understanding or perspective. In this case, a search on the definition of the word “safety” seemed like a logical first step in getting on-track:
Safety: Relative freedom from danger, risk, or threat of harm, injury, or loss to personnel and/or property, whether caused deliberately or by accident. (www.businessdictionary.com)
Wait, what? Does anyone else feel like we danced around this definition a bit? Prior to reading the “official definition” of the word, I had attempted to envision what safety meant for me. My mind traveled to things that make me joyful. My first thought was of the beautiful flower gardens I had last summer. The moments our family spent soaking in the sun, taking in the different garden smells throughout the summer with the varying array of vibrant colors were my new definition of what “peace” felt like. They were our first flower gardens. We built nine of them and we were one-hundred percent hooked on gardening.
Photography by: Jen Cousins
I also knew that any moment spent in the gardens I loved so entirely were moments that potentially brought me closer than I ever wanted to be to one of my biggest fears. Snakes. In short, I do not like them. I respect their right to live and thrive, as is the case for me with all living beings. That said, I do not want to see snakes in my garden, on the television, on my Facebook feed or in a pet store. The fear a snake-sighting instills in me is one that presents itself as panic in my gut, tightness in my chest and a general terror that cannot be reasoned with.
I did have a couple of dreaded run-ins with a snake that took a liking to our gardens over the summer. It was nothing short of a miracle that the neighbors didn’t call law enforcement to report a violent attack the day Mr. Snake and I met up in the Lavender bush. Man did my foolish screaming terrify that poor thing. As it turns out, snakes move quickly AWAY from you when you scare the daylights out of them with screaming fit for a murder in progress. Last summer was the first time I was able to meet a snake on that level. They were at least as scared as I was, poor things. They can still be scared far, far away from me and my lavender. For fear of offending my english major friends, I’m going to do my best to be where the snakes ain’t.
Photograph by: Jen Cousins
I’ll likely scream loud enough for even the farthest neighbors to hear again this summer. (I really have tried to overcome this, guys,) What I know for sure is that we are looking forward to Spring time in the biggest way. We have already started to plan our gardens and I’m guessing Mr. Snake is looking forward to all that the warmer weather has to offer, too.
As I wrote about my fear of snakes, I felt my fear for them in my body. Even now, I can still feel a tightness in my chest and a slight lump in my throat. As I acknowledged my love for gardening and all the healing it brought to me in three short months, I felt a release in my heart and began to breathe easier.
Photo by: Jen Cousins
Safety is not a place, or a person or even a thing. Safety is both a state of being and is meant to be experienced in the small moments we consciously choose to acknowledge. Do we choose, in this moment, to take in the smell, the feel and the radiant colors of the garden? Or do we choose to fear the snake that may or may not appear and then disappear at any moment? Maybe in the end, the answer to the question of safety is about perspective within moments.
Up Off the Mat 