I’ve lived in this box for twenty-four years.
It’s constricting and small and suffocating. It’s also safe.
It’s hard to know if someone else put me here or if I put me
here. These walls that contain the
“quiet girl,” the “shy girl,” the “Harry Potter girl, the “weird girl.” Did I put myself in the weird box? Or did I just become resigned to the
label. I took the walls they put around
me and I reinforced them. I covered them
with posters and t-shirts that would scream loud enough so that I didn’t have
to. So I could stay quiet and weird and
shut out the world beyond them.
Whether it was them or me who put me here, I have stayed in
the box. I stayed because I thought if I
was those things – if I was weird and nerdy and quiet, maybe that meant I was
boring and unworthy of anyone else’s attention.
Maybe all I ever could be were the words they used to define me. So I took the words and I owned them.
But you can’t own something that’s not yours. You can’t live in a box made of words that
don’t define you. It can’t hold
you. Fat, nerd, quiet, killjoy, straight. They’re labels that don’t quite fit. They don’t quite cover who I am. I’ve peeked outside the box recently and it’s
brighter out there. It’s open. There’s nothing pinning me down outside the
box.
But still. Leaving
the box is hard.
I love this place.
I’ve been here forever. Not all
the time in the box has been bad. Those
words that bind the bricks of this box might not wholly make up the mess that
is me, but they’ve been parts of me. I’ve
worn these words on my person long enough they’ve started to tattoo themselves
into my skin. Sometimes they are a mark
of beauty, a reminder of the past. Other
times they are scars – failures and reminders of the time I spent lying to myself. I love and hate these marks the way I love
and hate my box. The way I love and hate
myself.
But the hate is starting to fade now. I know this because at least now I know there
is a box. Before it was just my place in
life. It was the place I thought I had
to stay because that was where the world had pegged me. The box was my only world. But now I know that there’s more. And I know that I deserve what more lies
beyond the box.
I deserve to be happy.
To be with people. To laugh with
them loudly and without care. To say
what I think and not hold back for fear of being disliked. I deserve these things because I cannot be
boxed. My being is too bright, my facets
too many to be contained. I am many
things. I am sister, daughter, friend,
geek, introvert. But those are not the
only things that I am. Maybe I do have
at least a foot stuck in the weird box.
I may very well be a weirdo. But
even weirdos deserve to live.
And life
happens outside the box.
I might miss you, box, but I promise that I won’t come
back. My soul needs freedom from your
confines. It needs to explore and find
love and happiness. I will take some of
the things I’ve tacked to your walls. I
will carry them with me, not like they are something heavy, but like they are a
souvenir from a trip taken long ago. The
memories will follow me. They will thunk
in my pocket like a coin and jangle against the me of now, reminding me that
they exist. But they won’t take hold of
me again. They will no longer be my
prison. They will just be a part of
me. A part of me that shrinks as I exit
the box and expand and grow into the me I am meant to be.
