On their blog, adrienne maree brown (amb) writes of the importance of articulating what we want and do not want in our interactions with other humans:
When you feel something come up that you want to say but you’re scared to say, you’re on the precipice between the lie of omission and the bravery of honesty. You want what’s on the other side of that precipice. Say what you want, so you’ll either get it, or know you can’t get it in this connection.
It’s About Your Game (Flirting to Find Your Authentic Self), adrienne maree brown
That precipice teeters on the walls we have been building since the moment we were born. We experienced things we didn’t feel comfortable with or were downright traumatized by. And so we built walls to protect ourselves from those threats in the future. The trouble is, friends, that these walls do not selectively prevent the bad times from reoccurring and let the good times roll. They obstruct all novelty, all change, and all risk. This is a devastating price to pay for the sake of protecting yourself. This wall is the precipice between the certainty of a steady discontentment, or the uncertainty of love and loss, play and solemnity, connection and rejection. We must choose the winding path of uncertainty, because for every teardrop of heartbreak it threatens is an ocean of life worth living, turbulent may it be. As Louise Erdrich expressed so beautifully:
“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and being alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You have to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes too near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.”
Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum
My walls are defensiveness of my views, fear of words that I may perceive as rejection, fear of transitions that may incite grief and fear of the heat of anger in others. As to your walls, only you can know that. Friends, loves, strangers, I want to clamber over my walls, and stand by yours hollering, until you clamber over yours and run towards that turbulent ocean with me.
Let’s go to the beach?
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