It's funny how only a handful of words can immensely impact us once they are spoken.
Today, I was sitting in a dark theater with a bucket full of buttery popcorn in my lap, when a little girl on the screen dropped a truth bomb that rattled me to my core.
I was watching the movie Joy, starring the impeccable Jennifer Lawrence.
In the film, the main character is revisited by her child self in a dream. This young version of Joy looked into present day Joy's eyes with a pensive stare. As she spoke the words to her future self, I felt that she was also speaking them directly to me. She said, "When you hide from the world, you are safe...but the thing is, when you are hiding from the world, you are also hiding from yourself."
After hearing those words spoken aloud, I couldn't stop thinking about them and replaying them over and over in my mind.
I consider myself a bit of an expert on the topic of hiding away, because I did it for my entire life. When I was a kid, I was chronically shy to the point of not talking to anyone in my preschool class, even the teachers, for an entire year. The first day that I actually did speak to someone, the school called my mom in a state of excitement and celebration. My shyness ebbed slightly the older that I got, but I was always the person who had to have someone else initiate the conversation to engage in one at all.
Then, after a series of unfortunate events, I began to hide away in a different sense - one that was more physical. I was living in an unhealthy household for 10 years which caused me to withdraw into myself. I also acquired a back injury about 4 years ago that caused me to quit my job, and kept me from being able to stand for longer than a minute or two. I was carted around in a wheelchair for a while, and, as ashamed as I am to admit this, it humiliated me. I stopped wanting to go places. I didn't want to see my friends. I stayed home and lost myself in books and TV shows. For a long time, I told myself I was perfectly content, and maybe I really thought I was. Like the words that resonated with me so deeply today, I was hiding, and I was safe.
Things started to look up for me around September of this year. I moved to a new place with a totally healthy and healing environment, the toxic people that surrounded me were removed from my life, and I got to start anew. I came out of my hiding place. And when I did, I started to discover myself again, not even realizing that I had been hiding from myself all of this time.
So much has changed for the better in the past few months, and I have reached a point where I no longer want to hide from myself or the world. I want to live again.
Hiding is easy, yet so unfulfilling. In those moments of hiding away, we may think that we are content, but in reality we are stifling our true selves. We end up becoming some watered-down version of who we are truly meant to be. We think "I'm fine where I'm at. I'm comfortable, what's wrong with that?!" In fact, I told myself that so many times that it became my mantra.
Now, though, I know that if you are comfortable and have no plans to move forward, or "level up", you are stunting your success and your ability to gain more from life than you ever have before. It may feel cozy in that comfort zone of yours, but I can guarantee that it feels so much better when you step out and give yourself room to truly breathe and stretch out your tired limbs. There is no feeling like doing something that you have always told yourself you couldn't do. Is it still terrifying? Of course! The difference is that instead of seeing moving up as some impossible challenge, we should look at it as an exciting opportunity.
I want to stop fearing the unknown, and instead welcome it with open arms and an open heart.
I've hidden from my problems, from people, from life itself, for too long now. I'm deciding to emerge from my hiding place that has tried to swallow me whole. I am walking out of the fog and into the blinding rays of hope that fall outside of those walls I have spent so long building.
I plan to take life one step at a time and move forward into the unknown, yet exhilarating and wondrous future.
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