On Walls You Put Up

“But these high walls, they came up short.

Now I stand taller than them all.

These high walls never broke my soul.

And I, watched them all come falling down for you, falling down for you.”

— Louis Tomlinson.

I feel like the whole of my twenties has been about me trying to break down the walls I built up through the first twenty years of my life.

I wasn’t a kid who was good at stepping out of the shadows. When the curtain went up, I was the one shrinking away into the darkness of the corner.

As a teen, growing up and trying to grow into myself, I didn’t get much better. I was still the girl who shied away, hid herself, would never raise her volume or speak her mind, and I hated being that girl, every day of my life.

Somewhere along the way, I got a little better. I started to come out of the shadows, began raising the volume, started speaking my words and my mind out loud no matter how much my voice shook.

The issue with building your walls so high, over the course of twenty years though, is that they become so high you can’t tear them back down again, not easily.

I built my walls high enough that the words outside couldn’t hurt me, and I’ve been spending the past well, ten years — since I was eighteen and growing into the person I was going to be for the rest of my life, independent of the ghosts from my past — trying to knock them down.

I don’t trust easily. I don’t let people in. I guess you could say I’m a commitment-phobe, but it’s more like I’m afraid. I’m afraid of letting people in to an already broken heart — no one else broke it, I did, by spending too much of my life pretending and trying to be different girls because I was too god damn scared of being this one. I was scared no one would like this one, so I never gave her a chance, and I guess no one did before but I let her believe that no one ever would.

I let the ghosts in too far. The ghosts of words left unspoken and people I couldn’t hold onto. The ghosts of versions of me I kept trying to be. The ghosts that still lurk deep in the shadows of who I am.

Maybe someday those ghosts will be gone for good, or maybe they’re part of us forever. To remind us that who we were is not who we will be.

Maybe someday I’ll knock down the walls for good. I hope so. Even if that’s brick by brick.