you can't become who you're meant to be while carrying every version of yourself you've ever been

it's time to let stuff go

I am thirty one years old and I step foot into my first ever dance class. I am terrified and inexperienced and surely completely out of my mind. I spend 90 minutes fighting back tears, then I do it all again the next week and the next. Somehow, I keep showing up. My desire to improve is miraculously stronger than my fear of being seen trying. Eventually I stop wanting to cry and I just dance.

I am fifteen years old in the theater hallway at my high school, walking away from an audition for a role I decide I’m not good enough to get. A friend stops me to say, “If you leave now, you won’t see your name on the list tomorrow. If you come back inside, you might.” I go back, get the part, and begin to understand the simple truth that you cannot go down paths if you don’t first walk through the doors that lead to them.

I am eight years old and I am sitting at the dinner table with my family. I am quick and expressive and untamed and this energy spills out of my arms, accidentally knocking over my glass of milk for probably the third time this week. I am sternly warned, again, not to be so careless. Instead, I decide it is safer to become invisible. I begin the lifelong practice of taking up less space.

I am two years old, sitting in timeout under a bench at my preschool after being scolded for a simple misunderstanding. I pinched the cheeks of a boy I thought was cute. My first memory, etched permanently onto the skeleton of my mind. A reminder that love expressed is not always well-received.

I carry my past around like Russian dolls. Each version of myself stacked neatly inside the next. Every year on my birthday, I pick out a bigger casing to stuff myself into. A little bit taller, a little bit wider. Spacious enough to fit all the versions that came before. Tight enough to point out the spots where I might need to grow.

The deeper you travel inside the shells of years past, the further you get from reality. But also, the closer you get to the lessons that are so deeply ingrained into the fabric of my psyche. The ones that shaped how I moved through the world long before I realized I had a choice.

I decide to line up all the dolls on my windowsill. Each one taking up its own space, no longer stuffed away like a ratty old sweatshirt in the back of my closet. I honor the stories they each carry. The joy and the pain and the wisdom and the ways in which they taught themselves to survive.

“She did her best with what she knew,” I say as I hold each doll up to the moonlight and consider which lessons I want to hold onto and which I’m ready to let go.

I get to the last doll, the biggest one. I look her in the eyes and see the weight she’s been carrying for so long. I begin to understand why my systems have been crumbling to the floor around me. She’s been trying to hold us together amidst a million different conflicting identities. Decisions negotiated through outdated rules. Desires filtered through who I learned to be instead of who I am.

I am thirty two years old and I am alone in my favorite chair. I sit quietly with the stars and the moon and every version of myself I’ve ever known. I let the silence settle into place around me as I realize I cannot grow inside a structure designed to keep me small. I place the dolls in a box of donations and decide I don’t need to keep carrying every identity I’ve ever worn in order to be real.

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