Inner Walls

Inner Walls separate us.
I am surprised at my ability to build them - but I find them carefully constructed within myself.  Walls that have been constructed around almost every portion of my life.  They have not grown up naturally.  Neither were they (ultimately) put in place by anyone else other than myself.

Why do I build them?

Up to recently I would have responded that the reason I build them is to protect myself from other people, to defend against the vagaries of the moods of others (to be generous and a friend is to learn what to overlook and what to pay attention to) or the very really hurt that others sometimes can cause.  And maybe that is true in some senses and possibly for others.  But I do not think that is the real reason.

It it to protect others from myself?   Walls can not only keep things out, they can keep things in. But again, except for perhaps things I can keep of, there is not a conscious effort to protect others from me.  And so again I do not think this is the real reason.

I think I build them to protect myself from myself.

Why do I need to protect myself from myself?  It is not to protect me from myself per se that I do it - rather that I seek to protect myself from revealing something to others what will return the results that I do not want.

We have all been in the situation that someone exposed more than they intended to in an unguarded or truly honest moment - and the response was not what they had anticipated at all.  They perhaps thought to make a deeper connection or find a true moment of honesty or even simply be real.  More often than not, the response is hardly that: shuffling of feet, looking away, even a rejection of what was offered.

And so people (really me) learn to build walls around themselves.  They know the limits of these walls:  their height, their breadth, their construction, their appearance.  They know what they can and cannot safely do from these walls and how far to open the gates to allow access by others or to go out through them.  But even those gates are very carefully guarded lest in a moment of abandon what is behind the wall rushes out into the action at hand - with unexpected or unwanted results and reactions.

And the walls go higher and higher - in ourselves and thus between ourselves and others - until we find ourselves shouting across canyons of walls, the distances and the echoes obscuring the original message of what we wanted to say.  There is a danger of course, the danger that our walls will become so high and thick that we will never be able to tear them down and let what is out in.  It is a risk - but always measured against the risk of the reaction we did not want.

But Inner Walls ultimately trap us - they do not set us free but rather isolate us from all around us. And so we must learn to love the openness of relationship, even when it is painful and we are misunderstood and rejected and reacted to poorly, than we do the cool smooth protection of our walls.