PSA: This is going to be a two part blog since it is so long. I have really been debating on posting this manily due to the fact that a lot of what you read is not something that I have talked about with anyone. I kinda was living a double life but very few people knew about it. I wanted to be this person that everyone wanted me to be. This is a real and raw blog that scares me to share but I have really been learning all about vulnerability and being more open even with people I may not really talk with.
Lead Me Where I Go
Shoes have been a big part of my life for the past 3 months. Why? Well let me take you back to Guatemala Month 1. It was dinner time and I was sitting outside on the soccer field with Connaly having my one on one. I got asked a question about something and I thought about it a little and I instantly thought of my shoes back at home that I missed. Ever since that day I have always used shoes as a metaphor for my life. There are four pairs of shoes that are used. I have my pumas, timberlands, white vans, and chacos. They all represent something different for me. Two of them are shoes I need to get rid of and the other two are shoes I need to embrace more.
The pumas and timberlands are the shoes that I need to get rid of. They both represent something that isn’t good for me. The pumas are the shoes that I use to please others. And the timberlands are the protection I use.
The pumas have always been a big part of my life for as long as I can remember I can’t say no easily to others or I will say no but then I will end up saying yes to them later. For example, when I was working at my job I would have people ask me to come in early or ask me to cover for them. I would most likely say “yes” to them even if I had plans I would say yes and then cancel whatever plans I had that day. If I was asked to come in early I would always be going back and forth on it and more times than not I would go in early, but if I did go in early I would be getting paid like $10-20 to come in early by the person who asked. Which now that I look back on it, I have always been like this but it wasn’t something that people would notice about me. I would only really do this with my friends or people at work or school. This was never something that I would do with my family.
The timberlands are the shoes that I have used for protection. Ever since I was 12-13 years old I have started to build walls around myself to protect myself from getting hurt or feeling the pain of people leaving. I have had the fear that someone would leave or die ever since then. After someone who is close to me tried to commit suicide I started to build walls up around myself since I didn’t want to feel the pain of possibly losing them again. I didn’t realize how much that night had really affected me until I came on the race and a lot of things pointed back to that night. I had always thought that I didn’t have the right to feel these things because it wasn’t my story to tell. I have gone through a lot of pain after that. I have seen death a few too many times in my life. Freshman year my math teacher died while riding his bike to school he got hit by a car. Sophomore year I lost my grandma. Then this last year one of my great aunt’s died, that didn’t affect me too much since I wasn’t as close to her.
And then after I graduated I lost pretty much all of my friends. I had 3 friends from high school and then I had my work friends who I will honestly say aren’t the best people but I still put myself in that situation. I did some things that I am not the proudest about but I was doing all of those to take the pain away of having no friends. I was juuling whenever I was at work, driving around, and before bed and when I woke up. While I was also at work I would occasionally smoke weed. Which is most defiantly not my proudest moment. I thought that if I did all of these things I would be able to take away the pain that I didn’t want to feel, but in the end it didn’t take any of that pain away. It just made it easier to cope with the pain.
