She said to me, “I saw you in the corner, hiding behind the sofa, covered in the blankets.”
Camouflaged. Removed.
She said to me, “I know you are making yourself smaller. I know you don’t see yourself the way I do.” She said to me, “But I saw you, despite the hiding and the covering and the removing of yourself. I saw you.”
I wondered how she had known and she told me that despite my attempts that I was glowing, radiant, colorful. Beams of light bouncing off the corner, where the walls meet. There was no disguising despite my greatest efforts. She told me she was here to remind me that there is no sense in making myself small because I am anything but that. That others see it, why don’t I?
And I listened because I knew it was what I needed to hear. I knew that, for long enough, I had created a story in my head that I was one thing. That, at some point, one thing had protected me all those years ago and I had not bothered to change. But like a body that grows and no longer fits the clothes in the closet, I have grown out of my childhood protections and self doubts but they wished to fit a bit longer. Too snug and too tight. And I allowed it. Suffocating in it.
She said to me “That is no longer necessary.”
So I pulled off the layer of blankets. The warmth removed, the security taken away. I felt the cold hit me. The sudden discomfort urging me back to the blankets. But instead, I sat next to her on the sofa. She held my hand and told me I was lovely. That I have always been lovely. That my heart is big and my love is bigger. That I am exactly who I am meant to be at that moment and at all the moments beyond. I will be who I am meant to be, in the grandest and beautifulest of ways. She reminded me that my voice is as big as my heart. That the depth of me is the sea. That I am everything and all things and that I should never make myself big and never bury myself in the corner, behind the couch, under a pile of blankets ever, ever again.
