Don't box me in.

These are the days when I feel like I don’t need therapy, I don’t need this blog, I don’t need any advice on finding myself because I have found myself. It is the kind of day where I know I am multi-faceted and hard to define and someone who cannot be summed up in a single sentence and I’m fine with that. After all, the people I love in my life cannot be defined in a single sentence. I can try: Chairman – generous, charming, funny, sweet, talented, gifted – but that doesn’t really describe the person who is Chairman; Monica – silly, twisted, dark yet not, smart, funny, clever – but that doesn’t get to the soul of Monica. I could go on but you get it.

The times I struggle the most and am the most depressed are the times I feel like I have to fit myself into a box. Not just a box but a box whose size I don’t know, whose shape I don’t know, that is too small and too cramped and too limiting to actually cram myself in there. Most of the time, the box is created by someone else and I figure I have to stuff myself into it to be loved by them. Sometimes, it’s a box I create myself with that person’s name on it, maybe figuring I’ll mail myself to them when I finally manage to cram myself into it, I don’t know. Sometimes it’s the size of a shoebox, sometimes it’s a refrigerator carton. Doesn’t matter, the box is still too small.

It may come from never having that box defined when I was younger. Being the youngest in the family of over-achievers, there were no restrictions put on me, no definitions put on me, which seems like it’s amazing. But it’s crippling because there never seemed to be any real value to what I was doing because no one was invested enough in it to make me feel that it was as exceptional as what my other siblings were doing. Everything was “fine” so I went through most of my life being “fine.” Nothing bad, nothing good, just “fine.”

So when I met my first husband and married him, I tried to figure out what box that meant I should put myself in. He wanted to be a chef and run an elegant restaurant and be the host with me at his side. That sounded great. He’d run the place, I’d be at his side, beaming like the trophy wife I think I expected to be. I’d be Mrs. TSS and that was “fine.” Maybe eventually I’d have my own dance studio because I loved dancing and teaching and I was very good at it. But, in my head, I was just “fine.” I’d be better putting myself into the role of Mrs. TSS and making sure he excelled. That was the box I gave myself. But he escaped out of his own box before I could even see what size mine was and maybe that was a good thing.

I got trapped in a very tiny box at the end of my second marriage. It started out quite huge and seemed to be a box that fit. Mrs. RMJ. That was me. We were a team, if one of us succeeded, the other one would. I think maybe we stuffed both of ourselves into the same box and then ran out of air. I fought to break the top off the box and see what was outside, he wanted to duct tape the box closed with both of us inside. It took me a long time but I broke through that top and found myself falling a very long way to the table outside of that box.

I constantly want to be what you want me to be. And yet, confining myself makes me lose myself. The more I am free to explore and escape and climb and search and tunnel and swing and dig, the more I am me. Some people are comfortable in that box, some people crave that box. Some people aren’t even aware they’re in a box yet I can see it surrounding them, even though they can’t. Those are the ones I want to tear the top off of their boxes and reach down and pull them out. But I digress. I can only deal with my own box, not yours. Sorry if you’re stuck, you gotta want to get out before I can help.

The hardest thing is avoiding climbing into that box. I want to do it because it makes it easier sometimes. I think, “If I’m this, then this is what will happen.” And it doesn’t. Then I’m angry and depressed and frustrated because then I don’t know what box I should be in.

Some of us defy boxes. Some of us cannot be confined in such a finite way. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be happy if you’ve found a box that fits and is comfortable and you can do laps in. Those are good boxes. But some of us just want to float free and avoid being sealed in. We are too big for boxes, we are too restless to be locked in, we are too big to put a top on. You’ve got to let us be free. I have to let myself be free.

It sounds easy. Just be. Be who you are. Be what you are. But without letting myself accept that I cannot be one thing, I can never just be. Until I can feel like this every day, where I know my need to be unfettered is not flakiness but what makes me stable, my avoidance of boxes is not an aberration but an embracing of my nature, my complexity is the truth and simplicity can come from it, until I can feel like that always, just being is impossible.

So for today, I’ll just be. I’ll be complex. I’ll be artistic. I’ll be a teacher and a director and a writer and a woman and a girl and a dame and a producer and a daughter and a divorcee (twice over) and a glamour girl and a tom boy and a difficult woman and a nurturing woman and a… you fill in the blanks because I’m done trying to.