Stephanie Says (Leaking her heart on paper)

Dragging along anchors (Part 1).

It is so hard to give a voice to the unresolved things that are currently weighing heavy on my mind, but leaving things unexplored doesn’t make them go away. I think everyone has experienced the feeling of something weighing heavy on our minds. It is a dark cloud right behind our eyes that taints all of the joy in our lives. It is like having an anchor strapped to our ankle, making it difficult to move forward but all the while pretending like it doesn’t exist. Maybe the longer you let it sit there, the harder it is to overcome it. It begins to sink into the ground, grow rusty; the band around our ankle leaves bruises and scars but all the while ignoring the injuries and the burden. I think this is especially true in the context of having your heart broken and not having the first clue how to put it back together again. Instead of trying, we ignore the weight of our burdens. We ignore it so long, that we forget the extra weight even exists anymore and just accept it as part of ourselves. 

The thing about anchors is that not only do they slow us down, but it is also more easily to get pulled under the water. We are so close to the darkness of the depths of the seas. With fresh wounds it is easier to get injured again. If we are holding on to anchors, then it is not fair to ask someone else to come into our life, they don’t know what they are taking on, and you are so out of touch with yourself, you don’t know either.

As we drag it along, it accumulates layer after layer of failed relationships and emotional connections. We ask ourselves why do our relationships keep failing, without ever taking a look at where the brokenness started from. Until something happens and we can no longer ignore it. The moment when we stop ignoring it usually happens when our current relationship is at a breaking point, hanging by a thread. It is the “now or never” moment, the “do or die”, the “fork in the road.” You either take that step towards commitment, or a promise or whatever movement in love needs to be made at the moment of your relationship, or you don’t. Then you realize, you can’t take that step, because you are still holding on to an anchor that has finally sunk far enough into the earth, that it won’t let you move forward with someone else.

Then there’s comes a choice. Do you walk away from the relationship in order to “find yourself” or your brokenness, maybe with the hopes of repairing that relationship down the line? (This will all make sense after reading this post on brokenness). Or do you stick it out with that person, trying to explain to them why you aren’t ready to make that commitment, totally blindsiding both of you. All the while dragging them through all the turmoil you are going to endure as you follow the trail left behind by the anchor, backwards through the months and months you have been carrying that pain in your heart, potentially destroying the relationship anyways. And the longer we ignore the anchor, the things weighing heavily on our minds, the harder it is to find where the anchor came from to begin with. We have to retrace the steps in the past visiting every painful, confusing moment to find which one still has a hold on us. And who really wants to do that? However, the alternative is to give up on relationships, convincing yourself they are doomed to fail and that your heart was somehow manufactured wrong.

If you end up in this situation, where you discovered you are carrying around some past hurts (or simply put, you aren’t over your ex) while you are currently in a loving, worthy relationship, then unfortunately, I don’t know what to tell you to do. I only know that after doing it over and over again, dragging along anchors, ignoring what was hurting, that I didn’t want to do that again. So in my next post, I’ll tell you about how I did the opposite and how well that worked for me (or didn’t). And in the following post, I’ll tell you how I repeated my mistakes anyways.