Most indoor plants are like sad astronauts. They sit in pods to survive in an uninhabitable environment. Chronically starved of sunlight, they stretch toward windows, twisting unnaturally, reaching for what they need most. They grow pale, thin, and gangly. Weak stems, underdeveloped leaves.
Poor creepy little things.
There’s a word for this. It’s called etiolation when plants grow without enough light. They reach for what they can’t grasp and disfigure themselves in the process.
That’s how relationships work for many of us. We’re shaped (and sometimes malformed) by our earliest attempts to connect. The kid who was rejected becomes withdrawn and hypersensitive to criticism. Another touched by reckless hands winces at tenderness. The abandoned become clingy or pathologically independent. We become people-pleasers, control freaks, shy, aggressive, reserved, erratic. We reach for what we lack, distorting ourselves in the process. Etiolated humans bent to their breaking point. Hiding vulnerabilities, repeating patterns that don’t work, undercutting the connection we crave.
So let’s step outside, where the sun’s shining.
Look back through the windows. See the sad astronauts still trapped inside? They’re vulnerable, and that’s why they need to come out here. Some of their leaves and stems may burn off. That will hurt. But new shoots will come up stronger than ever. Strength can blossom from their vulnerability. Same goes for us.
If you want stronger legs, you can do squats until your ass and legs are afire. You push yourself to weakness, limp for a few days, and come back stronger. It’s the same for your emotional awareness, strength, and control. There has to be some deliberate agony, a conscious, repeated push past your defenses.
Those defenses can be hard to spot because we often think they’re strengths.
Our ability to stay cool and emotionally detached means we never get close to others. We carry false confidence, an air of superiority to mask deep insecurity. We use sarcasm and self-deprecation to control social dynamics, to deflect the attention of others. Our defenses show up in machismo, in vanity, in perfectionism, in an overbearing work ethic, in the obsessive need to be perceived in a certain way. Or in the belief that vulnerability is weakness.
You have to step out of your pod and let the cold air touch the raw nerves of things buried inside you. Otherwise, you’ll always be behind the glass, on the inside, looking out.
“Most people will continue on, dissatisfied but never attempting to understand why, or how they might change things for the better, and they die with nothing in their hearts but dirt and old, thin blood…”
~Patrick deWitt, The Sisters Brothers (Book)
