Just My Soliloquy

For the moments when I dare not meets I would.

If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

It's just like the most beautiful peacock dancing in the woods - and the world missed it. But whether someone happens upon it or not, the dance is still beautiful.

The value is in the dance itself. The peacock doesn't dance for the world; it dances because it is a peacock.

Photo by James Kelly-Smith on Unsplash

But we are never truly unobserved.

It is as if you are not allowed to express how it felt, unfiltered, your subjective reality.

We are not an island. Feelings don't happen in a vacuum. Every shudder in your nervous system is a reaction to something or someone else.

Your pain is evidence. To speak your truth means you would inadvertently speak about the other person, too; the mere mention of your pain points to their actions.

To them, your soliloquy feels like an accusation, even if you are just trying to breathe. You are exposing this other person just by being honest about yourself.

Even if you concentrate only on your own feelings - saying I feel… - the other person would still feel offended.

You can only speak in the colloquial, generally accepted way. Therefore, you cut those parts of yourself off and bury them.

Letting I dare not wait upon I would, like the poor cat i' th' adage.

Editing and erasing certain things because they may upset people, self-censoring even though there is actually nothing offensive - all because there is an observer that creates a pressure to conform.

The observer's potential reaction becomes a cage for our expression.

We extricate parts of our expression because there are always written and unspoken rules of the world that we need to abide by.

We constrict ourselves to accommodate someone else's limitations, or the limitations they impose on us.

We pull out pieces of our truth to ensure we don't trip over these land mines.

But this does not imply that we did something wrong. Most of the time, we did not. We perform for a livelihood.

We can get the promotion, the paycheck, or the stable household by performing the way people expect us to.

We delete ourselves to win the world. No foul, but is it fair?

I find myself ruminating on the parts of myself that I left to die in those woods.

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©Britt H.

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