Tightrope

Get my name out of your judgmental mouth.

It would be easier to go back. 

To go back to where I came from. To go back to the control. The ‘way of life’ (rules) to the cult. 

A laid-out way of life requires no thought. Autopilot. 

Stepping outside of those cult walls, it is easy to shelf the past. I hear it often, “ Breanna, leave it alone. Let them live their lives, and you live yours.” Autopilot. 

I disrupt; I do not keep the peace. Six years ago, I vowed to unlearn, risk, and lose everything I needed to uncover the truth about who I am. I have held to that vow through personal torture. Regardless of the heartache and discomfort, I have not wavered, and it has not been pretty. 

I am not a professional tightrope walker but walk daily without a safety net. I am a thirty-two-year-old divorced single mom of five children with more responsibility than many around me can grasp. I have lived four lifetimes while simultaneously being twelve years old and experiencing the world for the first time. My therapist tells me I am a toddler. 

It is exhausting. It isn't apparent. It is agonizing. It is a tightrope balancing act I do not want, but there is no safety net. Therefore, I do not have a choice. I stay on the rope or fall to my death. I shake, my arms flail and circle, and at times, I am holding on by my hands, growing sweaty, slipping, leaving me holding on by just my fingertips. 

People judge me, and why wouldn’t they? I am the easiest to judge. Sitting in the audience with popcorn and watching the tightrope walker is awe-inspiring. 

Onlookers, watching from their place of privilege, jump in to tell me what I can do better and how. “ Bre, if you did this, oh wait, no, do it that way. It’s THIS way,” on repeat. Constantly hounded, it comes from all angles. Tomatoes hit me while my fingertips slip dangerously. The hounding haunts my nightmares. Vivid as sunlight, in my horizontal subconscious, I travel to places you can’t possibly imagine, locations where my footprints remain.  

I am raw. My hands are blistered, bruised and calloused. Exhausted is an understatement, yet if I don’t hold on, furthermore, if I don’t walk this rope, five little humans fall to their deaths along with mine. If I don’t walk this rope, the past wins. The past prays for my demise. They set me up to fail. It is their greatest joy to see me walk through those front doors on my hands and knees, begging for forgiveness & blabbering my plan of reconciliation through a thunderstorm of tears. 

Along with my thick hair, which I don’t complain about, my biological father instilled in me the unequivocal fear of the word can’t. “ Breezy, can’t is not in your vocabulary.” While the statement has not allowed me to listen to my body, something I am learning to do with my therapist, it is also the voice in my head when I am one drop of sweat away from losing my grip. 

So the next time you think or know you can walk this rope superior to me, take my fucking place. Let me eat popcorn and gaze above in awe and judgment. 

The fact is, you couldn’t do it, and I do; I have to. I don’t do it perfectly; I cry, I scream, and I beg to get the hell off, but that rope is mine.

Can’t is not in my vocabulary, but when it comes to my life in your judgemental mouth, it is in your lexicon.