How can you ever float freely if there are so many cords connecting you to the ground?

I realized that planning this big day of ours is, for me, monumental in more ways than the obvious.  A wedding becomes a convenient stage for so many dreams and dramas to unfold; fairy-tale wishes side by side with self-esteem issues.  For me, though, the event highlights, underscores, even italicizes a part of my personality that I have struggled with every day of my life, usually veering to one extreme (needy appeasement) or the other (standoffishness) in the responsive end.  I have forever been a pleaser, have unceasingly allowed my mood to be tied to others’ appraisals of me.  My perception of their level of Liking Me has been the barometer upon which so many of my decisions and actions have been based.

There’s the healthy part of that: the concern for other people’s comfort and safety and welfare.  Then there’s the toxic side, in which I specialize, a side filled with misinterpretations and the reactions built upon them.  A wedding is the perfect place for such worries to thrive, and as the BF quoted someone’s reaction to a detail the other night, I literally put my hands over my ears.  “I’m sick of it!  I’m sick of the din of everyone’s voices in my head!” I yelled in our bathroom, at once cementing my chances at nabbing this year’s Most Needlessly Melodramatic Oscar and releasing some pent-up frustration.  I felt better, anyway.  And earned a laugh from both of us.

A pool is one of the last places (besides our bathroom) where an adult can feel free to act like a child in a quiet space. Specifically, underwater in a pool.  I’ve had some time off lately and much of it has been spent perfecting my handstands and holding my breath.  And floating, which may be one of my favorite things in the world.  Letting go, just being open-handed, something I do so rarely in life, is so easy to do when water won’t be held.  Neither will air, which is probably why flying is also one of my favorite things in the world.  Underwater and in the air I’m forced to do something I was originally made to do, something I have to be convinced to do otherwise through logic or tears (or some other form of love).  Maybe it’s also that reflection back to life in the womb, and although that comparison is a little creepy, it holds, because aren’t we always in some way trying to revert back to our younger selves?  To be that happy, that carefree, that peaceful, that able to laugh…that blissfully unaware of the public’s assessment of us?

So today I floated some, then was forced back up to the surface (or down to the ground, in the flying scenario) in a couple of ways. One, a phone call and a reminder of how some of us can be childlike in the worst sense of the word: making promises we don’t keep, ripping gifts back out of the recipient’s hand just to prove our ill-conceived point.  The other, a letter and a gift of pictures and words…the BF as a child, letters he wrote then that show his love and kindness and general nature did not develop only recently.  And that they are not sourceless, as I was reminded while reading letters from his family that assess both our love and me…the kind of assessments you hope for and usually only find when you’re not trying to get them, when you realize people have noticed the part of you that you hope came through but that life, and weddings, often suck away.

Kindness.  Assuming the best.  Other childish ways I hope to not put behind me.

I put life away for a minute and headed back for the water and went under, hitting that perfect suspension.  And I realized that some cords tie us up and bring us down if we let them because they want to pull us down to their level.  To hell with them.  Then there are the cords we need to be there, the best ones that don’t hold us back but connect us to what matters, letting us float but not disappear.