Today marks the day the 4th anniversary of when I ‘came out of the box’ – the day on which I began to have a drastic shift in emotional awareness, clarity, and a lasting change in my affect. I could not have identified that the box was there beforehand, but even relative strangers to me at that time had recognized that something big had shifted in me, and I was no longer as ‘cold’ & ‘aloof’. As time has unfolded since, I have gained perspective about the box, what it was & why it got there.

 

For no reason in particular a song from my childhood popped into my head recently. It was a triplet from the Bare Necessities in the animated version of The Jungle Book.

Look for the bare necessities
The simple bare necessities
Forget about your worries and your strife

The song essentially is Baloo’s way of guiding Mowgli toward accepting poor circumstances and to be more open about going with the flow. It is a familiar sort of notion to me, one that I had undoubtedly carried a long time.

This notion – of passive acceptance of shitty situations – is a significant part of the coping mechanisms that created the box.

I had ‘accepted’ my mother’s dying and death in real time, at the expense of really dealing with anything for years. But no bereavement counseling was provided anyway, and I continued on from that experience in an environment where addressing the way I felt would have led to nothing. Denial and revisionism kept the truth at bay, though the closest it probably had come was when one brother had remarked that “She was a very complex person” in response to my sister’s feelings.

In the face of the immediate, physical bigger struggles – food insecurity, late rent, utilities being shut off – there wasn’t a space for dealing with death. Moving houses. New school. So on. Suppressing those other feelings, and entering a sort of emotional maroonment, was how the box manifested. To cope with deficiency in my daily life, I might convince myself that I needed less. My box filtered out all but the bare necessities, and sometimes even more.

But today is the anniversary of when I shed the box. That day when, having become vested in a new, nurturing & secure home environment, and faced with a challenging situation that called on me to be emotionally supportive in a way I had not ever been called to, the box lifted. The compacted layers of suppressed feelings slowly came loose over the last few years, but within the first couple days at least I had felt really happy. I was connected and in touch, and people in the house thought maybe something was wrong with me. I hadn’t gotten out of the box on my own, but precisely because my best friend needed me.

These days I am a lot more interested in bear necessities. And sloths 🙂