Breaking Boxes

Photo©somchairakin/123rf

As a real estate broker, I see boxes every day. Buyers and sellers use them to neatly pack up their lives and haul them across the street, the city, the country, or the ocean. Boxes can be quite useful and have their place — temporary storage to keep things safe, out of harm’s way. But I have also witnessed other kinds of boxes — boxes that are invisible, are persistent, and when our consciousness expands, we see they are sinister. Still other boxes (ones I try to avoid) are more obviously treacherous, but somehow I find myself back inside them from time to time.

These invisible yet confining boxes are constructed of expectations and opinions — our own, other peoples’, and institutions — of us and of the various roles we perform in society. The gender box, the good girl box, the dutiful wife box, the “this is what we do in our family” box, the career box, the religious box, the ethnicity box, and so on. Subconsciously, one can morph into a communal amalgamation of self, a self that adheres to the expectations of the people and communities in which we live, unaware we are losing our very selves in the process.

One of my earliest and strongest memories is something I did often in middle school. At twelve years old, I would diagonally sprawl across my bed, lying face up on my full-sized flowered bedspread in my bedroom upstairs. Usually in the middle of the day, in a hot Florida summer. It was silent in the house and I wasn’t sure where my sisters or mom were. I would go through an exercise I called “Who am I?”

If I’m Not My Body, Then Who Am I?

“Who am I?” I’d whisper into the silence. I’d wait and hear nothing. “Who am I really?” I’d ask the silence again. “Who is this thing people call ‘Betsy’?” Next, I’d bring my leg up and reach for my foot, touch it, and say, “If I didn’t have this foot, who am I? Am I still ‘Betsy’?” I’d move my hand up my right leg. “What if I didn’t have this leg or my foot? Am I still ‘Betsy’?” I’d move my hand up to my arm. “What if I didn’t have my arms too? Who, then, would I be?” I was fairly convinced I’d still be the “me” trapped inside this body I was touching, but who was that really? Each time I did this exercise, I concluded the “I,” what makes me me, cannot be my body because I knew for sure that “I” would still be there even if I lost my physical body parts. “I” was not my body, nor did “I” reside in my body.

As I grew older, I’d run through this exercise but with various thoughts and feelings. If I didn’t have this thought, would I still be me? Yes. What about this feeling? If I didn’t have it, would I still be me? Yes, again. I concluded: “I” was also not my thoughts, nor was “I” my feelings.

This was where the exercise stopped because, often, I could no longer breathe. I felt stuck — in a box taped so tight I could not escape. My younger self could not reconcile if I was not my body, my thoughts, or my feelings, then why was I, the real “me,” constantly being judged by what my body has, does, thinks, or feels?

Boxes Are Meant To Be Broken Down

Physical boxes, by their very nature, are designed to be temporary. We forget boxes have thin walls and are meant to be broken down, flattened, and taken to the curb on garbage pickup day. Invisible boxes can also have a transitory quality but, too often, we hunker down and nest in these boxes, afraid to leave the known for the freedom found beyond. The longer we stay, the easier it is to forget we are living in one until one day, we realize we are Jim Carrey in The Truman Show, thinking we are living an ordinary life, oblivious to the fact it’s being played out on a set orchestrated by others.

In my home office, beside my computer, is a picture of a young girl. She looks to be about the age of four. She is in a one-piece bathing suit, her legs splayed out and nestled in lush green grass. Rain is pouring down on her head and her face is radiating pure, unbridled joy. I have this same picture at my office at work, on my computer, and on my cellphone as a screensaver. I’m not sure where I first saw this picture. The internet maybe. But the minute I saw it, I got goosebumps. I couldn’t get the girl out of my mind. Especially the words spread across her waist in the photo: “Remember Her?” And lower, across her shins: “She is still there… inside you… waiting… let’s go get her.” For some inexplicable reason, I felt compelled to keep that picture all around me.

One summer, in my late forties, I was feeling increasingly unsettled. For months, maybe longer, I had been restless, unhappy, slowly filling with rage that I could not rationally explain. How can this be? I had everything I wanted. Wonderful kids and rescue pups, several thriving debt-free businesses, a spacious and beautiful home and a boyfriend who was a surgeon. Maybe I was just feeling out of sorts because my girls were headed off to college.

In August of that summer, a hurricane was predicted to hit the south and my state of Florida braced for it. After filling up the car with gas and buying sandbags, batteries, and bottled water, my pups and I hunkered down. The power went out within the first few hours, and I lit candles as the sun set. Anticipating this, I pulled out the project I had planned in the event of loss of power and carried three shoe boxes full of photos to my kitchen counter. My goal was to give these photos a final resting place in albums I had bought years before.

Sitting on the kitchen counter stool, I began going through the photos, throwing out ones that were out of focus and sorting the keepers roughly by age. Two hours later, I had made my way through the boxes. I walked the empty three boxes to the trash can and saw at the bottom of the last one, a lone photo with its white backside facing up. I reached in and picked it up, a candle flickering nearby.

Unboxing A Nostalgic Discovery

I turned the photo over and moved it closer to the candle. Faded, it was a photograph of a small child, in her favorite red-striped one-piece bathing suit, looking straight into the camera. I was standing a few feet in the ocean water, plunging toward an oncoming wave as if to try to hug it. My father stood three feet in front of me beautifully capturing the water droplets suspended in air framing my wide grin and the pure innocence radiating from a child in wonder. At the bottom right of the picture, in my mother’s handwriting, read “Betsy, age 4.”

Jolted, I felt hit with a bolt of lightning. But this lightning wasn’t coming from the storm outside. Holding the photo, I grabbed the candle in its glass jar, and ran down the hallway towards my home office. I went to my computer and held up the candle to the picture on the wall beside it. The picture of the girl, on the lawn, in her one-piece bathing suit, with the rain coming down on her head, with her face radiating pure, unbridled joy. This image, the one I had felt compelled to surround myself with years prior, was my four-year-old self looking directly at me. Remember her? She is still there… inside you… waiting… let’s go get her.

While the hurricane passed in two days, the brewing inside me grew and I began a journey of self-discovery through reading, meditation, going through past journals and reflecting on when and how I lost myself. One theme that continually surfaced was feeling put into a box, a box I often was not equipped to recognize or, if I did, I ignored that it was not supportive, or it had lost its value. As I navigated the ins and outs of the boxes encountered in my life, I found my way back to that four-year-old self.

Reprinted with permission from Breaking Boxes: Dismantling the Metaphorical Boxes that Bind Us (Ethos Collective/Sept. 2024) by Betsy Pepine.

Betsy Pepine is a transformative leader in the real estate industry and a distinguished entrepreneur. As founder and CEO of Pepine Realty, Betsy has built one of the most respected and successful real estate firms in the country.

Find holistic Coaching in the Spirit of Change online Alternative Health Directory.

RELATED ARTICLES:
Limiting Beliefs Explored And Explained
Goodbye Trauma: A Way To Understand Trauma And Its Gentle Release, Part 1