It took 27 years for my shell to be cracked.
I’m not sure if it helped my day to day existence with others after I finally got the help I so desperately needed.
It happened in a counseling office. This had me trapped in a corner. About to actually feel something.
I’d always had a difficult time expressing my emotions or what I was thinking. Never mattered much if I shared what was happening on the inside.
Maybe it was me.
Maybe it was the people I attracted.
Just seems like everywhere that I went, it was easier to be the one helping, not the one being helped.
I always felt in the way. Some days I still do.
My thoughts never mattered unless it was going to add value to someone else.
My feeling? Who knows. Best to keep them contained in the pressure cooker that was my existence.
Still… something happened that led me to her office. I was there to get help.
I wish I could remember what it was that initiated that appointment.
It was probably the fact that what was once perceived as this cool, calm, never-shaken, stoic personality had somehow run out of currency.
Who wants to be in a relationship with a statue?
Here I was now, approaching 30, about to go and examine my life with a stranger who was a psychologist.
What really sucked was that it only took her 10 minutes to get through my defenses. “Who the hell is this person? and How did she do that?”
I was terrified, and she could see it.
“What are you feeling?” she asked.
“I feel like a child taking shelter in the corner.”
“Why?”
I wanted to run out of the room and into a hug in the same moment. I wasn’t sure if my heart, mind, and soul could handle what was on the other side of letting her into the secure, walled castle of my existence.
That was enough for one day.
I left there that day, having felt something… it was terrifying, yes.
But, for the first time in my life… I felt free.
That’s where my life really began. It got really interesting from there.
“Will people like me if they see in me what I just saw?”
Yes… and… no.
Bryon Christopher 
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