To this day, one of my top three movies is The Shawshank Redemption, which–extremely briefly–is about a man named Andy who is falsely imprisoned and eventually escapes after years of slowly chipping away at a concrete wall. (If you haven’t seen it, I’m sorry to spoil it for you.) One of the final scenes involves the night Andy escapes. After crawling through the tunnel he’s made, he breaks open a sewage line, crawls through hundreds of yards of you-know-what, and eventually emerges on the other side of the prison walls. It’s pouring down rain, and as Andy stretches his arms out wide, the water washes over him. Finally, he’s free.

The movie concludes when Andy’s best friend, Red, is released from prison and breaks his parole to join Andy on a beach. (It’s very sweet in a heterosexual sort of way.) Previously, Red had told Andy to accept his fate, that he’d be stuck in prison for the rest of his life. He says, “Hope is a dangerous thing.” Andy’s later response is one of the best lines in the movie, maybe any movie: “Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things.”

Last week I read a book called Scared Selfless by a psychologist who was severely abused and traumatized as a child. In short, her step-father used her as a sex slave and prostitute until she became a teenager. For several years, she dissociated, meaning her psyche seriously compartmentalized the horrific experiences, and she was able to go about her day-to-day life interacting with her step-father as if everything were “normal.” When she got to college she started having flashbacks, and although the shit really hit the fan, the good news is that she started the long road to healing. That road included a number of psychologists (at least eight), a diagnosis of multiple personality disorder (dissociative identity disorder), and discovering that she was a lesbian.

It’s a lot to process, I know.

Today I took the book to therapy and asked my therapist a few questions out of curiosity. There’s a comment in the book that “during prolonged trauma, denying one’s feelings can be beneficial and adaptive” because–why focus on your terrible life if you can’t do anything about it? So I asked my therapist if that was true, if it was “okay” to shut down sometimes, to put part of you in a box until you can deal with it later. My therapist said that in severe cases, it’d be hard not to. But–and she sort of pulled back the corners of her mouth before she said this–she didn’t think it was ever healthy to deny one’s feelings, to compartmentalize. She said, “I think a better response would be hope. Okay, this sucks, and maybe I can’t do anything about it now, but it’s only temporary. Everything is temporary.”

Although I’ve been through a number of traumatic experiences, I can’t imagine the level of trauma the lady who wrote the book endured. Still, I can appreciate anyone who shuts down or puts things in a box because I know I did that for the longest time. I remember being fifteen when Dad when to prison. I started paying the bills, driving myself to school, falling asleep on the floor at night while I was studying. I kept a four-point average, and after school I’d type up legal work for my dad and his friends. Looking back, I should have been mad as hell, come home crying on a regular basis from all the pressure. But I only remember crying a handful of times in six years.

I know enough now that the reason I fell in love with The Shawshank Redemption was because I felt like I was in prison too, trapped in a situation I couldn’t get out of. More specifically, I both knowingly and unknowingly took parts of myself and put them behind a concrete wall. In particular, I took one rather large part and put it in a concrete closet. For years I played the roles of the dutiful son, the teacher’s pet, and the nice boy. And whereas I can’t say that those roles were disingenuous, I can say that they didn’t represent the whole of me.

Here’s the deal–if you’re not whole, you’re in prison. 

My therapist says that hope is real, that she’s seen it change people’s lives. In my experience, it seems that hope has been, as Emily Dickinson would say, the thing with feathers. Some days it’s been right there, others so far away. And yet it’s always returned, sometimes in the form of a book, sometimes in the form of a movie I can’t stop watching, sometimes in the form of my therapist. When I consider the last twenty years, it’s amazing to me that I didn’t fully recognize the prison I was in. Like Andy’s friend Red, I guess I’d simply gotten used to being there. And yet part of me obviously knew there was more to life. Hey, get us the fuck out of here. We don’t like all this concrete. This place could use some color and a new set of curtains.

The last few years have often felt like tunneling my way through a thick wall–little bit by little bit. Like Andy crawling through the sewer, my therapist says she’s in favor of digging into and dealing with all your shit until it’s under your fingernails. (Then you can clean it up.) In short, healing hasn’t always been a pretty process. But I do think it’s been worth all the hard work. Even since starting this blog, I’ve felt like a lot of walls have come down. Yeah, I’ve been through hundreds of yards of shit, but I’m more complete now than I ever have been. Last night–at four in the morning–I went for a run, and it started to rain. Rather than go back, I just decided, I’m in this. So I spread my arms out wide and let the water wash over me like a baptism. I wish I could describe it better. My feet were hitting the pavement, my lungs were working overtime, my heart was beat, beat, beating. Several times I splashed around in puddles as if I were a kid again. It felt like every piece of me was there–it felt like freedom–it felt like the best of things.