The Walls of the Forgotten Self
On the parts of ourselves we've sealed away...and what it costs us
You didn't lose yourself all at once. You walled yourself off, piece by piece, for very good reasons. Here is how you find your way back.
As I walk the perimeter of the walls of my forgotten self, tracing my fingers loosely with a soft examination and trembling curiosity:
What’s behind these walls? Or am I within them?
There are places within us – areas unexplored, recesses of forgotten territory of the self and psyche – that leave clues, hints, and whispers. Shadows, or gentle callings, beckoning us to seek and explore them again. Like breadcrumbs on a narrow, dark trail back toward our Soul. They are deep truths: pinpoint, and sometimes garish, fragmented specks of self, but nonetheless important ones.
They are not to be confused with the broad and shallow stridings of the demanding ego.
They can sometimes be contradictory and unpleasant to the nature of who we think we are, who we’ve made ourselves to be, who we’ve masked and rehearsed so tightly that it has become the assumed identity of self. But is it fully true? Is it whole? No wonder we are searching. But what is it we are searching for?
The darkness revealed might scare us, shake us toward personal truths we’ve left unknown, or tried to. Or they may delight us in their playful, juvenile naivety, which once bounded so eagerly until the shape of duty and the responsibility of the audited adult compelled us to forget the essence of all we are.
How do such walls get built, and why?
Are they protecting us from ourselves, or are they sheltering us from what’s outside?
Sometimes walls are built because the intensity of what lies within is so powerful that it overwhelms an inexperienced mind. The mature mind offers ripe perspectives of depth and understanding simply unavailable to us at the time of tender youth, when we are unable to receive such awareness, or acceptance of these elements of ourselves without judgment, abandonment, or a total yet false embodiment that erodes the self.
Consider the darkness that resides within all of us – the revolting temptations, morbid ideas, sinister desires, thoughts that cross the heart like a shadow teasing, tempting, enticing. In a developed mind, these pass through. But in an unformed one without the discernment to recognize the trick or the walls to contain their intensity, one may succumb to the most devilish of existences, or the most despairing and hopeless demise.
We have all observed someone, or perhaps even been someone, who got swept away by one dark current of their fractioned self. A torrent of untamed emotion becomes a desperate grasp for personal agency or control in an environment entirely devoid of it. Left unnamed and unbuilt, this surging void might carry them toward an exaggerated identity, weaponizing its wounds to justify its existence.
Are people born evil? Thou mayest. The seed exists in every soul; what differs is the soil.
Yet the lack of structural support enables the most consuming of spirits to run amok and prevail. What should have remained an asterisk became the main character. An entire identity formed around and centered upon a label that is much less than a fraction of the whole.
In contrast, a different reaction in an undeveloped mind that encounters the darkness within is to build a wall of rigid resistance, severing off and separating fragments of self from the rest, in disgust, or in fear of its power. Yet severance is not integration. And what is not integrated continues to press up against the wall.
Other times, walls are built to keep the world out, and today’s world is coming fast, loud, and from all angles. The world does not wait to be invited in anymore.
Once, we had to go looking for it. Once we had to seek the world. Now it seeks us, finding us first, pressing itself against us as it beckons and baits. And what it offers in its urgency is but a perverted, cheap, and glittering imitation of truth. It does more damage than simple confusion, as we’ve unconsciously absorbed it before we’ve had the chance to question it.
And so we adapt the only way we know how: by building walls. The world forces an unnatural necessity to respond to an increasingly overwhelming world, arrested in development and moral character, so much so that we must build walls with no roofs. Pervasive enough to monitor and manage what gets in, open enough to feel like we are a part of something, high enough to see and be seen, but always just out of touch.
Until we become severed observers removed from the wild participation of real life. Espousing our separation from society. Watching, and being watched. But not truly interacting anymore.
The sun can reach us, and the rain, but not strong winds, nor the prying fingers and all the world’s bugs and beasts, generally kept at bay.
And we become more fragile for it. Inside these walls, some of our own making, some constructed for us, we are like fragile flowers, straining toward growth amidst our many imposed restrictions.
Eventually, the walls may come down, whether by erosion or demolition, but only if we do not fight to keep them. Should we cling to them, they only grow more insistent until they enclose us entirely. Unreachable and cut off from the common world. The dungeons we once tried to escape become the rooms we defend.
Defending one’s walls as an extension of personality, character, or trauma is one choice, a common and pervasive one, but the ache for wholeness and full integration demands a certain unsettling of these barriers. They limit us from finding deep inner peace.
Here we stay locked into lack, convinced that what we are missing cannot be found within but only through other people, places, possessions. It is, of course, all an illusion, but one we’ve been well trained and indoctrinated to guard.
We prostrate before the very systems that gave us awareness of all that is missing, while those systems teach us to believe the broken parts of us are somehow irredeemable – that the solution lives outside, not within. And so we consume. We acquire, we seek, we outsource our wholeness to products and people and experiences that promise to fill what only inner excavation can reach.
A self in perpetual search of its own completion is, after all, an excellent consumer. The economy does not profit from integrated people. It profits from hungry ones.
Such are the myths that drive our economy.
When in truth, as time and its long view continue to show us, they are simply places we have not yet met with the mature mind capable of integrating them.
When we are ready, open, and willing, we get the nudge. The invitation. The magnetic pull to seek, to accept, to break down the walls between us and the other parts of ourselves. And in doing so, we find ourselves a little more whole. Not from where we came or to where we will go, but within a shift in revelation that carries us to the next layer of consciousness.
Where are these walls?
Only each soul can lay its own clues. It’s less about where you feel it now and more about where the pain of separation originated, in the place you most often ignore. They are everywhere and nowhere, always the last place you’d think to look and the first place you should, yet don’t want to.
The walls are wherever you feel the most resistance, wherever you perform rather than inhabit yourself. Not the loud and obvious wounds you’ve already named, but the quieter territories you’ve learned to route around so smoothly you’ve forgotten they’re there. These are the walls of the forgotten self. The places you deflect with humor, or expertise, or busyness. The relationships or failures that trigger you disproportionately. The compliments and help you can’t receive. The dreams you won’t say out loud.
What system is at work? Did you build your walls to adapt, to survive, for validation, to receive praise as a form of control, or was it a practice in numbness as intelligence?
All and none at all. Only you know why. The secrets of the subconscious, the reasoning and reckoning of the suppressed and oppressed, the walls of the forgotten self know why. And if you seek them, they can show you the way.
We build different walls in different places for different purposes. Like reluctant treasures, one by one they demand to be opened, to free themselves by tearing down what was never built to last. Internal excavation of the walls that block your flow can set you free, if that is indeed what you want and need.
Why they went up only matters if it still feels relevant and unintegrated to you.
Do you still want this wall, or is it stifling you? Have you become a flower straining toward the final rays of light only to choke at the unexamined edge? If yes, seek your walls and dismantle them.
We can make do, get by, even thrive within a house of walls. But too many, too strong, too high…and we choke out any hope for the life-giving forces of aliveness. And we die a soul death.
It is not a failure to have high, sturdy walls around segments of forgotten selves. It is an adaptation to a nonlinear and unpredictable existence. It is highly individual and deeply personal. Walls come down only to rise again in new places, or sometimes, stronger walls replace the ones that just came down. They crumble, tumble, and rise again as we fumble in our ignorant, mostly innocent search of the psyche, the soul, and the humanity of our personal existence.
The body remembers what the mind cannot afford to.
Returning to the self is not an intellectual act, for insight alone cannot dissolve a wall. We do not think our way back. We sense our way back. Through slowness and stillness, we soften into the feeling that we are not under threat, and cautiously loosen our grip. Walls reveal themselves in grief or in rejoicing at their rediscovery. It is we who give permission to unseal the sensation of intuitive knowing, and it always has been.
This is the return to self. Not a conclusion you settle upon, but a doorway that keeps opening, an invitation to keep moving, keep meeting yourself, keep going.
𓆸 Feeling my way through the darkness with you – SJT
Written for and inspired by those who seek.
Hello human reading this - I am a NEW writer and I want to get better at writing. If you actually read this and made it to the end ANY FEEDBACK - no matter how blunt or hard- is genuinely and truly appreciated. THANK YOU. 🙏🏻