photo credit: Olivia Buyar, Unsplash
Listen to me read the post:
Once there was a girl who wore a velcro dress.
At an early age, before any other options became apparent to her, she’d stitched that dress together out of all of the bits that had been passed down to her by her mother and grandmothers before her. Into the stitches were woven the messages and beliefs from her culture, her religion, her family system, the media, and the grown-ups who knew no better because they wore velcro clothing too. There were also layers of trauma and generational baggage that she didn’t understand but that made its way into the dress anyway. The dress was prickly and uncomfortable, but she wore it because she needed to be clothed.
The velcro made it easy for other people to attach things to her. Some people attached expectations of how she should behave or what she should sacrifice on others’ behalf. Others attached their own needs that they wanted her to meet and the pain that they didn’t know how to carry. Still others attached their disapproval and judgement. There was also the weight of expectation of how she should look, the way that she should dress, the rules for good girl behaviour, the pressure to please people and not step out of line, and so many more things that she lost track of all of the bits that clung to her dress.
It was such a familiar pattern to have other people’s things hanging from her dress that she did it to herself as well – picking up pieces that other people should have been responsible for, saying yes when she wanted to say no, and layering on shame and fear and other people’s opinions. She was so buried under the weight of the dress that she had no idea what she looked like underneath.
Her dress was so sticky, in fact, that she could pick up new burdens simply by noticing a disapproving glance from across the room, or by hearing the passive-aggressive sigh of a person who’d come to rely on her.
By the time she was a young woman, a great deal of things were attached to that dress. She didn’t question the weight of it, though, because she knew that it was simply her lot in life to carry around what other people had tossed her way. It gave her a sense of purpose, in fact, and people started to praise her for just how much she was able to carry without buckling under the weight.
The young woman married and had a few children, and the dress became heavier and heavier. The man she married had a lot of pain and fear and insecurity that was hard for him to carry, and so he tossed it her way, trusting that it would stick and that her vows meant that she’d carry it on his behalf. She lived up to that expectation, believing (because that belief was one of the earliest things that became attached to her dress) that it was her responsibility as a wife to do so. Sadly, like her mother had done before her, she modelled that velcro dress to her daughters, and passed down little bits of it for them to begin crafting their own dresses.
At the places where she worked and volunteered, it was the same. Co-workers and bosses congratulated her for how much she could carry, and then they casually dropped more things on her and walked away.
Finally a day came when the dress became so heavy that the woman could barely breathe under the weight of it. She propped the heavy dress up like a concrete tent, slipped down into the cavity it created underneath, curled up in a ball on the floor and wept and wept. She had no idea what to do with this massive dress that had become her prison.
In her tiny cave under the dress she began to fantasize about what it would be like to live without that dress – about how freely she could move in the world without the weight of other people’s expectations, judgement, and needs.
“Enough!” she shouted to herself to wake herself up from the dream, “Fantasies have nothing to do with the REAL WORLD!” With new resolve, she picked herself up off the floor, slipped back into the dress, and carried on. Because carrying on was what she did best.
But the fantasy wouldn’t let go – it kept popping into her consciousness when she least expected it, and soon she was regularly sneaking away into her little cave beneath the dress, entertaining that fantasy and letting herself slowly begin to believe that another life might be possible.
One day, after the fantasy had grown so big that it consumed her even when she wasn’t hiding in her cave, she allowed a tiny thought to poke its way into her imagination… “What if I start to peel away some of the things stuck to this dress?” That thought made her heart leap, so she reached down and plucked off the thing that was easiest to reach. It was a cultural expectation of how she should dress at work. She dropped it on the floor and suddenly felt a tiny rush of freedom and hope.
Next she plucked off some bits of shame and fear that other people had projected on her, and those too fell on the floor at her feet.
Suddenly the world was full of possibilities. With each thing she peeled away, she felt a little lighter, a little more herself. She began to remember what she looked like under the dress, and that memory filled her with delight and expectation.
Many of the things she peeled away could simply be dropped on the floor, but other things had to be tenderly and/or cautiously returned to the person who put them there in the first place. Those were often the hardest to release, because one of the things that clung to her dress the most tightly and stubbornly was the expectation that she should never hurt anyone’s feelings.
For some of hardest things to release, she needed the right kind of support – people who were doing the same kind of work, people who had expertise in peeling, and people who were eager to dismantle the systems that had taught her to wear the dress in the first place. Sometimes she sat in circles with others wearing velcro clothing and they all did a little peeling together. The community support made the work feel a little easier.
A few things took much longer to peel away than others. Her husband’s pain, for example, took many years to detach from, and in the process of peeling it away she discovered that the marriage no longer made any sense without that attachment. She felt a little lonely without that long-held weight attached to her dress, but when it was gone she realized just how much closer she was to revealing her true self beneath it.
One day, after she’d peeled quite a few things away, she noticed that the dress underneath no longer had as much stickiness as it once did. Other people would try to toss things into the empty spaces, but those things either slid to the floor or bounced back to the person they belonged to. She was greatly relieved to discover that she no longer needed to catch what wasn’t hers.
She also noticed, as her dress became lighter and less sticky, that she was now more able to support people in holding their own problems and pain without letting any of it get stuck to her. She could sit with them for awhile, offer them a space in her big heart, and then she could walk away without bearing their weight on her dress. She knew that she’d helped them lighten their load for awhile, just by sitting with them, so she didn’t feel guilty for not letting it get stuck to her.
She wasn’t perfect, and sometimes – especially when she was overtired and under-resourced – she would still let things stick that weren’t hers, and sometimes she would berate herself for those moments of weakness, but over time she got better and better at noticing and peeling away whatever didn’t belong.
And one day she noticed how much lighter she felt and how much she loved the shape of herself that was emerging from under the weight of the dress. She looked down at herself, smiled, and said “Hello friend – it’s so lovely to see you again!” In that moment, she danced.