Bricks, Boys and Braveheart

A few years ago when I was teaching World History, I had a student that believed the Iron Curtain was a literal wall of iron between eastern and western Europe. He had such a hard time understanding how this wall could just be a figurative wall, one "built" to separate people, unless it was the Berlin wall, then it was literal. (Then again, this was the kid that could only understand concepts if I could somehow relate them to Braveheart. Problem is I don't remember much of the movie other than he was a Scottish peasant that somehow opposed the King and yelled "Freedom!" as a super significant line in the film). So....I found myself thinking about how we construct these figurative walls around ourselves over the years; we add a layer every time something hurts us, every time someone fails us or disappoints us, or we disappoint ourselves, or life just doesn't turn out the way we expect. Slowly but surely, brick by brick the walls go up, until we have this nice little fortress protecting ourselves from, well, everything. It is nice and pretty and we walk around in this little brick bubble of feelinglessness (yes, I made up that word on purpose). I would say that my wall has been built over the course of about twelve significant breakups. Yup! Count 'em twelve! This is not something I would wish on anyone. This doesn't even count the dates or little flings; these are the ones I cared about and it didn't work for some reason. I find myself rather numb to this number (this is because of the walls). Does time heal wounds? Yeah, but it still sucks, licking your wounds, twelve times over. So the point is I don't even have bricks, I have an iron curtain (so, this is where you should be thinking, is it real, or just a facade). Then the other day I was showing my class the Last Lecture by Randy Pausch a man dying of Pancreatic cancer. He talks about how the brick walls (talking about barriers to our goals) are not there to keep us out like we all think, but to see who wants it the most. I think that while boys have contributed to the building of most of my walls, I hope they can also help bring them down. Learning to open up and learning to trust are both kind of scary. And I began to realize that although my iron curtain was built to protect me, it also has become my crutch. It is all of the above. It is both real and a facade. It keeps them out and keeps me in. It is the barrier to my end goal of becoming open and real and letting down my guard, a little, just enough to let myself breathe and maybe, just maybe, "Freedom", like Braveheart.

Pic. Berlin Wall. 2010.