The Plates in The Chimney Flue
The moment I stopped running from what I was avoiding , I lost the ability to block it again .
Thoughts rushed in, not one by one, but in clusters. some arrived without me knowing, leaking through without me noticing. others appeared fully formed, things I never knew existed inside me, I started asking questions that felt almost foreign.
Are these my thoughts? Are these my beliefs? how did I ever believe some of these things, even subconsciously?, Where is this fear coming from. is it one source, or many ?
Then guilt surfaced , unmistakable. guilt that had been there far longer than I wanted to admit, shaping my decisions. regret followed close behind.
That one hurt the most, I was the person who taught others not to regret what they did. I was the one who believed that living without regret was a virtue . but now I see it clearly. that belief was built to protect me from something I already carried.
I’ve been minimizing regret my entire life because I was already drowning in it ,I didn’t want to feel it again, then something harder appeared. self hatred.
I don’t dislike myself openly. my self image isn’t obviously negative. but underneath that, there is something colder. a sense of not being worthy of good things when they happen to me.
And even when warmth is present, even when love is offered, I don’t see myself as someone capable of giving it fully in return. love feels strong. it makes me feel exposed. weak.
then another thought followed, brutal in its timing. that many of the people around me, people I thought I loved, might not be loved in the way I believed . that what I mistook for connection could have been coping. a way to survive proximity, not a real bond.
That realization alone felt like too much to hold, once you start pulling these things out of your head and putting them into words , there is no clean stopping point. confronting yourself even once can trap you in a loop that feels endless.
There are too many words to say.
Too many moments to revisit.
Too many people to explain myself to.
Too many fragments of myself scattered across different times and places.
The things that need processing feel infinite, When I tried to explain this to a friend, an image came to me: I imagined a chimney flue, narrow and vertical, with plates stacked inside it. from the outside, you can only see the few plates blocking the view, blocking the opening. they look manageable. clean. white.
But inside, the stack is chaotic, the plates aren’t aligned. they’re tilted, overlapping, leaning against each other at awkward angles. maybe forty five degrees. maybe worse.
The moment you reach in and pull the first plate, the others begin to shift. cracks echo before you even see movement. plates you didn’t know were there start sliding. some fall immediately. others pause, only to follow seconds later.
You realize the blockage was never just one plate, it was never just a few, they were always there, hidden deeper in the flue, held in place by pressure and avoidance. and once disturbed, they refuse to stay still.
now I’m tired, I want this to end. I want some form of salvation from this endless unraveling. escaping without facing it feels harder than it used to. but staying the same feels unbearable.
I don’t know what to do.