Balancing Act

-Libra Starring as The Peacemaker-

You remember it like a bruise, the way the tension would spike in your chest at the first hint of your mother’s anger. Her words were like cut glass, so easy to make you bleed at the wrong moments, when you were just a caterpillar struggling to free itself from its cocoon.

It was worse when your father yelled: exhaustion and desperation were the undertones coloring his every word. Sometimes a door would slam, jolting you out of your carefully curated safe space. Sometimes the fury would flow away like a tide from the shore. And sometimes, as if by chance, you would stand in the middle and try to appease from both sides—often a losing game in and of itself.

When they call you “Switzerland” now, with every cracked word or heightened moment, you smile away the truth. It’s so much easier to pretend you simply are than to explain why your first reaction to strife is to try and turn down the flame on everyone’s internal gas ovens.

You would rather be the pacifist than just another soldier ready to arm up and move out for the coming war between personas.

-Libra Starring as The Materialist-

It all started with dolls—Barbies, Disney princesses, the off-brand Janes from the dollar store. You collected them because you liked the way they looked: coiffed and plaited hair, Cupid bow mouths turned up in evergreen smiles, dresses that hugged or flowed in all the right places. Each one was a tiny slice of perfection, the ideal beauty in a world worshiping bombshells and beauty queens. In art and fashion and literature, you sought these same grains of a world you could own—yet never truly attain yourself.

Years later, one episode of “Hoarders” later has you questioning the overarching scheme of your life. Every filled bookshelf is a sticking point even as your closet drips with clothes you bought to wear to some occasion once upon a year gone long ago. “Retail therapy” may as well have you as its spokesperson.

But it’s not the clutter or the excess or even the monetary spill that bothers you: no, it’s the threat of emptiness, of hollow spaces being left open and vulnerable, that makes you fill your life up with these toys and novelties. They may mean nothing to someone on the outside looking in, but to you? They’re the anchors that keep you grounded when everything else in the universe seems to spin dangerously on the edge of chaos.

-Libra Starring as The Listener-

You watch the duration of the call tick past the one-hour mark. Your friend goes on about her work day, barely even allowing a word in edgewise, yet you soak up the words for all the things you cannot bring yourself to say.

You envy the people who can spill out their words, their truth, so readily. What holds you back is the expectation that everything you say must hold weight, power, substance in a world ever shifting on its axis in an orbit that persists without intervention.

“Are you there? Hello?”

The words smoke you out of the rabbit hole with a jolt like a fight-or-flight mechanism. “Yeah,” you say. “Sorry about that.”

It’s so easy to fill the space with nothing-words that will just segue into another one-sided conversation. You know the role you play. You could be anyone, even a cardboard cut-out, but that’s what “lending an ear” is all about, isn’t it?

The next time someone actually asks how your day is going, you may begin to cry for the rarity of it all.

-Libra Starring as The Worrywart-

You are hunched over in the passenger’s seat, your chest tightening with nerves as you think of all the ways a day can go wrong. It’s already 8:10 AM, and if you don’t get out soon you’ll be late—another thing to stress over. Just being absent one day, a single day in a string of weeks, has your stomach in knots as if you’ve missed an entire year of this same building with these same people in this same routine lived by millions upon millions around the country.

But as your mind tumbles over all the “what-if’s” and “could-be’s,” it is as if you are warring with a side of yourself that won’t rest until all the questions die down into trickles of known quantities.

If you had been given the choice to read your life’s story, you would have taken the challenge, no matter the outcome, because every page you read would have meant more certainty in your destiny. The unknown? It doesn’t delight you; it scares the hell out of you.

When you finally do leave the car and go inside the school, you try not to let it show that you are a heap of tangled wires ready to spark at the first hint of wrongness.

-Libra Starring as The Perfectionist-

You were the kid who always colored between the lines, who celebrated upon acing each week’s spelling test, who hated every time a book your friend borrowed came back with a crease in the spine or a dent on the cover.

As you grew older, you realized that perfection was a construct, like many things in society—but it was still this image that everyone pushed, as if it truly were possible to grasp at some point after trying for so, so long.

It also doesn’t help that you realize on one stark day that you are an artist. Every criticism hits like a needle at a sore point. “Masterpiece” is a word they like to throw around when someone is long dead, but just once you might like to hear it before you leave this earthly plane.

Everything may be meaningless in a universe as vast as this one, but compliments? They’re a balm to help forget the futility of it all.

-Libra Starring as The Martyr-

“Stop with your pity party,” your mother would say during the doldrums of high school. Those were years filled to the brim with worries about having no friends, about being unpopular, about sticking out in all the wrong ways.

Those grades that you had cherished in elementary school, every A+ and gold star? They may as well be anathema when you’re a teenager living in suburban America. Four years seem like a lifetime crunched down into fragments of memory that’ll mortify you in the decades to come.

But you learn to grow into your flaws, as all people must. If someone ever asks you how you lived your life, will you be proud of it all? Or will you hide your face in shame?

“It wasn’t the best of times all that often,” you may say, “but it was mine.”

And that will have to be enough.