When your head is made of bricks

When your head is made of bricks, it's hard to think.
When the bricks your head is made of are arranged into perfect walls holding back everything you are, it's hard to function.
When the bricks are chinked with every insecurity you've entertained, it's hard to dissolve.
And when you stand there, looking over the wall, at what you used to have access to, sometimes it's hard to keep it together. 
But the hardest part, harder than the sun baked brick, and the air dried mortar, is that you were the one who built the one.
The questions you used to ask, the curiosity that used to brighten your mind, the work and thought you had to give out, all of that, you shoved back there.
Back into that corner, slowly slowly building it up, then roping it off.
Roping it off, then putting up a fence, then, finally, putting up the brick wall, layer by layer.
But why did I do this?
Why have I made it so I can't?
So I can't learn the math I used to find so interesting?
So I can't make the sentences I write any better?
So the things I want to try to learn, I can't put the information into my head?
Fear.
Fear that I will realize how far I can go, and that the brick wall I didn't make is right beyond my grasp, and that if I didn't create this wall of my own, I'd go crashing headlong into the wall I can't get through.
Now I have to dismantle this wall I've built, and take the risk of hitting that wall.
But I still don't want to.
I'm still afraid of being hurt on the wall.
But now, I'm afraid that I won't be able to get there at all. That I won't even be able to dismantle the wall I've built.
I don't know how.
I think I put that knowledge behind the wall.
~Grace