One night, I was eating pistachios and I came across one of those that was almost completely enclosed in its shell, so I tossed it back into the cup on my lap--my usual protocol. This particular night I was in a bit of an emotional funk where I felt kind of stuck. I looked at the pistachio that I threw back and picked it up. I found myself literally relating to this freaking thing, thinking, I feel like a pistachio that was put back because it was too hard to open.
It so perfectly represented my emotional state of mind. So I clasped my fingernails around its edges and kept attempting to pry it open. I even cracked it with my teeth. I didn’t want to give up on it because at that point, this pistachio was figuratively me.
I then thought of all the possible pistachios that may have been thrown back into their bag and “given up” on. I paralleled them to the amount of people that must feel that exact same way at some point in their lives; like getting fired, going through a breakup, or over consuming one’s self in work. Sometimes, it isn’t only other people who give up on us, but ourselves.
Something as little as a pistachio helped me think differently about not only people, but also me. I had felt so misunderstood, yet was brought back by my seemingly odd analogy. I was internalizing my emotions under a completely different light and slowly finding my way out of this puzzle of a mindset I was in.
We wear this outer shell to hide who we truly are most of the time. I’m sure a lot of us feel like in today’s culture, we’re extremely disposable. We can be thrown back into the mass pile of humans and disregarded at any moment. There’s always someone who we have to compete with, this lingering fear of never being enough, or a paycheck that puppets us around. We can never seem to escape the walls that other people try putting up around one another.
I almost gave up on that pistachio, but I didn’t, and it finally cracked. The same goes for a person. Just because someone acts tough on the outside, doesn’t mean there isn’t something softer on the inside. Sounds pretty cliché, but the firmest people were once the softest.
Here I was sitting in my bed trying to snack and distract my frustrations away, when all I needed was to just be there for myself and come out of this shell I was subconsciously hiding in.
If you ever find yourself feeling like a wedged pistachio, instead of throwing all emotions to the side, be open to cracking yourself open and getting to the core of you. We won't be able to listen to someone until we learn to listen to ourselves, especially our gut intuition.
