sadness

What if I Cry?

January 3, 2018

I have been feeling this week. I am not typically a person who cries. I used to when I was younger. I would cry all the time. The smallest things would hurt my sensitive heart and I would not be able to stop the tears from flowing. I eventually started picking up on the cues around me that this was not a good thing. I must be strong. I must keep it together. Crying is a weakness. People will think less of me if I cry. People will think I am too sensitive and overly dramatic. So when I was 8 years old, I shut it down. I shut my heart down. I built a wall inside of me that kept my tears locked away. If something hurt my sensitive heart I learned how to disconnect from it. And so I stopped crying.

I am 28 years old now and I am beginning to learn that it is ok to cry. I am beginning to learn that it draws people to me and connects me with them. I am beginning to learn that people want to be with me in my tears and sadness. To me, crying is the most vulnerable thing I could do. It is letting people completely into my heart and completely into my pain. When I cry it feels like I am really letting people see me and that terrifies me. If I am around people and I start to feel my tears come up I immediately shut down. Not because I want to but because I have been doing it for so long that it has become an automatic response. It was a survival mechanism when I was younger and though I want to let people in now this automatic response often prevents me from doing so.

I have been trying to shift this automatic response. I have been trying to allow myself to feel when I am around others. I have been trying not to shut down my sadness. And this week something terrifying happened. I cried. In front of people. I started crying and I could not shut it down. Something had touched my sensitive heart. Something that triggered painful memories. Something that made me so very sad. And the tears started flowing. My heart has been shut down for so long and it is now starting to wake up again. And there are many tears that need to be shed. Tears that I have kept locked away for so many years. Does this scare me? Yes. For someone who believes that tears will scare people away, the idea of allowing others to see them terrifies me. But I want to cry these tears. I want to finally let them out. I want to heal. As time goes on, I hope the automatic response of shutting down my heart won’t be so automatic. As time goes on, I hope that I can let people in to this most vulnerable part of me more and more. The people I cried in front of this week still love me. They still care about me. They still want to be friends.

Is it ok to cry? Is it ok to let people see my tears? Is it ok to let people see my sadness and pain? I think it is. It terrifies me and the scared child inside of me says that it is not, but I think it is. I think it is how I heal. I want to heal. I want to let people see this part of me. And so I will give myself grace. I will give myself grace when I cry and I will give myself grace when I shut down. This is a process. Healing is a process. I am learning. I am growing. And my heart is slowly coming back to life.

I am Grieving

December 22, 2017

Feeling sad this morning. I am in the process of grieving. In the process of reconnecting to my childhood. Beginning to see the needs I had that were not met. I needed to be loved. Seen. Understood. Accepted. I needed to feel like I belonged. I did not feel like I belonged. Up until about a year ago, I felt like I didn’t belong anywhere. I felt different. Out of place. Misunderstood. I felt tainted. Like there was something wrong with me that kept people from being able to love me. I had a lot of people around me while I was growing up. I had my family, my father’s church, my school, but I felt like I didn’t belong in any of those places. I wondered what was wrong with me that made me so different. It made me hate myself. It made me wish I wasn’t alive. It made me feel empty. I was filled with the deepest sense of loneliness. Feeling like I was completely alone and misunderstood on this planet and like I would be completely alone and misunderstood wherever I went after death also. It filled me with fear because I thought that even in death there would not be an escape from this isolation and loneliness.

I think these feelings of being different, misunderstood, and like I didn’t belong are the roots of some of my suicidal thoughts. I think feeling like I didn’t belong anywhere on this planet made me not want to be on this planet. It made me feel like a mistake. Like god or whoever created me messed up and I shouldn’t be here. It made me want to correct his mistake and remove myself from this place.

I am adult now. I have friends now. I have a place where I belong. But I cannot shake the thoughts and feelings I had as a child. I cannot shake my beliefs about myself and the world that were created during my most formative years. Do I belong here? Am I loveable? Am I worth it? I’m feeling sad this morning. Because I am remembering how I felt as a child. I am remembering the isolation. The loneliness. The feelings of rejection. I am not alone now. But I am grieving the years that I was. I am reconnecting with that child. Learning that it was not her fault. But as I reconnect with her my sadness grows. Because no child deserves to grow up feeling that way. No child deserves to feel like there is nowhere they belong. So today, I am grieving. Grieving for the child who grew up believing she was all alone.

I’ve Been Sad but I’ve Been Brave

December 12, 2017

This blank page in front of me is my respite. My escape from the world. The one safe place I can express myself. I long to express myself. It has been too long since I have put pen to paper. Now that I am sitting down looking at this blank page I am not sure where to begin. Is this something I am going to post? Make visible to the eyes of others? Or am I going to keep it safe? Hidden where no one can see it? My dream is to make it visible to the eyes of others. Allow them to see me. Allow them to know how I feel. To provide a place for them to be seen and known as well. But I am afraid.

I’ve been weighed down with sadness today. Deep, deep sadness. It’s part grieving, part distorted thoughts, and part fear. The grieving comes from things in my childhood. Deep wounds that I am just now beginning to address. I am going through a season of mourning the things that I lost. Mourning the things that I never had. This weekend was a weekend of authentic connection for me. I have a special group of friends and together we sat down and took the time to get to know and listen to each other. It was refreshing. It was healing. It made me sad. It’s one thing to never know what you have been missing. One thing to never know what was lacking your entire childhood. I didn’t know what I was missing. Now I do. Connection. I was missing connection. Vulnerability. Authenticity. I am finding those things now and though they are so healing, they are also causing me to feel so sad. When I was younger I didn’t know that these types of things existed. I didn’t know that life could be so much deeper and richer. But now I do and this awareness is causing me to grieve the deep emptiness I felt as a child.

I have also been feeling afraid. I am afraid that I am going to lose this connection to others that I have just begun to find. I am afraid that my friends are going to leave me. That they are going to change their minds about wanting to know me. That they will be just like others in my past. It’s one thing to never know what you were missing. It’s another thing entirely to become aware of it, to begin to taste it, and then to have it ripped away from you. This is what I am afraid of. The amount of pain that would cause. I’m not sure I would survive that pain. And so I find myself wanting to pull away. Wanting to put my guard up. To protect myself. The thing I long for I also fear. Connecting with others is one of the most healing things. Being seen and then rejected is one of the most painful things.

This is what I am grappling with today. This is what I have been grappling with the last few weeks. Trying not to get lost in the sadness. Trying to be brave enough to risk being vulnerable. Allowing myself to feel what has been coming up. I’ve been sad today. But I’ve also been brave.