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.