Mike and I went to see A Star is Born the other day. It’s a deeply emotional movie on many levels. The woman who was seated next to me was going through tissue like she owned stock in Kleenex. I sat there with dry eyes.
I stood next to a hospital bed and held the hand of a dying child this past month. And I didn’t shed a tear.
In September, I wrote a blog post about my childhood sexual abuse that caused numerous people I know to tell me that they had tears streaming down their faces in the reading, and I cried not one.
Two years ago, I spent more than 9 months deeply worried about Aaron’s health and wellness. And even then, although my stress level was off the charts, my tears were rare.
I watched that same sweet boy walk across the stage this past June and give an incredibly moving and powerful valedictory speech, and despite the fact that I was proud beyond measure, I didn’t cry. Other members of his family cried. Family friends cried. But I, his mother, did not.
I don’t know if I cried when I was a little girl or not. There’s honestly much about my childhood I don’t really remember. Trauma tends to punch holes in your memory, I’ve found. I remember crying when my dad died. But not the deep, emotional, and healing, sobbing tears that I wanted to be able to cry. I don’t know even then if I had the ability to cry in that way, but if I did, I didn’t allow myself to do so. I kept those in because I thought I needed to be strong for my mom. So the only tears I allowed myself were the ones that ran silently down my face. And since his death, my tears have been infrequent and, quite frankly, hard to come by.
There are times that I may watch a movie or see a television show that strikes a chord and I will get a little teary and maybe even cry a few tears then.
Sometimes I get choked up in a jury trial when I have been advocating my heart out for days and my emotions are high, my anger is activated, and my exhaustion is strong.
There have been a few juvenile and CPS children clients that have made me cry because I have felt so powerless to be able to help them out of what were frustrating, painful, and totally unfair situations. Most often those tears came from anger that I didn’t otherwise know how to express.
But when it comes to events in my own life, I don’t cry. I wish I could. I am jealous of my friends who cry when they are sad, hurt, angry, or overwhelmed. I told a good friend recently that she has cried the tears for me that I was unable to cry for myself. I am grateful to her for that. But envious too.
I don’t know that it’s healthy to bottle up emotion in the ways that I have. I’ve had numerous CPS child clients over the years who have been cutters. Typically, people who cut themselves do so in order to allow themselves to feel something. When they can’t cry, they bleed. I’m not a cutter in the literal sense, but in ways, that’s what I am doing when I write. I am a metaphorical cutter, I think. Which is probably why my writing is at times so raw.
It’s not just words that I pour out onto the page, but my tears, and at times my blood.
I heard the following said in a recent workshop I attended: “You build personality to save you from childhood wounds. It’s like a cast. It helps to protect and to heal, but if left on too long, it causes what is underneath to atrophy.” What I was trying to protect as a child was my emotional self. My feelings. I put a cast on my heart to allow it to heal. To protect it. To keep it from being further harmed. But that cast also kept me from being able to feel.
I’ve been peeling off pieces of that cast, one strip at a time, over these past months. Some of that peeling has occurred in my writing of this blog. And what’s underneath isn’t always pretty. Sometimes it’s bleeding, or tender, or raw.
It’s not just words that I pour out onto the page, but my tears, and at times my blood.
For those of you who read my blog and have to take breaks from time to time because it makes you cry, I’m sorry.
For those of you who worry about me because of the pain that you read in my writing, don’t worry. Worry if I stop writing. I write because I feel. I write so that I can feel. I write so that I can peel away the remainder of the cast that is keeping me from fully feeling the things I want and need to feel. The good things and the bad. I write so that I can heal.
It’s not just words that I pour out onto the page, but my tears, and at times my blood.
Thank you to all of you for walking this journey with me. For loving me, and supporting me, wounds and all. For wiping away the tears and the blood from the page until such time as I heal enough that there’s no longer reason to bleed. And the tears can come from my eyes rather than my keyboard.
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