Scary Moments, Strength, & Wonder Woman

So if you haven't noticed lately, I'm still a mess. And in the past few days it's felt quite heavy. Maybe it's just going back to work after laying around existing and attempting to tune out physical pain for two weeks. In the heaviness, I've found myself angry; I'm angry that he put me here without remorse. I'm angry that I find myself in pain that's hard to wade through and keep afloat in. I'm angry that I was more committed and it hurts like hell.

I've been struggling a lot, and constantly trying to figure out where I can fit in therapy, can I afford therapy, and where do I find a therapist that I actually like, and can I practice therapy someday when I feel right now like I'm falling apart, and how does one get medicated? Like I'm that kind of mess. I should be working right now, but I just can't get my weary heart to write about insurance.

So just the other day I was thinking about it all. I read a past facebook post about God only knows what (I post all the time). I thought about how I used to be strong. At first this thought bothered me, it's been a recurring thought throughout this...thing, and it made me sad. But then I remembered something else: I was just as vulnerable at my strongest. Feeling weak and broken doesn't mean I'm no longer strong.

I saw Wonder Woman last night, and without giving too much away I'll say: I needed it. You've got this incredibly powerful, strong woman and a part of her strength and her very purpose is to be courageous enough to believe in the good of mankind – and then do something about it. I caught myself feeling empowered watching a super hero movie. She was both fierce and vulnerable. It was brave to believe the things she did, yet she wasn't spared the pain it brought.

And you see, I sort of realized it's hard to be strong when being strong also means being vulnerable. Sometimes, or what can feel like oftentimes, that vulnerability gets you hurt. Loving with your heart wide open can leave you faint and weary. But I came to another conclusion, too...

Tonight I saw a friend of mine going through it. She wearily asked, "How can it be like this when I've done all I can?" Her sentiments resonated with me, not just from my recent relationship debacle, but from life. Then I found myself saying something to her that, in my own haze of struggle, I needed to hear:

You're strong! Don't let a scary moment make you forget it.

I have been stuck in a real pain that I'm still not fully sure how to dismantle and I certainly haven't had luck wishing away, but I can choose strength. It's hard, and it doesn't feel good, or secure sometimes, but I can draw on my strength. It isn't gone, I can call it up and find it again.

Just yesterday I told myself I can and will be strong again...but by this morning at my desk I forgot. As I said just a bit ago, I decided I don't want to let the scary moments make me forget my strength anymore.

What We Do When We Avoid Pain

My life has felt like a mess. My worldview is teetering on edge because I can't make sense out of so many painful things happening over and over. Being teased with good things, only to have them ripped away cruelly. I've felt like a broken record because I know I've talked about it so much, but I also feel like I've hardly been listened to. It's why I write about it.

A minute to at most a few minutes into talking through any one painful part of my life and how stuck I feel, I'm usually offered a solution. As if the thing that's been on cycle through my mind for weeks and months can suddenly make sense to someone who listened to me talk about it for a minute – suddenly they have an answer. Usually it's that "everything will be fine", or it'll turn around. I believed that, for a while. Then it felt like things were turning around, until they weren't anymore. Until something else bad happened, followed by something else; until I lost the job I loved when I was house shopping, until I got my heartbroken yet again, and then after having my hope naively reignited, having it crushed again. Stuck in places of pain like being in a boat with a hole, bailing water out as it comes in.

I'm still sad a lot. I'm still looking for sense and meaning a lot. And the thing is I just want that to be heard and held, not fixed because I have the utmost doubt that just chinning up will fix this. For so long I felt not like myself, so long that it now feels like the new normal. At the same time, I still feel like I have to argue to have the pain in my life recognized and not brushed over.

I know: people don't know what to say to pain and often they just say something. I'm getting used to that, learning to have grace for it. But I also wish there was a greater effort to learn to think before speaking to a person in pain. I catch myself doing it, too, all the time. If there's one valuable thing this time in my life has taught me, it's to take pause before responding to a person in pain. My whole life I was that positive, look-at-the-bright-side person, so I still do it too, but I'm striving and learning to allow people to be in their reality.

See, being the one who sits and really listens, believing for something better without voicing it – that is a link to the hope outside the reality that the darkness hides. Sometimes life can be so painful, it makes it incredibly difficult to hope; it becomes scary, not just like how hope is often a risk but a thing that is truly hard to do. When we avoid another's pain by assuming they can take hold of hope, we leave them in that darkness to fend for themselves.

In these months that have stretched on farther than I'd ever imagined they would, the best words I've heard over and over again came from my best friend: "That must be so hard." They didn't make the pain disappear, they soothed simply by being with me in the reality that this is so hard.