By Catherine DiMercurio

Sometimes, I wonder if these posts are too small, too personal, when one considers the chaos in the world right now. And, they very well might be. But in the middle of the chaos we are also navigating our own lives, our own ups and downs, and I don’t know if we can help each other or not, but I feel as though we should try and compare notes, share maps and routes, even though the interior world I’m trying to understand is a different one than yours. So, perhaps it is more about strategies and empathy.

It was a difficult week. I have felt more reactive than usual, less calm. We all have old wounds from the past that sometimes find a way of reopening when we don’t expect them to. I’ve written before about the way some wounds are always with us and we have to keep trying to find ways to live with them, especially after we’ve put in years of work trying to heal them only to find out how easily they sometimes make themselves felt again.

A few days ago, I was walking to the auto shop to pick up my car after having the radiator replaced. The sun was shining cheerfully in that early autumn way it does when they air is just starting to get chilly. I noted this, more as a scientific observation than a sensation or experience that brought me joy, as it usually does. I was having a bad day, battling fears that, in truth, had no reason for existing. But sometimes, they exist anyway. Sometimes, a conversation or situation reminds you just enough, even if only by a sliver, of something from long ago, and the dormant fear sees that sliver as an opening to get a foothold again, and you spend time and energy trying to demuddle past and present, fear and not-fear.

As I was walking my feet itched and I had the urge to run and I felt so cold despite that cheerful sun and I thought about how tired I was. I thought about how some fear-pain responses are not things that you can run away from, nor are they things you can hide from; you just have to keep staring them down whenever they rise up, and I remembered again my fatigue. And how it all made me feel like I didn’t know what to do, though there was nothing to do. But it felt like something in me was readying me to fight, filling me with anxiety and adrenaline.

And then, there is no place to put it, because there is nothing to fight now.

And then, to be completely inelegant, what remains is only this greasy fat blob of emotional sludge to deal with. And that takes time.

And we wonder, how long will the people we love be patient, and can they keep loving us the next time we find ourselves ready for a battle that doesn’t exist? And we wonder, how can we wonder that? That’s not how love works. But we also remember, it did work that way once, when we called it love but it was really something different.

I made it to the auto shop and paid my six hundred sixty-two dollars and drove home. I tried to look at the emotional stumbles of the week like a messy room that will never be completely ordered. It would be easy to close the door and pretend it didn’t exist. But it does. Sometimes we have to be calm and brave enough to walk by and glance in, and keep walking. And sometimes we have to be even braver and walk in, and sort through the messes for a little while, even though the window we decided to leave open because we need fresh air allows in the gusts of wind that leave everything strewn like scattered leaves again.

My messy day progressed, and I still tripped and stumbled through the messiness. Until I didn’t. I found scraps of normal, and I found empathy, and I found that the feeling of ringing-in-my-ears-except-not-my-ears finally quieted.

It is easy to feel too small, too tired, too messy. I remind myself to be loud, but sometimes it comes out wrong. I remind myself that strong and loud are different, that I am not composed of the detritus cluttering the messy room.

The past creates such noisy whispers. Maybe sometimes I’m just trying to be louder than that. Sometimes we believe in completely fictional versions of ourselves written by everyone except us.

What drowns out whispers and erases fictions?  Maybe it’s just me, singing loudly and off-key.

At the same time, singing through it only gets us so far. It helps us be brave sometimes, or distracted enough to not be bothered. But we also have to face that the things that snag us impact our relationships, with our families, friends, our partner. And even if we allow that a particular wound within us is easily reopened, and no amount of trying to “fix” ourselves changes that, it doesn’t mean we get to leave the wound unadministered to. It means we have to stop sometimes, and talk ourselves through things, or, that we have to have uneasy conversations with others when talking ourselves through isn’t enough.

I’ve always been clumsy and always been told to pay attention. I am, to so many things. Sometimes we trip anyway, and there will always be skinned knees and hearts to tend to.

Sometimes, we simply must treat our wounds, again, and there is no reason we cannot treat ourselves with kindness and patience in the process, rather than judgment or resentment or anger. There is a softness maybe that we can let in, with acceptance. Maybe, when we feel something hurting that doesn’t seem like it should be, we can just say, oh, this again, sometimes this hurts, I need to lie down for a little while, I need a hug, a cup of tea, a walk. Maybe if we don’t feel compelled to judge the pain for existing it will have a little less control over our emotions and we can move forward with a little more grace. It’s okay, we can tell ourselves, each other. Everything’s going to be okay.

And it is, and it will be.

Love, Cath