Be grateful for your tears

So maybe it’s true. The highest highs are intertwined with the lowest low. It’s usually the people you love so much who can hurt you the most. When you love someone so much can you get really hurt by them. In engineering terms, the magnitude doesn’t change much, but the sign does.

The topic of vulnerability has been spreading a lot since Brene Brown’s TED talk. Sarah Kay also alludes to it when she says, “Now, I know that the number one rule to being cool is to seem unfazed, to never admit that anything scares you or impresses you or excites you. Somebody once told me it’s like walking through life like this. You protect yourself from all the unexpected miseries or hurt that might show up. But I try to walk through life like this. And yes, that means catching all of those miseries and hurt, but it also means that when beautiful, amazing things just fall out of the sky, I’m ready to catch them.” 

The point she’s trying to make is that by building up fences around yourself, you’re not just shutting out the bad in the world. You’re also shutting out the good. In other words, you’re simply shutting yourself in.

People might say you’re oversensitive. Throw the word at you like it was an insult. “Stop being oversensitive. Buck up.” They make it seem as though this emotional stuff is just fluff, cotton candy that has no nutritional value. So it’s tempting, really…to just numb your emotions. Bury it all. Throw it out of sight. Sorta like the way we tidy the room before our mother walks in. Throw everything under the bed or in the closet and pretend the room is now tidy. And yet we know that’s not how it works.

We can’t go through life numbing our emotions. Let me rephrase that. We can. It’s just that we shouldn’t. It’s not healthy. Take it from a person who’s spent their whole life packing memories into these tiny boxes and burying them inside, they tend to build up, and truth be told, they never really go away. Just because they’re out of sight doesn’t mean they’re not going to spring open when you least expect it. The worse part is that when they do, they actually appear in a transformed into something so dark and ugly, it makes one wonder why they left it unattended for so long.

So how do we attend to it?

Step 1) Don’t pretend it doesn’t exist. Step number one to any proper treatment is a proper diagnosis. We shouldn’t live in denial. Yet denial seems to be our default M. O.  We live in an age where living a pretense is much, much easier than accepting what is true.

Step 2) Talk. Cry. Throw things around. Having your feelings manifest itself in the world takes it out of your system.

Step 3) The letter. As a writer, I’ve always loved the letter idea. It’s actually part of step (2). Write a letter to whoever caused this feeling and decide after two weeks whether it’s a good idea to send it or not. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s not. So you need to give yourself that time period to sit on it, sleep on it…whatever it takes. Just don’t send it as soon as you finish writing it. t’s all part of the process. Purge your system. Get the toxicity out.

Step 4) Finally do something about it. And there are really two things to do; change it or accept it. It’s the binary rule. There’s no third option.

My point is process it as soon as it occurs. Otherwise it will keep on bothering you for a very long time.

In generic terms, the story that made me write this is someone hurt me a couple of years ago. It was such a pivotal moment in my life, you can say it really opened my eyes to a lot of things. Of course, the thing that hurt the most was the fact that this person and I were really close. Anyhow, come last year, the perfect opportunity for revenge came to me, and I really wanted to do something about it, partly because I’m evil and partly because I wanted that person to get a taste of what they did so next time I mention the story they don’t dismiss it with a laugh like I was being oversensitive. Now the problem is that someone else shut down my whole revenge plan, and I was so frustrated because if it weren’t for person # 2….

So I opened my journal and I wrote a stern letter to myself. I practically screamed at myself. It went something like, “YOU REALLY NEED TO GET OVER IT!”

I realized I can’t keep on carrying this baggage with me forever. And if I’m going to be honest with myself, I needed that moment in my life because it really changed a lot of things for me. As much as it hurt, it was important. So come last week, for the first time, I actually thought about it and was able to dismiss it myself, and I realized that it really works to process everything as soon as it happens so it wouldn’t last forever.

In other words, be grateful for your tears. They really make you stronger. But to be grateful for your tears, you need to first let them out.