She looks at me and I look at her nervously.
— So how long is it going to take? She looks at her watch.
— I don’t have time for that. She says.
I burst out laughing. It is a joke but also not. She just broke up with someone. She is sad and have been crying every day. It has been a few weeks now and I am sitting on the floor in her condo.
We are doing things that we usually aren’t — eating ice-cream and stroking each other’s hair.
We both have the same thought in our heads — “this is not us”. We don’t have time for break ups and getting over people. We don’t have time for griveing.
Or rather that is what we tell ourselves.
The truth is: we don’t know how to grieve. We were never allowed to.
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Being sad has always been a sign of weakness. You had to be strong. And for both of us, we also had to become adults too early — adults to our parents who needed emotional care-taking.
There was no time to be sad, and grieve. We had to adjust to other people’s sadness.
We both know that and we can have a deep conversation about the ins and outs of that experience — of the effect of our childhood wounds on our present.
We do that sometimes. Neither of us lacks awareness. Both of us lack patience, and most importantly patience with ourselves.
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As I am going to leave her condo and get in the car, I will play some upbeat music. I have noticed recently that most of my music is upbeat.
It either matches my mood or it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, the intention is for it to bring me in the mood.
I don’t know how to be sad. I spend too much energy trying to run away from that state.
I keep thinking of the reasons why. I keep analyzing it and even writing these articles but I refuse to feel the sadness.
— How much longer mate?
— What? To get over someone?
He shakes his head.
— I don’t think we ever do.
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I will never forget when a few years ago I was on a research trip in India with my classmates. One of them just broke up with his long term girlfriend and I too was going through a heartbreak.
I remember we went to a nightclub with a few of friends I had in there. He drank 6 shots and told me to get him a cab home. As I was saying goodbye he looked at me and asked “How do you do it?”.
— Do what?
— How can you dance and be so happy while also being so hurt?
I took it as a compliment and don’t remember what I said. Probably something along the lines of having a certain mindset.
While I am glad I wasn’t drinking my sorrows away, I was also not really processing them either — not until many months later.
The secret to such amazing skill was throwing away the dimensions of my self to fit into the one dimensional image of upbeat, tough and happy girl that I imagined myself to be.
Do you really get hurt if you never admit to yourself you do?
Of course you do. And that was the whole secret. The big cover up.
I was just stuck in the denial phase, and I have never really moved through those other stages.
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Running away however never works because eventually you will have to stop. Eventually you will hit a wall and there is no place to run.
And when you do you have so much grieving to do that it is hard to even process. It is hard to process. It is overwhelming. It makes other people feel like you are going through a depression, and maybe you are but it is also necessary. And then you convince yourself that it is necessary and you no longer know whether it is still necessary, or you are just identiyfing with your suffering.
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— All you had to do is to admit that it hurts.
— Then I will lose.
— But this is not the game. And what do you really win?
— I don’t know. The title of being strong and brave?
— And what does that get you?
— Love and affection.
— And what if you weren’t strong and brave?
— I wouldn’t be here.
— Where would you be?
I look away out of the window.
— Where would I be if I didn’t have to be strong? Would I be weak?
Is not being strong all the time equals being weak?
What if that equaled being free?
But no, I meant that quite literally.
I wouldn’t be sitting here. I would have never got out of the dark places I have myself in. To be honest with you, I don’t know if I would have been alive.
— It sounds like being strong has served you a great deal.
— It did. It saved me. I saved me.
— It helped you to survive. But when are you going to start living? You don’t have to be the survivor anyomore. You don’t even have to be the fighter.
— I know. I know all these things but how do I approach this huge thing The daunting sadness that I still don’t what to do with?
— What if you danced with it?
— Danced with it?
— Yeah in the same way that you dance when you are angry to all those rap songs.
— Haha I don’t dance to them when I am angry. I dance to them because I love the flow.
— So maybe you can dance to some sad songs and tell yourself that you are not dancing and crying because you are sad, but those songs are making you to. In the same way as when you play that song where the first verse ends with ‘f*ck you man’ but you are really just rapping along. You are not angry, and maybe you are also not sad.
You are just signing along and the tears are just there, you know.
— Well now I cannot do that. You have exposed me.
— But you knew that all along.
— But I didn’t need to know it like that. Explicitly.
— Why?
— Because it makes it hard to pretend that I don’t.
…
We will find numerous ways and opportunities to run away. We can continue playing games and the mind will play along. But in the end of the day it is only ‘you’ versus ‘you’.
In the end of the day, you are the one who will be left with your own truth.
It doesn’t matter how many cover up stories you create to maintain the ego — the identity that you guard so closely. Deep inside you know. We always do. And the problem is the not the truth itself.
The pain is not the problem.
The sadness is not the problem.
All those things that we don’t want to admit to ourselves are not really the problem.
The problem is that we resist accepting those things as true. Resistance is what hurts so much, that is which creates so much inner conflict.
The problem comes down to the relationship we have with ourselves, whether we can hold ourselves gently, whether we even know what it is like to be held. Or whether we internalize the guilt and shame and turn against ourselves in such moments.
Maybe we never lacked patience.
Maybe what we were really lacking is self-compassion.
One of the most important elements of self-compassion is the recognition of our shared humanity. Compassion is, by definition, relational. Compassion literally means “to suffer with,” which implies a basic mutuality in the experience of suffering. The emotion of compassion springs from the recognition that the human experience is imperfect, that we are all fallible. Why else would we say “it’s only human” to comfort someone who has made a mistake? When we’re in touch with our common humanity, we remember that feelings of inadequacy and disappointment are universal. This is what distinguishes self-compassion from self-pity. While self-pity says “poor me,” self-compassion recognizes suffering is part of the shared human experience. The pain I feel in difficult times is the same pain that you feel in difficult times. The triggers are different, the circumstances are different, the degree of pain is different, but the basic experience is the same. — Kristen Neff, the author of the book “Self-Compassion”
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If you are interested in exploring the depths of your subconscious mind and building a deeper connection with yourself, visit my portal Find The Universe Within.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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