Everybody Hurts

In childbirth you learn to trust your body, to have faith that it knows what it's doing. You surrender to the pain. You let the pain serve its purpose.

A similar thing happens when you get a stomach virus. The body knows what to do: empty. Get it out. And so, as you lean over the toilet heaving your guts out for hours at a time, you reassure yourself that you'll be okay. You just have to let it out. The same is true for emotion. When difficult emotions try to surface, we so often try to avoid them. It doesn't feel good to be angry. It doesn't feel good to be sad. It doesn't feel good to process loss. So we drink. We work more. We go out. We make jokes, we stay busy, we read books and binge TV shows. We distract ourselves in any way possible to avoid feeling the feelings. But eventually these things bubble to the surface. Because your body knows what it is doing. It's pain with a purpose. Your body, your heart, is trying to get it out. We fight it, we numb it, we do all sorts of mental gymnastics to hide from it, when really what we need to do is let it come. Then you breath a sigh of relief once you've ripped off the band-aid. You've felt the icky feelings and had a good cry or identified some difficult truth about how you feel and what you want. You look down and expect to see yourself nicely healed under that band-aid. Only to find another, smaller band-aid that must be ripped off when its time comes. We serve ourselves best when we learn to trust that those unsettled feelings we have deep down are a sign that another band-aid is ready to be to ripped off. When we recognize that this is the only way to get to healing. And when we remember that sometimes what you reveal is a cut that never fully heals; it simply scabs over. If you pick at it, it will bleed every time. But you learn to stop picking. You learn to work around it, careful not to nick it, aware that it exists and is part of you. And you learn that when it does bleed, it will again scab over. You will be okay. You just have to let it out. And trust that your body and heart know what its doing.