Compassion

I have spent nearly half of this year in mourning. There is a time for it. What I have begun to understand, though, is that there truly is a season for everything. Betrayal, particularly the all-encompassing soul betrayal, is no easy thing to come to terms with. In fact, it is so personal and such an intangible pain that most human beings have no adequate words to offer for comfort. "I'm sorry" or "It will get better" just feel like salt poured into a wound that one realizes over time no one can possibly heal with words. It is one thing to be betrayed, but what happens to one's physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being as a result of the betrayal is a whole process in and of itself. You cannot know this pain unless you have felt it. But, what I have started to understand deep within my spirit, is that there comes a time when holding onto the pain someone else has caused you injures yourself and the world more than the betrayer. More than that, the one who has betrayed, unless one of the rare human beings who carries absolutely no remorse, suffers immensely while you refuse to extend forgiveness.

Forgiveness is almost as difficult to describe as love. Neither can be touched, contained, controlled, or forced. Both are gifts that can only be given when truly first embodied within one's self. I believe many of us, including myself, prematurely offer what we believe to be forgiveness because we have been taught that we will not be forgiven ourselves or that there is some shame or guilt to be carried for an inability to forgive quickly. Forgiveness is an experience one must come to on their own terms, and I have found that the times I have not received forgiveness are the times I learn the most about the value of it.

In all of my pain and inability to forgive, I have hurt people whom I love so deeply. And, when we really truly stop to understand our lives, we all recognize that there is pain in us caused by others that inevitably has affected us in ways that perpetuate pain through our actions with others. It's circular and cyclical. It's all connected. Therapists build their careers on us behaving this way. We can spend a lifetime rehashing and pulling apart all the ways in which others have damaged us. But, when do we stop? When do we stop and recognize that every human being has been wounded, and if when we are wounded, we have made mistakes and desire forgiveness, why then, is it so difficult to offer this to those who make mistakes that affect us? Too often, we walk away from friendships, family members, and marriages because the growing pains of learning greater forgiveness and compassion become too great. Is there truly a limit on love, compassion, and forgiveness? No. The only limit is within ourselves...when we close off our capacity to expand as creatures of eternal healing for ourselves and those around us...when it becomes easier to restrict our innate purpose to be whole, because in order to be so we must rearrange expectations or needs we believed were critical for our survival. Change is hard. But, while the season may come for solitude, anger, and unforgiveness, so does the time come for compassion. Within each of us is the small child still hoping to find a safe place to lay our head. When we accept our own vulnerability, our own shame, and our own frailty, it becomes innate that we honor it in others.

So I ask you, who have you not extended compassion to? And who are any of us to determine that someone is undeserving of such a gift?

Head-on Collisions

Sometimes, prose fails us. It's not raw enough...not true enough. There's nothing pretty about heartbreak. There's nothing beautiful about feeling tossed by the wayside. Maybe it's just that I am not talented enough to find a passionate way of describing feeling run over by a semi, to find that you're still alive, and that no doctor exists who can mend your wounds.

Roadkill. That sounds like the word that describes this feeling, except really I feel more like this animal I hit one day years ago. I don't think I killed it. I think it either slowly died or forever stumbled around with a limp and half of its brain function from the impact of my car. I feel like I've gone through a head-on collision with a drunk driver, one who purposefully got behind the wheel with no consideration whatsoever for any one else on the road...only to have that driver jump out unscathed and shout profanities at me because the wreck was somehow my fault.

I write to no one tonight. There will be no one who could stop the collision...not even myself. It has happened. It has happened so many times, that I'm inclined to choose two courses: 1-never get on the road again or 2-become a better driver. This concussion is too severe to make any decision tonight.

We are all connected...

There's kind of this running joke in the lesbian community about how inevitably, we're all connected, because in one way or another, we've slept with someone who's slept with someone, etc. The point is not that we're slutty...but about the fact that we're a small community. I use this as an example for two reasons. One, I am a lesbian and I can relate to this experience. Two, and more importantly, the truth is that--gay or straight, black or white--all of us are connected. We do a disservice to our existence, our spiritual and emotional progress, and our interactions with one another to ever believe anything less. Maybe you disagree. Maybe you believe that somehow you can live and behave in whatever manner is fitting for you and it has no bearing on who comes after you and tells no story of who came before you, but it does.

My whole life I tried to escape many of the behaviors and beliefs that I grew up living around. I thought if I could somehow get far enough away, surely I would finally be able to flourish in my individuality...as if somehow outside of all of the chaos or pain, there existed in me some perfected version of "self." What I refused to want to accept or believe was that the very essence of my thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors were in one way or another a direct result of how I grew up. My dismissal or rebellion was a reaction to my past--not an escape from it.

We all in our own ways do the very thing I believed I could do--escape our own pain. The problem is--because we are all connected--every effort we make to escape our own pain has the potential to create or reawaken pain that others carry within them. The things that may be insignificant to us, may be greatly significant to others because of their own journey. We may have lived our lives feeling no one ever heard our voice and so we are determined to yell and scream in desperation now to be heard. We may express this in the company of someone who was yelled at during their childhood and we, inadvertently, cause them to feel their own wounds and vulnerability when they are around our "outbursts." We all unconsciously, subconsciously, or consciously engage in this exchange of connected pain on a daily basis--whether anyone else makes us aware of this.

So, what can we do? Some people would say we should all be in therapy working out every childhood issue we carry in us. Some people would say nothing. There is a wide spectrum of solutions, but I believe that the only true solution, the only lasting solution, is love. When we truly live the spirit of love, we are able to recognize both our own pain and the pain of others. We are strengthened, not weakened, by this recognition, because once again, we realize that the pain connects us. We can understand another's suffering, because we know what it means to suffer. We can hold another person who weeps, for we know the despair and emptiness we have felt ourselves. This is the very essence of empathy. We fail ourselves and each other when we fail to show empathy. When we carelessly or selfishly believe that somehow our pain is different than someone else's or that we are different from someone else.

Rather than running away from my childhood or from fear of embodying my parents' habits, I heal myself and the world by finding empathy for their human weaknesses or flaws...for my mere ability to have empathy requires the recognition that I, too, am imperfect. I can't help but question what the world would be like if we truly lived as if we are all connected; if we understood that everything we do and say truly does have an equal and opposite reaction; if we could look at ourselves in the mirror and admit that we have probably injured more people than we care to admit and that only through love will we ever be able to see and repair what is broken.

May you understand that my pain is your pain though it may be dressed in a different mask, and may you awake to commit for the rest of your days to love, truly love, fully love, at last.