I mentioned before that until the past few months I haven’t been someone who cried much, and that things have been very different for me lately. I bring this up again because it’s something that I’ve been reflecting on quite a bit.
Tears weren’t a common occurrence in my life. Not because I didn’t feel pain. I felt pain just like everyone else did. I honestly believe that I didn’t cry much because I had become disconnected from my emotions. Everything I viewed was done so through the lens of logic. I don’t mean that in some robotic sense. I didn’t walk around assessing things strictly based on numeric value or devoid of human feelings. It’s just that when I processed my environment I did it through the filter of facts. I processed my emotions and the emotions of others in the same way — emotions became facts and then those facts were processed just like all the others.
I remember being a sensitive kid who cried a lot — much to the disapproving glare of some of the men in my life. Toughen up. Don’t be a baby. Somewhere amid all the cliched catchphrases and a desire to fit in I disconnected that part of me.
I was 23 when Brenda and I started dating, and I remember talking with my good friend Henry about some of my feelings. I told him that I felt like I loved her. But I had something else going on. At the same time that I was feeling these positive emotions, I was having a rush of old, negative stuff that kept coming up to deal with, too. He told me the problem with doing an internal disconnect of emotions like I had done is that you make it that much harder to connect to all of your emotions — not just the ones you’re trying get away from. “Numb is numb,” he told me.
I think over the past twenty years that Brenda and I have been married, I’ve slipped back into some of my old habits. If you had asked me six months ago if I was loved I would have, without hesitation, said yes and looked at you as if you were strange for even thinking my answer could be anything else. But I believe that would have been a reply from the part of me that takes those feelings, turns them into facts, and processes a result. If you would have asked me if I felt loved, I don’t know what my response would have been. It’s not that people didn’t show me love, they did. Every day. But I had shut down my ability to feel it — instead, I turned it into a logical exchange. I allowed myself to know I was loved, but I had closed off my ability to feel it.
That partitioning of feelings and logic became evident to me as friends and family responded to my rapid onslaught of symptoms over the past months. At first it was a response to the news of my Type 1 diabetes. Then it was a bigger response as the symptoms of my mystery disease, which would later be diagnosed as CIDP, progressively took my energy and ability to function normally.
As friends and family rallied I can honestly say I felt loved. I felt it as I watched how much Brenda had to do because of what I couldn’t. I felt it as she would gently touch my head when sitting in a chair was all the energy I could muster. I felt it as people called to see how I was doing or came to our house and did things for us. I felt it most of all when those same people took the time especially to see how Brenda was holding up through all of it.
I’m getting better in small steps each day. But when I look back on this time, those are the tears I believe I will remember the most. Tears that came because of the love that I felt. Tears of gratitude.
As you face whatever battle you’re in the midst of my hope and prayer for you is that you’ll be able to stand your ground, face that unknown future, and have those same tears in your eyes. Because those tears remind you that you’re not alone. They give you the strength to let go of your need for control and move forward because you know you can’t do it on your own. Life is better lived when you have tears in your eyes.