Grief, suffering & sacrifice

Years ago, a friend of mine said to me, "You have a deep well of grief hidden inside you." At the time I didn't believe him.

But evidently I didn't dig the well deep enough. Or maybe didn't hide it well enough. A couple of years ago it overflowed or came uncapped or was stumbled upon. Whatever it is deep wells of grief--hidden in such a way that the person housing them doesn't even know they're there--do.

We are supposed to be in control of ourselves and our emotions, but I am not in control of mine.

I cry. Like, a lot. "I could write a whole book on crying," I wrote in one of my pieces, and it's true. This essay might be the beginning of it.

On Crying

In a past life
I could've been a professional
mourner, one of those people
paid to grieve the deceased.
Strange that in those days
tears were wanted & rewarded
seen as a gift
to the family

And I think of Margery Kempe
whose bouts of crying,
because they went on
so long & loud
for no apparent reason,
were attributed to divine inspiration
a gift from God

There are questions I won't answer
in public because just thinking about them
makes my eyes hot & the water stand
I do what I can
to avoid burdening others
with my tears. Where
did I get the idea
my tears are a burden?

In creative non-fiction class
I routinely cut into my heart.
Every day uncontrollable weeping.
So f---ing embarrassing.
Hot tears, snot, choked words
read aloud. I could not
pin my grief on
any one thing.
And despite my tears
and fear that
they'd think me crazy
some of my classmates fell in love
with me
for crying.

I am ashamed of my pain because I can neither understand nor control it. I fear others' judgment. My tears also make me unwillingly vulnerable to strangers.

It's so uncomfortable
this tearing into skin
this exposure of ribs & ligament
this passing around of
my still-bleeding heart

About a year ago, when I turned 33, my friend Diane gave me a card with the following quote in it:

"If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. 

If you do not bring forth what is within you, it will kill you."

 --attributed to Jesus in the Gospel according to Thomas

This was really powerful for me. I'd spent the last couple of years editing myself and performing acts of spiritual self-mutilation in order to try to fit into my work environment, to please the people with whom I was working so that I could continue to have positive working relationships with them and therefore keep my job. My perception was that being my whole, true self was detrimental to my survival. 

The Jesus quote, the way I read it, was more than permission to be myself. It was a promise and a warning: being my whole, true self is what would save me; continuing to do what I was doing was going to kill me.

I burst into tears as soon as I read it, and continued to cry for a long time.

A few weeks later, the same Diane referred to what I was doing to myself--that process of spiritual self-mutilation in order to fit in--as self-crucifixion. "You have to stop crucifying the Christ inside you," she counseled.

Today is Easter. But I know so little about Jesus' resurrection in comparison to his suffering and sacrifice. It's his suffering and sacrifice that have been glorified in this culture. But what if that misses the point? What if the whole point was not that we have to suffer to be good, not that we have to sacrifice who we are in order to play well with others, but rather that we have to let the part of us addicted to suffering and others' opinions of us die so we can truly live?

Toward the end of a piece called "Shiva the Destroyer," I wrote about my addiction to pain and suffering:
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And then I start to panic. I think: I think my pain is what makes me interesting. If I write through all of it, if I take out all the shrapnel, what will be left? Who will I be?

Anything you want, I whisper back.

I am afraid to lose my pain, to heal the causes of grief, because they have been essential to my sense of identity.

When I was thinking about quitting my job to become a full-time freelancer, I was afraid of how I'd survive without the structure and steady salary. It almost seemed like suicide. Jumping off a cliff without any guarantee of a soft landing. But about a month into my self-employment I realized that, while there is great risk in freelancing, there is also unlimited earning potential. I'm limited now by my own time, energy & drive, not by how much my employer wants to pay me or thinks they can afford. As much as the system supported me, it also held me back.

Maybe the grief, too, holds me back from living fully. How do I let it go? My hope isn't to not feel it anymore; it's just to not be defined by it. I want to be able to feel it without thinking that the grief is me.

Grief and crying have been on my mind a lot lately because I'm going to be doing a reading soon, and I'll be reading a piece I've never been able to read aloud without crying because it reveals my pain. This means, in essence, that I've agreed to cry for seven minutes in front of a room full of strangers. And the realization I had today is that I am ashamed of my pain.

I don't want to be ashamed of my pain. I want to accept and validate it as part of my experience so that I can move beyond it.