Empathy

In the last week I have been writing and trying to make sense of the thoughts running through my head and the experiences that I have had. Each one of them I have tried to place nicely on a shelf in the right pile to make sense of all the things that have led me to this place. I have felt angry at some of the cultural things that I see that leave people feeling powerless and unimportant. I have pondered the feelings of never having done enough and always coming from a place of feeling as though no matter what I do, it will still not be enough and no matter how tired I can never stop to rest regardless of what I may want or need. I am tired. I have no more strength to fight beliefs that are taking life instead of giving it. As I was driving to work yesterday my thoughts went back to my son's illness, leukemia, and the heart wrenching experiences contained in those four years. I realized through all of the cultural beliefs that I had held about how to respond in a faith promoting way and how to accept the Lord's will, that I had rarely, during that time, stopped and wept openly, acknowledged to myself, to him, to my family my fears, my pain at watching him and the whole family suffer. I thought of the day he died, I wanted to go back to that day again and sit on the bed with him and just hold him and cry with him and say goodbye. I wanted to stay with him after everyone else had gone and weep over his lifeless body. I wanted to go home and curl up alone and honor the experience that is every mother's worst nightmare, but instead as was dictated by the belief system, I responded to each of those things as a pillar of strength and faith, leaving everyone so impressed by my faith in God, and leaving me weeping inside like a child wishing that I could be real. And to this day, I struggle to walk into a hospital or a doctor's office. And asking for help, something you just don't do in this culture, becomes a sense of shame, showing that you don't have enough faith, but what I have was told is the remedy to asking for help when you need it, the remedy for needing to rest when you are burned out from care taking is to do it some more. And if you don't you are being selfish and faithless. When you want to cry, you should laugh instead. I want to clarify here, that the things I just wrote are my perceptions of the beliefs that I was raised with, the family and church culture that I belonged to. So what I learned was when you need help really need help, you need to be alone. It is the best and only way to handle the voices that cause me to put my own needs aside and be selfless, an incredibly dysfunctional thing to do. When you look at books on grieving, or on caretaker burnout, they are careful to invite you to be gentle with yourself in this process and know that each part of the recovery is a step and will not last forever, but you cannot pretend them away, unless you happen to belong to this church and family culture, they call it our legacy of faithfulness. Again dark words, they steal the life from your eyes and your heart. The love, light, life and empathy that you need starts when you hear your own cries………… When you don't you just become the beautiful walking dead, beautiful and faithful looking on the outside and dead from not hearing, or giving life to your own life. It is interesting how uncomfortable sharing your pain can make people. The little RSA shorts that I posted I love. I have listened to it a number of times before I really heard one of the things they said in there. Sympathy drives disconnection. Empathy drives connection. I rallied that sympathy is like a black hole of aloneness. I realized this because the other night a friend came to visit me. I have had so few experiences with empathy that I didn't realize how much I was needing it. SO, my friend came to visit me. Unlike many people right now in my life she came without an agenda, came without any judgments as to why I wasn't sitting in the same pew as she. She just came. So we sat down to visit and honestly I am guarded right now. My hurt has run very deep and more sympathy or pity driving the emptiness of disconnection I cannot handle. I would rather be alone. She brought herself. We talked and she shared some of her heartache and cried and then I cried because it was some of mine too. We listened to each other and for the first time in a long time I heard myself saying how much it all still hurt. She listened and then thanked me for she had needed to talk about that pain too. I had needed to as well. For a brief moment, I realized the power of empathy, the power of honesty the power of being real in your own life. She didn't come to save the day, or fix something. After she left, I thought about how much it hurts people to be treated as though because you have pain or need to rest and heal that you are not enough, or that you need to be fixed or helped. Healing is beautiful and it is what life is all about on a day to day basis. Hearing the pain, crying when you need to cry, hugging someone, or yourself when you need to so that you can step back into life at some point. Does rushing the grieving make it go faster? I remember someone telling me about someone whose son had been killed, they were from an African culture and in this culture someone comes and stays with the mother for 30 days so that she will not have to be alone. I thought the beautiful thing about that was that emotions, and mourning was so a part of what was normal that they could open up and share it with someone. See, I had too much shame, too much conditioning about how I was supposed to handle it and mostly sympathy around ,driving loneliness. How I would have loved someone like my friend coming to be with me and with my family, to cry with us and laugh with us and just be with us, so we could have cried. In all fairness, some of my family who came were amazing and beautiful at that moment holding us gently and I wished they could sty for a month, but the visits were brief and everyone quickly moves on. This event is not the only point of grief that I am holding, the only one that I will talk about here. The first step for me today is the realization that I need to shed the pretense of faith, to experience the honesty of healing, the beauty of empathy. Today it will start with my realization that I am enough, I have nothing to prove and the emotions and the heart break that I experience are meant to be experienced and not pretended away. I am where I am not to prove myself enough but because I am enough and now I love the feeling of nothing coming between me and finding healing in Christ. The first step, recognizing the lies, the life sucking beliefs that have kept me from connection with myself and with others. Amazing feeling, the freedom of love, of truth and of being alive,I am starting today by honoring what ever my journey is without fear. What a beautiful day it is without the fear…………….