Recently, while I was away for work, my cat disappeared and never came back. This may sound trivial, but it devastated me. He had been my little guardian for over 10 years, and I wasn't ready to say goodbye. I didn't get to say goodbye. It is a loss I still cannot surmount. I can't write this without it moving me to tears. But things happen, and we can't stop them. Life moves on, even in the absence of saying goodbye to those we love.
But then sometimes we get that opportunity, and we try to resist. We resist because it hurts and it's not what we wanted to happen and it crushes the hope of what we thought the future held. And that's the illusion, that we have any kind of control beyond ourselves.
When things don't go my way, I shut down. I try to become cold and hard, as though I had hollowed myself out from the inside. It never works. I'm too sensitive for that to ever be effective, and it's a terrible way of coping because those things you try to shove down always have a way of floating back up at inappropriate times anyway. This is why there's that uncomfortable energy in the air when someone really lets loose and does an ugly cry in a setting that isn't them alone in their house; you are feeling all the things they've tried not to feel for so long. I remember once being at a meditation workshop, and we were chanting a mantra over and over, and then suddenly something let go and there I was openly sobbing in front of a bunch of strangers. I was crying about my Grandpa who had died months earlier, and I hadn't yet stopped to grieve. I had processed it logically and thought I was fine and was moving on, and had tried skipping past feeling the crushing sadness of what I had lost. I couldn't move forward until I did.
I often feel like life is a continual lesson in letting go. I hope I'm getting better at it. The other day I got thrown another one, and it was so tempting to shut down and disappear and harden. I was so sad, and then very angry. But then once I had actually stopped to feel those things, something softened. Something gave way and what felt right was to stay open and say what I needed, even when my heart felt vulnerable and tired and bruised. And it was worth it. For me, it was a moment of pure love, to say goodbye, and say it freely. Letting go was the only way to move forward, and I think there's a beautiful kind of freedom and hope in feeling that.
Sometimes we get to say goodbye, and sometimes we don't. So jump in with both feet and feel everything, even when it might hurt. We all face loss, but can we still stay open, especially when it might be easier to harden? Can we acknowledge how gutting it might be to care too much without steeling ourselves against the world? Can we take off the jackets we wear when we want to appear cold and unmoved and unfazed? That's not being human, that's being T-1000, and he was so full of rage and anger and homicidal tendencies probably because he was a sensitive kid in a chaotic environment and never learned to protect his heart and turned all that sad, hurt energy inward until it swallowed him whole. And also because he wasn't actually human.
Be vulnerable, be honest, be love. It will be worth the risk.
