The pain below

This is something I wrote last night in an attempt to recover from the emotional flood that tried to make its way out. Like all of us, I am definitely not immune to past hurts and pains, but I learned from an early age that repressing and forgetting my feelings was the "best way" to deal with life. Over the last couple years God has provided safe outlets for my current feelings and problems to be shared, it’s the past feelings that need to start emerging, in time. The effects of growing up while not feeling and becoming "numb" to my pains and hurts, are that I still don’t feel much of either. God has been breaking down these walls that I had become a loyal slave to. Even though I didn’t break down into an all out, pull over the car and ball session, I did shed tears. For me, this gives me hope. Hope that I can cry and feel the pain that I ran from. More so, it gives me hope that I can feel others pain and share their pain with them.

“I cried tonight. In the midst of my past, in the middle of my hurt, in the brief moments of feeling, I cried. It wasn’t a wale or even a voice quivering, tear-repressing cry. It was a tear-by-tear, stone cold voice, cry. The kind that you have when you can’t believe your crying and don’t want to feel the pain behind the tears. The kind where the tears flow, but you are shut off to the abysmal pool of hurt. The kind that begins just as it ends. I realized something, that I am not as free as I thought I was. I realized that there is an ocean of pain and hurt that lies beneath my 22 years of existence. Of feelings too painful to even begin to feel. Of feelings that are like the dark secrets of past generations failures. The ones that no one admits to, no one talks about, and no one brings to the surface. My feelings. Tonight I told a snippet of the pain I try to forget. The pain that bares no weight, for it has never been felt. From the hurts of family, to not being there in others moments of suffering, to not feeling my own. I have become the kind of person who nods and feels nothing. I have opened myself up to numbness in order to cope with the intensity of all things hurt. I have decided to lock out, forget, and suppress the emotions that show weakness or induce pain. I have learned not to cry.”