From Showing Off to Showing Up by Nancy Regan

Author:Nancy Regan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781774710647
Publisher: Nimbus
Published: 2022-03-28T18:07:02+00:00

my cheeks are stained with tears today

emotion rolls through me in waves

but I’m not afraid of the sorrow I feel

it’s been building for too many days

some sadness is mine and the rest for the world

all the pain and the suffering I see

allowing this feeling won’t solve all the woes

but it does help me to be free

* * *

When I was in my mid-twenties, a boyfriend of mine broke up with me and moved away. I was pretty smitten with him, and with everything our relationship represented. Hindsight has shown me that acceptance and belonging were wrapped up in that bond, and I realize now the impact of that sense of desertion I felt. It triggered my abandonment issues and brought me face to face with my own not-enoughess. But at the time, it just felt like my world was falling apart. I actually called in sick to work for a week! I lied to my boss, telling him a friend had died. Because that’s how it felt. I couldn’t stop crying, and I was way too embarrassed to tell the truth—not only had I been “dumped,” but I was an uncontrollable emotional mess. To make things worse, said boyfriend revealed that he was leaving to be with his old girlfriend. While this made everything seem much worse at the time, I can now sit in gratitude for the extra measure of pain it provoked. Because it was a flashpoint in my life.

What do most of us do when we experience an emotional body blow like this? We may cry our eyes out, even yell and scream into the abyss, as we absorb the full force of the pain. But then, we shut that process down as soon as we are able. In the same way we bury any tangible mementos of our defunct romance, we pack away the tears, memories, and torment. But here’s the thing I’ve learned: holding onto that shit isn’t healthy.

I didn’t learn the lessons this experience had to teach me for a long time. Because as soon as I could, I stuffed the heartache in boxes in my psyche and duct-taped them shut. I thought that was how a strong person “deals with it.” Sitting here writing these words thirty years later, I chuckle at the perfection of this analogy. The pain I packed away remained with me for decades—like those boxes you move from house to house and never get around to opening. That lost love got in the way of me forming healthy bonds for years—because of how I allowed it to erode my own sense of self; how I let it confirm my fear that I was not worthy of love. There was a time I might have told you I hated that young man, but I’ve come back around to loving him for the role he played in my undoing. Negative emotions, like boxes of clutter, can only be hidden or buried for so long. Eventually they have to be released.

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