Lately, in conversations with friends, they’ve been challenging me, confronting me, exposing me and inviting me to come out from behind my walls. I frustrate them, irritate them, hurt them, avoid them, and just plain drive them crazy with my awkward attempts at setting boundaries. I told someone the other day that I see myself living behind a moat and I’m pretty sure that moat is filled with some amphibians with very sharp teeth. At least that’s what my friends are telling me.

How do I explain I’m not doing this to cause anyone else pain, but instead, I’m doing it to prevent myself from feeling pain? Kind of rough on the people close to me to have them think I’m assuming that letting them get close to me means I’ll have pain in my life.

But it’s not quite that simple.

I’m not afraid they will cause pain, but rather that my recent wounds will be re-opened, not intentionally, but perhaps without knowing it someone may bump into a sore spot, thereby, opening a floodgate of feelings—feelings, mind you, they didn’t cause, but just happened to stir up.

In the past four years, my emotional range opened up fully—which is what, like it or not, intense grief and major life changes do—and I hit notes I hadn’t played since my father died, along with many others I never even knew existed. This opened my heart and made me aware of many levels of human experience. I touched and was touched by other people’s pain at a much deeper level. I could see and know experiences that before I had only imagined.

The raw beauty of it was that prior to my marriage falling apart, my range had been very narrow and small, very contained. Then like a suddenly active volcano, my life and my heart blew open, spilling the contents of my inner most feelings all over the place. It was a mess.

I learned to live in this overheated muddy place, for many, many months, my identity in pieces. The pain allowed me to connect with people, allowed them into my most vulnerable and sacred places. I had no choice. I needed people or I wouldn’t have survived.

I still need people, perhaps now, more than ever. What’s different is that I finally got a break from the pain, and I’ve been enjoying the more neutral feeling of equilibrium. However, I have also become so attached to the absence of pain that I’m now doing whatever I can to avoid it, including not letting people get too close. My range has shrunk down into that narrow place again because it is what I can manage and control. The very thought of being out of control again terrifies me.

All this sounds pretty foolish. The cost is quite obvious when spelled out that way. Without the full range of feelings (no pain=no joy), we miss most of the essence of life, instead spending most of our energy maintaining our comfort zone and protecting our small little world.

I know all of this, and yet…and yet, I hesitate at the doorway of intimacy and human connection and peer in watching people engaged in the dance and wonder if I will ever feel safe moving in that world again. That’s what the sharp knife of grief does…it puts you in a state of post-traumatic confusion and doubt that you will ever be “normal” again.

Life, if nothing else, is about change and growth, and in all likelihood, this state of no pain or numbness, is temporary, a kind of suspended animation or existential limbo, allowing me to travel a great distance from one state of being to another. I trust that one day I will wake up and feel confident again about taking risks in my relationships again. I trust that my friends will be patient with me a little longer, and not see my withholding as a personal rejection, but rather regard me as someone who is on retreat from the world for a time, in order to regroup, refresh and restore my being into a place of wholeness.

In the meantime, I will continue to linger at the doorway, reminding myself that intimacy—like riding a bike—is something you never forget how to do.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 13th, 2008 at 8:43 am and is filed under Awareness, Psycho-Spiritual, Relationships. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.