all the cuts you don't feel
today's flourish friday are my thoughts on the slow burn of grief, the hope of healing, and the weight of shame.
*Cover photo by Bro Takes Photos on Unsplash*
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This morning, I was making my new favorite drink, an expresso tonic, when I realized the lime I would squeeze into my glass was too hard. As suggested by the internet, I put it in the microwave to soften it up. When I opened the microwave after 15 seconds, all I could hear was sizzling. I assumed my demise was imminent and backed away. It took me a minute to process the burning sensation I was feeling. I'd moved so hastily that I'd accidentally cut my hand two inches, a bleeding frown now right above my wrist. It made me think of all the cuts we experience in life that happen so quickly that we don't realize we've been hurt until our insides begin to make their way out.
I went to the park earlier today because I've been in my house too much this week. Walking up the steps and into the real world has felt daunting. While sitting on the bench under the crown of the tall trees surrounding me, I continued listening to Francis Weller's The Wild Edge of Sorrow. I'm not far into it, but it resonates deeply with me. I'd never consider myself a grief expert because it sounds pretentious. However, I'm experienced with grief, even if I haven't figured out how to emerge from it just yet. And I wonder if you actually do ever emerge. Maybe your relationship with grief just ripens over time.
Grief is not neatly confined to what we go through when we lose someone in our lives to the promise of death. Grief is also the everyday things we power through: feelings of inadequacy, abandonment, dreams gone by, or chasing some destination we fear we won't ever reach.
Grief is all the little cuts that happen so suddenly that you only come to acknowledge the pain later.
The band-aid I placed across my hand hours ago is now missing. It's fallen off somewhere. Maybe after washing my hands or as I paced back from the park. Now, with nothing covering it, my skin that has been sliced apart is visible. Tender to the touch. An invitation to infection. What I do now, in these initial moments, matters. My healing is contingent upon me doing what I need to do to tend to myself, to care for this wound, to believe that what is broken apart can magically mend itself back together, even if the scar it leaves is just a reminder that it can never get back to where it was. Grief sometimes feels no different.
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