Oh, if staying silent could only bring peace! I would be one peaceful motherfucker.
I mean, in some ways it does, but it is a fleeting peace, a transitory peace and hard peace. It is temporary and comes with the highest price tag - your authenticity.
I am not sure where I got the idea that I should not have emotions. But somewhere along life and living, I decided or was told, or something happened where I thought and then began to live according to those thoughts that I should be happy all the time and that was an attainable goal and the only negative emotion I could express was anger. So I lived most of my existence in this place of elated happiness always attempting to go higher and higher and being fucking pissed the fuck off about shit that sometimes mattered, but not as much as my anger would make it seem.
I lived in the polarity of extremes: very fucking happy and very fucking not.
It wasn’t until I sobered up that I realized, much to my surprise, there were about a million emotions that existed between those two things. Things like sadness, joy, consternation, apathy, rage, elation, affirmation, envy, peaceful abiding. There is a whole spectrum of feeling that I just flew right by on my desperate grab for happiness and my equally demanding move towards being pissed. And I could find no stability or contentment really until I was safely orbiting one of my familiar poles: happy or angry. I have always preferred happy but anger has its own intoxicating properties that have allowed me to spend way more time there than is likely helpful or warranted.
So basically I woke up one day and realized my whole life I had been suppressing my feelings and emotions, staying silent, not letting people know what I felt, all in some misguided effort to find contentment and peace in this life. I didn’t argue when I should have and said shit when I shouldn’t. I had no barometer and kind of kept my feelings and emotions away from others unless they passed this rigorous self examination that censored them for acceptability and general admissibility in society at large. So really, I was just a liar.
I told you that your actions didn’t hurt. I pulled punches I should have landed squarely. I lied and said that I what you did didn’t upset me. I capitulated. I reasoned. I did everything fucking thing I could except tell you how I really felt. And guess what? I thought that my refusal to own and express how I felt and was feeling would bring us closer and ultimately more peace. But it didn’t, not even one time.
All it really did was set us both up. So we resulted in some fucked up relationship that was not honest, could not survive truth and was based on me refusing to engage with you in an adult, responsible manner. I can see now that I created relationships where peace would never, ever be possible.
I staved off the battle in order to fight a war. I could have said how I felt, created a minor dust up and then reached a higher level of resolution and understanding. But I didn’t. I just kept putting stuff between you and me so that when the time came to leave, and let’s face it, I leave a lot, it was just easier to leave because there was so very little holding us together anymore because I placed so much distance, dishonesty and pain between us that was never fucking owned or expressed.
Today I am working on it. I am trying to remain in relationships while telling you the truth contemporaneously to when that truth is happening. I am working hard to say things like:
“I didn’t like it when you did _______.”
“When you said or did that, it hurt me.”
“I feel like what you just said or did was disrespectful.”
“How you are behaving or treating me doesn’t feel good or safe.”
And saying any of the above is fucking terrifying.
But I have learned my willingness to withstand my own discomfort coupled with a faith that if I tell you the truth, you may in fact leave, but perhaps that is better for both of us, has increased my capacity for honesty and opportunities for a truer and more real connection. And within that connection, peace abides.
I want peace. Which is also something new. I am not sure I ever really wanted it before. I said I did and paid lip service to the concept but that was not really how I was running my relationships. I was always at a silent war with you. I was always mounting evidence against you. I was making cases, cases that always resulted in me having a laundry list of good reasons why I should leave you.
I can see now that suppressing my emotions and staying silent was only in furtherance of me having ample reasons to leave. And it is very hard to grow any kind of intimacy when you are gathering evidence, real and imagined, so there is a whole plethora of proof that me leaving is really the only intelligent thing to do.
It is terrifying to let you into my private thoughts because they are what guard my emotions. It is like I have kept these feelings at bay with intellectual iron bars...holding the fragile, delicate and easily broken shards of my inner emotional life prisoner to my ego and fear.
Today I am working hard to just say it. Whatever it is.
“That hurt”
“I don’t like that”
“I don’t want to”
“I want to”
Whatever it is that I feel. Just expressing it and allowing you the God given right to respond however you might wish. I am just going to say it or do it or the like and then you will do whatever you are gonna do. I will be ok. I always am. And likely always will be.
When it comes to relating and relationships, I have developed the open palm approach. You are welcome to come into my life and land on my open, outstretched palm. And you may stay until you decide to leave or I decide you should leave. I am not grasping for you to remain should you want to go and I am not doing your work for you out of fear that you will one day leave. We are all gonna get left. For another, a lover, an idea, because of fear, whatever. It doesn’t matter. Everyone leaves in the end. We come into this world alone and we leave it in the same fashion, no matter how much we love, commit or endure, ultimately those we love are going to leave us and that is always going to hurt, be painful and we are going to suffer because of it.
I believe I am finally rounding the corner to a place where I can really behave as though what we do with each other until that time comes, whenever that might be, is what it is really all about. It is what we do with the time we have instead of grasping or cutting the time. I am not in charge of how long you shall remain. I can, however, count on the fact that you will leave when it is time or when your behavior indicates to me it is time for me to move on. I have an entire life of experience demonstrating this exact thing.
So what really matters is the time we are here, together. And it is kind of important for me to be real, authentic and honest with you about how I feel about you, about me, about what we are doing, about what we are not doing. And yes, my honesty in this regard might hasten our ending. And that is also how it should be. Better to feel it and say it and risk it, than to hold it all inside and allow it to evolve into something that resembles a connection, a love, a like but isn’t any of those things really.
I have gotten it wrong way more than I have gotten it right. Today, though, I believe and am trying to live in that if you are in relation with me then you deserve to know what I feel just as much as you know what I think. And my life long practice of acting like my emotions and thoughts are something only for me to know and you to find out when I want you to, really just another way to manipulate and attempt to control a life that is never, ever going to be controllable.
It has taken me my life to get to a place where my emotions are not so terrifying that I don’t have to silence them. I don’t have suppress them. I can just allow them to well up and express them, as appropriately as I can, as much as I can, as often as I can. And in so doing, I bring opportunities for peace in all that I do, in all that I relate, in all the life I live.
Again...still, sometimes for the first time in this way. It's an evolution of the soul expressed in tiny increments of trust, authenticity and earnestness. And it is hard and terrifying and painful but it is the only way I believe one can ever have a peaceful and loving relation with another. Ever. And isn't that what living and loving is really all about? Peace has to be the goal...otherwise we are just warring factions attempting to stave off real connection one relationship after another while calling our actions something else entirely.
Love requires peace and courage. And first, we must find it within before we will ever be able to share it as a communal goal.
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