I Did Not Want To Handle This At All…

I didn’t want to handle it well. I didn’t want to handle it at all. 

I was talking to my mom on the phone and she was complimenting me on how well I have handled the past 8 months of my life. I told her I wish I hadn’t handled it well.  I wish I could have a mental breakdown and drink myself into oblivion and drive with no destination in mind other than getting far far away from my current state of affairs. I wish I could do this without telling anyone where I was going. Go off grid. Concern everyone. I wish I could hole up somewhere where no one could find me or bother me and lose myself. I wish I could go off on someone–really curse someone out. Punch something or someone. Let my flesh take all the way over and do whatever the hell I want to do. Call that person and give them a piece of my mind without caring how it affects them. Do completely irresponsible things for the short term dopamine affect it would give me. I wish I could abandon my job and my responsibilities and just go. I wish I could do this so much and for so long that my entire family and friend group has intervention for me where they all read me letters about how much I mean to them and how worried they are for me.

I do not always want to handle things well. One of the things about handling things well is that it can be mistaken for handling things easily. 

I used to love to watch Dancing with the Stars. I loved watching the dances and the behind the scenes of the professionals and celebrities practicing the dances. And when performance day comes, I think everyone, even the ‘bad’ dancers, make the dances look easy. I thought this so much so that I thought taking a ballroom dancing class would be a good idea and be ‘easy’. I was beyond wrong. First of all, I think you need to have at least some rhythm to do any kind of dance and I am unfortunately devoid of that. Secondly, I do not know how to follow a leader apparently. Needless to say, I was not very good and it was not at all easy. 

Just because something looks easy for someone does not mean it is. Just because someone smiles does not mean they are happy. Just because someone looks healthy doesn’t mean they are not sick. Just because someone carries it well does not mean it is not heavy. What we never see is the behind the scenes of someone’s life. Whether that is them at home or alone in their car or in the shower or just what goes through their mind. A broken heart makes no noise as it breaks open unless we assign a noise to it. And too many of us stay silent. 

Someone who runs when things get hard and choose yelling and cursing and punching and benders and going off grid have assigned a sound to their broken heart in the same way someone may let out a heartbreaking scream at the news of a loss. We assign noise to the broken heart if we choose to. Sometimes that noise is instantaneous, like a scream, and sometimes that noise is a behavior that we pick up after a hurt or a loss and that behavior can go on for so many years that people stop seeing it as the sound of our hearts breaking. 

But whether or not you have a sound to your heart breaking or if you are one of those, like me, who tend to stay silent and make people believe you are handling it well while you’re silently wishing you could go off the ledge just to see what that feels like–pain is pain and burdens are heavy for all of us and you cannot tell from looking at anyone what they are going through so as simple as it sounds, be kind. Every person out there is dealing with something you have no idea about.