Numb.

I hadn’t worn earrings in a few months and hadn’t purchased any in a few years. So when I was in the store the other day, and a pair of small sparkly pretty dangly ones caught my attention, I thought, oh this could be my lil splurge after all these years. They didn’t allow me to try them on for hygienic reason so I just put them up to my ears and stared at my reflection, admiring more than the way they looked — the way they made me feel. I felt femme again with this splash of girlyness after a long streak without any real flair.

As soon as I purchased them I slipped one earring on my left ear and and as I tried to put the other one on my right, it would go in but something kept stopping it. I stood in the store trying and trying when I realized that perhaps the hole had closed up. Is it possible? In my 32 years of having my ears pierced, it has never occurred. Hmmm…. I decided to walk out of the store get some fresh air. Then I tried again, this time with force, and before I knew it, a split second before it happened, I knew that I was going to end up re-piercing my own ear. Yeowtch! Instinctually, I could feel myself physically numbing that area before I fully forced the earring through the flesh so I couldn’t feel the pain. And so TA DA! A freshly accidentally re-pierced ear that had a slight after pain shock.

This made me think about how I, and perhaps humans in general, numb themselves out of survival when they know they’re about to get hurt. I do this all the time emotionally. If I feel that someone’s about to hurt me, or a fight is about to start, I switch from hurt to numb, which takes away my ability to feel and be vulnerable. This triggers me to be ZERO compassionate, which is followed by me opening up my mouth to let a stream of fact based raw hurt dirty style below the belt arguments out. Do I make my point loud and clear and win? Yes. Do I lose a part of that relationship? Yes.

Should we make an effort to accept and let the pain resonate deep within us for long-term compassion building rather than temporarily numb our emotions for short-term satisfaction? Probably. But how the heck do we do this? How can we teach ourselves that we need to allow ourselves to feel a little more pain, and that pain is part of connection and compassion when we are so hard-wired by our families, societies, groups to do otherwise?

Perhaps it just takes a little bit of practice every day, like anything else, to say that hurt my feelings to someone who has hurt us. It’s as simple and difficult as that. And figure out how to be with this hurt without passing the energy to unsuspecting victims, further fueling the mileage of the initial hurt. It’s as simple and as difficult as that. Perhaps it is in that acknowledgement, and that non-action action, that we will de-numb ourselves and just feel. And with that feeling, we can and will progress.