Love-blind
I’m sitting in the therapist’s office and I start hyperventilating and crying at the same time. I can’t do this, I say. After all the pain of sitting in that chair that I’ve already been through, it’s when I felt what being loved would actually be like that it became overwhelming. I fanned myself with my hands trying to breathe. Make it stop, I cried.
I equate it now to those videos of color-blind children getting glasses that help them see color. When they see plants and flowers and the sky for the first time they are both stunned and grieving. Life without that kind of beauty now feels painful and cruel. That’s why life hurt so bad, and that’s why I couldn’t say anything about it. How could you even know something that connected and beautiful existed without having experienced it?
Later that night, my bedroom spun in circles. My stomach, in knots. I felt so nauseous I tried to sleep upright. At the dawn of the next day the toxic bile of 30 years of going away, numbing out, and going back came up and out. It felt like what I imagine purging in a medicine journey would be like. I knew I wasn’t sick and I knew it wasn’t the food from last night. Something was being expelled and I no longer had control.
Love truly can heal and our souls require it. Like a purifier, anything love touches that can’t be opened and softened will be terrifyingly expelled.
