It's a sin that somehow
Light is changing to shadow
And casting its shroud over all we have known
Unaware how the ranks have grown
Driven on by a heart of stone
We could find that we're all alone
In the dream of the proud
…
No more turning away
From the weak and the weary
No more turning away from the coldness inside
Just a world that we all must share
It's not enough just to stand and stare
Is it only a dream that there'll be
No more turning away?
~ Pink Floyd
On January 20th of this year, I logged into my regular Wednesday evening therapy session, said hi to my therapist, and immediately burst into tears.
I cried for the full hour, while my brilliant, wise therapist – who has been working with me for over a decade – gently listened to my grief pour out. It wasn’t just the inauguration, which felt the way I imagine it feels to cross a bottomless chasm on a shaky rope bridge and finally touch solid earth. It wasn’t the emotions surrounding my birthday the next day, or any of the traumas of the preceding year(s). It was all of it.
Every single day of the past, terrible year, and the challenging years before it, I have soldiered through the hours – not crying, not falling apart, not sinking into a paralyzing depression – but simply marching, one foot in front of the other, through pain after pain after pain. And this has been vital, because on my shoulders I have been carrying the happiness of others – most importantly, my children – and my strength has had to hold.
And so it was startling and terrifying when suddenly the dam broke, and there I was, weeping, unable to stop.
I often joke that I come from the WASPiest Jewish family you’ll ever encounter. We love each other deeply, and we are all close, but we simply do not talk about our feelings. (“What are these feelings of which you speak?”) I’m the emotional one, and my emotions make everyone uncomfortable. Heck, they make me uncomfortable. Hence all the soldiering and the marching.
Still, I’m not immune to the awareness that all this repressing emotion is not particularly healthy. I’ve been practicing meditation (as well and as regularly as time allows) for the past couple of years, and I recognize that I am going to have to reckon with all of my accumulated pain, if I am ever going to feel better.
I’m not going to live like an emotional zombie. That is no way to be, and it’s a terrible thing to model for my children…
I am not saying Stoicism doesn’t have its uses. I just think we twist it into an unrecognizable shape when we mistake being stoic for being emotionless or numb. As Marcus Aurelius, the great Stoic philosopher, writes (as translated by Gregory Hays): “It’s normal to feel pain in your hands and feet, if you’re using your feet as feet and your hands as hands. And for a human being to feel stress is normal - if he’s living a normal human life. And if it’s normal, how can it be bad?”
In other words, as the saying goes: Pain is mandatory, suffering is optional. The more we open to pain, the more we accept it as part of the cost of being alive, rather than shutting it away or fleeing from it, the more we will live a peaceful - and even happy - life.
And so, at my next therapy session after Inauguration Day, I showed up with a request: Give me homework. I told my therapist that I was going to do my best to face everything that had been hurting me, and that I was committed to working through it all, and to emerging a better person on the other side.
Being wise and brilliant (see above), my therapist responded with a long set of written instructions for living with pain. As with meditation, the focus was on making space for pain, letting it in, and turning away from the coping mechanisms that everyone develops early on in life, but which turn pain into suffering, or a paralyzing suspension in a bad status quo, or – at their worst – can be a destructive force, causing anguish in every direction.
The night after the directions arrived, I listened to a guided meditation, led by Joseph Goldstein, on living with pain.
“Close your eyes. Sit and know you’re sitting,” he began, as he always does. And, as always, that instruction struck me: How many of us ever sit with intention? Such a basic activity, but one that can be imbued with meaning in the right circumstances. (Alright, full disclosure, I often meditate lying down. I’m nothing if not a rule-breaker.)
The session continued, and the instructions were simple: Be open to whatever emotions arise, and try to simply notice them without any further response.
“Make a soft mental note of the emotion…If your mind wanders, come back to the breath…”
I waited. Thoughts arose, and each time they did I tried to gently pull my focus back to my breath. I had my soft mental notepad ready…and nothing. No emotions.
There’s a wonderful story called “Tear-Water Tea,” by Arnold Lobel, in his book Owl At Home. In the story, Owl wants to make tear-water tea, and so he thinks of a variety of very sad things, until he is weeping and the teapot fills.
Thinking of that, I tried Owl’s strategy, but nothing worked. I went through every sorrow of the previous year, and could summon no feelings. I investigated all of my wounds - heartbreak, grief, rupture, conflict, worry, abandonment - and...nothing. The best I could do was stir up an intellectual curiosity about it all. I knew I was trying harder than you’re supposed to try during meditation, but I also wanted to avoid running away from difficult thoughts entirely. Eventually the meditation ended and I fell asleep.
Not long after, someone I love sent me a beautiful lecture by Pema Chödrön, whose writings on mindfulness have been an anchor through these rough times. In the lecture, Chödrön explained that meditation is not just about arriving at a clear mind - it is about helping the roiling waters of our thoughts settle, until “we can see ourselves clearly, with compassion.” But, she cautioned, when the waters settle, “you think what that’s going to feel like is peace. No one ever tells you that when the water calms down, then you can see all the old tires and skeletons and tin cans and corpses and all your misdeeds...leering up at you from the bottom of this still pool.” And this clear view is exactly what I have been avoiding, and what I am dedicated to seeing now, overwhelming as it may be.
It’s funny, how hard I’m working to fill with hurt. But I have to! I’m not going to live like an emotional zombie. That is no way to be, and it’s a terrible thing to model for my children, who - like most children - are highly perceptive, and who inevitably will observe and absorb any misery or joylessness in my existence, no matter how hard I try to hide my emotions. I want my daughters to see me fully alive - alive with all of the wonder and the anguish that the world brings. I want them to see me hurting with acceptance, feeling deeply without clutching any particular feeling too tightly, and loving with abandon - living the immortal Mary Oliver’s creed that “[t]here is life without love. It is not worth a bent penny, or a scuffed shoe. It is not worth the body of a dead dog nine days unburied.” If that’s not how they see me living, how will they learn to live that way themselves, to dive into love and elation, to reject emotional cauterization and a life of numb coping, and to hold all of their feelings - especially their pain - gently, with the vital understanding that feeling pain is just another part of the stuff of life? I will help them through the worst of it, the way my therapist and my dearest friends are helping me (so many dear friends, new and old, have circled around me through this year, holding me tight, and my gratitude is boundless). But I have to open, for myself and for my daughters. Let the levee break. I’m ready.
(P.S. I am deeply aware that it is a luxury to have time and resources to devote to surviving this period of crisis. So much of this article resonated with me, and there are some good resources at the end for those - women and men - who might need them.)