The gift of suffering

I was older than I am now ten years ago. I thought I had to do something. Be something. I assumed my value lay in what I could offer and not the life I was living. But when I almost died at 27, a different instinct took over my body. And I fought for the freedom to be human.

By 30 I had lost my money, credit, possessions, and house, all because of the malpractice that had almost killed me. I tried to get up an infinite amount of times, I strategized, I worked hard, and each time I was knocked down. I was angry then. I didn’t see the value of looking up at life from the floor.

Finally in Spain, I started to get it. In Adra, I was again stripped to the bone by poverty, isolation, and illness. But what I found in that darkness was my core longing. Having learned to surrender into the suffering, this time I felt less apologetic. I started to birth what was inside of me. Not from a place of fullness. But as a YES to being alive.

I don’t think I realized how much I had changed. But this past week I saw it in the reflection of an ex-boyfriend who braved an ocean to see me. It is no secret that he and I have had different lives. He has been working at the same job for over twenty years and is still living within a 60 mile radius of his childhood home. We are like a Venn diagram with a small central overlap where we have shared in a lot of beauty.

I had never been with him in a country where neither of us spoke the language. For me travel is a God of wonder and humility. But for him it is vacation. In the face of overwhelming newness, my occasionally having to work, and his inability to communicate, he shut down. We concluded that for him, long languid periods of sensual immersion equaled pleasure. While pressure, time constraints, and continuous challenge equaled pain. He felt relieved that he hadn’t followed me to Europe.

Missing him, while he was still here, I started to feel immensely grateful for all the ways I have suffered. It has trained me to stay open despite my circumstances. When you have sat in Hades with a soft heart, a lot of things become easier. When you know how you try to protect yourself from pain, and can track it, you can choose to stop the falling dominoes. Whenever I feel myself approaching impact, I remember why drunk drivers are usually less injured in a crash. In their inebriated state they are less tense.

I have started my own mythology that life creates us, at least partially, with a hammer. Pain chips away at the excess of rock until our figure is revealed. Those of us who have suffered with our eyes open, exist in vivid detail. We can start to gracefully move into the blow. Knocking off what obscures our true shape. As I have grown older, I have shed years of defense in lieu of a deeper humility. Perhaps the things we fight with such vehemence to avoid, could also be the things that reveal us.