Hurt

Hurting is a hard thing to do.

Or rather, figuring out what to do with that hurt is a hard thing to do.  I've always held a deep admiration for incredibly destructive people.  People who can tear a room to shreds, shatter a mirror, punch a hole through the wall.  Because all of that is way impressive, but it also means a lot of miserable work the next day and possibly a lost damage deposit.

Or a lost relationship, lost job, lost whatever it is that rides on not absolutely losing your shit.  The hurt self in me--and here I bank on the recognition that we all have an inner hurt self, lest I be singled out as morose--believes that I suffer some significant caliber of mental illness, but it is unrecognizable because of my compulsive need to control my image, to give the appearance of having everything together.  But it would be pretty rich of me to think I have constructed a complex that the whole field of psychiatry never anticipated, wouldn't it?

So having some dramatic, public breakdown is ruled out as an acceptable response to hurt.  The problem is, when we hurt, we desperately want someone to know it.  All we want is for someone to see our pain, and respond with love.  Why, then, is it so hard to go to someone and tell them that is what we need?  Instead the blogosphere explodes with "sideways communication," people Facebooking about how they're "sick of fuckin' drama" or venting to Xanga about their unfair treatment.  I do, on occasion, re-read my old Xanga, and I cringe at the sullen teenager I see screaming for attention.  Nobody likes someone who screams for attention.

Maybe we are better at being composed now.  But I think a lot of us are worse at being people.  I am, anyway.  Yes, in high school I responded to a very deep hurt by flailing for attention in ridiculous ways, and yet I found from friends a level of depth, support, and patience that seems increasingly rare as I age.  And I, in turn, offered the same to others.  I held the suffering in my arms, and my heart swelled with the significance of the moment.

Now, I turn a deaf ear to many cries for help, saying I will offer only what is asked.  And in penance I don't have that person who drives to meet me in the middle of the night to sit with me by the waterfall.

I'm really not trying to make this about me.  That hurt, caring me was the introspective one; now I much prefer to universalize my experience and try to process it in the form of social commentary.  It shields me, I suppose.  But I think there's something to this... I don't know if it's the fact that we all grow up in the years between seventeen and twenty-three, replacing naiveté with a jadedness that tells us there's no actual significance in those old "emo" moments; or if it's the lightning-paced, surface-grazing communication style perpetrated by Facebook and texting, pushing an unexamined culture; or if it's something else entirely.

The imperative here is that we do something to correct that.  Maybe most of our efforts to resist the progression of the world are vain and ill-advised--the shouting of luddites at a harmless but irreversible wind--but this one matters.  We need to embrace a hurting world, sit with crying people, and allow ourselves to be awed and humbled by what woundedness is offered us.

I suck at this.