The Way My Heart Works...

When I was a kid, I used to sleep with every single stuffed animal I had, which was A LOT.  I couldn’t leave one out because I was sure I was hurting their feelings and making them feel left out.  Even as a young child, I knew that stuffed animals didn’t have “real” feelings, but the idea, that maybe they could, maybe they might, was enough to alter my behavior and hedge my bet.

I can see now this was a harbinger of a difficult path for me to walk.  I spent most of my youth making decisions that were totally bad for me, but good for others.  I placed your needs and wants above and beyond my own. Once my alcoholism got into full swing, it created this boomerang effect where I would ingratiate myself upon you and your needs and then, quite dramatically, behave as if I didn’t give a shit about you, ever.  And so thus, there was a lot of relational wreckage created along the way.  I needed to be needed, but then I resented you for needing me.  Fucked up!

But when I peel back all that “behavior” I have always been the person who feels badly for stepping on flowers, or knocking rocks out of place.  And I have also always been the one to pray for forgiveness when I do such things.  If I accidentally stepped on a flower, even a weed, I felt badly.  I still feel badly.  Like what right is it of mine to do something that caused another such harm?  This would be reason numero uno why I don’t eat meat.  I can’t do it.  I love meat.  I probably would be healthier if I ate some, but I cannot do it because I cannot disassociate enough from the act of eating it from the tragedy that occurred to get them to my plate.  I just can’t.

My dad was forever telling me I needed to toughen up, to not be so sensitive.  And despite his best efforts to help me in this endeavor, I have remained stubbornly open hearted and perhaps more sensitive than I have ever been.  It is like all of our combined efforts to have my heart be something other than what it is, failed and with each failure it got worse, not better.

I used to think that this good natured part of me was just that, a good thing.  But I have come to see that it was often a strategy to mitigate pain.  I thought I was so altruistic, but in reality, this tender heart laid me bare in a way that caused me to have to disassociate later on.  That my inability to set and maintain appropriate boundaries in the beginning, set me up for having to set much harder ones later on.  And they resulted in my continued practice of idiot compassion that got me into quite a hurt locker where dating and men were concerned.

My heart is always going to break for the displacement of rocks, the injury of anything animate or inanimate: people, pets, ideas, causes.  I have always been a sucker for anything that wreaks, even a little of anything sad or hurting.  And I have just come to accept that I am like this.  I am always going to take in the stray, although I have stopped doing that with men.  Cats are one thing, men, well, just no.  And it has taken me a long time to allow myself to just be this way, and also develop appropriate boundaries that take better care of this tender heart so that I don’t end up in meat grinder so often, and neither do you.  It has been a delicate balance that has been more of an imbalance...

My heart works, and that is the most important thing.  I can’t help that I feel sorry for the hard things that happen to beings in this life.  I can’t help that I still have that childish desire to not leave anyone out, to my own inconvenience and detriment.  This is the way I am and it is also has paved the way for being quite avoidant about letting other people down, telling them no, or otherwise telling them something they do not want to hear...and so I struggle.  And I arrive once more at the place where I have to accept myself as I am, with a heart that is way too tuned in sometimes that it requires me to have to tune out.  I am not sure I will ever get the dial right on this whole loving and being thing, but I persist anyway.

Again, still...