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Finding Understanding Amidst the Storm

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“If we would know true love and understanding one for another, we must realize that communication is more than a sharing of words. It is the wise sharing of emotions, feelings, and concerns. It is the sharing of oneself totally.”

-Marvin J. Ashton

It’s been a wild week.  My last post about my brother coming out, and my journey to discover true love and support has kicked up a lot of intensity.  So many people have contacted me with loving messages and thank yous and sad stories.  I have learned so much in this week as I have been totally immersed in phone conversations, emails, Facebook discussions, blog comments… It has been highly emotional.  Despite the enormous outpouring of love that has been carrying me through the week, I also have been really, really angry.  Writing about this issue stirs it all up. Now that I find myself in fierce support of my brother, it is hard to hold onto my patience.  It is so easy to become swept up in defensive anger and I find myself throbbing with frustration  and fury over the stubborn, deaf ears and hardness that still exists.  I have read so many messages from gay people, thanking me for sharing my story. It has been shocking to me, the recognition that there are still so many people experiencing such personal rejection and anguish.    I read these messages, and their pain moves into my chest.  It settles into my lungs, heavy and toxic.  It makes the tips of my fingers pulse and my toes curl.  I hurt for them.  The injustice of it.  And many times this week, that hurt has spilled over into furious exchanges and hot tears.

In a whirlwind of emotion, there is a anchored truth at the center.  The truth is, we must find a way to communicate with each other.  Still the tornado of emotion.  Let the anger and hurt and fear and indignation and self-righteousness begin to lose momentum and fall to the earth,  so we can see each other, instead of a funnel cloud filled with debris.

We are not listening to each other.  We are not seeing each other.  We are screaming when we need to be whispering.  We are throwing punches when we need to be sitting on our hands.  We are frenetic when we need to be still.

My desire here is not to shout in angry protest.  We need dialogue.  We need to find common ground.  Things we can agree upon.  Things we can understand about each other.  So I am making an effort to take a seat, on my hands, mouth shut, eyes open.

To try to calm the storm.

Gratitude: the Back Float

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Wow.  Have you ever had one of those weeks (or two or three or forty in a row) where all of those cliché sayings like, “When it rains, it pours…” and “The shit’s hitting the fan” and “That which does not kill you makes you stronger” are appropriately running through your head?

Not the truly devastating stuff… not the real monsters like a death in the family, or a life threatening emergency or the end of a marriage.  But mid-level crap and madness that are stress inducing and eat away hours of your sleep.  The junk that makes you alternately lose your appetite and then eat a whole pizza at midnight like you are a 19-year-old college kid?

Stuff like that, peppered with ridiculous moments that seem to add insult to injury…since your brain is occupied with the mid-level madness, you don’t realize you are pointing the non-stick spray at your face and not the hot pan while making your kids’ breakfast (yes.  It happened.)  Or you begin dropping things constantly and repeatedly (never the car keys, always the iPhone).  Then you bend over six times in a row before successfully picking it up, making you look like you are doing some ridiculous dance in the cross walk of Target while everyone waits for you.

The moments that kick up that stress level until soon, every word you utter brings tears to your eyes?

Well, that sums up my last few weeks.  A stressful event happens, I freak out, I deal with it, I wake up the next day having talked myself down through a night of sleepless agonizing.  I begin my day feeling much more stable and ready to carry on…and then something else happens.  And slowly, I begin to unravel.   I will try to get some advice from a friend about the day’s non-emergent, mid-level flavor of the day crisis and suddenly I am desperately wiping away insistent tears on the kids’ playground at school.  It seems like a terrible over-reaction to the issue at hand…but  the culmination of it all at once that threatens to take me down.

Having these experiences has seriously challenged my ability to write a Gratitude post.  Something I committed to doing weekly and have been failing to meet the mark.  I am drowning here, people. Continue reading →