I had a conversation with my husband yesterday. He told me about this old-fashion notion that men had to be strong and not show their emotions. It’s something that many men from my generation and the ones before it believe and/or believed in. I can say that my father never showed any emotion at all except when he was drunk or when he showed the signs of Alzheimer’s. I have found that many people really don’t like confronting emotions and getting to the heart of things.
When I was first diagnosed with anxiety, I took some psychological testing, and they said I had avoidance behaviors. It’s ironic because I really didn’t. I was just too complex for the psychologists to understand with their simplistic tests. I had developed all kinds of behaviors to protect myself because I had grown up in an abusive atmosphere and felt like I was in danger all the time. These doctors didn’t see that I was trying desperately to just survive.
Now that I am not in constant alert mode all the time, I am one of the most confrontational people I know. I don’t hold back. I believe that if I am feeling something I should say it. I guess my view of life is that at any moment everything can be taken away from us. In the blink of an eye, everything can change. I don’t want to leave things unsaid. I don’t want to ever feel like I didn’t live life to its fullest and tell people how much I loved them or how much they meant to me. I also don’t want to be the person who didn’t say something that had to be said. I know that sometimes that makes me challenge. I also know sometimes I don’t charge forth with everything because there is a time and place for everything.
Yet, I want the courage to be able to say what’s in my heart. I want to know that if I died in my sleep tonight, the people I truly loved would know how I feel about them. I may not be perfect and I may not always say the best things, but I hope that every day I keep trying to share what’s in my heart. Because when I really think about it, the truth of my faith is that the light of God is in my heart and that’s something I should be sharing with the rest of the world.
My faith saved me. May God’s peace reside in all of our hearts.
