Have you ever been injured in a way that parts of your body or your mind forgot how to do something the way it used to? Let’s take a common one, like breaking a bone, say a finger or an arm. If it’s one that you would use to write or type with, you might have to find another way to do that for a little while. Adjusting by using other fingers, the other arm, asking for help…
You know, doing all the hard parts of working around the injury beyond the actual healing. Then, after it’s healed, you would have to ease back into using that finger or that arm again, little by little and day by day, until you’re comfortable again. Until you’re okay with putting some weight on it.
That healing takes a lot of patience, after all, there are things to consider. You wouldn’t want to put too much strain on yourself, otherwise you might break that bone all over again—if that were to happen, it could break worse than it was before.
At least that’s the physical idea of the concept. But what happens when it’s not physical, when you’ve been emotionally hurt? Something happened, someone breaks your trust or hurts you badly enough that it hurts just as much as a broken bone.
Up to a point, the goal is the same as the physical one was. You want to get to the healing though the same patience, little by little and day by day, just as you would with any other type of injury. The problem is, it might be a little bit harder because, well, it’s not physical.
You can’t see the break; you just know the fear or the pain that comes with it. You just know that backlash that comes with losing friends or hurting other people because maybe you’re not able to trust the people you used to trust.
You just know the anger and the disappointment that things aren’t the way things used to be, even when you know things can’t go back regardless of how badly you want them to.
So sure, maybe one day that emotional healing might come the way physical healing does and you get past the distrust and the anger and the disappointment…
But what if you don’t?
What if when that bone broke, you didn’t ask for help and instead, you put on far too much weight, much too fast?
Between the physical and the emotional, these are two different kinds of metaphors, absolutely. But the way our world exists right now—especially our nation—we are within the boundaries of both conditions. We can see the breaks in the bones, yet there are situations and reasons and obstacles and people that refuse to let them heal.
We see the mistrust, we see the fear, and we see the overwork. We see the disappointment. Yet somehow, despite everything that we are seeing and the agreement that something needs to be done, all of our actions seem to be working against one other.
This week, I don’t know how to decide how I feel about some states opening back up because I don’t fully understand what is happening around me. Many people seem to be on edge, and I understand why. Jobs are being lost, too many lives already have been, and no one needs to remind me what the economy looks like right now.
But what I don’t understand is why everyone wants to fix the problem, the sickness, the economy, and the hurting, but no one stops longs enough to care that everything that is broken is broken because all the problems tie into one another.
They coexist; all of the problems match each other. Fixing one changes how you fix the other.
While there are plenty of physical breaks that we can all very clearly see, there is a whole lot of distrust and fear spreading that might overturn whatever physical fixes we can come up with faster than we can heal the breaks.
Does that make sense?
Even if we opened up an economy and told everyone that it was safe to go outside, there are too many people who do not feel like they are safe, like they will be protected by the ones who are telling them to go out. These two problems are codependent.
Trust too much, feel too safe or too confident, and people begin to get together again only to hurt themselves or one another in the process.
There’s a balance here, one that just might hold something special in the healthy medium of it, only if we’re willing to give that medium a chance to be found. To be organized. After all, we would have to be the ones to organize it.
I don’t know what that would look like yet, none of us do. But if we could find a balance that would fit, one where we’re careful with the breaks and honest with the disappointments, we actually stop trying to get things back to the way we used to do them. We stop trying to move time somewhere it cannot go.
Instead we start hoping and moving forward. We hope for and build a new normal. For now, I think that’s a better balance than going backwards, don’t you? That’s just my two cents anyway, for whatever it’s worth.
What do you think? I would love to hear from you before I see you Tuesday. Happy Friday everyone, take care of yourselves.
kwilliamsbooks 