Grief is rarely how you'd expect it to be. There are people and situations I've lost, and the sense of loss has never been proportional to how I assume it ought to be.
When I left Jen, the night I said I was not prepared to work on the relationship and drove out away from the house, I knew I had done something irreversible. I knew I had hurt Jen, and I guess somewhere deep down I knew that there would be difficult emotions for me to handle. The grief wasn't just for the end of a relationship, it was for the lost potential in that relationship, and for the sadness that all I felt in that moment was sad, empty, and deceitful.
I cried. I wailed. I thumped the steering wheel. I got to the end of the street and I made myself stop. I had to. And I had to stop because I had to make a telephone call.
The call I made was to Amy. I had met Amy that February, and we clicked instantly. We saw each other a couple of times a week in the time between me moving out of Jen's house and the night I really, finally, left.
Perhaps the reason I felt so anguished when I left Jen's was that I hadn't been honest with her, not even close, about my relationship with Amy; and on some level I think I knew that, as much as I wanted to want Amy, what I really wanted was to leave a situation I thought was unbearable.
Being accepted by someone for who you are, and for whoever you might become, is to experience faith first-hand. The peace of being in the presence of someone who trusts you is something that places us in a state of grace. Whether we betray that trust, watch it slowly erode, or even come to question it, when the trust goes, we fall. And in the falling we fear that we might never land, that we'll never feel that warmth and comfort of being somebody's someone again.
But it's just fear.
It's the same fear that shuts down communication, that makes us not say the things we feel might be too terrible for our loved ones to hear. It's the fear that makes us sweep honesty under the rug and say that everything is okay, until walking across the living room requires crampons, an ice ax, and a belay line.
But it's just fear.
In the last two years I have come to learn something about fear: you can beat it like a rug, but not if the rug is covering painful truths. Because the moment you lift the rug, you have to explain the things you've been hiding under it.
I have grieved for a lot of things in the last few years, but there's finally a separation I don't have to mourn: the separation from fear. Honesty doesn't scare me anymore. Emotional intimacy doesn't scare me anymore. Failure and rejection don't scare me. Your response to who I am doesn't scare me.
I am not afraid.
It started as a suspicion of a whisper, but now the voice is undeniable. I am not afraid.
I am not afraid, and I will not mourn the person I became. I will step through my life with caution and confidence. I will guard against his return. I will lift the rugs.
Because I am not afraid.
