If we can't make sense of it, can we make space for it?

Although I've had many ups and downs in the different seasons of my life thus far, it feels like the last four years have been especially intense.  Chocked full of painful experiences, sad news, huge life changes and stress - not always my own, although I'm affected by all of it in some way. I often find myself thinking about pain, and how people cope with it.  About how they make it through times that are especially difficult or painful, whether the pain is emotional, mental, or physical.  Do they push into the pain, or push it away?  Do they fight it, or can they let it be and accept its place inside them?  Do they use meditation, prayer, therapy, yoga, or other methods of healing?  I don't know if it's directly or indirectly related, that the start of this intense period happened to coincide with my professional launch into the world of social work - into the lives, hearts, and minds of those who have suffered severe traumas and/or experience the pain of poverty, etc on a daily basis.  Perhaps.  Perhaps it coincided with a "coming of age", as I turned 30... gaining more responsibility, and beginning to see the world in a different way.   But 2008 stands out in my mind as a year that was also, personally, extremely difficult for me in many ways.  And I'm trying to figure how, and even if, I've really coped at all or processed the challenges that year presented. 

In the spring of 2008, I was finishing up my last semester of grad school, and also finishing an academic year of a clinical internship at the National Institutes of Heath.  That year, I worked with the NHLBI (National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute), with patients who were critically ill with blood-related cancers or diseases.  These patients came to NIH to receive stem-cell transplants... most of them, hoping for that last chance to be healed.  That last chance to live healthy again.  As a social work intern, I provided education, counseling, and resource referrals to these patients.  I visited them often, and for some, I was sadly their only visitor. I worked (or did my best) to support patients, both emotionally and logistically, on many levels.  To help them understand the system and the procedures that they would be undergoing, and for many of them, to help them express their feelings about their illnesses.  To hear them (and for some, their family members) talk, cry, avoid, accept, etc, the massive amount of fear and pain that they carried inside their bodies and their minds.

I had the best supervisor I've ever had, anywhere, to this date, at NIH.  She is a lovely woman, born to teach and to guide others;  a very skilled social worker with a huge heart and an abundance of grace.  We developed a working relationship that felt mutually satisfying, and full of respect. She supported me through that tough year at NIH, and I will be forever grateful to her for it. She helped me process many feelings and emotions around the work we were doing, and I learned so much about myself as a social worker (and as a human being) that year, largely due to her support and insight. During the last few months of my internship, my supervisor became seriously ill herself.  I found myself supporting her, or trying to at least, as it was a scary situation.  She had to be out of work the last 3 weeks of my internship, and she trusted me enough to fill in for her with her patients, as well as my own.  I was the only social worker on the floor for three weeks. It was a huge honor, and the least I could do for her during her time of need after all she had done for me.    

Approximately one month before my grad school graduation, I got two difficult phone calls.  One, from my mother, to tell me that my father had been diagnosed with a golf-ball sized brain tumor, and was undergoing more tests to find out more information.  The other was from my sister - telling me that she had been diagnosed with stage one cervical cancer.

I cannot even remember the following month clearly... on the grad school front, it was a flurry of papers, exams, final projects, and presentations.  And on the home front, it was a flurry of doctor's appointments, consults, exams, procedures, and preparations for more procedures.  It's a blur in my mind, how it all went, and how I coped with the stress of it all.  Most likely, I just kept on moving.  I avoided the stress, denied the fears, and didn't process much of anything except for the things that I had to get done. 

My father attended my graduate school graduation at Virginia Commonwealth University on May 16th, 2008, approximately one week before his scheduled surgery to remove his brain tumor at the University of Virginia. 

Both my father and my sister underwent surgeries (and both, thank God, are doing well today).  My father's surgery was extremely risky, and it was a long road to recovery.  I was so relieved that I was finished with grad school, so that I was free to be there for Dad's surgery, and to make multiple trips down to Lynchburg to see him in the weeks/months following his surgery.  My sister had a procedure done, after which, she was proclaimed to be cancer-free. 

Fortunate as were are to have them healthy today, it was an awfully scary time for my family.  And I'm not sure that I've (even now) processed all the feelings that I had or that I suppressed during that time.   And when the worst of it all was over (the surgeries, the trips, etc), I stopped moving.  My sister and Dad were both out of the woods.  School was finished.  And I finally began to feel...and what I felt was depressed.  And so I continued to run from the pain, pushing it away, afraid to acknowledge its presence in my heart. 

During the summer/fall months in 2008, more pain made itself present.  I struggled through 6 months of unemployment after graduating from school, sending out what felt like a million resumes and hearing next to nothing in return.  The looming grad school loans made the pressure of finding a job even more intense. 

I had a good friend suffer a mental health crisis, who my husband and I picked up on the side of the road and took in to help her stabilize; other friends, whose pain was emerging and marriages/significant relationships were crumbling; friends who lost family members or had family members who were being diagnosed with terminal illness; and more.

As I look back on that year, I realize that I did not know how to separate my own pain from the pain so many others were feeling in their lives. My heart was hurting and gaping open for those I knew and those I loved, and I was overwhelmed with the weight of it all.  It was like I dove head first into other people's situations, taking on their pain and trying to help them alleviate it in some way... and I'm not even sure where my own pain began and theirs ended.   

I'm realizing that I was choosing to see and feel and deal with other people's pain, but not my own.  Perhaps it was easier for me to sit in their pain with them, rather than facing the impact that my own hurts were going to have on me.  

 It is a place that I am familiar with, however unhealthy it may be.

I did do one thing in the fall of 2008. I created a short dance piece about processing pain.  A solo that was performed on the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage, called, "Breathe it Out."  And in the piece, I used text...and a sentence that was prominent from the piece is "If we can't make sense of it, can we make space for it?"

I guess that THAT is one of the ways that I try to deal with/cope with pain - I try to make space for it.  Space in my heart and mind and body.  And usually, I'm quite successful in coping with my own physical pain. I have a high threshold for it, and have found ways to breathe through physical pain and to let it go.  I'm not afraid of it.  But the part I need to work on, is making space for my own emotional pain.  I can find all the space in the world for other people's... but it's my own that I find hard to accept.  To sit with.  To acknowledge.  To express. I let it get clouded in with everyone else's hoping that it will just fade away in the mix.

All things considered, I realize that I still have a lot of work to do.  Awareness is the first step.  And it will be important for me to do this work because as life goes on, it will inevitably bring more pain and more discomfort my way.  More things that I will need to make space for in my heart, mind, and body.  And I will be doing myself a disservice to run, or to deny/ignore its presence, as it will just find another way to resurface. 

And so I continue on this path, as we all do, to know and accept ourselves fully in our truest form.  To acknowledge all the beauty, all the pain and all the broken parts that make us wholly who we are. 

All that makes us vulnerable.  All that makes us real.  All that makes us human.