walking on broken glass

loading the dishwasher. that's when it happened. again. (the third time in the past week.)

i reached down and pulled a small shard of glass out of my foot. this one was really in there. it stung as i pulled it out and immediately began bleeding. i hobbled over to the bathroom to get a bandaid and now i can barely tell that anything happened at all.

a little over a week ago, i left a glass of water on the kitchen counter. big mistake. as can be expected, mr. darcy kicked it off of the counter and it shattered on the floor.

i don't think that i saw it for two days. i was so busy, that i simply didn't notice. luckily, when i finally did walk into the kitchen i was wearing sneakers. i heard the glass crunch beneath my foot and i froze, looked down and started cleaning up the mess.

it was easy to pick up the large chunks with my fingers. it's the tiny pieces that cause trouble. no matter how many times i swept the floor, there always seemed to be more. until finally there wasn't, and i thought the floor was clear.

and yet, i keep finding tiny shards of glass in my feet. it doesn't happen every day. and it won't happen forever. but it hurts when it does...

this is what happens when things shatter. the broken pieces seem to surprise by tearing into you time and time again, until you've found every single one and cleared them away.

permission granted

"i just don't feel like i have the right to be sad about this," a friend said to me today. the very moment the words escaped her lips, my heart sank.

how often do we limit ourselves like this? we don't allow ourselves to feel certain emotions because we think that it wouldn't be allowed or that we couldn't handle it. we don't allow ourselves fully experience the utter joy in a moment because we are waiting for the other shoe to drop. we don't allow ourselves to feel pain and loss over a death, because we weren't as close to him as others were.

we create these arbitrary rules for what is allowed and what simply is not okay.
key word = arbitrary.

here is what i wish to say to everyone out there who is struggling with their emotions right now:

you have permission to feel whatever it is that you are feeling. 

you really can't control your feelings. so go ahead - be sad, be betrayed, be joyful, be confused, be conflicted, be anything that you are feeling because if you are having to tell yourself that you are not allowed to feel these things, well, you're most likely already feeling them anyway.

hidden harm

shortly after i adopted pete, he underwent surgery to remove a lump on his side.

well, it was a lump originally. i first noticed it within days of bringing him home. it was as small as a bug bite and the vet said not to worry about it.

but it grew. and grew. and grew. until it was as large as a silver dollar.

then pete bit it and left a crater instead of a lump. so the vet cut all around the sore and sewed him back up.

he looked pretty brutal for a while. it made me cringe, just to look at it. when i would accidentally touch the stitches my entire body shivered with disgust. sure, i was disgusted. but he was mine. and i loved him. and i would have done anything to make him feel better.

today, you would barely know that he ever had those red stitches lining up along his side. he has a long scar, but his fur covers it up. unless you really pay attention, you'd never notice that some of the dark spots don't line up just right. you'd never know that he ever had surgery. you'd never know that he was ever hurt.


this past weekend a friend of mine facilitated a workshop with some college students. the workshop is designed to make them aware of how their decisions effect those around them. during a section on hidden harm, the unthinkable happened.

some of you will know what the buzz phrase "hidden harm" means, but for those of you who do not...here we go. hidden harm is the risk of everything you don't know. in the world of student development, it refers to the unknown history of a student's life.

during this workshop, the students are given scenarios to discuss. each scenario presents a student who is asked to do something that triggers something from their past that they'd rather not remember. in the middle of this activity, while talking about activities that may cause a student who was abused as a child to relive or at least recount those painful memories, like i said - the unthinkable happened.

the students laughed.
they LAUGHED.
they laughed at child abuse.

when my friend told me about this, i couldn't decide if i wanted to cry or if i wanted to vomit.

my disappointment in these students is more tremendous then i could ever put into words.

each of us have history. bags that we carry of varying weight. some days the bags may be more than our tired arms can stand. some days the bags are so light that we forget that they're even there. but we carry them. and like pete's scar, other people can't see it. we've covered up the scars with designer clothes or sarcastic humor.

maybe we've covered it up, but like pete, if you look closely you'll see that something just doesn't line up quite right.