Riping Out the Stitches

Remember all that happiness and nice talk from the previous posts? Let me tell you another story. Two in fact. They inter link. One for the image, one for the application.

When I was young, maybe seven or eight, my sister and I went outside to ride bikes before lunch. We were playing at my dads, going round and round in the driveway. Lisa took a turn too tight. She slipped, the bike lay flat on its side. She was bleeding from her head. I remember rushing to help, followed by the image of blood on a white washcloth, followed by endless hours watching the tv in the hospital waiting room. This was, to an extent, traumatic for me, however it has never carried as much weight for me as the follow up visit.

Two weeks later I went with my mom and sister to have the stitches that were sewn into her face removed. The doctor was running late, it was near lunch time, she was in a hurry. I think she wanted to push back the appointment but my mother was insistent that it be that day, after all she had dragged two young girls out of school and nearly an hour from home for this already terrifying appointment. So the doctor saw my sister. I watched her rip out each stitch. At no point up until the day they were removed did my sister appear to be in an unbearable amount of pain, but watching the doctor jerk each stitch out she looked like it was killing her.


That's what it feels like. That's how I feel today. I got hurt a while back, it took me a long time to go in and see a doctor to fix me. This is all metaphor of course. Time to realize that I didn't have to leave my wounds open, time to want to heal, time to want to be healthy and okay again even if I was scared. But after that time I started to sew myself together again. Recently I let someone else into my life. I tried to put some of the old pain and hurt away, tried to put some walls down, tried to do something that would force me to fail in a new way if I was to fail. I think I did everything that I could have done.

But the thing is, the same thing happened. And it ripped out my stitches. I was healing and now the same wound has been re opened.

It wasn't all that important maybe. Maybe it was. I had said I was happy. He implied he loved me. I opened up some. I let myself like him. Enjoy time spent. I believed in hope a little tiny bit. For the first time in a long time I let someone link themselves to that part of me. He was different from what I was used to, made nice gestures, said nice things, told me he didn't want to see my masks, he liked me for me. It was an idea I was just starting to come around to on my own before he arrived. I was just starting to imagine letting people in and seeing small parts of a maskless me. So I let him share a little bit, enough to let it hurt. Enough to risk something of me.

Now it does. He went back to his ex girlfriend. That makes 5 for those playing along at home. Five times that someone has walked away from me for someone else. Five times that I haven't been enough. Five. Five times that I wasn't chosen.

I'm proud of me. I did damn good. I accomplished things that I was struggling with, I let new things happen, I let go of some of the old. I made choices to help me. Still, it hurts. I'm proud, I'm happy that I can be happy, I am glad that I can be angry instead of just sad because I know I made progress in how I deal with people. Still, it does hurt to not be chosen. It does hurt to be left for someone else again. It does hurt to have someone rip out the new stitches to the old wound and let it bleed again.

I want to hide. Doing this whole "cliff jumping" thing hurts me again and again. Often times I feel uncomfortable and edgy, defensive and nervous, and scared. If I do hide though, I'll lose the only parts of this story that I'm proud of though. I'll lose the ability to say that I did the bold thing, that I overcame things in me and that I didn't let the risk of caring about something push me around. So I'm scared, and I want to hide, maybe I even will a little bit in some ways, but I can't really decide on that as the standard course of action. I'm only proud of me when I'm willing to do hard stuff. Like let people know me and reject me. So I have to do it again. Until maybe some day someone loves me and chooses me first. And as much as it hurts I have to choose that the hope for that is better than the safety of letting go of a dream I may have no business holding.