Excavating the Internal Mine Shafts: Our Hidden Dark and Twisty Places
Over the last few years, I’ve written a lot about the dark, twisty places I’ve gone on my journey of healing from my parents’ suicides. The reality is, we all have those times and places, no matter how perfect our lives might appear on the surface; no matter how idyllic our childhoods might have been. Life challenges us, giving us opportunities to build a strong character. Not everyone rises to the occasion, but few fail to at least try.
Many of my friends show a flawless exterior to the world. Most of my acquaintances do and I’m not even aware of what lies beneath their pristine surface. I do know the unmarred surface doesn’t come without a great deal of effort and strength. Everyone has had some kind of painful, if not traumatic event in their lives they’ve had to overcome.
It might have been a horrific car accident which temporarily deprived them of the ability to perform simple activities for themselves. Or perhaps an abusive marriage, or losing a child, mental illness, or lifelong health issues, or, like me, losing someone to suicide. In far too many cases, the trauma is even more deeply ingrained from physical, mental, or emotional abuse as a child—sometimes, all three. Whatever cast a shadow on our otherwise perfect life forced us to dig deep down inside ourselves to find strength we may or may not have known we possessed.
Even more than getting past the event or events is how we handle ourselves afterwards.
Making the Choice to Evolve
The healthier choice will always be to reach out for help from friends and family, even if it’s only 
emotional support. Those who do that, I’m guessing, have fewer dark, twisty places lurking in the shadows of their minds.
Some of us, though, were trained practically from birth to handle life’s challenges on our own. It’s ingrained in our psyche that asking for help is weakness and showing weakness is dangerous, or wrong, or something we’ll ultimately be punished for doing.
The facades of those who willingly reach out may be forged of love and in place only to prevent the world in general from seeing the pain they’ve overcome. We who didn’t learn to share and depend on anyone else to get past obstacles, no matter how much longer and harder the road became forge our facades more solidly. Each painful step we’ve taken is a brick in our wall. Each tear of frustration, anger, hurt, or pain we’ve shed becomes the mortar joining those bricks together.
Humans Weren’t Meant to be Rocks or Islands
The fortunate among us eventually learn humans weren’t meant to be solitary creatures. We learn we were never meant to succeed alone, and that asking for help benefits not only ourselves but those who we allow to see our weaknesses and imperfections and give us a hand. Feeling needed is as important to the human psyche as feeling loved.
So we endure the pain which comes with tearing down walls it took a lifetime to build. The pain we felt when we first created the bricks must be lived again until the bricks are no more than piles of dust to be scattered by the winds of time. The tears we shed that became the mortar must be shed over and over until there are no more to shed; no more mortar to dissolve. The biggest price we pay for walling ourselves up behind the events of our lives is how much more difficult we’ve made it to let the painful ones go. They’re so firmly embedded into the structure of our lives we’ve convinced ourselves the structure will collapse should a single brick be removed.
Life Demands Change and Change Demands Flexibility
I’ve learned the structure of our lives was never meant to be built on something as immovable and inflexible as bricks at all. The give and take of friendship and loving relationships is far more forgiving, and adjusts more easily to the inevitable changes we encounter as we travel down life’s unpredictably exciting path.
Walling everyone out is far more disadvantageous to the one constructing the wall because it makes it so much harder to change course when something isn’t working. The bricks drag us down and prevent us from moving quickly when we need to. It’s not so far removed from chaining a cinder block to our feet and tossing us into the ocean. There’s nowhere to go but down.
Excavating Before the Rebuilding Process Begins
As I spend more and more time spewing words on a page, via my morning pages or the writing prompts
in A Writer’s Book of Days, long-buried pieces of my life are rising to the surface, reminding me I still have big chunks of brick and mortar to remove from the wall I spent most of my life erecting. Though I haven’t gotten back to work on the re-write of Forgotten Victims in recent weeks, the time spent just writing without thought for how or where it will fit into the story has been more necessary than I realized. I have to clear my head about a lot of things, many of which go back to my childhood, before I can move forward with my story.
I’m learning we have many defining moments in our lives, and some are more cataclysmic than others. It doesn’t mean the place I pick to start my story is either the most or least dramatic. It merely means the one I pick has to be where I finally realized those walls were not the blessing I imagined, but the curse.
There will be more dark, twisty places in my future, just as there will be more defining moments, but the ones which ultimately led me out of a place of isolation and into a world where friends don’t have to hide behind masks will always be the most significant because they allowed me to start removing the bricks which stood between me and making changes for the better.
Our Most Valuable Qualities are Found in Our Broken Bits
Sharing the imperfect parts of myself allowed others to share their imperfections with me. It reminds me of the Japanese art of Kintsugi or “golden joinery” because it really is about embracing as well as cherishing the broken bits, not only in pottery, but in people. I’ve learned those broken bits are far more valuable than the parts which haven’t been tested and tempered with time and trouble.
Even more, the broken parts of ourselves give us connection. Every trauma we’ve overcome, every mountain we’ve scaled, sometimes on hands and knees, clawing our way to the top with knees and fingernails bloodied, gives us common ground with other people. The more ordeals we’ve had to navigate, the more people we’ll relate to.
For example, people who’ve raised their children as a couple may understand the trials and tribulations of child rearing, but not of being a single parent. People who don’t have children may not understand child rearing, but might relate to being an introvert in Corporate America. In short, we relate on different levels with different people. And the more we expand our horizons, the more relate-able people we’ll find.
Most of all, I’ve learned that selectively allowing people to see our broken parts will not cause us to shatter into a million irretrievable pieces a la Humpty Dumpty.
Be sure to watch this space for news of the upcoming release of “Forgotten Victims: Healing and Forgiving After Suicide”.
