Grieving requires more strength than building barriers

Grieving requires more strength than building barriers. As I have been processing my week in the last couple minutes, I found tears streaming down my face - not tears of frustration or sadness about the week, I actually feel rather freed - but grief. Relationships force us to look in the mirror and really see all our flaws. Loving someone else, really loving them, makes us so aware of our shortcomings. I have a lot of thoughts in my mind and understand sort of what I realized this week, but I'm not sure how easily I'll be able to unpack it all. Since my boyfriend and I hit the six-month mark in our relationship a couple weeks ago, I have found us becoming a lot closer -- like a lot of my barriers that I so carefully put up over the years, and a lot of his, have been coming down. This has been so good for our relationship as we have really gotten to know each other for our real selves. I thought that from the beginning I was sharing my real self, but that real self has been so covered in layers of armor just to function as a "normal" person. Letting it come down has been a little bit scary, but mostly just freeing. In the last few years I have come to think of myself as a "strong" person, someone who, although emotional, is able to remain un-phased by most things. I "don't let things get to me" and I usually won't cry in front of other people. I pretty much always, in the last few years have smiled. I thought it was because through the toughness of having to move a lot growing up I had developed a "tough skin" and although that might be true to some extent, it's more like strong, impenetrable armor.

I am reminded of Hilary Duff as "Holly" in the movie "The Perfect Man" - one of my favorite guilty pleasures being her friendship/relationship with the cute comic illustrator "Adam"- and how he drew her a picture of her as "Princess Holly" who "doesn't need an army to protect her." She was really hurt by that and it made her want to move away because that's how her mom had unintentionally taught her to deal with guy problems. He is finally able to get the picture to her via her mom who tells her what Adam said, which was that every picture has two sides. On the back is a drawing of her and him and his caption reads, "I'll always be there for you."
Maybe I have some things in common with Holly. She grew up constantly moving -- not because her family was called to the mission field, but because her mom was bad with relationships and whenever she would be dumped or would dump someone she wouldn't just find another guy, she would move to another city in another state. It's hard to constantly move - I am now at my record for the longest I have lived in one city at a time - 5 years - and even within that time, I have lived in two houses. I'd like to think that after living in the United States again for 9 years, even though that's pretty evenly split between two states, that I'm pretty well adjusted. And on some level I am. On the surface I appear to have a good number of friends. I have a job I love. I have my family nearby. I have this pretty great coping mechanism that I call my "silver linings philosophy" which is where I try and always focus on the good in a situation. On the surface, those things are great. Below the surface is this pretty thick steel layer and under that are things that have hurt me but have gone mostly un-processed and un-grieved. There was a time I remember believing that "love was a weakness." What I meant by that was the kind of love that is purely emotional - really more of a crush, where the sight of someone makes you weak to your knees, and where your brain goes fuzzy when you're around them. Now, I know that love that is purely emotional isn't true love. It's a feeling, and feelings fade. True love is a choice. That choice is not weakness. I also saw crying to some extent as a weakness, because for some reason it felt weak to need someone else to comfort me, to not just be able to pull myself up on my own. I know that we're supposed to lean on God for strength, and I did that sometimes, and to be fair, I have leaned on other people at times as well, though often I would just tuck away my hurt, pushing through it, not always acknowledging it. One of the problems with moving a lot is that - and I really have just begun realizing the extent of this - I am hesitant to let anyone close. On the surface, I love and care about people, but I'm scared to really let people in. I'm scared to really let people get to know me, the real Jen, the Jen that hides below the thick metal armor, and I'm scared to really get to know others as well. The fear I think was/is (I mean, I've realized this but it doesn't mean it's solved yet) that if I let someone close they would see my pain and my emotions which I had classified as weakness, and I wanted to be seen as strong I think, to prove that I had grown up an MK and somehow turned out ok. I think I was scared of people seeing my imperfections and rejecting me for them, but it's more than that. The more I learn about someone and truly get to know them, the harder leaving is. The problem isn't that I want to leave, but that based on my life patterns, moving away is inevitable, and truly loving another person and letting them love me is scary. It's not only vulnerable, but if the friendship or relationship is ever severed for whatever reason, or people move, it sucks. I grieve because I feel like there are a lot of friendships I've let go by the wayside or just never really invested in because of fear. I'm afraid to invest in other people because I'm simultaneously afraid of losing them and of them getting to know the real me and not liking what they find. And so I realize that 9 years after graduating high school and moving across the world I am still dealing with MK stuff. It has been so freeing to let someone in, especially someone who genuinely cares about me and loves the real Jen that he is finding beneath the surface, someone who doesn't expect me to be perfect and who isn't perfect - what a relief. And so I find that God has been teaching me some much needed lessons, and it hurts, but it's so necessary, and it is so good.

And so I am back to where I started - grieving requires more strength than building barriers. What I mean by that is that it is out of weak fear, not strength that I put on armor and build walls. Strength is grieving the things that need to be grieved. It's allowing people into my life and letting them really know me, and really getting to know them as well, even though it might be hard sometimes. It's being willing to care about things, to have opinions, and to get my feelings hurt sometimes, because having emotions is not a weakness.