Plaster people

I’ve been going to weekly therapy for over 8 months now.
And recently I received a missed call from an old friend – the kind of friend you speak to once every few years.

This time, though, I felt different during that phone call. Therapy is a challenging process where you start to be more honest with yourself and others.

So for good reason, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to keep softening the truth of what I’ve lived through just to make others feel comfortable – I’ve been doing that my entire life.

When we finally spoke, it started with the usual questions:
“How are you?”
“How’s your family?”
“Are your siblings okay?”

Even these basic questions mean something to me. Because I never had a normal upbringing and relationships with family.

People see that I’m married. I live on a quiet farm, a I travel more than I did when I was alone. From the outside, it all looks fine.

People make the mistake that my life today is the proof that everything before no longer hurts. If anything, the idyllic picture of my life does the opposite. It exposes the contrast between internal and external environments. The calm around me makes the storm inside me louder.

That phone call revealed something.
It wasn’t just that they couldn’t see my pain — it was that they didn’t want to.
Because if they acknowledged it, they might have to do something with it.
They might have to sit with it. Sit with me.

That’s when I understood:
People often don’t put a plaster on your life to help you heal
they do it so they don’t have to look at your wound.