two gold velvet sofas...

Yesterday I climbed to the 3rd floor of a large, old brick church. The church sits on the corner in the middle of a quiet mid-town neighborhood. The disheveled office was pea-soup green. Neat offices make me uncomfortable. Life is usually messy and those who make choices to live in reality tend to inhabit 'lived-in' spaces.

I sat on one of the two cornered mid 70's gold velvet sofas and he sat on the other. Introductions aside, I started carefully unpacking the contents of me. He listened, he did not judge and he invited.

We talked about the unfairness of life and I shared about a couple of my emotional wounds. As I sat back, in third person I listened to myself and realized how easy it was to dress up my bandages and minimize the very noticeable scars that made me "ME".

I have a hard time really feeling what I feel and acknowledging how things affect me. Growing up I remember being told to "stop crying, only babies cry". Over and over I was instilled with the message that it is not okay to live with what I really feel. What I know now is that the adults around me didn't want to get their hands messy with emotions and sure didn't want to understand what made up the wonderful little girl that they had in their lives. What a pity it would have been for "christians" to admit that they have feelings that they can't control. Feelings like hate, lust, emptiness. Seems like a whole generation walked around the piles of elephant sh*t in their gold and orange living rooms, grabbing air freshener and spraying furiously. No wonder a large percentage of 30-40 year olds make frequent visits to pastors/counselors/life coaches. We don't know who the hell we are! We are the product of the "no aftertaste, no unplesant odor" age.

Sitting on that gold velvet sofa I realized that I had a whole box of disassociated feelings and I often don't have the faintest clue where to place them or how to appropriately feel them. Most often I dismiss them. So here is the short list of feelings that have been swirling around in my head: ANGER, loneliness, distrust, desire. Most of the time I try to quiet them enough to be able to function and at night I just hope that I'm tired enough to slide into sleep without realizing that there isn't someone next to me who might stroke my hair and love me to sleep.