Years ago, I suffered one of the worst injuries of my life: tearing one of my pectoral muscles. Unless you're unusually or morbidly curious about what that feels like and want to try it out, please take my word for it: It is not something you want to experience for yourself. Ever.
In sports, tearing your pectoral muscle is considered to be a "season-ending injury." It was a long and a painful rehabilitation, just as it would be for any athlete, taking several months before I felt close to "normal" again or before I could resume some of the activities I had previously enjoyed taking part in, such as sports or dancing.
Never having experienced anything like this before, I wasn't entirely sure how to proceed with my day-to-day life in the meantime. Since my right muscle had been injured, I ended up doing a lot of simple tasks by using my left hand, arm, and shoulder only. Often, these were rather basic daily tasks like holding onto the steering wheel of my car and shifting gears or picking up dishes in the kitchen.
After going on like this for some time, both my orthopedic doctor and a friend who was studying medicine talked to me about a word I had heard but had not understood the meaning of before:
atrophy.
Atrophy, they told me, means that a muscle will weaken and will become harder to rehabilitate the longer it goes unused. Sooner or later, I would have to use it again and exercise, no matter how scary this prospect was nor how much pain I was in. Otherwise, I would either make the healing process even more difficult, or I would lose the use of it altogether.
Physical therapy was hard work. Anyone who has had to go through it for any injury knows exactly what I am talking about. At first, it felt strange to perform exercises with a muscle I hadn't used for anything other than combing my hair or shaving for months.
I can't do this, I thought more than once.
It hurts way too much. It was, indeed, painful, albeit a new kind of painful, and a different kind of painful than my injury had been.
The more I went to physical therapy, however, and the more I completed all of my therapist's instructions, I got better. It was painful, as I mentioned, and it took a great deal of effort on my part. It also took time and required a great deal of patience. It was subtle, but it happened. Eventually, I could do the things I once had enjoyed doing before my injury.
Now, I move on to where I'm going with this with an analogy. I think that the heart, the body's strongest muscle, can atrophy, as well. And not being a cardiologist, I can speak only figuratively. But many of the same principles apply.
In matters of dating, the heart, too, can be injured. Sometimes, the injury hurts way more than we ever imagined it possibly could. We wonder what we could have possibly done to feel the amount of pain that we feel, and we even stop using it altogether. Not only that, but, whether by choice or inadvertently, we numb ourselves to anyone or anything that could make us even begin to feel those emotions again.
The longer we go on this way, the harder it is to heal. Some even close themselves off to that mere possibility completely. I once dated a girl whose particular heart injury was grieving over the death of someone in her immediate family. Now don't get me wrong; I'm not saying in any way that she wasn't right to feel this way nor is it important to grieve and to deal with loss, and I understand that everyone heals in their own way. But this wound, years in the past, had completely consumed her past as well as her present and future. When this family member was buried, her heart was buried in the ground along with it. To the best of my knowledge, it is still there.
I hope and pray that she will, someday, open her heart again to loving another human being as she had loved this family member. I really do. I could not be the person to reawaken that desire in her. But as I wrote about my aforementioned injury, opening up the heart again, a little at a time, is the only way for healing to take place.
Consider Miss Havisham, she of Charles Dickens's book
Great Expectations. Jilted on her wedding day as a young bride, her entire life figuratively ended on that day, too, as she became a recluse and a shut-in and a despiser of all men and mankind. In the end, it destroyed her
—both spiritually as well as physically. I was reminded of her sad story when I recently watched a recent BBC adaptation of the tale. Hopefully, it is a lesson to us all about the negative consequences of harboring ill will, anger, spite, and remorse.
I don't pretend to be an expert on this subject nor to possess any special insight. I know only my own experience, thoughts, and intentions. Likewise, I can't judge anyone else, and I don't know their experiences, thoughts, and intentions; I can only share what I have observed and, consequently, how those things have made me feel or how impacted me personally.
Very recently, my heart was again injured deeply. So was hers. When I met and began dating this person, the thought occurred to me:
This is either going to be wonderful, or it's going to hurt like the Dickens. (No pun intended.)
Both possibilities occurred. For a time, it
was wonderful. Right now, though, it hurts a lot. People aren't perfect, and I have made my mistakes. I have challenges I still need to overcome, although some, particularly physical challenges, I have no control over, and the only thing that remains in my power of agency is to deal with them the only way I know how
—one difficult day at a time.
Rather than pointing fingers or casting blame, however, I choose to take a moment, albeit a brief one, to grieve
—and then I will move on. My prayers will be only to let in forgiveness and healing, in all of their forms. I will take the positive things I have learned from this person, my mistakes and the lessons I have learned from them, and I will use them to make myself a better person, too. I will keep my eyes, my ears, and, above all, my heart open to the possibility of good things and of good people to come. Were I to keep them closed, I could miss out on something good. And that would be a tragedy easily preventable.
It's the only way to heal.
