The Art of a Broken Heart- #20DayChallenge
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My heart is broken, the scars are all over and they have created a mosaic. At times, I feel confused because all the scars and bruises demand my attention and I do not know whom to attend first. Should I attend the scars from childhood or the recent ones? The scars are entangled and often overlapping each other. Some are bleeding fresh scarlet blood others have maroon dried blood engulfing the bruise. The zig-zag pattern looks like a beautiful piece of art. Only if I could frame it somewhere on the walls of an art museum as a fresco.
We often read that we should learn to forget the past, live in the moment, be mindful, blah! blah!blah! but those of us feel the pain know how difficult it is to forget every scar, every pain, every heartbreak. Each time the heart breaks a part of us dies and it is quite difficult to revive that dead part of the soul.
I have a doctor friend who is a pain and palliative care specialist. Last week I met him for some work and we were discussing pain. We were mainly talking about physical pain but during the course of the discussion, we started talking about mental pain and trauma. And he said that pain has its own memory. Just like computer software has a memory of its own and remembers everything, similarly, pain has a software. When we think of a painful event it gets remembered and the older the memory the more engraved it gets in our system. The interesting fact is when we recollect a painful memory we are actually referring to the last time we thought about it. Therefore painful incidences keep revolving in our system and for few of us until we suffer complete memory loss the painful memories are not going to go away.
Recently, I read a post by one of my favorite bloggers and a dear friend Shilpa Gupte from Metanoia where she asked ‘why don’t we share our imperfect moments?’ I agree that we never share our imperfections because we are scared to bare our wounds to the whole world. We are scared of being judged by others and most importantly we feel inferior to the ‘happy’ people with our ‘sadness’. There was a time when I was afraid to attend family weddings. I used to see my cousins with their parents, siblings, husband, and kids wearing the finest of costumes and jewelry and laughing their heart out while I used to sit alone in a corner brooding in my pain of being a motherless child. While my cousin’s had their mothers to dress them up, I had no one even to comb my hair.
If you are an orphan or a divorcee or a widow/widower or childless (not by choice) or if you have a physical disability or survived a traumatic incidence then weddings and social media are the worst places for you. These are the places that will point the finger towards your pain and make you feel more vulnerable. If you are grieving the loss of a mother then you will definitely come across friends posting photos of enjoying Switzerland with their Moms. Right after a miscarriage, you will find your timeline crowded with baby shower pictures of your friends. Right after a financial crisis, you will see friends splurging money, exactly after divorce your best friend will post a romantic picture. There is definitely some kind of Murphy’s law in action in these cases. I agree it is not good to compare your life with others but let me be honest when you are bleeding within at that time the happiness of others does make you feel worse. This is human nature. I often feel that few of my ‘happy’ friends do take sadistic pleasure in torturing the less fortunate with their ‘happy’ pictures.
There was a time in history when people who failed in life were punished. Those who lost money in a business were paraded naked on the streets, if a woman lost her family in cholera or plague she was termed a witch and killed, widows were put on the pyre of dead husbands, childless women were considered bad omen, and a rape victim even today is blamed for the rape. We have a history of criminalizing the unfortunate and punishing them. And I believe even in this modern age of smartphone and iPhone nothing has changed. Even today those who are less fortunate are considered outcast and the center belongs only to ‘happy’ people.
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Linking this post to #MondayMusings hosted by dear Corinne.
