Learning to be Open and Unafraid

Dona Nobis Pacem Waiting For Something to Happen

Learning to be Open and Unafraid

A friend wrote me yesterday and told me how much she appreciated my openness in talking about my grief and other traumas and added��that it was a learning experience for her. To tell the truth, it��s been a learning experience for me, as well. For decades, I��ve kept my private life private (secretive, some people say, though why they would think they have a right to my privacy, I don��t know), but things change. I changed.

I was more open when I was young. I remember writing long angst-ridden letters to friends when I was in my late teens and early twenties, but stopped abruptly when a friend found one of the letters I’d written to her years previously��and read it to me on the phone, laughing the whole while. She thought I��d find it funny, but I didn��t see the humor, only the betrayal. I never wrote another such letter to anyone. Although I talked about my feelings and situations, I��didn’t want��anyone to��have written proof of my follies. And yet, here I am.

When I first signed up for the internet seven years ago, I didn��t quite know what to do. I figured I��d pay for a year and then if I still hadn��t found a way to make use of the resource, I would disconnect. Within a mere four months, though, I��d entered a contest, made online friends, and discovered blogging. Blogging was my way of getting people interested in me as an author, so I wrote posts about writing, reading, trying to get published, and anything else loosely pertaining to my writing life.

Even though I was living through the trauma of a dying life mate/soul mate, I couldn��t write about my life or his illness. He was afraid people would think less of me if I mentioned his being sick, but even if I wanted to mention our situation, I wouldn��t have. His illness didn��t belong to me. I am intensely loyal and my loyalties were with him. Besides, I mostly took his ill health and our strange half-life for granted and didn��t have much to say about either. I can see now how numbed I was��by his dying and the trauma of my life, but back then, I accepted the situation as simply the way things were. Since I was online only to try to promote myself as an author, I tried to be professional — I was disheartened that many people used online forums to whine, and I didn��t want to be another whiner.

After he died, well, none of that mattered. I no longer needed to be loyal to him (the way I figured it, if he didn’t want me talking about��our life, he shouln’t have died) and��I��was so stunned by the way I felt that my feelings just burst out of me. I couldn��t believe the exorbitant pain of grief could be so unknown (unknown to me, anyway), and it seemed important to chronicle what I was feeling. Now talking about my emotional traumas has become a way of life. I am comfortable with writing about my feelings, though I am amazed (and so very grateful) that people don��t tell me to shut up and quit my bellyaching.

And if they did? Well, I’ve accepted that possibility as the price of��learning to be��open and unafraid��online.

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Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, ��an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.�� Connect with Pat on Google+. Like Pat on Facebook.