fear of self
“If you learn from a loss you have not lost.”
~Austin O’Malley
Two years ago I lost my grandfather. He’d been ill the last time I saw him and I knew it was coming. And yet, I was still not prepared for the depth of my grief.
I had lost loved ones before, but while I had loved them, they weren’t him. He was special. He saw me.
If you know what it means to be seen I don’t need to say anymore.
If you’ve never felt seen, let me explain what that feels like: It is the very best feeling; better than love, better than friendship. It’s looking into another’s eyes and seeing complete acceptance, acknowledgment, and the truest form of love.
And I got that from him. Every time he looked at me. Every conversation we had.
Every moment we shared together. And then he was gone. He moved on and I was left feeling/worrying that I would never know that kind of love again.
That I would never be seen.
We all wear so many masks. We wear them to fit a role: mother, sister, wife, good worker. We wear them to protect us in social situations: good girl, bad girl, tough girl, sweet girl. For so many of us we hide ourselves because we’re afraid that the truth of who we are will not be acceptable. That if others, even those who we trust with our love, were to see who we really are they would turn from us, that we will be seen not as angels but as monsters.
Do you “see” your loved ones? Do you let yourself be “seen”? I’ve been reading Dr. Brene Brown’s book, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead.It’s an extraordinary piece of work. It’s beautiful and terrifying.
Dr. Brown explains that while we are all afraid of making ourselves vulnerable, study after study shows that the majority of people are truly rooting for you. They want to see you; they admire your courage. It’s eye opening information.
The very thing we are protecting ourselves from could be the source of our greatest strength.
It’s in large part because of these two things—the loss of my grandfather, and being inspired to let myself be seen (despite deep shyness and a healthy amount of social terror)—that I started my blog, and am working on starting my own business.
Before last year these are two things that I would have never considered. They were for other people, not me.
As I sorted through my grandparents’ photographs looking for a keepsake photo of my grandfather and me, a talisman I could hold on to, it occurred to me that my family’s photos were in desperate need of organization and preservation.
I began to think that I couldn’t be the only one in this situation. That there had to be others who were grieving a loss and were left with shoeboxes filled with precious family photos and no idea how to keep them safe.
Stop Taking Things So Personal by Abigail Brenner M.D.