I See You There

I see you there. You’d blend in if it weren’t for my pain being able to spot yours. To the naked eye, you’re just motioning us all past the facade your heart maintains with a look in your eyes that begs us to believe you when you say there’s nothing to see.

But the trouble for us is that I’ve been there.

I’ve been there so I won’t be able to do you the favor of ignoring the cries I hear bellowing out from the depths of your truest self. I can see you’ve encased them in bubbles only kindred souls will be able to see. And, well, that’s me. I can hear the wounds you’ve endured which are crying out to me like morse code that only folks like us can transcribe. And because I can hear and see and feel your story, you can call me your sister.

Allow me to back up far enough for you to understand my story so that you may feel its likeness to yours. And while some of the details are sure to differ from yours to mine, the through line is undoubtedly clear. The through line is suffering, but the through line is also surviving.

I came to be in a story written about people who started off in a land largely unknown to me. My familial cords are tethered to origins that can only be revealed to me through the results of a mail-away ancestry test. Because, for immigrants, often more information is left out than is included. Generations henceforth left puzzled about all the accompanying details that would and could elucidate their stories. Maybe it’s because the weight of their truth is too burdensome to carry on such an expedition, so they lighten their load by shedding the particulars of the life they led before the moment they decided to leave it. In doing so, they abandon the truest version of their story in hopes of creating the version that exists in their dreams. This fleeing, the one that attempts to leave behind the story someone is handed, is a re-birth and a death all in one. A pain born of opportunity and lack thereof. Pain that results from having to make your heart divisible in order to be able to imagine the journey at all.

And while I don’t have the full story of those who came before me, there seems to be a muscle memory to my emotional being that suggests I am equipped with more knowledge than I remember acquiring.

Because, you see, the parts I do know of the story which led to me include a long line of women who were dealt blow upon blow. They were manipulated, savaged, trafficked and brutalized. They were turned into commodities by the women who bore them. Intermittent recovery from the thing that had just burned them allowed for enough time to exhale before being burned again. In their adulthood, they carried on such cruel traditions by creating lives that would mirror the ones they lived as terrified children, and they would do to their own what had been done to them. Forlorn figures of parenthood.

But this is only part of why your pain won’t ever scare me. Because suffering is my family’s native tongue.

It would take my mother and her sister to cauterize the emotional veins that ran from the terrorized to the liberated when they silently said to themselves, “Not mine. Mine will be protected in ways I wasn’t.” Courage was the gift they gave to my generation. Courage to imagine a life that didn’t include the sacrifice of their young to carry on the family tradition of inhumanity. But no one wishes such a brand of courage on anyone else. Because to know this version of courage requires that you endure such unimaginable depths of pain and atrocity that you will have to watch people wince any time you tell a tale from your childhood.

I once saw a medium who claimed he was in touch with my grandfather. The man who tormented his children, of which my father was the oldest. This medium said the man wanted me to know he was misunderstood when he was here among the living. His message spoke of a complicated relationship with the cycle of the moon, this being the reason for his unsettling nature. What a simple explanation for so much pain doled out through his trademark cruelty and unabated alcoholism. A seemingly pedestrian reason given for agony that was endured to such a degree by each of his children that they would forever be hindered in their efforts to hold meaningful and close relationships. Every bond they attempted to form would be informed by the level of trauma endured in their family of origin. Heart born scars that could never promise invisibility. Scars that only promise to proliferate in size and intensity.

To accept this message meant I would accept the means by which my father was shaped. The modalities of such included beatings, endless insults and an unpredictable home life from which he’d flee as soon as he could. It would mean I’d absorb the explanation for why my father could never relax in my company. His truest feelings and natural responses to life around him remaining unfurled in his heart at all times. His protectionist mindset. His flinches every time I said, “I love you.” The space he’d always made between us when he hugged me, an intentional gap between our two hearts as we embraced. The same intentional space placed in the emotional bond we attempted to form over and over again. I’d have to allow the moon as the reason for why my own childhood was shaped by the heritage of alcoholism that my father wasn’t able to skirt.

So rather than accept his message, I received it. I took it as the context it could be in the story of a life I’ve shared with my father for 42 years. A complicated and gnarled tale of two souls attempting to love each other with abandon, but never being able to do so without the inherited pain being the unwelcomed third party in the relationship.

With these truncated stories of my roots, you are privy to the aching collective from where I come. The lineage that fortified me with the stories of suffering and survival. The people who experienced the striations of pain as it was being embedded in the geology of their emotional structures. My people know the topography of pain so well it’s as if they were the first to explore and inhabit its inhospitable terrain.

Some families hand down heirlooms. Mine hands down pain. As such, I inherited their wounds, and the ghosts of their stories are the characters that sit on my shoulder when I witness you standing there selling your story that feigns contentedness.

I know how to love your pain because I learned at a young age how to heal upward. I apprenticed dutifully and am, therefore, well versed in how to apply love and companionship as a salve for the harshest of circumstances.

So, when I say, “the trouble for us is that I’ve been there,” what I mean is that I’ve never known or experienced what it means to love someone’s pain in a way that doesn’t involve my own being triggered. Because when mine is triggered, it beckons a response in me that says “I’ll get down in that hole with you. You won’t have to be alone down there as long as my pain can serve yours.”

However, as I’ve recently learned, such an effort only multiplies the pain and does nothing to ensure its demise. My heart may be a porous structure, but your wounds are practice for my pivot. Turns out I’m here to learn and unlearn the responses native to a girl who hails from pain. I’m learning I can feel you and embolden your bravery at the same time. I can see you and know that you will be well no matter the support strategy I choose. I can hear your muffled and terrified calls for help and still choose the singular act of loving you hard…and possibly from a distance.

Yes, my heart is porous, but I can’t serve you well if I absorb your pain and allow it to take me down, too. Because to do so would ignore all that has served me well when I was the one who was in pain.

My pain has fit like a glove on the hands of my ancestors’ pain. It’s form and function, while different in the circumstances that formed it, is not unlike that pain of every woman before me. The pain of feeling unlovable. The pain of confidence as a scarce resource. The pain of loneliness and awkwardness while jostling for an identity to call my own. The pain of being cast out so many times I should have grown numb to it at some point, but I never do. The pain of fearing and revering another woman who glides through life gracefully, wondering to myself why I wasn’t so lucky. The pain of being lied to so that my body could be ravaged by the liar. The pain. The pain. The ugly pain.

While down in my own hole of suffering, I was served best by those who held me. Those who allowed me to come exactly as I was in that moment. Judgement aside. Solutions withheld. Loving nods bestowed abundantly and with mercy toward my humbling circumstances.

To be truly seen at your worst is to have another bear witness to your potential. It is to receive love when love feels scarce.

As for my ancestors, well, they walked their paths because that was the experience they were supposed to have while they were here. I suppose it was in service to my generation who needed to come from such a brand of pain that the emotional muscle memory is hardwired in us. So that we could spot the pain in others. So that those who are in pain won’t be alone as long as we’re around. So that we could rewrite the code to be inherited by the generation that comes after us. Giving us our homework on day one. Carving out for us the heart work we would need to do in this life. To charge us with the continuation of that brave severing that my mother and her sister started all those years ago.

Each generation moving the needle ever so slightly toward more love. Love for ourselves. Love for the road we took to get here before even we came to be.

So, yes, the through line between our stories is suffering. And the through line is also survival. The way a mother births her child through a process we refer to as labor. It’s the hardest of work—an experience of incomparable pain with a built-in reward. We endure it in order to give life and be re-born ourselves. Just as the suffering of any pain is a labor and a birth all its own, giving life to an expanded heart and a re-birth of ourselves. Survival might as well be called labor and delivery like it is in hospitals. Deliverance to ourselves. Emancipation from the dark nights of our stories.

“We are the manifestations of ancient prayers we whispered inside our hearts centuries ago.” - Ra Vuyi