~Penelope in The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood
How many of us believe that in the wake of betrayal? I did. My mistake, I figured, was trusting this man. My mistake was opening my heart to him. How could I have been so stupid!
If only I'd kept my mouth shut and my heart locked. Right?
Spoiler: Didn't work for Penelope. Didn't work for me.
But that doesn't stop a lot of us from thinking it's a viable response to betrayal. We'll stay with him for the time being for a whole bunch of reasons: we can't afford to leave, we have children, our entire lives would be disrupted, we love this man. But if he thinks we're ever going to trust him with our hearts again, well, then, he's kidding himself.
Never.
My heart will remain locked. My mouth will remain shut to my deepest secrets. My ears will refuse to listen to his pain.
And it works at first. It numbs us somewhat. We play the role of wife, smiling when appropriate, crying privately. We're there...except we're not. Our hearts are locked away. Our souls are hidden.
I expected to live the rest of my life that way. I stayed for my children, mostly. More than anything, I wanted to spare them the chaos of my own childhood. I wanted them to have stability, predictability, safety.
So, to spare myself any further heartbreak, I shut my mouth (mostly) and kept my heart locked (mostly).
I'm not so good at it, it turns out. My heart refused to stay locked. It felt heavy with pain.
So I focused on finding slivers of joy where I could: my children, my pets. The lake and the woods. My home into which I'd put so much of my heart.
And I kept showing up to therapy, where I felt safe to let my heart free, to open my mouth.
That's where I learned that bottling up pain also meant bottling up pleasure. You don't get to choose which feelings you experience, my therapist explained. If you numb yourself to the bad, you numb yourself to the good. Which perfectly explained why I felt as though I was living life wrapped in gauze. I felt...nothing. At first, it was a relief. But, with time, I resented it. I watched other people living their lives. I was alive. But I wasn't living.
With time, I learned how to keep myself safe by establishing clear boundaries. (I'm a work in progress but I've come a long way!)
I learned that I was strong enough to handle the pain. Storms make better sailors, says Shakespeare and I discovered that was true.
I learned that the tears eventually do stop, that they could baptize me into new life.
Penelope says those words knowing they aren't true. She believed them at one time but, at the end of her life, she'd experienced more heartbreak than many.
She speaks for all of us broken-hearted, who think the solution is to lock our hearts away, to protect them from being shattered.
But what we discover is that hearts can heal. That breaks, as Leonard Cohen says, are how the light gets in.
But we have to look for it. We have to reach for it.
We have to choose living over just being alive.
