From my desk I can look out onto the roof of my porch. It’s an old house, and there’s big divot in the porch roof—which fills with water each time it rains. And this spring there’s been a lot of rain. The landlord knows about it and it’s on his list, but for now, it may be the best and biggest rooftop birdbath in town. There are a constant stream of birds perching and bathing –which routinely distracts me during my Zoom meetings. And this morning as I sit at my desk and gather my materials for a work trip there are a pair of goldfinches sipping and bathing in equal measure. The sunlight makes their yellow even brighter. A mourning dove takes up the opposite corner.
In something that is considered broken, so much beauty can happen. The porch roof is something that will need to get fixed and mended—and when this happens it will be considered ‘better’ than it is now. But when the roof is eventually fixed, and no longer holds water, I will miss the birds.
There were many years when all I could see or feel were my flaws. I can remember painful moments of despair during stretches of healing. I felt hurt or broken. Awkward. And I was really aware of thing things I couldn’t yet do. Aware of the things that still felt too hard.
I felt raw. Sore. Like every one of my nerve endings was exposed. I used to say that I felt like I wasn’t wearing skin. I sometimes felt like my arms and legs weren’t attached.
It was hard to feel so much at once. But at the time, all that feeling was also a superpower. When I could hang on to it, it helped me listen to others—listen to the words and listen to their hearts. As a psychologist-in-training it motivated me to learn—to understand how to build and re-build a self. How to build and re-build attachment. How to heal. How to grow. I worked as many shifts as I could. I read as many books and studies as I could. If I was adrift in a sea of hurt, I was going to learn how to swim so that I might get out—so that I might help others get out too.
But I didn’t heal in a big ocean. I healed in the equivalence of a birdbath—which is what therapy can feel like. You perch precariously on the edge—frightened. And you start by sticking a toe in tentatively. You dip your beak in. You brave ruffling your feathers. And when it’s all too much, you take shelter nearby, only to return and try again.
The thing about being really hurt is that the smallest acts can feel like such a big success. The moment you ask for tea. The moment you say the thing you want to say and not what you think someone wants to hear. The moments you are brave enough to listen to your own silence or tolerate another’s. And the fabulous moments of surprise when you can let yourself play, just a bit, with the part of yourself you have been working so hard to hide.
Healing is a process, and not an event. I am still working to heal, but much of the early pain and despair has been replaced with a mixture of sturdiness and elasticity—two things I couldn’t have imagined at that time. But with this gain has come some loss. My superpowers have shifted. I can’t hear all of the frequencies of hurt the same way I did then—and I know that for better or worse my empathy isn’t the same as it was. And in my healing, the small moments of delight in being able to do things for the first time have changed. The work is challenging in different ways. I now take so much for granted that I can miss the actions that would have seemed impossible then.
It's easy to think of repair—of healing—as universally positive. And so much of it is. But healing also comes with loss. A bittersweet loss. It’s easy to confuse the healing of trauma with the trauma itself because you are untangling yourself from the trauma while you are healing from it. But healing isn’t trauma. And when it is done well, it has a sweetness and a tenderness that it hard to see when you are in it.
I don’t miss the painful aspects of those days. But sometimes I do miss how much I could feel the edge of my bravery—and how much I could feel and hold that in others. How acutely I could hear emotion and how attentive I was to the layers of healing. Like the two sparrows now bathing in the sun. Feeling the sun and the wind on their feathers—completely unaware that the beauty they are enjoying comes directly from brokenness.
©2024 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD
