It has been over a year since I last posted. An uncountable number of experiences have befallen me over the past year, but instead of recounting them all, I am going to write about what I learned. I find that my most pensive and insightful posts have been about lessons rather than the experiences that spawned them.
I suppose an important lesson I learned is that communication requires emotion. I consider myself to be emotionally mature and possessing of the ability to communicate but I realized that it is very challenging to have and do both. It is rare that I should find myself unable to empathize with a companion and even rarer that I wouldn't be able to strike up a conversation. Just yesterday, I befriended many people while wearing tiny fairy wings at the Renaissance Festival; I was the self-proclaimed largest fairy there. Here's the thing, though: I often make new friends on a purely superficial level. These superficial friends (hereinafter 'superficials') exist in all of our lives. If you are anything like me, though, when you go through a deeply moving experience, whether public or private, you might be surprised how many of these superficials step up to the plate to assert the assistance of their strength. Superficials are the true test of my ability to feel and communicate simultaneously.
In late July, my father's cancer finally won out and he passed away. Although he was ready, the rest of us are still feeling his absence, and I think we always will. Looking back through the blog, I came across an old post about my dad's cancer and that was when this idea came to me. After I had written about it, I had my dad read it and his reaction came as unexpected to me. Somehow, he was surprised by my reaction to the news and to the feelings that I was experiencing. Even near the end, he was shocked to find out how much I was feeling. My father went into liver failure, almost overnight, and his brain started to suffer from the sudden overabundance of non-filtered toxins in his blood. Thus, when he said something that didn't make sense, we just started to take it in stride. These shady moments, though, mostly served to punctuate his moments of lucidity. One night he had gone to bed and suddenly turned on his light. My mom was crying in the living room so I went back to check on him. To say that I was startled by my father's violent outburst is putting it mildly. "WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON OUT THERE? WHAT AREN'T YOU GUYS TELLING ME?!" If you've never had to remind your father that he was dying and that it made you sad, consider yourself lucky. But even when faced with his own mortality, he thought I was sad because of something else, not just him. This would seem to suggest that I wasn't adequately communicating my emotions to him. I'm not looking to be reassured about this, as a very great blessing, I don't really carry any regret or guilt about the whole thing. The last words my father and I exchanged were "I love you" and that's as it should be. But if I can't adequately tell my father how I'm feeling, how the hell am I supposed to express it to a superficial?
That's just it, though: I don't express it. What I've learned is that instead of making everybody else feel weird, I crack a joke, say something reassuring, and move on. But the fascinating thing is that I think my approach has actually just made the whole thing worse. People react very strangely when I make light of the situation or feign a light heart. The truth is obviously much darker. I'm not a robot, and as much as I'd like it sometimes, I feel deep sadness like the rest of humanity. Apparently I'm not special. . .
Lame.
Although it is infinitely harder, I've started to consciously tell people that I'm not doing very well, and that it is very hard. The plain truth. Who would have thought it was so hard? Don't answer that, by the way. I am well-aware that the truth is often harder, but I just didn't expect the truth to be this hard. But be faithful, if you find yourself sugarcoating it for the cheap seats in the back, where the superficials like to hang out in the theaters of our lives, the first word is the hardest. It isn't the truth that poses the challenge; rather, it is the commitment to tell it.
Thus the lesson: even though it sucks, when people ask me how I am feeling, they are getting a cold, hard truth-slap square across the face because sugarcoating it just won't suffice. It makes me seem unfeeling, it makes them feel uncomfortable. Who needs it? The added benefit to this approach has been the seamless transition of various superficials into actual friendships.
There are obviously a million lessons that I've learned from my father, and particularly from the last couple weeks that I got to share with him, but this one feels like a particular winner. I might not always make you laugh, but if you converse with me, you will learn about me rather than the ridiculous tales that I weave to create false familiarity. So long surface-level banter, hello meaningful conversation.
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