Scar tissue and "getting over it".

Two things have been knocking around in my brain since last night.

Scar tissue
and getting over it.

Some of it spun out of my last post, and the quote about suffering and each additional pain being both trifling and unbearable.

There we go again.  The opposites.  One thing cannot exist without it's opposite.  How would we "define" good vs bad, us vs them?   Our essence really is juxtaposition.  We feel the pulls of both, always.  We can only hope to grow and understand life when we acknowledge and embrace our always of opposites.


I digress.


So of course that quote is as true as anything.  Think about it.  Think about it pertaining to heartbreak.  I have recently learned there are many types of heartbreak.  I already understood romantic heartbreak, career heartbreak (us actors are experts) and now I know death heartbreak.

Isn't it amazing what we can endure? That we survive it? And how we do get up to go on another day? We can almost feel the visceral scar tissue we build along the way.  With every sad period, every disappointment, every cruel word.  It adds to us and whether we know it or not, it stays.  We heal up, but we heal differently than before.  Something that wasn't there previously, now is.  And we heal up with that remaining scar.  Some are big, some are small.

That's why I believe there is no such thing as "getting over it".  Otherwise I wouldn't be able to tell you a comment that hurt my feelings in my childhood, or share with you an experience about a boy who broke my heart, or give you a story about a role I wanted and didn't get.  We wouldn't remember these things.  We wouldn't be able to recall them if they didn't matter and stay with us, no matter how deep it may be buried, how neatly tucked away, no matter how rarely or how often we think about it.

If I am truly honest with myself, I am not over any heartbreak I've ever endured.  That's right.  Ever.  Even from those who I claimed at one time I "hated".  I can still be hit with a wave of nostalgia.  A minute of being "in the mood" for the company of a person in my past.  "In the mood" for a different and or simpler time.  "I miss things all the time".  Someone once said to me.  Yup.  Me too.

When you've exchanged time and parts of your life with a person, you can't take it back.  It belongs to your scar tissue.  It is literally part of you.  Forever.

There are people who will be important to you.  "Good" important and "bad" important, and they will shape you and teach you.  You will not be the same once they are "out" of your life.  Sometimes these important people come to us for a time, and then we are no longer able to have them in our lives.  (Sometimes we feel this is for the best, and sometimes we feel it is a mistake.  Both hurt terribly.  Both can hurt so much we're sure we can't go on.  And then we do.) And sometimes when a person is no longer in your life, they are still alive...and sometimes they aren't.

We learn to live with their absence, not always because we want to, but because we have to.  There is no choice.  We just learn to live differently.  We are forced to adapt to a new normal.

I've never believed, "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger".  I've always said, "whatever doesn't kill you makes you...well...not dead."

The scar tissue they left us with is forever, and there is no such thing as "getting over it".

Each time the scar tissue gets bigger, and it is both unbearable and trifling.


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