Pockets

In elementary school - sometime early in kindergarten - my table-mate, Dana Arnold, told me that it was against the rules to chew gum at school. I had no idea! So I did what any gum-chewing, teacher-fearing five-year-old would do. I pulled the offending gum out of my mouth and shoved it into the pocket of the bright yellow dress I was wearing. I am sure my mom had a fun time with that after I got home!

I was in junior high - the summer between eighth and ninth grade, three weeks after my family moved from Kansas to Colorado - when my mom told me that Leslie, my best friend, who for years had been my fellow explorer of life and rock stars and the coolest clothes, had died. Mom told me the news while driving me and a new Colorado friend home from the neighborhood swimming pool. In the backseat of that car, with a girl I barely new and my mother telling me the saddest news I could imagine hearing, I didn't feel that I was in a safe and supportive place, so I did what any death-fearing, feeling-burying fourteen year-old would do. I shoved the crumbling pieces of me into some invisible pocket in my body and psyche.

Over the years, many more griefs have been put into that invisible pocket. It's getting quite heavy.

I love pockets. I feel lucky if, when pulling my coat out of the closet as temps fall, I find a surprise of money or a movie ticket memory. I don't like carrying a purse, so my jean pockets carry my driver's license and credit card.

Because I'm a pocket stuffer, I have to be careful to check all pockets before throwing clothes in the wash. But my invisible pocket has never been emptied or washed.

Up until recently, I had not looked at its contents, let alone accepted them into my life. Every once in awhile, the loss of something or someone dear to me - or just an intimate conversation about loss - has opened that pocket, and an impressive amount of power has rumbled out. It was a recent over-the-top explosion of tears that motivated me to ask my therapist to help me look at what it was that caused so much crying over something that happened long ago.  The work I've done with her has helped me to admit to myself that this private holding place even existed.

The thing about these invisible pockets that most, if not all, of us carry is that they beg to be explored.  Kindly investigated.  Still, we can ignore them - until we can't.  If and when we do go mining into the depths of our pockets, it is good to have someone to join us in our exploration - just like we might need to employ the help of some major cleaning products to de-gum a yellow dress pocket. We created the invisible pocket because at the time of our loss or violation, we weren't able to grieve it, and now we need a trusted person to help us stay in our functioning adult mind so that we can hold and support the places in us that still feel so very young and vulnerable.

I love what Stephen Levine, in his book Healing into Life and Death wrote about a woman who was in physical pain - and this can be used for emotional pain, also:

"So each morning, at whatever time she awoke, she would whisper into her pain, 'Good morning, sweetie, how are you today?' she talked to it with loving kindness, recognizing the necessary balance that did not invite it to stay but no longer pushed it away. She greeted it as one would a colleague at the breakfast table. Not wishing her occasional pain to become a chronic difficulty, she did not make it the love of her life, but instead allowed the love in her life to exclude nothing. She used her pain as a means of focusing compassion on the predicaments of the world. Sending forgiveness and mercy into the pains of the world, she felt that no pain in her body was unapproachable by love."

Thank goodness for pockets - to hide unlawful gum, to carry our prized possessions, and to contain our wounds until we're ready to heal them.