I love this, Steph, especially the part where you described your flood of tears upon your greeting at your childhood church. It's funny how life finds opportunities to give breath to emotions you didn't even know were inside. After my father died, I discovered that funerals caused this incredible upwelling of emotion in me.
I found myself at a funeral of the lover of a woman I worked with, about a year after my father's death. I never even met the man we were there to remember; I was there to support my coworker. But there I was, sitting in the pews surrounded by strangers, and I began crying. It wasn't a sniffly, dab-the-eyes kind of cry, either. It was a full-blown ugly cry. I made a spectacle of myself. The sheer weight of all my unprocessed emotions, childhood traumas, and unresolved issues with my father forced their way out of my body.
I like to think these emotional triggers are our subconscious' way of forcing us to process what we repress because it's inconvenient. Your divorce, my complicated relationship with my dad, all of it.
I love this, Steph, especially the part where you described your flood of tears upon your greeting at your childhood church. It's funny how life finds opportunities to give breath to emotions you didn't even know were inside. After my father died, I discovered that funerals caused this incredible upwelling of emotion in me.
I found myself at a funeral of the lover of a woman I worked with, about a year after my father's death. I never even met the man we were there to remember; I was there to support my coworker. But there I was, sitting in the pews surrounded by strangers, and I began crying. It wasn't a sniffly, dab-the-eyes kind of cry, either. It was a full-blown ugly cry. I made a spectacle of myself. The sheer weight of all my unprocessed emotions, childhood traumas, and unresolved issues with my father forced their way out of my body.
I like to think these emotional triggers are our subconscious' way of forcing us to process what we repress because it's inconvenient. Your divorce, my complicated relationship with my dad, all of it.
Thanks for sharing such a personal story.