all the tears that never fall

Once, a few years back, I found myself in a counselor’s office. It was my first experience with therapy. I made the appointment because I wasn’t sleeping well and I was experiencing chronic nausea that had just been diagnosed as gastritis. I was in grad school at the time, and the doctor recommended that I make use of the counseling center at the university, which was free to students. I had wondered for a long time if my mental health was bad enough to seek professional help, so I agreed and took the necessary steps for an evaluation.

I felt like a fraud, then. I knew I was not okay, especially after my gastroenterologist ruled out every cause for my gastritis except for stress. I was experiencing limited-symptom panic attacks periodically. I felt unequipped to deal with my life. At the same time, though, I was functional. I was taking care of myself and my responsibilities. I was making progress (slowly, at this stage) toward my degree. I couldn’t acknowledge that I was experiencing a high level of anxiety and also some depression. Those words didn’t apply to me, I thought. Not really, anyway. I was okay, after all, because I was functioning. Some part of me believed that only people who were more or less paralyzed by these conditions had a right to use the terms. I didn’t even need medication, I thought, and I was afraid that the counselor I saw would feel like I was wasting her time because surely there were more severe cases requiring her attention. I was worried that I was the mental health equivalent of a hypochondriac.

But, of course, my counselor didn’t scoff at me as I nervously tried to strike a balance between being open about what I was experiencing and maintaining control of myself. I wanted to be good at therapy, meaning that I wanted to say the right things, answer questions in the right way, indicate an impressive level of introspection, make appropriate progress toward some nebulous goal of “better” or “fixed.” So I came to therapy with my usual approach to dealing with my life: identify the problem and devise an actionable solution. During one session, I was talking about an upcoming situation I expected to be highly stressful. She asked me how I was going to deal with the stress, and I confidently laid out a strategy for mitigating it. It involved confrontations and boundary setting. I was pretty sure I had aced the question. When I finished, my counselor kindly said, “Or, you could just feel your feelings. Try to be curious about them instead of problem-solving them.”

I was floored. Not only did I give the wrong answer, the correct answer was something I couldn’t understand. What did it mean to feel my feelings? Isn’t that why I was in therapy in the first place–because of these inconvenient, uncomfortable feelings that kept disrupting my life? Isn’t feeling what got me into this mess in the first place? And anyway, how does someone not feel their feelings? With some more work, I understood a little better that the goal was about actually processing emotion instead of trying to avoid it or suppress it. But I didn’t really like that answer. As Andy Bernard on The Office says, “So, life gives you lemons, and you just have to eat them, rinds and all.” Not only do I have to have uncomfortable emotions, but I have to just sit with them instead of fixing it. Rinds and all.

I didn’t like it, but I accepted it and I began to understand that I have a very strained relationship with my emotions. Grace, my friend and roommate, affectionately calls me Spock because sometimes I seem half-Vulcan (emotionally shut down, for you non-Trekkies). It’s more joke than anything, but the reality is that for most of my life I have worked hard to control and suppress my feelings, sometimes knowingly but more often not. I tried to purge what I thought of as “bad” feelings, which apparently for me is anything that is not happiness or compassionate sadness on someone else’s behalf. And both of those are only acceptable in small, controlled doses. I won’t get into why I’m like this because that’s a whole post on it’s own, but I will say that as an enneagram type 1 (wing 9 for those of you playing the enneagram game at home), one of my deepest drives is to be good, so those emotions I labelled “bad” along the way are off limits.

Of course, I’m not actually a Vulcan, and I don’t have some Jedi mastery of my emotions (I know, I’m mixing universes. #coexist). My mom, by virtue of being the safest person I’ll ever know in my life, has witnessed emotional outbursts of a variety of kinds from me and could tell you stories. (Seriously, she loves to tell stories about me and my brother. If you ask, she’ll tell.) And I remember trying to figure out how to be a Real Girl in middle school and trying to internalize the old stereotype that girls are hyper-emotional. If I were going to be a Real Girl who behaved the way that girls are supposed to, I needed to be emotional. That mostly meant that I cried really hard at movies like Romeo + Juliet (the one with Leonardo DiCaprio, or as I thought of him then, Luke Brower from Growing Pains) and Titanic (there’s a theme here, apparently), or more embarrassingly, Armageddon. But that was a short-lived phase and I soon went back to my default state of emotional semi-detachment, and I’ve only gotten more buttoned up as I’ve aged. For a long time, that seemed like a virtue to me. I never thought of myself as unemotional, but I did think that I had a lot of emotional fortitude. I thought I was strong.

So it took me by surprise to discover earlier this year that I was dealing with real, life-diminishing depression. Not the “low-grade” kind of depression I experienced (and wouldn’t acknowledge) for almost all of my time in Atlanta. I couldn’t ignore it because it was making decisions for me without me even knowing it–decisions not to do the dishes or the laundry, decisions to lay down for naps in the afternoons instead of grading or class prep, decisions to watch the entire Netflix catalogue of The Great British Baking Show like it was my job. I could still do the things I had to–I was always prepared for my classes and I did a good job teaching. And let’s be honest, I’ve had worse semesters in terms of keeping up with grading. But it was hard to do those things and anything that wasn’t absolutely necessary was nearly impossible to do.

And all the while, I was grieving the loss of Spur, a feeling which I couldn’t do anything but feel. Grief is an unsolvable problem. There’s no getting around it. You just have to feel it all–the love and loss, the empty spaces. Even if it wasn’t too big to stuff down deep inside of yourself and avoid the feelings, grief is physical, too. And not just in the way that the emotions cause that compressing ache in your chest and that tired feeling around your eyes. It’s also there in the places where you live and the objects you own. It’s the leash that hangs unused by the door. It’s the spot on the bed where a dog used to sleep. It’s where she used to lay down to wait when she followed me into the bathroom. It’s the phantom-limb feeling of knowing, still, the exact weight and shape of her body in my arms, or the sound of her bark.

Is it normal to grieve this way for a dog? I don’t know. People don’t really talk so much about their pet grief. Nobody writes songs about it, even though there is that baffling stereotype about dead dogs being a staple lament in country music. (Having never heard a song about a dead dog, I doubt that’s an actual trope, but either way, can we not make fun of it?) So on top of my grief was shame and an impossible need to explain myself to people, to let them know that Spur was special and unique, and that I understand this grief isn’t the same as losing a beloved human family member.

And my grief for Spur stretched back and entangled with my grief for my Aunt Janice, who died just over a year ago, and for my Uncle Max, who died about five years ago, and for my grandfathers, who died when I was 9 and 13, for friends, for other animals. All deaths that I never fully mourned. All of my life’s losses would merge and cascade, at times, and there was nothing to do but feel my feelings. To be curious. To pay out this great cost of loving.

I think, now, that for all these years Spur was a ballast in my life, her presence and love helping to stabilize the emotions I tried not to feel. I knew that I relied on her, but I don’t think I understood how much. I am unbalanced without her, though I am learning to find a new balance with River, who brings a whole new kind of joy and magic into my life.

And so in the wake of Spur’s death, I am processing through so many hidden feelings. Old griefs are fresh again. It feels like every wound is finding its way back to the surface, and all the tears I never cried gather behind my eyes and wait while I try to learn how to feel without labeling any emotions “bad” and try to release myself from the confines of perfectionism out into the open spaces of being human. Almost everyday, I recite to myself the opening lines from Mary Oliver’s beautiful poem “Wild Geese”:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

Oh, how I loved my Spur. I love her still, and my grandfathers and aunt and uncle. And for as much as I wish I could skip over this grief that comes at me like waves crashing and receding, I am grateful still for this last gift from Spur–learning to let this soft animal of my body love what it loves. And feel what it feels. And to love myself not because I’m good or because I’ve done everything right, but simply because I am worthy of love. Maybe when I’ve learned this lesson well enough I will be able to, in Mary Oliver’s words, hear the world calling to me “like the wild geese, harsh and exciting / over and over announcing [my] place / in the family of things.” Only maybe instead of the honking of geese, it will sound more like a dog barking, and I will know that it has been calling to me all along.