A heart tattooed for the world to see

Close your eyes. Fall in love. Stay there.  ~ Rumi

“a tendency to wear my mind on my sleeve…”

I’ve been told, more than once, that I need to learn to be a bit more opaque, that my tendency to wear my heart on my sleeve was likely to get me into trouble at some point. Like many Geminis, if you read anything into such things, I tend to communicate a lot. (It’s no wonder that I write as much as I do and that I halfheartedly attempted a career that indulged my love of communication).  Though I am introverted, I welcome conversation more often than not, and alongside, I have the troubling tendency to be a bit too forthcoming with truths about myself. Ask me virtually anything and I’m likely to tell you (though it’s unlikely that I’ll volunteer information off the bat).

Well-meaning friends have told me that I need to hold parts of myself back. Some family members have suggested that I outright lie. “People don’t need to know everything about you,” they’d say. And, of course, to a point, that’s true. But when I think about what it means to get to know someone, I realize that there’s a certain degree of trust involved in sharing intimate truths. In some respects, sharing who we are as people is more intimate (and assumes more risk) than sexual intimacy, and, while I’m not an advocate of sharing everything with another person upon first meeting, I truly believe that the only way to know another person is to be open to them. I’m not sure I’d be happy being anything else.

There’s a certain danger in trusting, in being open with people, and on some issues I’m guarded to the point of frustration. What comes across, perhaps infuriatingly, as a tendency to speak in riddles, is very much the result of a hesitation to divulge. But the truth of the matter is, if I’m comfortable with you, and only if I’m comfortable with you, that hesitation rarely lasts for very long. Comfort me and give me solace and I’ll be as open a book as you’d like. I’d like to hope that people are as open and as honest with me as I am with them, but of course I know this isn’t the case. I know, too, that being open is likely to land you in a whole lot of hurt, if not immediately then certainly down the road when you think you’ve opened up to the right people only to find that you’ve misread people entirely. Despite these risks, being open is something I tend toward repeatedly, no matter how many times I should have learned to do otherwise.  I suspect it’s a trait I’m unlikely to grow out of, no matter how much time passes. Still, there’s something to be said for building walls…and for those who work hard to breach them.

In the last year or so as I’ve watched friends and family navigate the ups and downs of their interpersonal relationships and as I’ve done some of the same navigating myself, I’ve become increasingly fond of the adage: “hurt people hurt people”. I’ve come to understand that although we might not intend to hurt, we transmit damage like radiant sources of heat, forever burning the people we come close to. Sometimes it’s as simple as taking out our frustration, say, for example, with work, on friends or family. We lash out in anger because rage has left such an indelible mark upon us that this energy needs to go somewhere. Sometimes we hurt through omission, through silence so deafening, it’s as though we’ve written someone off. But other times, that hurt is far more insidious.  The child that watches his family split apart at a young age takes that baggage into adulthood.  If it’s never reconciled, all potential partners are left to cope with the latent effects of the divorce he bore in his youth.  Many people also take their relationship baggage from one partner to another. Hope intermingles with distrust because it’s the only way to save ourselves from being burned yet again. But if I’m honest with myself, being distrustful of others isn’t who I want to be. Perhaps it’s naïveté, perhaps it’s wishful thinking, but my unwavering desire to hope follows the unrelenting desire to repeatedly put my trust in others.

But oh how that hurts.