small magic

“I have a dinosaur heart, cold, massive, indestructible, a thick meaty red. And I have a glass heart, tiny and pink, that can be shattered.” – Louise Erdrich, from The Sentence 

At the end of a yoga class, I see my own heart as clearly as I once saw the knot in my stomach. 

It is thick and textured – saturated, almost purple – and woven, with intertwining paths that trace where I’ve been and where I have yet to go; a tender topography with bits of greenery here and there, patches of stitches protecting otherwise exposed wires, and hidden places to safely pause for a while. 

As it beats, I feel how big it is: floating in the middle of my chest and making my body shake with every pulse. It protects the shattered pieces of my tiny glass hearts, which break over and over again in June. 

My dinosaur heart, oh my dinosaur heart: beaten up and thrown around and stitched back together again and again. Tender but unbreakable, bigger than myself, holding what’s come and gone, and allowing me to visit – to rest – to be. 

It has tripled in size as I’ve rediscovered a tenderness that I thought was long gone. It has learned what love is, and what a gift that tenderness can be. And healing my heart has been an all-consuming practice, but it is the most important work I’ve ever done. 

—

It’s June: I’m grace under pressure. Stitched together by secular divinity in the form of a Chris Thile album and the discipline of confronting my innermost self over and over again on my yoga mat, I make my first bold move. I bet on myself. I stand up for my values and start to demand more of my life. This begins the process of becoming, of rediscovery. I am so far from whole, and so very far from home, but a light comes on inside of me that I vow to never let extinguish. And all of this, bit by bit, breaks my heart. 

It takes months for me to find the slow, the steady, the safe, and even longer to trust it. I realize that this is only the beginning, that my heart must break over and over until it is all the way open. I think I’m ready; I am not. No one is. But I recognize that I owe it to myself to keep leaping, and so I do. It gets harder. It breaks. I hurt. I wonder if I’ll ever stop hurting. I wonder if I’ll ever fully understand the hurt. 

—

It’s June: everything is raw. I’m at dinner with friends I haven’t seen in a while. They unknowingly rub up against the exposed wire in my chest and I am forced to rip a band-aid off long before I feel ready. My private pain is no longer hidden as trying to answer an innocent question feels like being stabbed in the stomach with a rusty, jagged knife. 

This massive disruption that I must now disclose is mine, fully, and I am healing and growing through it, but sharing it with others requires a vulnerability and courage that perhaps I’d rather not know. My detrimentally private past has caught up with me: there is no choice but to be brutally and radically honest. I name the disruption first with delicate hesitation, too quick with concern for the response of others; afraid to take up space, afraid to let the pain linger. 

I learn things that my heart, too, would rather not know: share a hard truth about your relationship and you’ll learn how others feel about their own. Tell about it, and you may find others have no capacity to deal with it – and so instead you find yourself alone and crying in elevators and fried chicken restaurants and on your dog’s anxiety rug in the closet as a part of your chest is ripped open again and again and again. 

I repeatedly perform this emotional bait-and-switch on myself until I finally find the words that allow me to own my own story. But I grow weary. I grow tired. I grow tired of growing. I want to forget it all, to run as fast and far as I can – but there is no hat big enough to hide this terrible haircut, no band-aid capable of protecting me from being shocked over and over again. I contend with the fact that my reality makes others uncomfortable. And I have to sit with that, on top of everything else.  

But I also learn who I am in these moments: what is at first jagged and raw eventually gives way to an incredible tenderness; what is at first terrifying begets unimaginable bravery. The strange and devastating window I am allowed to peer into as a result of sharing my own heartache teaches me of others’ capacity to sit with discomfort and shows me their own trauma and their own fear. I see their goodness; I understand true compassion. And amidst the lingering hurt and loneliness that comes and goes in waves, I learn to ask for help. 

I find friendship and mothering in places I didn’t know I could find them. With astonishment and wonder, I find others who teach me what it really means to hold space and sit with pain. I wrestle with my guilt and my shame and my anger and everything that kept me so very small for so very long and somehow, eventually, find myself held within a community created in darkness – even more powerfully than if it had been created in joy. 

The discipline of deep healing at times overwhelms me: but my dinosaur heart has now begun to grow. 

—

Maybe if I hold my own heart a little closer 

Maybe if I press my palm into my chest 

Then maybe 

Maybe 

Maybe it will stop bleeding 

Maybe it will heal

—

It’s June: again, loss. I have been seeking myself in places familiar and not; I start to see my heart as the whole and enormous and complex organ that it is. I learn to hold heartbreak and love simultaneously. I learn to hold joy and pain side by side. I find the unbearable lightness that lives on the other side of despair. I learn to sit with discomfort and trust that it won’t last. I learn that my strength lies in the most tender parts of me. I now long to bring healing into the spaces in which I was hurt, so I share this with others, in case it helps someone else feel just a little bit less alone. 

—

Finally,  my heart turns a bright electric blue. It engulfs me, every shattered and beaten and painstakingly stitched up inch of it. It’s enormous: it becomes me. And love over fear guides me towards what’s to come.