Since my mother passed away, I find myself crying at the oddest times and for the strangest reasons. The grief of losing my her is there.   I am fine and yet it is there.  I’m learning more and more about how I process emotions these days.

During my divorce and surviving a relationship with an alcoholic, I felt numb.  I felt like they say survivors can feel.  We put aside our emotions and dull the pain by burying it.  Alcoholics train their victims and themselves to shut down emotion.  It is a defense mechanism.  They drink to hide their inner anguish and yell at family to stop showing how the drinking hurts them too.  It is a vicious cycle of guilt and pain.  Eventually, you stop feeling.  You grow cold and numb.  It was the coldness and compete absence of joy that finally woke me up. I had to float slowly back up from those depths.

Having an Ex in recovery and working through those feelings was harder and easier in ways I didn’t expect.  He also had to find his joy again and do it while sober. He built new coping skills.  He went through therapy.  He had many people guiding him.  The result of this was that he became someone who knows the process.  He looks at me and wants to ‘fix’ me too.  He actually wants to fix everyone he comes in contact with.  His hyper focus on healing and therapy has brought him to this strange place where that’s all he sees.  He sees everyone’s faults and psychoses and wants to ‘heal’ you too.  It’s the pendulum swing.  I hope and pray he gets over that too.

Before I realized this was happening, I listened to him to a greater extent.  He was better at recovery than I was.  I left him and my life got suddenly and quickly more normal.  I began to feel fine again. I didn’t go through a huge cathartic healing like he did.  But then I didn’t go through that many meetings or grief over my lost life. I did but in a different way. I had gone through so much anguish in the choosing to leave. Once I left though, I did not look back on my decision.  What’s done is done. 

So, here I am, seemingly fine.  Moving on with life.  Occasionally being told by my Ex that I must have this deep well of emotion buried in me that is going to break out and drown me.  His drowned him for a while, that was for sure.  I saw it and experienced it. I wondered about it.  Do I? Is there this scary buried well of emotion inside me just waiting to drown me?

I’ve talked about my many reasons for moving towards a D/s relationship. One of them had to do with this fear.  Can edge play push me to find that well and experience those emotions?  Is this a way to break out of the cocoon?  While playing with Mr. D, I have found myself being tested and prodded and my buttons pushed. I have experienced many emotions but nothing has triggered this possible well of pain to surface. I began to stop worrying about it so much. 

Now that I am grieving for my mom, a very hard emotional thing, I  see more about how I process emotion.  I am in pain.  I am grieving.  I feel it ebb and flow over me.  Most days now I am completely fine and life is good.  Some days, though, I can feel the emotion well up and I sob for a few minutes here and there.  Then it passes and I am fine again. 

Mr. D worried that our D/s might have resumed too soon. I understand that concern.  I can feel myself react to his play differently right now.  I am more fragile.  I can feel that and I see myself taking our play more to heart.  That’s okay.  It gives me chances to experience the well of emotion that is me.  Now that I see my way of dealing with life, I don’t fear that I’m some emotional ticking time bomb. 

Mr. D gave me the final piece to this puzzle the other day.  At my mom’s memorial a good friend of mine broke down and cried.  She got semi-mad at me and asked, “But why aren’t you crying, too?” She feels that I’m entirely too level, too happy most of the time. I’ve been told that by other friends.  They think I’m too even all the time.  That it’s weird, in their eyes, that nothing bothers me. I relayed her comments to Mr. D and he immediately said, “But you’ve been feeling it for weeks now.” He’s right.  I have.  

I’m done doubting myself and fearing that I don’t feel like others feel.  I don’t and that’s perfectly alright.  We all feel emotions in our own unique ways.  I allow for others to feel and react as they choose.  From now on, I will give myself the same courtesy.