Breaking It Down by Building It Up

I guess something I never expected to learn from living 1,300 miles from home is how to be missed.

Funny, huh? And a little (lot) bit strange.

I mean, who needs to learn how to be missed? Don’t we instead have to learn how to deal with missing someone? Isn’t it our own coping mechanisms that need perfected?

Yeah.

But I think we sometimes—no, I know from experience that I definitely did forget how to be missed.

Don’t worry. I’ll explain.

I know that my family misses me. It’s that thicker-than-blood tie that we share after living in the same house all our lives, after trying to kill each other several times, and after nearly killing anyone who tried to hurt anyone else in the clan. (That sentence makes my family sound bloodthirsty. In reality, I just exaggerate things. Call it poetic license or whatever. But we didn’t actually ever contemplate real-life murder, just for the record.) I expected to miss my family and I expected them to miss me.

But friends are another thing.

Knowing me, there was once a time where I was young and naïve and all the world was sunshine and roses and anyone I missed automatically was assumed to miss me too. I’m still that naïve, unsuspecting girl in many regards. But I’ve lost that supposition that people I care about return the feeling—which is very true in some (a lot of) situations. Except that I apply that distrust to everyone. Including people who actually do consider me their friend.

I’ve had several people I called really true friends walk away in the past years. I’ve gotten used to being the one who cries myself to sleep as someone else forgets that ‘Melissa’ is anything more than a pleasant-sounding name. And so I’ve built walls.

I think maybe, to some extent, all of us have.

We get hurt, we decide that maybe that pain isn’t the most fabulous thing in the world (again, poetic license here) and so we go to semi-drastic measures to assure that we won’t repeat the experience.

But walls like these work to rob the joy from life.

Walls like these feed our insecurities until they are monsters too big for us to prevail against on our own.

And walls like these limit fellowship with people who truly do care about us.

It has taken me nearly three months to stop second guessing people when they say ‘I miss you.’ People who have demonstrated how much they care about me multiple times and in multiple ways.

Pretty ridiculous, right?

What a trust issue, right?

Glad to have gotten over that one, right?

(Well, mostly gotten over. I still have my days.)

But here’s an idea: what if we specifically devoted ourselves to being the reassurance to others that it’s okay to learn to be missed? What if we valued each friendship for the priceless jewel that it is and we didn’t just walk away with no explanation? What if we actually learned from our scars?

I know I’ve been hurt.

I strongly suspect that I’ve unknowingly hurt others.

And I know that that can change me.

It can change each of us.

Just my thoughts this afternoon; take them or leave them. Also: Texas weather is bipolar. That is all.

– Melissa
John 15:12