Two Hearts

I have come to realise that I wear my heart on my sleeve much more than I realised I did. I thought I kept my feelings fairly well guarded and hard to decipher except to those that know me well. Not that I think it is a good thing to be so guarded but believe it to be a defence mechanism to protect myself from letting people get too close and then in a position to cause me pain. I have, regrettably in the past let people past my outer defences only for them to attack me from within, a Trojan horse of emotional conflict.

I have always been a fairly emotionally charged person and will easily get upset over things and people that I care about, I have worked in jobs that could have proved very emotionally taxing, however due to the fact the job was with people that didn’t really mean anything to me I was able to remain emotionally detached from it. However when things come closer to home it is quite often all I can do to hold in the tears. I don’t think it is a bad thing for a man to cry or for a man to cry in public, in fact I think more men should, but sometimes I do struggle with this and will try in desperation to control myself and not show my emotion in a physical form, preferring to do this in the seclusion and safety of my own home and in private.

We have two hearts, the first being the muscular organ in our chest cavity which pumps blood around our bodies, the second being the metaphorical heart, the source and centre for our emotional life, a place where our sincerest and deepest feelings can be found, a place incredibly vulnerable to pain.
Without either we would cease to be.

If our emotional heart is damaged I’m not sure it will ever be as good as it once was, I think we have the ability to repair ourselves but that the scars will always be present and just maybe weaken the area damaged. I think we, the human race, have an adept ability to get back up and carry on, we all go through various hardships and difficult times and most of us are fortunate enough to come through the other side. There are, of course some that sadly fall by the wayside, maybe there heart was already weakened from previous conflicts and just could not cope with the most recent trauma, I don’t know.

I believe I am a fairly strong person, emotionally; I have dealt with various tragedies to my personal life over the years and in my eyes for the most part have coped well. I think this is partly due to the fact that I have learned to release my emotions, whether in private or with others I trust. Emotions that are not released can only put added pressure on the weakened scar tissue and cause further damage. During my young adult life I had not learnt how to deal with my emotions quite so well and did some things that I am not proud of, drank far too much in a futile attempt to find the answers I was looking for, for what its worth the answers are never at the bottom of the bottle, no matter how many you look in.

Sometimes I contemplate things maybe a bit to much, relive past hurts in my private times a bit too often, but maybe that is just the way I have come to learn how to cope with and deal with whatever it is that may be troubling me now, looking for answers or solutions to previous worries. When you are alone you have plenty of time to examine your heart and soul, to prod around in places that sometimes you wish weren’t there. When you are in that quite place, whether it be those few minutes before you fall asleep at night and you are just lying there in your bed or if you are lucky enough to grab a few minutes during the day, when you are alone with just your thoughts as company, when the world lays still and a hush falls over the commotion of the day, when that hollow feeling engulfs your chest and your eyes well with the tears of faded scars, you reflect on yourself and catch a glimpse of the person that you are.
It can be a scary place to be, a very lonely, desolate place, a place that asks us questions we don’t want to answer, but at some point we must all visit it. Some more than others, it is a place I have come to know all to well and would like to leave undisturbed for a time. But life asks questions of us and demands answers and sometimes those answers can only be retrieved from the darkest of places.

I fear I still have many questions to go, many left unanswered that I have yet to find the answers to or am just too scared to venture where I know they can be found.