Rip Off the Bandaid. Let Healing Begin.
By: Cristy Bird
Tags: Grief And Loss, Grief, Life Lessons, Healing Emotions

Granny and I crying at a wedding. She taught me it was O.K. to cry, it was O.K. to love so deeply that emotions, both happy and sad, were a good thing. She also taught me that physical pain is temporary and can be overcome.

If I could tell my past self anything it would be that pain is rarely 100% bad and is rarely pointless. I’d tell myself to look for the light at the end of the tunnel and look for the purpose of the healed scars because they will be there waiting to be discovered!

Pain is proof that healing has begun.

I distinctly remember learning this lesson early in life but not realizing it’s full potential, and that I could and would need to apply it to emotional pain too.

I remember getting frequent swimmers’ ear or ear infections one summer as a kid, my mom didn’t think ear pain required a doctor’s visit so I woke up in the middle of the night, more than I would like to remember, with throbbing pain. I tried peroxide, I tried different oils that I would ask my granny or my mom about, they would tell me what they thought would work. I heated up a wet washcloth and put it on my own ear to ease the pain.

It was a lesson in trial and error, it was a science lesson, it was survival of the fittest. I tried everything! When it wouldn’t subside quick enough I would cry myself to sleep.

When I finally tried getting a washcloth so hot that I could barely stand to lean it against my throbbing and painful ear, it eased it the fastest!

Similarly, that tweezer pulling out the splinter relieved the pain in no time. Ripping off the bandaid, swallowing the disgusting medicine, taping up the broken toe as soon as it happened even though I could barely stand the pain of anything even being nearby the toe. All situations that caused physical pain, but the quicker you attend to your pain the quicker it subsides.

My granny was a tough lady, way tougher than I have ever had to be, and frankly tougher than anyone in my entire generation that I have ever known or read about. She has endured an entire life of physical and emotional pain.

She almost died as a young girl of six because she had gangrene in her leg. She was regularly physically abused by her own mother who had gone insane after losing multiple children (it was a different time back in the 1940s). Later, when she was old enough to work, she slipped on a piece of meat at the meat-packing plant where she worked and fell backward off a 4-foot platform. She endured excruciating back pain and leg pain for 65 years from that fall.

When she was about 42 years old she lost the love of her life, and husband suddenly from an unknown cause, which later was discovered to be pancreatic cancer. Two years later she lost her dad, the only family support she ever had.

My granny had a ceiling fan fall on her at the age of about 68 and cut her forehead right open. I once saw her fall through a back porch that surrounded our above ground pool and damaged her leg badly. I saw her step on a nail. I saw the results of a customer trying to attack her with a knife when she caught him stealing. (Granny was a bit of an accident waiting to happen if that wasn’t already clear. In fact, it was a frequent joke in our house that she was an accident waiting to happen. She just had a knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.)

My granny experienced pain in epic proportions. But she NEVER let that stop her. She kept moving. She never gave up. And each time she experienced more pain she built a stronger tolerance to it and a more impactful story for developing mind over matter.

I attribute the same to emotional pain.

My granny (a woman who raised me and molded me into the person I am today, a woman who I admire and revered) went from being strong and lively to slowly dying over the course of a year. It was the most painful and most impactful loss of my life. (I am one of the lucky ones. Most people have a lot more pain, a lot earlier in life than I have.)

I think she would be proud and I think she would agree that I didn’t run from the emotional pain of losing her. I haven’t pretended I don’t have hard times or hard days. I have thought and talked about her, I cried out the tears. I talked to her and talked to God. I talked to my sister, my mom, my husband, my kids, and any friend who was and is willing or able to listen.

I learned through her experiences and mine, that ripping that emotional splinter out works just as well as ripping off the bandaid.

Pain isn’t always a bad thing. Pain is not to be feared but embraced!

It sounds counter-intuitive, and it is. Your body and mind reject pain because they don’t like it. But if you can overcome the fear of pain as opposed to the reality of it, that is where you can thrive like never before. Realizing that pain can be fleeting, and typically is, is key! Fact, you will experience physical AND emotional pain in this life. Don’t let it beat you, you can overcome it.

Just like the pain of healing a wound, the pain of a loss is slowly heals and the pain dulls. By talking through it and feeling your way through it breaks the fever, it dulls the sting, and the wound can be cleaned more easily. Maybe it prepares you to better manage pain in the future? That’s not for me to know, that’s for you to figure out on your own.

But we can all learn from it, grow from it, and share it with others so they aren’t cleaning their wounds alone either. Grab your tweezers and yank that sucker out!