tender

On pressing in where it hurts...old aches give you a roadmap back home...

I am, at any given moment, covered in bruises…most, I honestly cannot account for.

A greenish purple-y one blooming and watercoloring on my thigh…a deep purple situation setting up camp on my hip bone…a whole constellation of them down both shins, like I lost a fight with a staircase (stairs and I DO NOT agree, iykyk).

I’ll catch one in the mirror getting dressed and go…huh…what in the WORLD did I do? Because…I almost never remember how I got any of them. My spatial awareness and honestly…my peripheral vision live somewhere between “questionable” and “entirely non-existent.” I’ll clip the corner of the kitchen island at minimum twice a day. I bang into doorframes I’ve walked through ten thousand times. And yes…I’m a grown-ass woman…a high-functioning, knife-wielding professional who still, somehow, cannot manage to get her own body through an open doorway without it leaving a mark.

When I find one of these mystery bruises, I do this thing…I press on it. I press on it to remember.

I push my thumb right into the middle of it, and it HURTS, obviously…but in that little flare of pain, the memory floats right back up. Oh, riiiiiight…the walk-in door…last Tuesday…I remember now. The pressure wriggles the lost memory loose…the exact moment, the exact corner, the exact dumb thing I was doing when I did it…the pain is a bookmark…and when I press in on it, I can see exactly what was going down on the page.

I didn’t think much about my little borderline sadistic habit until a few weeks ago…

I wrote recently about the epic birthday gift my mom gave me…tickets to a Lit Society book event here in the city, and at one point in the evening, someone said it…in one of the share-out times…about writing and healing: push on the bruise. That’s where the good stuff lives. And it’s lingered with me still, weeks later (like the bruises on my legs…).

I think we walk around carrying these old wounds…the tender spots…the places hit a long time ago…but they never quite stopped aching, instead they just changed colors. And most of us spend our whole lives doing everything we can to NOT touch them, to NOT look at them, to NOT acknowledge them. We cover them and hide them from plain view…we arrange our whole personalities so nobody else bumps up against them.

I’ve learned, this year, that if you can bring yourself to press in…gently…and on purpose…the ache itself will tell you the origin…where it came from…the soreness is a bookmark…the tender place will reveal the whole root of itself on the page.

I sat in that room full of women at the book event, and as the speaker talked about pressing the bruise to go deeper in writing and feeling…I thought about my shins…and I thought about everything else.

Pressing in is the one thing I have spent decades refusing to do, ignoring in the name of positivity and hope for better…believing that all things happen for a reason.

My whole operating system was built around doing the opposite…hurt…flinch…look or hide it away…cover the sore spot with a little “it’s fine!” and keep moving forward. I am, historically, a world-class positive-the-shit-out-of-it kind of girl. Something hurts? Hurry and find the silver lining before bleeding even stops…manage the wound, dress it up, make it palatable and quiet and easy for everyone else around me…all so nobody ever has to sit in the discomfort of MY discomfort…including me…ESPECIALLY me.

Managing a wound and understanding a wound are two completely different things. Over the years, I got so good at managing that I never tried to actually understand my wounds. I knew how to keep everyone comfortable…around the bruise…around me. And over time, I’d forget where the bruise came from in the first place.

And then, in January of this year, I started weekly therapy with my amazing therapist, Noelle, AND subsequently, I started this Substack.

Between the weekly sessions and my disciplined writing schedule of Sundays and Thursdays, I started pressing in…pressing those bruises, one-by-one, trying to remember their origins.

After a spring-time trip back home to South Carolina, I found my childhood journals…I say childhood, but these babies dated back to elementary school and ran all the way into my late twenties, through my first marriage, my first jobs, my first adult life.

These journals absolutely wrecked me when I read through them again, after all these years. I guess wrecking was the whole point of all of these deep-dives into my past…whether it was in therapy, through my writing or my re-reading of these journals.

I’d read one particular entry from my eighth or ninth birthday…a day I’d been so excited for with explicit plans for a party with friends or a shopping day or something…and then the very next page, a little deflated report…nobody did anything, everyone was too busy, the day went by like any other. And, I felt that familiar soreness rise up in my chest…the old bruise. Instead of flipping past it the way I have my whole life, I decided this time, I’d pressed in.

The memory immediately gave me grace for my parents…they were young, they were overwhelmed, they were busting their asses to give us a good life…they were also just busy. But beyond the grace for my parents, the memory also reminded me of a long-held belief that had taken root during that time in my childhood. I believed I was easy to forget…it’s where I learned that love needed to be earned…by being good…quiet…useful…and that if I wasn’t intentional and disciplined or didn’t try hard enough, I’d slip right through the cracks of everybody else’s hard week and would be forgotten. Nine years old and those thoughts had begun to take root…only to be pressed on and felt deeply, guiding who I was and how I was for the next few decades.

Other bruises have begun to resurface…the not-so-obvious ones…every time one of my relentless shoulds flare up…I try to stop and press in on it now. The should that says I HAVE to post every single Sunday or I’ve failed. The one that says I have to make myself useful so that people will love me, will notice me, will need me or else I’ll be forgotten. The one that says three morning pages, not one, or it doesn’t count. The one that insists my birthday has to be perfectly, productively, meaningfully orchestrated or the whole year is ruined.

I feel that familiar pressure wrap itself around my chest, and instead of just obeying it like I always have…I decided to press in on the bruise. So now, I press in and ask the only question that actually matters: says who? Whose rules are these, really? Where did I pick them up? Who handed me these particular measuring cups and told me they were mine?

Pushing on any one of these bruises…the ache leads me back to the past…the same handful of places and memories…the cool girls who built the first bars of my cage, the church pews of the mega church where the whole focus was performance…in every sense of the word…the hard seasons where two overwhelmed, young parents couldn’t catch every falling thing and a little freckle-faced girl decided that must’ve meant she didn’t matter.

My therapist reminds me often that we have to be willing to look at the painful parts to understand why we got wrapped up the way we did…and only then can we start to unwind them. You can’t fix a sauce you refuse to taste…and you can’t heal a bruise you won’t let yourself feel.

A bruise is tender…the actual word for it…it’s tender, don’t touch it. And tender means sore….but tender also means soft…open…reachable. In the kitchen, tenderizing something tough is necessary so it can finally take the heat, finally soak up the flavor, finally become something you’d want to eat. The toughness has to break down for the good stuff to get in.

Pressing the bruise is about finally tending to the spots I’ve been guarding my whole life…the ones I took on as parts of me, parts of my identity, parts that defined who I was or could be. The ache that comes from pressing in…it’s actually just information…it’s our bodies holding up little signs that say here, it started here, come look. By looking at them, remembering them, we can start to release them…by pressing in, you can start to let go and when you let go, the bruise rises up, starts to dissipate…and fades away, colors and all.

A couple weeks ago I wrote about learning to trust my own gut…about putting down other people’s measuring cups and seasoning my own life to my own taste. But what makes trusting even possible in the first place?? You can finally trust when you know you can tell the difference between your gut and an old bruise flaring up…knowing the difference between this is genuinely wrong for me or this is just a 1991 wound that needs releasing.

Half the things I’ve spent my life reacting to weren’t even happening in the same room…they were led by a nine-year-old’s misguided beliefs…the ones still running the show, still flinching at the pain. You can’t season to taste if you can’t tell which ache is the dish and which ache is the scar.

Pressing these dang bruises…pressing in is how I’ve been finally able to know the difference.

Bruises will continue to come…I mean, let’s be honest…I’m going to walk into that kitchen island a few more times today, and the day after, and every day for the rest of my natural life, because some things about a person simply do not change. I am Jess and I am chronically clumsy.

And the other kinds of bruises…the invisible ones…the ones that are dark and deep…the ones that linger a little longer than you want or need…the ones where you feel misunderstood, undervalued, under-appreciated, overlooked or not even looked at, at all…those, too, will still show up.

But I’m learning there’s value in pressing in…on all of them…not flinching away or dismissing them in the name of positivity. I’m pushing my thumb right into the sore middle and loosening the memory or the unnecessary expectation…and releasing its grip on me. Following the ache all the way back to the little girl who got the bruise in the first place…and to crouch down next to her, finally, and tell her the thing she couldn’t hear back then…it’s not your fault, you’re not the problem, you do matter and you are strong, you CAN do hard things.

I used to think I was weak…but I’m learning that tender is the truer word. And tender…as it turns out…might just be one of the most valuable parts of me. The tender aches…each time, they give me a roadmap back to my home, back to me and back to who I’m meant to be.

♥