I hate rejection. I hate how pitiful I feel when I’ve been snubbed, forgotten, pushed aside. I hate how all I want to do is tell the person who wronged me all the ways in which they did so. But no amount of eloquence makes the words sound any less desperate to be wanted than the heartbroken lover on her knees begging to be taken back.
The sight of a beggar makes me cringe. Someone hanging on the edge of misery and desperation, the ledge their fingers grip requiring them to let go of all pride in order to hang on to what once was. What they so desperately want to be once more.
And yet, I’ve found myself there. Here.
I’ve been the girl once included in the game only to be left looking on from the sidelines.
I sat in on the secrets, the planning, the excitement, and then had to watch it all play out from afar.
I walked with them, talked with them, rejoiced with them, and in the end had to hear about them through the broken lines of a telephone game.
The love, the friendship, the togetherness we shared is now but a fleeting memory of what once was.
And now, as I allow the freshness of hurt to seep out from its dark, hidden place and let it be seen in the light by someone other than myself I feel the desperation clinging to me yet again.
Why must honesty about hurt and pain come across as desperate and pitiful? As if the person standing beside me has never felt the disillusionment of a relationship ended, a heart betrayed.
Why must we continue silently through the sting of rejection and disappointment as if we never really cared at all? As if the shrug of the shoulders is enough to shake off the heavy hurt that weighs us down.
The truth is I did care.
The truth is I did give it my all.
The truth is I did get hurt in the end.
But the bigger truth is this: that love? that passion? that person that caused the hurt? It was never all for nothing unless I allow it to be so. Pain needs our permission to cripple us.
The cut may have been deep enough to leave a scar but that scar represents healing and doesn’t that permanent mark upon the skin also tell of its even bigger mark upon the soul?
I’m choosing to learn the lesson set before me from the pain that is behind me. I’ve learned the true meaning of Grace and Kindness, both capitalized here because they should be capital actions in our lives. I’ve learned to see the good, especially when seeing it requires so much searching for it.
When it is oh so easy to see the bad and distasteful, I’ve learned to taste and see that the Lord is good.
He has given me a taste of His love and compassion and I’m left with the wonder of how I ever lived beside people without really seeing them. Not for how I could make them better but for how He has already made them best.
And so, in the end, there is no other choice for me but to be thankful for the hurt, for the pain. It’s the shaking of the fault lines in my heart that becomes the quaking of my soul. Shaking me awake to that which brings breath to my lungs and blood to my veins. To that which brings me life.
As i move on from situations of hurt and pain, I take the lessons in love that I’ve been gifted, for they are great and they are many, and I continue on, letting go of the bad that has changed me for good.
he hung the moon 
Melissa,
I have wondered and fought through all you express. One of my most favorite quotes is by Khalil Gibran when he said… “Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.”