Living in Hurt

It’s important to let people hurt you. It’s important to feel the pain, recognize the hurt, and then separate yourself until you heal. You may never get back what you lost, but you will feel at peace with your decisions. Fear prevents most of us from taking risks. Fear of rejection, fear of pain, fear of loss. Interacting with other human beings always opens yourself to the possibility of hurt.

It’s imperative to me that I maintain a trust in humanity. Trusting humanity means believing that most people are not trying to hurt you intentionally. It means making yourself vulnerable. But you never need to keep making yourself vulnerable to the same person. Individual humans will let you down. Some times you need to walk away from those humans and go trust other ones instead.

We live in a pluralistic world. There are no surefire ways to identify the good people from the bad. Every story has at least two sides and every person is living with decisions they’d rather have not made. Trust as far as your instinct lets you and if you can’t trust your instinct, ask for help. Find a third party, someone with perspective: friend, rabbi, therapist, legal professional, explain what you are going through. Let them help you distinguish fact from fiction.

Knowing that people have hurt me and they are indifferent does make me feel physically ill. There is a pit in my stomach that churns and cramps when I think about times I’ve asked for my pain to be acknowledged and was rejected. This is the line I use to determine when I should stop trusting someone…