My Heart Weeps Blood

       When we open our hearts to love, we take risks. Risk is inherent in life. We manage risks all the time. Crossing the street against the light, we gauge the risk of getting run over against making it to Dunkin’ Donuts a few seconds quicker. We invest our money, risking losing some of it (or all of it) to make more of it (or shitloads of it).
       When it comes to our feelings, we risk every time we care about someone. When we care, we risk getting hurt. It’s part of the equation. What we try to do is gauge the chances of getting hurt, or how mow much we could get hurt, against the rewards of caring. The more we care, the greater the risk for pain. And the greater the chance for true love.
       For most of my adult life, I managed risking my heart. Whatever experiences I had growing up, including my first love, helped mold how I managed that risk. Of course, when you’re younger, you rarely realize what you’re doing. It’s pretty much an unconscious process. Hopefully, as we get older and wiser, we unravel this and become self aware of what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. Only then can we learn from our own process. Those lessons become crucial in how we do relationships going forward. This can happen all within one relationship as well. We don’t need to have many partners to get our lessons.
       Some people never get this. Maybe I never would have, so resolute was I in protecting my precious, tender heart. But I did get it. And it changed everything.
       I first became acutely aware of my own process a little over ten years ago. Before that, I would manage the risk of love by not investing too much of myself in any relationship. I would invest just enough where I felt comfortable. As I aged, my comfort level expanded, meaning I could invest more and more. Consequently, my relationships deepened and expanded as I became more aware. There was more love, because I was risking more of myself. But still, never all. I kept just enough hidden, a piece of my heart that no woman would ever get, because of my fear that if I ever lost that piece from heartbreak, the pain would be unbearable. The risk of that pain just did not seem worth the reward of true love. Of intensely deep, incredibly energetic, outrageously passionate, transformative love.
       And make no mistake about it. Love is transformational. It is in fact the most transformational energy in the universe. Nuclear fusion powers the stars. Nuclear energy powers the physical mechanics of the entire universe in fact. But love powers the human experience. And the human experience is what defines our life. And a universe, no matter how vast and magnificent and amazing, is, without life, to paraphrase Carl Sagan quoting Thomas Carlyle, “an awful waste of space”.
       When the day came that my heart did get shattered, after twenty plus years of making sure it never would, it transformed my life. It transformed my experience of life. It was only when I became willing to risk it all that I became capable of truly transforming my life and myself.
       Since that heartbreak six years ago, I’ve learned how to risk even more. That allowed me to experience love on new levels, and thus allowed me to transform my life even further. That did not come without risk.
       Recently, I experienced the beginnings of a healing of some very old, very deep wounds. But that healing has now taken on a different form, and it’s actually opened up some wounds again. Right now, my heart weeps blood.
       This is transformative as well. Even if I’m bleeding. Because I’m choosing not to run from how I feel. I’m choosing not to let fear get in my way of where I need to go. Even if I don’t know exactly where that is. Even if that’s painful. I’m choosing to stay open and not let fear keep me from feeling. From experiencing. From transforming. I’m not protecting my heart the way I did for so many years. I continue risking it all. Because I’ve done it the other way. It doesn’t lead to anything very real. It certainly doesn’t lead to anything transformative.
       Today, my heart weeps blood. But that’s not going to stop me from loving.


©2014 Clint Piatelli, MuscleHeart LLC, and Red F Publishing. All rights reserved.