To Be Fully Known + Truly Loved
I have been thinking a lot about this quote lately.
There is no part of me for which it does not resonate.
Years ago, someone I mentored said, “We all just want to be fully seen, known, and heard…” It was the first time I heard that phrase. Now, I see it everywhere.
When someone says something like that to you, your first thought is, am I doing that for them? Your second thought drifts to whether anyone is doing that for you.
A season of transition gives you a lot of reason (and sometimes the time) to ponder whether you have loved well and been loved well. Sometimes, the answers are jarring.
My Sis printed a photo of me for the bulletin board over my desk in the writing shed. She thought I needed an actual photo versus the photocopy I had of one hanging up there (my friend Katie encouraged me to print one off during my March writing cohort so I could write to young me).
I am sharing this because the girl in that photo was loved WELL. Considering she revealed herself as precocious and a handful pretty early, she was born into a family that handled it and her well.
Of course, not everyone did, but that is to be expected.
I often wonder what I would have been like if the bottom had not fallen out of our family. If I had never known a moment of being unloved or unwanted - if I had never heard a harsh word directed at me - if my child’s heart had never been crushed.
Last Friday, I had to miss my great-nephew’s first birthday party. It was the second time that week that I had cried, and it was only the third time since August of last year (the final month of my sabbatical).
There is no way for you to know this about me, but I spent decades where the number of people who had seen me cry could be counted on one hand. My heart was entirely locked down. I then spent a decade letting God and failure restore it, which meant I lost/gave up trying to control my emotions. Amid that, therapy helped me understand them, process them, and eventually heal. I felt myself locking down again the last couple of years, as much due to self-preservation as anything else. Once you fully remember who you were born to be and start hiding that person again, it can cause some real issues. I nicknamed my issues "emotional constipation.” I was, in fact, emotionally constipated because I cried maybe three times in that entire two years - once during a devastating turn of events professionally in 2022, once when I said goodbye to one of my oldest and dearest friends in May 2023 before I left for Italy (and my sabbatical), and then when I said goodbye to Sis at the airport a few days later.
I then proceeded to not cry again until deep into my sabbatical.
Crying is therapeutic, healthy, and cleansing. I don’t enjoy crying, but I generally feel better after a good, long one.
I haven’t had one of those in over four years.
If Doretha (my surrogate mother for a season) were alive, this is when I would call her. I would tell her I needed a good cry, and she would tell me for the one-thousandth time why she hated crying and did not recommend it. She would have me laughing (and ironically, probably crying).
Doretha knew me. As in fully. And she loved me. Wholly. Unconditionally.
I had not known love like that since I was eight, so meeting Doretha again in my thirties was like someone being plucked from the desert and plopped into the ocean.
My years with her cemented everything I believed about unconditional love, soulmates, kindness, grace, relationships, mercy, forgiveness, and ultimately…grief and joy. She was never put off in the least by my big feelings, big emotions (joy to sadness), big storytelling, or any of the other things that so often I had worked to stuff down and hide away. I always worried about being too much or too little in every area of my life.
There is a great back-and-forth in the film Ya Ya Sisterhood between the daughter and her father:
Sidda:
Daddy, did you get loved enough?Shepard James 'Shep' Walker:
What's enough? My question is, did you?
If you ask me that question today about my own childhood, the answer is, “I did, and then I didn’t.” And let me tell you something: understanding that specific truth about my childhood helped unlock a lot of empathy in my heart for myself. Again, thank God for therapy.
So why is this bugging now, today, and at this moment?
Maybe it is because I can’t have a good cry and not remember Doretha and her whole ‘theory’ on crying. Maybe it is simply because it has been so long since I had a stretch of days when my emotions were so close to the surface that actual tears fell. Maybe it is because there are many good things happening in my life right now, and I miss having “a person” more when I am happy rather than sad. Maybe I have no clue.
What I know is that I still love and crave that feeling when you are in the presence of someone you can wholly trust with all that you are and see that they wholly trust you with all that they are.
I believe that to be the ultimate realization of being ‘seen, known, and heard’—and the closest we get to understanding how God loves us.
I believe we all want that, but I know for certain that I do.
Author’s Note: I need to be transparent that as I started writing about (and remembering) sweet Doretha, I broke down and, for a few minutes, had to lay my head on my desk and just let go and cry because the grief overcame me. I cannot remember the last time the grief over losing her did that to me, but I swear to you, I can hear her, even now, telling me not to cry and something ludicrous to the fact that she isn’t worth it. Please know that she most certainly is. I also feel like I should do a disclaimer, saying that I saw her cry a lot, but she hated how it made her feel. As such, we had a large number of conversations about crying. She had plenty of good reasons to cry, to grieve. Her posture was that joy and laughter were a lot more fun. In the end, as much as therapy, Doretha taught me it was okay for me to hold space for both sadness and joy, and for that gift, I can never repay her.