I have always been a very sensitive person. I don’t know how I got to be this way and I honestly wish sometimes I wasn’t. I can remember hearing a song on the radio or a song in church and the tears would just flow. It’s always been like I feel things more than most people. I’ve envied people who could just let things roll off their backs.
I believe part of the reason I have such a tender heart is because of the way I was raised. I was surrounded by people who loved me and did everything in their power to protect me from getting hurt. It wasn’t a bad thing by any means but when I had my first teenage heartbreak, it just about knocked me down. I could not understand what was wrong with me and why he gave up on me the way he did. He was the original “ghosting” type that one day just quit talking to me. What I didn’t understand then was that there was nothing wrong with me. Some people are just not meant to stay in one another’s lives. And that’s ok.
I struggled to fit in when I was in high school. I didn’t understand how to take a joke and took everything as an offense. To be fair, though, my elementary nickname, “Dumptruck,” followed me into high school. There’s hardly anything funny about a nickname like that for a teenage girl. I was always on guard, waiting for someone else to make fun of me for my nickname or to make some kind of joke. Most of the jokes were meant to be harmless but I had my guard on so high, I couldn’t even decipher the difference between playfulness or meanness. The best way to not be made fun of was to keep my head down and not engage in conversation.
That coping mechanism has followed me into adulthood. I often find myself shying away from engaging in conversation with strangers or sometimes even making eye contact. That childhood fear creeps in and tries its best to protect me from rejection and hurt. Why try if you’re just going to get hurt, right? Besides, these days you never know who might be trying to scam you or kidnap you, right? Excuses, excuses. The sacrifice for being tender hearted should not be meaningful conversations or friendships with other humans.
What is meant to protect and preserve that tender heart makes it lonely. It’s lonely to shut the world out for fear of being judged just for being you. I’ve always wanted to be the kind of person that felt comfortable in her own skin. But, I’ve shied away from risk because it seemed like every time I put myself, my real self, out for the world to see, it was met with rejection. Over and over, I’ve been hurt. In one of my first jobs after college, I had a boss who decided not to give me a raise when it was time for everyone’s annual raises. When I asked her why I didn’t get a raise, she told me that I didn’t deserve one. Ouch. I worked hard, did everything she asked me to do, and still wasn’t good enough. That just broke my tender heart. I wanted to do a good job and just didn’t know what I could do to make her happy.
But I could only see part of that story from my viewpoint. Later, I would learn that she was threatened by me since I had a college education and was actually sabotaging my work. She deliberately went in and changed work I had done to make it look like I was making lots of mistakes. See, it wasn’t really ME with the problem. This woman, and her evil heart, went to great lengths to protect her standing in the company. In the end, our IT department discovered her actions and they fired her. Hurting people indeed hurt people. Ugly doesn’t always win.
It’s still hard to move forward with wild abandon when dealing with people. I once heard someone say that it’s not our right to know what people think of us. At first, I really didn’t understand that because I felt like outside validation was truly the only way to keep my tender heart fed. But the truth is not everyone is going to like you all the time, even the people who really love you. We shouldn’t have the right to always know what someone thinks. It doesn’t stop me from really wanting that knowledge sometimes.
I have a really close friend who can sometimes go days without speaking to me. I immediately go to the long scroll list of things that I could have possibly done to make them mad. Then I end up getting hurt because I’m not a priority. Life’s harsh truth is that sometimes maybe I’m not. Maybe I’m not as important to them as they are to me. Or, maybe life is just hard some days and it has nothing to do with me. I catch myself saying that I just wish they could just say a quick hello but nobody really owes you anything, even if their actions hurt you. When we allow people in our lives, we really have to decide behaviors that we can allow and behaviors that we can’t. I am sometimes quiet with this friend, too. 99% of the time, it has nothing to do with them. What if this friend is sitting somewhere questioning what they’ve done wrong when I don’t speak? Am I a bad friend? Of course not. And neither are they. But that tender heart will convince me otherwise if I let it.
Sometimes my tender heart pours with compassion and empathy. I’m the person that is always approached by the homeless or the mentally ill. It never fails. My friends always know that if there is someone like this within a ten mile radius, they will somehow make a beeline to me. I once asked a friend why I seemed so approachable to these folks, despite what I perceived as being very unapproachable. She said, “They see the compassion and kindness in your eyes.” I once carried on a forty five minute conversation in KFC with a man who tried to convince me that he was in a lot of martial arts movies and was there to sell his magical guitar that made snow. Most people rolled their eyes and kept moving. As much as I wanted to do the same, I stopped and asked myself, “what if this is Jesus?” What if the difference in this man’s life is ME? Yes, I realize that it’s risky to sit and entertain this kind of conversation, but can’t that be true for every interaction we have with seemingly normal people?
I’ve come to realize that my tender heart is a tool. Used skillfully, it can help to heal the broken. Used sparingly, it can remain intact yet empty. Tender yet empty. No one wants to hurt if we have the option to not. To hurt is to know we are human and that we have the capability to feel beyond what the hands can touch. Isn’t that a beautiful thing? Though we may know this, being hurt can make us bitter and cause us to willingly be empty. But do we really want to choose to be empty when we can be full? I want my heart to be full, and when it breaks, may it leak any of the love I have ever felt onto the soil and grow seeds of tenderness. And then, may the courage to continue to be tender be the same thing that heals it.
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