Tears Were Never the Problem
This is the second blog in a series on what Francis Weller calls the five gates of grief. The second gate: the places within us that have not known love.
I cry when I'm sad. I cry watching my dog sleep. I cry, sometimes, from the sheer joy of the life I've built.
I tell you this up front because six years ago, in a room that was supposed to be safe, a spiritual teacher looked at my tears and called them manipulative.
I've been called too emotional, too sensitive, since I was a kid. So she wasn't telling me anything new. She was confirming a verdict I'd been carrying my whole life.
Six years later, I still think about her words. They find me folding laundry, working, standing in the kitchen. One sentence, spoken by someone I trusted to help me open, and it still walks with me. That's how it works with the places in us that have never known love; they don't need much. One sentence can echo in a closed room for years, because the room was already there, waiting.
Weller calls this the second gate of grief: not the people we lose, but the parts of ourselves we send away. The pieces we learned early were too loud, too soft, too much. And this is where the grief lives for me, not in her sentence, but in all the years before it. Every time I swallowed tears so no one would sigh. Every time I apologized for caring too much. Every time I made myself smaller so my feelings would fit the room. I grieve for that kid, the one who spent years believing the most alive part of her was a defect.
I’m feeling emotional as I write this, and that is exactly the point. Because I didn't abandon myself when I heard those words. I leaned deeper into my healing, my intuition. I started removing myself from spaces, friendships, and jobs that couldn't handle the wholeness of me. And as I created space in my life, love, purpose, and true connection started pouring in. I began to attract people who were truly curious about who I was. I began to unlearn beliefs I'd been taught that were holding me back from living in my true purpose.
The people in my life now love the very things I was once persecuted for. I care too much, out loud, in front of them, and nothing bad happens. I cry at the table, and no one flinches. The rooms I kept closed for decades are filled with people who see me.
That's the second gate: grieving the parts of ourselves we sent away, and finding out they were never too much. They were just waiting for people who could hold them.
Today I know that this kind of grief can't be healed alone. Shame grows in hiding and dissolves in witness. The closed rooms in us don't open because we finally think our way out of them; they open because someone walks in, sits down, and stays. The gate isn't in the way of the healing. The gate is the healing.
These words are me, walking through it, tears and all, where you can see me.
I hope that you allow yourself to feel deeply today and always.
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