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It has been almost a year since I’ve connected with you, and in a world gone mad, there is such a need to share and tell stories of heart and meaning that I felt compelled to write. Such stories can counter, and overcome, the dark public narrative and they are everywhere. One such story is Kareem Rosser’s memoir, When You’re Ready: A Love Story. The author shares his experience finding and then losing the love of his life to a brain injury. What pulled me along in his story, aside from the narrative thread, was how he opened his heart and shared his vulnerabilities. I also learned about “ambiguous loss,” an emotional state labeled and defined by Pauline Bolen, Ph.D. It is an undefined loss that carries within it a hope that things will go back to the way they were. The Alzheimer patient will remember her loved ones. You’ll reunite with a former partner now married. The brain injury person will return to her old self and you can continue your life together. At the time, I also watched Sensitive: The Untold Story on the library streaming service, Hoopla. Oh, that’s right, I realized. I’m a highly-sensitive person (HSPs). Once upon a time, I had even gone to a HSP gathering. I had forgotten about that, had instead put myself and my sensitivities in the box labeled, “Odd and Quirky,” and an ill fit for the world. So I’d hidden away from it. But what I realized, dreamed, woke up to recently was that the combination of those two emotional energies, while they emerged as sadness and tears for my own ambiguous loss of a relationship long over and a nature overly-sensitive to the world’s pain, is that they carry within them seeds of a different story, and a more hopeful one. Those as the stories worth telling. Carolyn
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