Dear Cali Chica:

That “glimmer of sadness for both of us” that you felt, can you imagine the abundance of sadness you felt as a young child witnessing your mother’s show of misery (not knowing it was a show)?

We don’t want to experience that overwhelming abundance of empathy anymore because it hurt too much, so we try to experience none. Young children cannot handle such abundance of sadness, it hurts too much.

Years later, we want to undo that hardness, soften that tissue that is hard. It is like directing blood into that hardness, reviving that tissue, making it soft, alive. It does hurt. I don’t like how it feels.

But the alternative is the suffering I know very well. Seems like we humans cannot be happy unless we are soft. That softness makes it possible for us to engage in life so much that we forget to (over) think and resist emotions, we let them be, come and go, no longer resisting, no longer tense, no longer afraid of the experience of emotions.

anita