Yesterday I gave my blog on "Wounded Mind, Fractured Brain," to my shrink to read. As he read it in silence, I sat and just pondered my life and the dreaded thoughts of what I keep pushing to the back corners of my brain. After he had read the first few pages he looked up at me and said, "I am sorry for your life." I became instantly choked up. Kindly he kept reading in quiet, as I was trying to hold back all of my tears and that is when I realized something. Nobody had ever said those words to me in person before. The very words that actually make such a difference when you hear them from a real human being, I had just had a dream come true. Of course, he said it after reading what I had written and so I guess in reality it was prompted, but what I did not ever expect was my reaction to it being said straight to me, face to face.
My eyes filled with tears that I could not seem to stop or control the overwhelming feeling inside of me. For the first in my life I wasn't embarrassed by what has happened to me. I felt the hurt but it was not the same, it was what I had imagined it may be when someone truly takes the time to say to you, "I am sorry you had to live through this nightmare." To hear his words without the judgement of, "Well, you have to prove it first, before I have any feelings on the matter," was so different, I must admit it was the dream that I had thought of when I wrote about "Wounded Mind" the other day.
It is so impossible to communicate my pain to anyone these days but somehow I did. I wrote a piece that made the difference in my life today. I felt something yesterday that I had never felt before in my entire life. Someone said out loud to me the most simple of words and it impacted me so much that tears came from this girl that were so different I can hardly share with you the experience of joy. I never imagined that you, as a human being could shed tears of any other kind than the kind that comes from pain and agony inside of your body. I don't know what those tears that I shed yesterday were for or where they came from. I would like to say it was relief but it was not what I felt. I, Karen Placek could tell you today that for the first time in my life, someone actually saw me sitting in front them. He acknowledged to me in an open venue with an audible voice the belief that I existed and was worth feeling the sorrow for the life I have lived. It was not pity, it was not hurt, it was just sadness from one human being to another.