Does It Hurt on the Inside?

I pulled up the right leg of my jeans and revealed a long scar running parallel to my shin bone. My neighbor had broken her ankle and, for the first time in her life, was on crutches. So, of course, I had to tell her about the only time I’ve ever been on crutches.

It was in 1983. My youngest son was 2 years old. We were at home getting ready to leave for the day. I picked up a large glass jar, the kind in which old-fashioned candy stores displayed Tom’s candies, but I collected loose change in mine. As I walked to the kitchen table to count out change for a vending machine lunch, somehow I tripped and fell on top of the jar. It broke and a very large piece cut my leg about halfway through the calf. My greatest fear had come true: being home alone with a small child and becoming incapacitated. I managed to call my husband. He got to the house in record time, took Joe to a neighbor’s house and put me in the car. Our first stop was the minor emergency center where they packed the wound, wrapped my leg in bandages, and sent me to Brackenridge, Austin’s trauma hospital. That’s when I knew the cut was really bad and not something I was going to recover from in just a few days.

At the hospital they put me on a gurney and wheeled me into the emergency room. Butch stayed in the office area filling out paperwork. A nurse started cutting off the bandages. She suddenly left. A few minutes later she came back with another nurse and, standing right by my gurney, said, “It looked so bad, I didn’t know what to do”, further increasing my fear that this was really bad. After they got me cleaned up, they put the packing back in the cut and left. Soon the emergency room doc came by, looked at my wound and said he would have to call a plastic surgeon to stitch it up. Then he put the packing back in and left.

I was still lying there all by myself because Butch was doing paperwork—how long can that take? A young man came over and said, “May I look at your wound?”

“Sure”, I said, thinking he was the plastic surgeon.

He took the packing out, thanked me and put the packing back in and left. That’s when I remembered that Brackenridge was a teaching hospital. Two or three other student doctors came by and repeated the process, each time not talking to me or looking at me.

Then three EMT trainees stopped by my gurney and asked if they could look. As one of them was taking out the packing, another one looked at me and asked, “Does it hurt?”

“No”, I said.

He said, “It doesn’t hurt on the outside, but it hurts on the inside, doesn’t it?”

“Yes”, I said and the tears started. Amazingly up to this point, I had not cried and the cut had not hurt. Shock, I suppose.

Telling my neighbor this story got me to thinking that there are lots of things that don’t hurt on the outside, but they hurt on the inside. And no one knows. Worse, it can seem as if no one wants to know.

Yesterday I flew to Denver on Southwest Airlines. I read a Kindle, but there is time taking off and landing when all electronic devices must be switched off. That’s when I read the in-flight magazine; on Southwest it’s called Spirit. An article titled “A Story in Black and White” caught my eye.

The article began with a story that took place in the 1970s. The narrator recognizes that her co-worker, Shirley, was in a lot of pain, “that something had cost her.” That something was her mixed-race marriage: he, Pat, was black and Shirley was white and Jewish. They married in 1952 and lived in San Francisco near the neighborhood where Shirley’s family lived. For Shirley to marry someone who was not Jewish was bad enough. It was even worse that he was of color. Her family would probably have reacted by sitting shiva for her, mourning because she would have been considered dead. So Shirley and Pat hid their marriage from her family. Her mother visited every week and every week Shirley gathered up everything that indicated a man lived there and hid the things in the basement. Pat would leave the house, but sometimes he too would hide in the basement. He died in 1974 leaving Shirley with a hurt on the inside that didn’t show on the outside.

How many things do I carry around on the inside that don’t show in the outside but still hurt? Carrying those hurts on the inside and not letting them get to the outside, does not allow healing. Sharing those hurts with a trusted individual gets them to the outside. The light of day has a healing effect. I think of it as coming clean, confession.

For me, the thing I kept inside for many years was the fact that I was pregnant when Butch and I got married. I think most people guessed it when they found out we got married in high school which was another fact I kept inside. I had been married about 25 years when I realized that the greatest blessing God had given me was my marriage. If that’s what I believed, then I needed to come clean so others would know the greatness of God. I was keeping my light under a bushel. Little by little, I began to come clean, telling trusted friends and slowly widening the circle as I got used to saying out loud what I had kept secret for so long. Coming clean, exposing my secret to the light of day, brought healing. Several times I found I was confessing to someone who had experienced the same thing and my confession gave them permission to bring their secret to the light of day.

So what about you? Is there something that hurts on the inside but not on the outside? Is there something that needs the light of day to begin healing? I encourage you to find a trusted person to talk to and come clean. Expose your secret to the light of day and experience healing.

If you feel safe in this forum, I’d love to hear from those of you who have a story to share about something that hurts on the inside but doesn’t show in the outside.