All I can think of is that scene in the hunger games when Katniss has to go out to get the medicine for Peeta. She knows it is the only way to save him but to do so she has to take a risk. She had to be willing to take action to get the thing.
She had to move.
She had to risk something to get what was promised to her.
Because sometimes we have to choose risk to get the thing we need to keep moving forward.
Sometimes we have to choose to risk so we can get to safety. Like when you’re playing tag or hide and seek as a kid and in order to get to home base you have to take a chance at running through danger.
To get where you need to be you sometimes have to move through a space that is scary.
I think right now, I’m a little like Peeta in the cave. I’ve been through a lot. I’m going through the motions.
But I think I’m supposed to risk something to get to home base.
Because honestly I understand not wanting to leave a place that feels safe to go through a place that isn’t safe to get through to a place that is actually home base.
I think I’m too timid right now.
I’m not sure how that’s going to change.
Hell, I’m not even sure what home base is.
I just know that right now the comfort of sitting on my hands is starting to not outweigh the fear of finally moving.
I started this on a Sunday and I’m finishing it on a Monday and I’ll get back to you if I figure it all out.
I guess I can end it like this:
Sometimes we have to jump to prove the parachute still works.
Last week I said the words “I’m so ready for this hellscape of a 40th year to be over”.
And honestly, I mean it.
If you know me, if you’ve read my writing, you know that I’m someone who is fully capable of holding two emotions in my hand. I live by it.
Because I feel to let yourself be ruled by one emotion- sadness, joy, grief, anger- and not to make space for a second, not to hold the belief that emotions can coexist you will find yourself missing out on the things you can pick up along the way.
I will not mince words: this year has been fucking hard.
Even starting from the beautiful, perfect weekend I turned forty- it was the best, but my body was unknowingly continuing to shut down. I was in pain unable to move quickly, pushing through all of it.
I feel as if I lost the entirety of the first half of this year. June to December was spent in pain, in the hospital, unmoving, terrifying.
I spent a lot of the year in grief. Grieving what I had lost: moments with friends, trips, celebrating those around me, being present. I had to grieve my body and what it had been and what it had become.
I have spent a total of 3 weeks in the hospital. I spent a good month being unable to walk downstairs with making sure someone was around. I couldn’t get in and out of bed. I would go days without seeing another person. One night walking back from the bathroom my body collapsed at about 2am and I had to lay there to figure out how to pull myself off the floor when I had no strength in my body to do so.
My list could go on and on.
But in all that I also hold strength and hope and the knowledge that all of that; all the hell, that terror, that pain, I got through it.
I did it.
Then, just about a month ago, getting on a plane to try to make it in time to say goodbye to my dad.
To be frank, I’m still fresh with that grief. Writing both of my parents obituaries before I turned 41 is something I don’t wish on anyone. Mourning my parents, my childhood and the realization that there is no one on the other end of the phone. Saying goodbye to my dad is something I still haven’t completely come to terms with.
This year has been undoubtedly the hardest year of my life.
Today in church when I 100% didn’t want to be there I heard words incredibly clearly.
The Lord is close to the broken-hearted.
I have been utterly broken-hearted this year.
But, in all of it the Lord has been close.
He’s been there in every moment where a friend came to hold my hand or help me shower, or take me to an appointment. He’s been there when I’ve been unable to sleep or when I’ve been trying to make myself eat.
He’s been there in prayer circles and care packages and cards and people showing up.
This year has been heartbreaking. I have been lonely, in pain, scared, gut wrenchingly broken sad.
But I’ve been more surrounded in my heartbreak than I ever have before.
If you take anything away from this year of my life, this year 40; I want it to be this, please know you can hold two things in your hands at the same time.
You can hold hope and grief.
Joy and pain.
You can hold strong to the belief it will get better while still feeling devastated it’s happening.
One of the concepts that stuck with me, that I found so beautiful upon learning about in my Bible classes in college was about the rule of first mention.
Essentially, when a word was first mentioned in the Bible (the originally translated word) the meaning behind it was how it was meant to be read the rest of the time in was mentioned. When we would do word studies and we’d have to sift through to find the beginning, to find the way it was all tied together.
I think it was the that I made the connection that God was a storyteller. That he wanted to leave foreshadowing and theme and bits and pieces to pick up. He wanted to leave so that we might be able to untangle story that from first glance have no bearing but when we dig deep we see the unearthed path left behind.
That the meaning of a word could be more important than just what it says on page; that it could carry story upon story.
I’ve been thinking about words in my story that grab onto the meaning of first mention that for good or bad has dragged itself through my life and made a mark.
And one of those words is one I truly can’t stand: resilient.
And I’ve been trying to go through my brain to find why I can’t stand the word as much as I do.
I think that some of it is from working with kids and the thought that children are resilient. Something about it always rubbed me the wrong way. It felt like a reaction to kids having trauma or traumatic experiences was not to work on making them better but to respond with “kids are resilient”. It never settled with me that it was the thought.
And for myself, my resilience felt like a reminder that I had gone through something.
In a book I read recently by Lacey Day, two of the characters were talking about the word resilient and this is what they said:
‘And the worst part? People kept calling me resilient. Like I was some warrior goddess in cute boots’ ‘That word,’ he murmurs, and it’s not just agreement, it’s something low and rough in his voice that makes my stomach dip, ‘I hate that word, it’s a nice way of saying you survived something terrible and we don’t know what to do with your sadness, so here’s a pat in the back and a vague compliment.’
That’s why I do not like the word resilient.
But.
I’m coming to terms with the fact that maybe I’m the one that supposed to do something with the word resilient.
Maybe I’m the one who’s supposed to be changing the word and what it’s about.
Over the last 8 months I’ve been told over and over that I am resilient. And truth be told I have to grit my teeth each time.
Because I don’t want to have to be resilient.
But, at the end of the day, I am.
I have been built into a tough old broad like my mom and I chose to keep fixing going no matter what.
I am not positive for positives sake but I do choose to move forward even when it feels like the world wants me to stop.
And those things, those moments, those events have made me resilient.
They have refined the places that were deemed broken and strengthened the places that got lost in the muck.
I still will probably bristle at the word resilience. I still will be an advocate of doing everything in my power to not be a reason a child has to learn resilience.
But, I have to the terms that maybe, I’m supposed to change the way I see the word resilience.
I don’t know what your word is. I don’t know what makes you bristle at the mere sound of it.
But I do know that it probably means you are meant for that word.
I can’t confirm or deny that for longer than I’d like to admit that I’ve absolutely been giving God the cold shoulder.
I am sitting here, listening to a favorite album of mine, drinking my favorite beer and staring at a blank page so I took a deep breath and just asked “ok God where should I go?”
And from another table, in the same room, he looked at me like “where should you go? Why would you go? I’m right here”. Then, a flash of images flew across my brain like a montage in a show that was speed running time. It was snapshots through the past few months showing me every moment where God was in the room with me, while I sat silently, more hurt and angry than I really wanted to admit.
Because I’ve been trying really hard not to just be pissed off.
I’ve been trying really hard to not admit this is the loneliest I’ve ever felt in my life.
I’ve been trying really hard not to stack the things I’ve deemed offenses to my person.
I’ve been trying really hard to force the light, when I think I’ve needed to acknowledge the darkness.
I’ve been trying really hard because if I don’t what will I be left with?
So, right now, in this brewery, I think it’s time to be a little more brave than I want to be.
Because I don’t and haven’t felt like enough for any part of my life for a very long time.
And I think somewhere along the way I’ve stopped being able to try.
I lost a lot of last year to a body not bodying and I have a feeling I’m still trying to climb out of the hole that I found myself in because of that.
I’ve been feeling a step behind, just outside of the circle and just truthfully; bone crushingly alone.
I’ve forced myself to look at everything logically, tried to fit things into boxes so I feel less like an island, so I feel less vulnerable.
I think I haven’t wanted to acknowledge God in the room because I don’t want the reminder of the proof that I’ve crawled out of this place before and I can do it again.
Because even if I’ve had a village giving me supplies for a ladder at the end of the day, I have to climb the rungs.
I’ve been beating myself up writing all these words, a voice in my head telling me I’m not grateful, that I have no right to be angry.
That how dare I, other people have had it worse.
My emotions do not negate my gratitude for the people who have help build my ladder.
Feeling alone and sad and angry about the sequences of events that happened in my life does not take away for the overwhelming love I’ve felt from the humans around me.
And that’s a really hard thing for me to grasp- the holding of such aggressively juxtaposed feelings in my hands.
And I think that’s the bottom line of giving God the cold shoulder.
When I admit all the things that feel dark and twisty and hopeless, when I speak those into the room they are there.
But so is the hope, and the love and the gratitude.
I’m allowed to have both.
I’ve said this before, in betwixt words that feel more heavy than I like, that I don’t like writing words without a conclusion.
Like, I’m still feeling all of it. If not more so right now because I’m choosing to let myself.
I honestly don’t know if I’m going to stop giving God the cold shoulder.
I don’t have any answers.
But, I do have my hands full with all the ugliness of healing.
If you’ve made it through these storm clouds of words, I hope you note them, hold them, bookmark them for a moment you might need to hold your hands full of emotions that don’t match.
I hope you remember that healing can be ugly.
And I truly hope you know, even amidst things I’ve written that don’t feel as so, that you can keep fucking going.
I feel like my modus operandi these days has mostly just been avoiding writing words I should be writing. It’s not my fault I have a guttural reaction to putting words on a paper because 9 times out of ten I figure something out I don’t necessarily want to know.
But, even though I’ve been tired, something my OT told me was to save energy for things that I want to do.
And something I wanted to do today was walk somewhere and write. Even though I don’t really want to , I want to. So here we are.
In church on Sunday my pastor was talking about one of my least favorite Christian buzzwords: hope. It’s a word that is absolutely misused, misrepresented and honestly misunderstood.
I hate to break it to you; hope isn’t always a beautiful bouquet of flowers. It’s not some floaty, pretty cloud formation or something that always makes you feel better.
Hope can be found in the gritty, in the cracks and crevices.
For me, hope almost always goes hand and hand with peace. Because if I don’t feel peace about something, I’m absolutely not going to feel hope. Something a mentor taught me years and years ago was to follow my peace. Not, follow the thing that felt the easiest, but to follow that spot in my gut that realized what was supposed to happen.
And in that, without realizing, I began to follow the things that felt hopeful, even when they didn’t feel easy, or when they felt like a leap instead of a step.
In church on Sunday I had this image. It started out simply as waves, but then it became a moment from Moana Jr. tech week. There was a part in the show where “the waves” were the ones who moved the big boat Moana rode on. And at one point while I was up in the booth watching the girls get a bit off path and got way too close to the edge stage for my liking. They got very close to something very scary happening and right at the last minute went a different way.
Sometimes hope is like that. It’s going to feel scary until it isn’t anymore. It’s going to feel scary until we get to the point that the path hope is taking us on is more than the fear of moving forward.
And sometimes you have to even find the hope amidst the scary thing happening.
Even if we have to go back over the narrative and find the hope amidst the moments that were full of fear.
I think there are a lot of ways we can move towards hope. It’s not about being toxically positivity, or believing that nothing bad can happen. It’s not about wearing rose colored glasses and believing that nothing can touch you.
It’s about hoping in spite of.
Hoping even if.
It’s about not letting the circumstances you can’t control define how you wield hope.
I had to come to terms pretty quickly during my hospitalizations and getting diagnosed with the fact that I couldn’t have stopped it. At the end of the day there was a little autoimmune bomb in my body waiting to detonate and I was just so lucky that I just had a full system shut down.
(Two autoimmune diseases for the price of one).
I don’t think I felt hopeful.
But, what I realize is that I was more hopeful than I can could comprehend. I chose to take the pressure of guilt off of myself and because of that I think I made room for the ability to keep moving forward. I chose to believe the doctors, I chose to listen.
I chose to live.
Now, I’m not saying it still isn’t scary. I’m not saying I am just filled with hope for my tomorrows daily.
I just am saying I’m not where I was 3 months ago.
For me, hope is moving forward. It’s choosing sometimes to jump off a cliff. It choosing to lay down things that you don’t need to carry so you can hold more of something else.
It’s choosing not follow it to the edge of an outlook only to find a safe way down to the water.
Sometimes (okay maybe most of the time) we just have to chose to be moved by hope. We have to ride the wave or the rollercoaster or follow a path.
We have to move regardless.
I don’t know about you but I’d rather wield hope by raising my voice, by living, by letting go of the things I don’t need to hold onto.
I’d rather wield hope by moving forward rather than sitting still.
I’m someone who has a really high threshold for vulnerability. I believe my threshold is higher than others so that they are able to find the space to be vulnerable in ways that didn’t realize they had the permission to be so.
But, I can sense the Vulnerabilities that actually take something.
And those, I cannot stand.
But, the problem with having a high threshold for vulnerabilities is that the ones that take; the capital V Vulnerabilities, those hurt to let the light hit.
I think the last few months as I’ve even bogged down in other things and other hard things I’ve had a couple Vulnerabilities just start to edge into my house. It feels like whenever I come home there they are. Just sitting at the table seeing if I’m going to notice them. Seeing if I’m going to decide to deal with them.
Seeing if I’m going to choose to say them out loud.
Friday, sitting on my kitchen floor, I had a panic attack. I caught it and was able to shake it off and move through it but it still happened.
And it felt as if the Vulnerability just stared at me from my spot on the floor. Beginning to take up more space than I wanted to give it.
So here I am, sitting in the room with that Vulnerability. Choosing to not be afraid of the way it makes me crawl out of my skin.
Choosing to not be afraid of the things that feel scary to say out loud.
The capital V Vulnerability is sitting in the room with me now, on the couch, just waiting.
Waiting for me to choose to put hope into the room.
Waiting for me to be more ok with the ways it can cut me.
Well.
I have different words marked on my body. Words that mark moments and seasons and words that I want to carry with me each day.
One I got a few years back is the word audacious.
“Showing a willingness to take surprising bold risks”.
It hit me tonight that it’s time for a season of audacious hope (as absolutely fucking terrifying as that is).
I’m going to make space to light candles that mark the hope and I’m going to try to choose each day to walk in audacious hope.
What would we have done if they would have never told us we were world changers?
One of my people, my soul sisters, Joanna sent me some midnight thoughts after a particular rough in my head Friday.
And intertwined in the beautiful words and truths and sentences I had to agree with, with gritted teeth, was the stark reminder that we both grew up in a generation of Christianity and youth group and camp themes that told us over and over again that we were going to change the world.
That it was our job to go out and be his hands.
To go where He sent us.
That we were the generation that was going to go into all the world.
And I didn’t realize until I stopped and pondered Joanna’s words how much that heavy statement affected me.
How much I carry the fact that I’m supposed to change things, that I’m supposed to make a difference with each day.
How I feel like I fail every day I don’t feel like I’ve made a difference.
To quote my beautiful friend in her words to me:
“It’s not pressure. It’s the realization that being born for such a time as this is not a mandate to live up to.”
As a millennial growing up in a high school youth group, who went to a Christian university, who has worked at a lot of churches, who did a year long mission among other missions trips, the phrase “born for such a time as this” has always felt like a challenge, something I need to meet up with.
Something telling me I was strong enough to be stronger.
Not something saying I had the things I needed right then, right where I am, as I was.
I remember youth conferences and Mexicali themes and university chapels and it was always the altar call of “who will go?”
They told us to go and when we weren’t able to and when we didn’t know how to translate it into our normal lives, something happened.
We lacked the ability to feel enough.
I’m one of the “lucky” ones.
I went.
I’ve been 14 countries on mission trips. I’ve preached in prisons, taught Bible stories in the middle of a village in Mozambique.
I’ve prayer walked in Thailand and Swaziland and Peru.
I’ve taught English in Cambodia and China and Malaysia (because English IS easy- iykyk)
I’ve cooked and cared for widows and orphans.
I’ve been proposed marriage in at least 4 countries and kicked out of public transport when I said no.
I’ve went.
But now I stay.
I think that’s part of the reason I always feel like running would help.
Like going somewhere I’m unknown, unneeded and uninvolved would help.
Because they told us to go.
They told us to change the world.
They never told us to stay.
So, now what?
How do we, a generation who has disentangled from a faith that told us to go, to change the world, to move- how do we stay?
And what if the world we were always meant to change was our own?
In the smallest semblance of being.
What if we were meant to change the world by staying but they just never got to that part?
What if we were meant to move in the same space.
What if the going was the daily thing we do.
What if it didn’t have to be a big deal.
What if they never told us to go change the world?
What would we have done?
Well.
I guess, as much as I don’t want to say this, we should do the opposite:
Usually that isn’t the case. I might not like the word, but I see the good things that come from it and I can understand.
Not this year.
On Sunday, I was sitting in church and I was like “ok god, let’s be done. Let’s wrap this one up like a bow.”
And he said “nah, I’m good.”
Because, again, I have to keep going.
And no matter what that’s going to be the case. I’m always going to keep meeting places I’ve been before.
Again and again.
I thought this year would have more answers than it has. I thought maybe it would hold something.
And really, it has held a lot.
It’s still held more than I can even comprehend I know.
Usually, at this point in the year I feel like we’re starting to coast to the finish line.
Like I have a grasp and I start to understand what the baton in the relay race is going to look like.
But, right now, I can’t even see the baton. I don’t know what it looks like, I don’t know if I’m even still moving towards the finish line.
It kind of feels like I’m playing Mario kart with the Steiners and I’m just choosing to go off course because it’s easier.
This year has honestly made me feel like I don’t know who I am at all.
And has made me feel like I know exactly who I am at the same time.
Because I knew this year, each thing I met, I had met before. I knew that each moment where I felt like I was walking through fire, I had walked through it before.
I had done it before so I can do it again.
And because of all of that; I stopped seeing that as a threat.
When I think about the labyrinth and how Sarah, the main character, is utilizing the book she has that is the story of the labyrinth to get through she must feel as if she’s been there before. She knew the book so well that it must have felt a bit like she had been there before.
And there were places in the maze she went to again and again.
She was caught in the place of either moving forward and or allowing herself to “rest” in a place that at one point in the journey been safe.
But the journey moved her forward.
The journey has kept moving me forward.
The things I’ve had to unearth even in just the last stretch of time that have been a reminder to me that my worth is not based on what I do.
That I’m not the glue, even when it feels like if I allow myself to let go control it will all crumble.
It causes me to sit on a street corner in Brasov, Romania across from Betsy Garmon as she leans in to tell me, remind me, implore me that I don’t have to be the glue.
It’s almost as if, I’m still making my way toward the Goblin King.
I haven’t had the chance to tell him he has no power over me.
I am not ready for whatever comes at the end of these words.
As I’ve said; again and again, I write to untangle.
I start at the beginning with words, or a phrase or a reference to the labyrinth or something Hannah Brencher wrote or something my pastor said in church (or honestly just during the work week) that pissed me off because I had to agree with it with gritted teeth.
And then I write.
Currently I feel that if I begin to untangle I might lose it all.
I feel, as if I am hanging onto my sanity with an absolute death grip.
That means, for today, it’s Hannah Brencher.
She does a series of notes for every month and there is always one or two that I latch onto.
For lovely words and truth; @ Hannah Brencher
I know that I know that I know I’m supposed to be letting go.
I can physically feel how tightly wound I am, how I’m still terrified at giving hope a chance.
Because if I can’t control it; who will.
(I know I’m freaking digging a deep hole with these words for my week but here we are).
Truthfully, I haven’t been eating really. I haven’t been sleeping.
I’ve been in survival mode for longer than I care to admit.
The bags under my eyes have their own bags and no amount of concealer can help.
(I also know none of this will be surprising to my best friend).
October was rough with ghosts and dates and memories of what once was. Then during nap time at work the day before Halloween, a text that friend had suddenly passed surprised and shocked me, shook me up.
Solidifying to me that nothing good ever happens in octobers.
I realized this morning standing in the cafe at my church that I am legitimately still terrified to hope that good things will happen.
(To me.)
And that controlling the hurt I encounter will make it hurt less.
I haven’t been feeling very brave lately. Or strong.
Or capable.
These words aren’t meant to strike pity or empathy.
They are literally just truth for me to begin to untangle whatever all this is from my clenched fists.
I think (I know) I’ve fallen back onto a pattern in which doing will get me out of being.
When I had to get taken care for a month last year, it was damn hard for me. Even amidst all that I was going through, I was still writing the menus for work, typing out notes for each and every day I was gone even though it physically made me ill to look at my phone.
When it feels like I’ve come so far from this place of doing as a personality trait I’ve realized it’s deeper and deeper.
That month of dizziness and being unable to move was the hardest month I’ve maybe ever had because if I can’t do then what am I.
So, today, I stare at my clenched fist.
I don’t know what to do about it.
I don’t know what I need to un-grip from.
I just know it’s there.
All the things amidst the grief, the pain, the things that don’t feel like hope but actually are.
And I know; none of this feels good.
The words would make my mom call me. Would cause people to feel like I’m worse off than I am.
But you know what; I’m still here.
And I’m choosing these words because right now in this world, this place we need to know that there are other people moving forward with us in the midst.
I never want to be a person who brings others into her distress, grief or pain.
I want you to know that amidst all of that you can live, you can have laughter and joy.
You can support people and make ordering McDonald’s on DoorDash something you do for the plot.
You can still have joy.
Amidst all this I may not have hope but you damn well better believe I have joy.
We have less than 60 days left in this year.
My word for the year was _______ again.
There are so many things I’ve had to do this year; again and again.
And damn it, I think I’m supposed to learn through these last two months of this year to hope again.
To believe that beautiful, bold, unattainably feeling things can happen for me.
Love, grace, bright spots of color.
I don’t know what else I need to un-grip from, but I do know that I’m supposed to un-grip my aggressive hold on hope and let it do its magic.
My friend Amanda told me I need to replace my hatred for October with cozy socks.
Well, basically.
I’ve never been a basic fall girl like my best friend Tori whose love for sweaters and spooky season has rubbed off a bit on me in the last nine years of living in Washington. She goes full send into seasons essentially just for herself and that’s something that I absolutely love about her. Her no holds barred ability to show her love of something. Even if that something is just spooky season.
It feels ironic and also kismet that her best friend hates fall.
For me; fall brings all the ghosts out that I tried to keep dormant for too long.
(And not the good ghosts like Devon Sawa as Casper.)
But in the fall the ghosts return full force and cause me to have panic attacks and try to sneak into my brain to tell me all the ways that this is how it always is.
It’s actually kind of funny. There are things to myself that I would absolutely never tell a tiny human. I was talking to my director last week about a few things and I said that the phrase I hate saying to tiny humans and to adults is simply “But you know better”. Because while tiny humans absolutely actually don’t, adults should.
But I still can’t bring myself to say it.
I also can’t ever bring myself to speaking over someone that “this is all there is”.
Myself though?
Fall is that reminder that the lie that says this is all there is might be true.
Fall tells me that the other shoe will drop. That I’m not strong enough.
Fall tells me I’m broken.
Fall has receipts.
That I’ll keep circling back to these ghosts because fall will inevitably create new ones.
But I should love fall.
Honestly.
I’m a whiskey drinker, cozy couch loving, preschool teacher who loves an excuse for product art and a writer.
So what the heck do I do?
I have to remember that I’m still here despite fall telling me I’m broken and alone.
Because I still show up in fall.
Eight days after my mom died I performed on a stage in front of an audience for the first time since high school. I was in a Halloween music review and the next day I got a plane to spend a week in Kingsburg leading up to my mom’s memorial.
There was no way I wasn’t getting on that stage.
I needed fall to be something more than what it was.
I needed something to remind me I could survive fall.
And now, I sit here, with an immensely clenched fist on my emotions, I realized I have survived fall.
Specifically, I have survived fall every year since 2008 when the words in my brain told me the world around me would be lighter without me.
I think sometimes when I write I need to remind myself that I’ve survived the things that I didn’t think I could.
I need to drag myself out of the hole that feels like I can’t do it.
I need to drag myself out of the hole that says this is all there is.
I need to gather the hope the falls before this has created.
she writes on sundays 