My favorite toy growing up was, hands down, my dollhouse. I loved it. Even sitting here as an adult I find comfort in knowing it’s still in my parent’s attic. ‘Make believe’ truly defined my childhood, with my dollhouse as the centerpiece. I loved that I could approach it every day or hour by hour either extending the narrative I had created earlier or completely starting from scratch. I was never stuck in a story I didn’t want.

Which reminds me of the time I once ran away. I honestly cannot tell you what provoked this rebellion, but I went all the way to the back of the yard (take that mom and dad!) and hid under my favorite pine trees. What did I bring with me? Two beloved old books from a garage sale (that I couldn’t yet read on my own) and a notebook. I sat under the trees and pretended to be a stranded professor. I was smart and a survivor and able to do anything because that’s what smart, stranded professors could do. It’s a cute story, but underneath it (just like the dollhouse) packs a message I’ve feared my entire life: my story as is, is not enough. A self deprecating mantra that stated, “To be worthy you must be more than you are.”

To sit inside the understanding that as a child day dreaming was both an escape and a nightmare is unnerving. I was a creative kid. I loved story. I never realized that part of that obsession was because I felt my own narrative was broken and less than. How could I? The problem now is that I’m starting to see a pattern, a cycle of chasing worthiness from the wrong sources, with the wrong tools, for the wrong reasons. And the problem with seeing is, once you see something you cannot unsee it.

The world as we know it right now is in a forced pause as we navigate through quarantine 2020. I like calling it a forced pause because it is truly how I am experiencing the epidemic. You see whether I wanted to acknowledge it or not, I’ve been running for some time. I don’t mean the healthy kind you do for cardio and extra wine on the weekends. I mean running, as fast I could and as far as I could, from the place that I was. You see, if you run hard enough and fast enough you don’t have time to look back. You don’t have time to pay attention to the signs and red flags. Your history of pivoting when shit hits the fan is like muscle memory and you accept it like you always have. You turn a blind eye because you have to. That’s what competitors do to survive. They don’t’ listen to anyone else on the course, they focus on their goal ahead. Getting to the next finish line. Creating the next story because the one you built your life on just fucking crumbled.

Running isn’t always actual movements by the way, but it is always internal decisions. Sometimes running takes the form of hunkering down, ignoring the things around you because you believe surviving demands it. Sometimes running is giving up, letting go of all your ambitions and hope because it’s getting to be too much work to keep holding them up as the world says no. And yes, sometimes running is actually getting up and escaping. No matter what it looks like physically on the outside, I define running as a defense mechanism response to personal trauma and triggers. Running is rough stuff.

As you can imagine, then, a forced pause is a crippling thing to a well accomplished running plan – if accomplishment means distance created from the thing you can’t or aren’t coping with. It forces you to… pause. To stop. And if you can’t focus on the next thing in your fixer upper, if you can’t keep yourself dizzy with activity, if you can’t run after the displaced blame you put somewhere else, you eventually have to experience all the things you were running from. What’s worse is you eventually can’t help but turn around. To see how far you’ve gone (not come). To realize you’re bulldozing your own path into a place never meant to walked . Into a place never meant to be under construction. Into a place never meant to be… yours. And once you turn around, you cannot unsee what we’ve begun to see.

So with all this on my mind and these wounds still newly opened and nowhere near healed, I found myself in contrasting emotions. I found myself relieved to find a moment of peace. I know that sounds utterly ridiculous, peace when all hell has broken loose internally but it was there nonetheless. Like my heart had been beaten up so much by the running it never had a chance to rest. Peace as if the indescribable pain was better than the numbing mechanisms that had been in practice up until this point. Peace as if just maybe the pain had moved from ‘self sabotaging’ pain to ‘self becoming’ pain. Yet in the contrast I admit there was also a lot of shame. Shame I didn’t pay attention to the signs, shame I didn’t have the strength to stay where I was, shame that I wasn’t brave enough or kind enough or wise enough. Shame. Shame. Shame. On repeat.

That’s where I find myself. In contrast. What I’m learning is that maybe healing is a stage of existence, not a step to check off on the ‘to do’ list. And if healing is an entire stage in the human condition, in my current condition, than maybe healing is defined differently than what we’ve tried to make it in the past. I’ve always looked at healing as a place to get to – a mountain to defeat with a constant climb up of glowing reviews and gold stars along the way. An internal fanfare event if you will, with pats on the back and ‘way to go sluggers’. Like when you were in t-ball back in those early years. You could have missed the tee every time and ran the bases backwards, but by golly you’d get a pat on the back at the end anyway. I guess I’ve looked at healing as a place I wasn’t required to try much. I was doing it, ok? I was there in the grief, what more could you actually need of me?

The thing that I’m realizing in this new place, in this place where life is paused and pain is being demanded to be felt, is that healing comes in waves. Sometimes there is peace, sometimes there is shame, and sometimes there is more pain than there was when you started. Healing lives in contrast because it is not stagnant. It’s not something you show up to and get a ‘participating’ trophy for. Healing is a different kind of sport entirely, one that does not happen without surrender to it, without an active willingness to get down into the trenches and dig up the junk you’ve been burying one by one. Healing is a choice.  

I’ve lost a lot of time and gained a lot of bruises viewing healing as something that will just happen along the way. If I say the things and I keep mimicking all the right movements, healing would just occur as a I ran forward into the next chapter. If anything I viewed healing as a distraction, something preventing me from moving forward. It’s excruciating to sit still and become aware that yes you were moving, but forward isn’t exactly what you would call it. Left of center maybe? Backwards possibly? Just not forward.

With the forced quarantine and isolation, has anyone else realized how devastatingly lost they’ve been?

This has been the question, in one form or another, on my heart and in my mind. Has anyone else ever gotten this far down a road they were never meant to travel? Has anyone else talked themselves into not looking back? Has anyone else been terrified to stand still? Has anyone been here, deep down a rabbit hole of their own design?

What a forced pause does is….. force you to pause. My prayer of ‘I don’t know where to start’ remains a centerpiece in my hour by hour existence. I find moments of peace, where I am able to truly surrender, but my spirit is not what it used to be. Peace is only found in small moments, eventually the test of spirit is lost against all the anxiety and fear that surrounds me. The honest reality is … my spirit is not strong. She became cynical and selfish and tired. She stopped practicing what she preached. She became stagnant and dusty with excuses. And then she became shocked when she realized how diminished and weak she really was. So when the lies of depression clouded the sky and anxiety rained down suffocating the small amount of spirit left, well… she drowned. She let the rain fall, she encouraged it, and when it became too much she gave up. She surrendered to the wrong things.

I reopened my bible. That was one of my responses to ‘I don’t know where to start’. I know it feels pretty self explanatory, but it wasn’t for me. In the move I brought little with me, but it turns out despite all my bad decisions I made a few good ones. I don’t just have one of my bibles with me, I have four. Why does one bring four bibles with limited space especially during a time of ignoring their faith/ running from the center of themselves? I don’t know if I can answer that except to say while I don’t always know why or when God intervenes in our lives… this was defiantly one of those moments.

Reopening your bible after years of letting it collect dust on different shelves is a strange act, but one that came with little output at first. I don’t know if you know this but there are A LOT of books in the Bible. I’ve read the Bible quite a bit in my past life. I used to know my way around it like the back of my hand. It felt hopeful but foreign to me. Similar to when you try sports you were once good at. Some of the skills are still there – you know how to shoot the ball properly towards the basket, doesn’t mean you’ll make it with ease anymore. You know you can sprint fast towards the goal, doesn’t mean you won’t pull a hamstring in your old age and out of practice body. That’s honestly how it felt reopening my bible. I knew the joy I had once found it in, the peace that my faith had brought me, and I knew how much I had once had memorized and organized in my brain. Shame and guilt and fear swarmed me when I realized I couldn’t conjure up any of my favorite verses. I couldn’t even remember where to find them. I held my bible in my hands and I found yet another pause inside all these pauses. Faith, to me, is surrendering to grace. Acts of faith are then an expression of that surrender and eagerness to live inside that grace – such as reading your bible and finding your own nuggets of truth through the stories. ‘Fun’ fact, similar to sports or weight lifting or yoga … if you do not use these muscles they weaken and break down. It takes willpower and a conscious effort to regrow them. I should mention I’m not saying this with any authority, I’m saying this as a person who is now having to be very intentional to regrow muscles she never thought she’d lose.

I don’t know where to start.

It seems to be my life’s prayer right now. It’s the most honest I’ve been with myself in a long time. I feel like I have so much to say, to cry out about, to be outraged by, to ask forgiveness for, to ask for help for… that sometimes or maybe I should say almost all the time it just overwhelms me and I short circuit. When I look at the full picture of the mess, my mind and body shut down. It reminds me of a home I used to live at, more than once I was down in the basement with a flashlight looking at the fuse box and figuring out what fuse needed tending to. That’s how I’ve had to begin looking at my spirit, my life, and my aches – as a fuse box. It’s a weak fuse box, this thing has been through the ringer so it’s not one that will hold up when too many things are causing a stir at once. But, when the inevitable happens and something shorts, I try to get myself to the internal fuse box and see what fuse is the source of the rest of the problems. Sometimes I can see it on my own, sometimes I have no light to guide me and it takes longer as I pray through it.

I don’t know where to start.

As for my bible, throughout the Easter weekend I listened and read the Resurrection story (found in the Gospels for those who may not know – Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John). This morning however, when I understood I needed to keep going – that for me healing will be found in continuing to dive in – I found myself responding to the Psalms. So that’s where I’m going next. The cries and hurt and love and prayers of David. He’s a bit of a mess, but faithful in his cries and I guess I can’t really see myself anywhere else. I’m a mess, but I want to relearn my faithfulness. Because I haven’t been. Faithful to my spirit, to myself, to my person, my being. I got gobbled up by the idea that if I can run away the problems would be left in the dust but the thing about that is…. even if you can outrun them for a time, you may find yourself in a forced pause. Maybe even a pause that the nation hasn’t seen since the Great Depression. And you may feel anxiety and fear and regret and shame and isolation and confusion ….. and then you may wonder to yourself and be in awe at the question…. Does God love us so much that he would nearly pause the world to get our attention? To bring our eyes back to him? To use the loss of everything in order to rework our hearts? To heal us with grace?

That’s pretty radical grace.

I want to believe in radical grace again.

It’s been a while. Years in fact. And I’m not just talking about since the last time I approached a keyboard with the intent to write here, a blog that once brought healing to my own soul. I mean it’s been years since I’ve submitted to the outrageousness of grace. I feel nothing but shame when I state that and yet… my ego wants to defend it and explain away all the reasons that this occurred. As if stating that it was on my list of “Things To Do’ is an adequate argument.

Sitting in quarantine has felt much like a ‘Holy Saturday’ the space of waiting, sitting…. being stuck inside a demanded pause. Life is no longer what it was and at the end of this… I just don’t think life can ever be the same. And that’s where I find myself. In the awareness of how deep this radical pause must go.

On Good Friday I woke up and felt uneven. It had been weeks of quarantine for NYC, something just under 30 days. At first I wanted to blame the long days of required ‘stay at home’ as the reason for the shakiness but the more I dwelled on it across the morning, the more I realized I was stuck inside a critical moment. That Easter had creeped up on me in a different way than it had in years. Without the ability to hide behind the practice of spending time with others or cooking a meal, I was stuck to sit and dwell on the actual reasons… the deeper, more profound purpose of Easter. I’m ashamed to say I tried to push that aside and fight it. Dealing with it, sitting in it, would mean sitting with all the things I’ve been running from. Because if I’m honest, I knew what all the miles and years represented. I knew how hard it would be to be still. I knew it would begin a crack in my ability to just adapt… expose that adapting is not healing. It’s simply begin able to continue until the hurt is muted or quieted down by time. So I sat inside that critical moment and I did something I hadn’t done authentically in years. I prayed a very simple, very honest prayer…

“I don’t know where to start. I don’t know where to start. I don’t know where to start.”

It was my heart’s plea. The most honest and truthful thing I could say. Could feel. Could express. A little while later I reached out to a friend I hadn’t truly spoken with in over 8 years, a friend I knew could dive in where I needed to go – even if I wasn’t quite ready to go there. I also reached out to another friend who allowed me to join her service that day and to connect 1/1 virtually the next week.

These things are not simple to me. This is not a moment unnoticed. I didn’t know where to start and then I was lead on how to start. This is not a miracle moment where I can say everything is fine. It’s not. I am not fine. My faith is not healed. My connection with God is clouded by ego and bruises and empty miles of space between us that I let get there. And I don’t quite know how to truly get back.

But… this may have actually been the bravest, most truthful thing I’ve done in a very long time for myself. To submit to the painful awareness I’m in over my head. I had no idea where to start.

Holy Saturday is a day of waiting. Sitting. Being still. And being still, in this sense, doesn’t mean while staying busy. I often like to purposely confuse those two together. This kind of stillness demands more from us than the busyness of phone calls and social media and tv marathons and the occasional thriller novel. This kind of stillness is to come to a place within ourselves where we are willing to dig in and be intentional with ourselves. This kind of stillness, this kind of waiting is…. uncomfortable.

Though Holy Saturday will soon pass, the symbolism will live on as the days continue here in quarantine. We are in a very scary, unsteady, unnerving time. Could it be, though, that we are also in a space where we are being given a reset? I mean when in our adult lives will this ever happen again? Demanded stillness. Despite all the anxiety and fear and uncertainty it also feels…. sacred. If we let it be.

How? I’m not sure yet. This is just my acknowledgment of what once was and what may be someday.