Scary Moments, Strength, & Wonder Woman

So if you haven't noticed lately, I'm still a mess. And in the past few days it's felt quite heavy. Maybe it's just going back to work after laying around existing and attempting to tune out physical pain for two weeks. In the heaviness, I've found myself angry; I'm angry that he put me here without remorse. I'm angry that I find myself in pain that's hard to wade through and keep afloat in. I'm angry that I was more committed and it hurts like hell.

I've been struggling a lot, and constantly trying to figure out where I can fit in therapy, can I afford therapy, and where do I find a therapist that I actually like, and can I practice therapy someday when I feel right now like I'm falling apart, and how does one get medicated? Like I'm that kind of mess. I should be working right now, but I just can't get my weary heart to write about insurance.

So just the other day I was thinking about it all. I read a past facebook post about God only knows what (I post all the time). I thought about how I used to be strong. At first this thought bothered me, it's been a recurring thought throughout this...thing, and it made me sad. But then I remembered something else: I was just as vulnerable at my strongest. Feeling weak and broken doesn't mean I'm no longer strong.

I saw Wonder Woman last night, and without giving too much away I'll say: I needed it. You've got this incredibly powerful, strong woman and a part of her strength and her very purpose is to be courageous enough to believe in the good of mankind – and then do something about it. I caught myself feeling empowered watching a super hero movie. She was both fierce and vulnerable. It was brave to believe the things she did, yet she wasn't spared the pain it brought.

And you see, I sort of realized it's hard to be strong when being strong also means being vulnerable. Sometimes, or what can feel like oftentimes, that vulnerability gets you hurt. Loving with your heart wide open can leave you faint and weary. But I came to another conclusion, too...

Tonight I saw a friend of mine going through it. She wearily asked, "How can it be like this when I've done all I can?" Her sentiments resonated with me, not just from my recent relationship debacle, but from life. Then I found myself saying something to her that, in my own haze of struggle, I needed to hear:

You're strong! Don't let a scary moment make you forget it.

I have been stuck in a real pain that I'm still not fully sure how to dismantle and I certainly haven't had luck wishing away, but I can choose strength. It's hard, and it doesn't feel good, or secure sometimes, but I can draw on my strength. It isn't gone, I can call it up and find it again.

Just yesterday I told myself I can and will be strong again...but by this morning at my desk I forgot. As I said just a bit ago, I decided I don't want to let the scary moments make me forget my strength anymore.

What We Do When We Avoid Pain

My life has felt like a mess. My worldview is teetering on edge because I can't make sense out of so many painful things happening over and over. Being teased with good things, only to have them ripped away cruelly. I've felt like a broken record because I know I've talked about it so much, but I also feel like I've hardly been listened to. It's why I write about it.

A minute to at most a few minutes into talking through any one painful part of my life and how stuck I feel, I'm usually offered a solution. As if the thing that's been on cycle through my mind for weeks and months can suddenly make sense to someone who listened to me talk about it for a minute – suddenly they have an answer. Usually it's that "everything will be fine", or it'll turn around. I believed that, for a while. Then it felt like things were turning around, until they weren't anymore. Until something else bad happened, followed by something else; until I lost the job I loved when I was house shopping, until I got my heartbroken yet again, and then after having my hope naively reignited, having it crushed again. Stuck in places of pain like being in a boat with a hole, bailing water out as it comes in.

I'm still sad a lot. I'm still looking for sense and meaning a lot. And the thing is I just want that to be heard and held, not fixed because I have the utmost doubt that just chinning up will fix this. For so long I felt not like myself, so long that it now feels like the new normal. At the same time, I still feel like I have to argue to have the pain in my life recognized and not brushed over.

I know: people don't know what to say to pain and often they just say something. I'm getting used to that, learning to have grace for it. But I also wish there was a greater effort to learn to think before speaking to a person in pain. I catch myself doing it, too, all the time. If there's one valuable thing this time in my life has taught me, it's to take pause before responding to a person in pain. My whole life I was that positive, look-at-the-bright-side person, so I still do it too, but I'm striving and learning to allow people to be in their reality.

See, being the one who sits and really listens, believing for something better without voicing it – that is a link to the hope outside the reality that the darkness hides. Sometimes life can be so painful, it makes it incredibly difficult to hope; it becomes scary, not just like how hope is often a risk but a thing that is truly hard to do. When we avoid another's pain by assuming they can take hold of hope, we leave them in that darkness to fend for themselves.

In these months that have stretched on farther than I'd ever imagined they would, the best words I've heard over and over again came from my best friend: "That must be so hard." They didn't make the pain disappear, they soothed simply by being with me in the reality that this is so hard.

What I Learned About Love

I can't tell you how many times I've thought to myself how pathetic I must be in the last two months. Pathetic! Constant ups and downs of missing someone who won't even acknowledge me, who didn't even value me enough to dignify me with a face-to-face conversation about the end of our relationship. I've missed that guy so much and it has felt pathetic. Why do I miss him? I have trouble letting go.

Even amongst feelings of anger and half-joking comments to my friends about how I'd like to key his car, I missed him. A lot. For weeks I've woken up with him as the first thought in my head, several of those times starting my day with a cry because this is what it is and there's not a damn thing I can do. I cared for someone and I miss him, and that hurts.

It's a familiar process, even though it's a different relationship than my last. The other one only just stopped hurting, it seems, but otherwise still feels fresh so I can't help but note similarities in processing another chance at love lost. See I thought after my first relationship I'd never feel excited or passionate about another man. I'm a loyal person, so I thought no one else would make me feel that way, could be that comfortable and easy. I thought I'd always feel like he was missing from my life. And for a long several months it did. But even after the dust fully settled, and I'd even moved on and been hurt by another, I realized I still love him. I'm not pining, I have no desire to pursue anything, but I still care.

I noticed it a time or two over the last year, and figured it was just that not enough time had passed. Especially before having another relationship, I thought I just hadn't fully found a way to move on. While that's partially true, the attachment was real and the separation painful, felt unnatural. And that's where I came to realize something: I was wrong when I thought I'd never feel a strong connection and love again, as if I thought I'd spent what I had to give. I wouldn't recommend trying to love someone romantically more than once (I hope, if anyone else, it's only one more) because it wears on the heart, but it can be done.

Just in this past week I started to feel normal again, not like I'd forever wake up each morning and cry, prying myself out of bed. The strange thing is that even while starting to feel normal and not broken, I still miss him. I still pray for him (nearly the only prayer I can muster, lately). I still just want to sit on his couch and listen to music and talk – and that thought still makes me tear up. Even though I'm starting to heal, still...

What I learned is that love isn't meant to be a passing thing, which is why ending a relationship that had it is so very painful. The love continues to persist in you without its object. Hence grief commonly becomes a companion. Painfully it doesn't displace love. But neither did loving once already inhibit me from it again. The beautiful, hopeful thing is that it's not all used up; I have not run out of love. Same in romantic relationships as with friendships long gone, the love leftover doesn't keep us from finding that there's more to be had and more to be given.

And the stuff that remains, it's okay.

Skateboarding, Good Tunes, & the Hots

It was about a week or two ago when I began to feel a little self-conscious that I'm still stuck on this confusing, painful end. I started to wonder if there's something wrong with me. I date a guy for a little over a month and fall head over heels hard, but it ends abruptly. Then I wait idly by for weeks in intermittent fits of anxiety to find out if he would break my heart more or indeed take me back as pondered over a lengthy cup of coffee just days after breaking up. The answer [eventually] was a firm and unkind no, which I then struggled to make sense of. 

And it was a week or so ago that I thought there must be something wrong with me for missing this guy in my life who hurt me so. It occurred to me I needed a fresh start, a ray of hope: I needed to go on a date. Where does one procure a date these days? On any number of phone apps, duh. Much to my surprise, I quickly had one set up. I thought, I've dated two guys who were "my type" and had an eery amount of interests in common, maybe I should give someone I wouldn't expect a chance. I'd begun to think that having common interests was a pitfall to my relationships, so maybe I ought to look for someone who had the big things and whatever else might not matter. 

Well, moral of the story is and will always be trust your gut. Which is to say, it was a dud. Part way through the date, a mere hour in, I felt relatively apathetic (in hindsight it probably also meant I wasn't actually ready to go on a date). I thought of the way I felt about Cute Coffee Shop Guy on our first date, or the Bearded Lutheran (I'm giving him that moniker as I'm sure he'd like it anyway) on our first date – pure excitement, intrigue, giddiness. Throughout processing the big breakup last year, and even this one, I've had people try to convince me that all that isn't important. This uninspiring date helped me to see otherwise. 

The problem with either failed relationship wasn't ever that there was a strong mutual attraction, great chemistry, and a plethora of shared interests. Both failed for other, greater reasons that couldn't be superceded by the attraction, the chemistry, or the interests. That doesn't make their ends any less painful, or me any more hopeful, but at least I know I don't have to want for something I don't want. Of course I don't love the prospect of spending my life as a single person, but I'd rather share my life with someone I'm excited about every single day – even in their weak moments – than with just any old warm body who looks good on paper. 

The blasé date helped me realize you can't force the rich, exciting, deep relationship to happen, but it sure feels fortunate and magical when you do stumble into one.

The Familiarity of Grief

Time
Odd considering I'm late most of the time to anything, I am a keen observer of time. Okay, so maybe it's in a different sense. Anniversaries tend to stick in my memory. Recently I noticed I may have a knack for knowing any given toddler from church's age in months. I'm interested in the passage of time and how it seems to change in spite of our measurements of its passing.

Sometimes days seem to come and go in warp speed, and we drink them in with insatiable thirst. Other times, the hours, minutes, seconds seem to trudge a saunter as we hunger for sleep to take us until the next painstakingly slow day begins. I've been having the latter kind of days, just sort of waiting to feel good.

Recently, I was telling someone about my Europe trip from last May and I realized it was almost a year ago. The memory felt so distant and foreign that I was convinced for a second that it didn't even happen. I remember thinking, huh, I've been to Rome, and then thinking, that was an unbelievably long, painful year I could stand to forget.

That Old Familiar Feeling
When it really hit me that this relationship was over, I was scared, because I've known this pain so I know that the only way out is through. Last week I found myself wondering why I felt the same heavy sadness from a much shorter relationship than the longer one whose grief swallowed an entire year of my life – and it hit me, that's it: I'm grieving! (Cue the Simon and Garfunkel...) Somehow it hadn't occurred to me that, yet again and so quickly, I was experiencing a loss and mourning a possibility. The moment I recognized it as grief, I was oddly relieved. As if it's any bit disarmed by my seeing it.

Sadness hits me in the strangest moments. As part of an important revelation I've stopped avoiding it, but started letting it roll over me.

I went to Ikea last night to scheme and daydream about my new home, but it didn't occur to me until I exited the freeway that I went there with Coffee Shop Guy on a date a la 500 Days of Summer (unbelievable irony here on so many levels). Never thought the sight of sectional couches could make me nauseous and weepy, but oh they did... The moment I hit the display floor my stomach felt tight and the entire time I held back tears. We'd also picked out his new couches at a different scandinavian store just days into our then adorable sweeping romance.

In a strange moment of what felt like taunting and cruel serendipity, a little boy came running up alone and stood sobbing in the marketplace, having lost his mom and hurt his hand. It took all the weary strength I have in me not to lose it looking at his crocodile tears and subconsciously thinking, yes, losing someone, being hurt, and feeling alone is incredibly scary.

Grief is Unique and Common
While the longing to seek solace in someone I inherently cannot was familiar, this time different things hang me up than those I tripped over last year. Not more, not less, just different. Grief is grief, yet each instance of it is completely unique; each pushing through incredibly necessary. And once you know it's what's happening to you, that recognition can allow you to give yourself a little more grace for feeling like a mess.

I would dare to say grief is the worst part of human existence. It's a suffering you can't do anything to remedy, rather simply endure. It's impossible to articulate, yet it haunts you. It sneaks up and pounces when you're unsuspecting or busy. It tells you lies and then smacks you with the truth. It turns your reality on its head, forcing you into a new reality you don't want to be a part of. Maybe, if you've known it before, you'll know it when it comes around, but maybe not. If you haven't known it yourself, have grace for others and don't rush them through it. Each step forward – even the two back – is important to moving through a mourning. I revel the thought of the impact it could have if we all learned to have more grace, understanding, and compassion for the pain of life and its wake.

The only way to not be swallowed by it is to notice it is washing over you and roll with the waves.

Unraveled

**Disclaimer: This piece was written pre-deconstruction of religious beliefs and faith system. Many of these beliefs inform the sentiments of the writing and are not in alignment with my values. As this is a part of my journey and an extensive blog over years, I have chosen not to remove a majority of my posts written on faith. Please as a reader, take this into consideration and take what works for you, leave what does not. I also apologize for any harm my words from this past perspective may cause to any readers.**

Somehow it happened. I've always been pretty sure of myself but then I unraveled. I've spent more days in the last year (plus) wishing I didn't feel the way I did, than being okay with how I feel. So many days have been sad days or lonely days, hard days. I've wondered a time or two if this is me now: a sort of cynical, "realistic" person who buries herself in television and struggles to get out of bed nearly every day.

Questions I didn't know I had have come to the surface. The basis of everything about life is up in the air. I've begun questioning why I believe certain things that I just always have. I'm longing to experience God tangibly as I have so much of my life, and yet I feel like I'm wandering a desert in circles. Explaining this to just about anyone has been impossible, I never quite feel like I've done it justice just how uncomfortable I feel with myself and the questions. I'm stuck between feeling completely apathetic and yet not being able to live life without a deeper meaning that makes sense.

I took a break from attending church for a few weeks, then last week I went back. No certain reason other than Easter seemed like as good a time as any to break a church fast (it happened to coincide with lent, oddly). I realized I'd really missed my pastor. He's an interesting and insightful speaker, and tends to be realistic and honest. That's what kept me at the same church for so long, I liked that the pastor wasn't acting holier than others, but self-deprecating. His message on Easter was the exact one I needed, honest in that sometimes it feels like we're still losing. I've been in a long season that feels like losing, and it's so easy for anyone to look at it and say it will turn around or that God loves me, but those things don't change the reality; those things haven't eased the pain, they haven't pulled me out of bed in the morning.

Thankfully I have had my wits about me enough to know that if I don't show up things will only get worse.

Easter was a special occasion but I decided to show up to church again today. I sat in the back because I was late, which is usually a death-sentence to my concentration. Naturally I was in and out of the sermon versus my thoughts. A few times something would hit me and I felt on the edge of tears. Then came the singing. It wasn't anything particular in the songs, I just decided totalk to God as I often do during worship and sat down. I thought about all the questions, the doubt, the loneliness, the distance, the pain. Tears started creeping down my face seemingly out of nowhere.

I feel so out of place and like I'm in pieces, but I don't even understand it – yet somehow it was important that I sit in the back row at church and let slow tears evolve into an ugly cry. I needed to show up, just for that. There aren't any easy answers, there's no quick solution, there's no cure, but there's space for ugly crying in the back and hoping that hope returns and that things make sense again. Somehow, someday.

Shifting the Lens

**Disclaimer: This piece was written pre-deconstruction of religious beliefs and faith system. Many of these beliefs inform the sentiments of the writing and are not in alignment with my values. As this is a part of my journey and an extensive blog over years, I have chosen not to remove a majority of my posts written on faith. Please as a reader, take this into consideration and take what works for you, leave what does not. I also apologize for any harm my words from this past perspective may cause to any readers.** 

"I think the Kingdom is more about poetry and life than it is definitions and boundaries." – Sarah Bessey, Out of Sorts

I've turned into so much more of a hippie than I ever could've imagined. I'd always sort of thought of myself as a free spirit, I don't brush my hair very often, and I've never tried pot because I don't need a substance to make my mind go to weird places. But on a fundamental level, I recognize a lot of beliefs I hold now that I used to judge others for having.

I'm always fascinated by the ways we evolve and change. And I would go so far as to say if we're unwilling to examine why we believe what we do, and possibly even abandon some perspectives for new ones, we're missing out on life to the fullest. We are learning beings. We aren't meant to be stagnant. I know a big part of why I've felt such a struggle for a long time is that I've felt stagnant. I haven't known how to change it, how to push myself forward.

My faith is the lens through which I view the world, and it has adapted vastly over the years. It has become something I didn't think it would, but I'm so much more comfortable with it being what it is, than what it was. Growing up I had pretty defined ideas about right and wrong, good and bad, left and right. As I began to encounter other schools of thought, other perspectives, I found things that made more sense than my previous doctrine. And ideas that fit with my experiences of God; happenings over years and years that I can't do justice to explain. Over time, I've come to settle firmly on the belief that God is love. That is the primary thing anyone should ever know about Him, and the thing that when nothing else makes sense, that still does.

So when lately I've been struggling to make sense out of the lens through which I view the world, one of the few things that gives me peace is knowing that I've transformed to arrive here. I sorted through so much unknown and I've sorted through so much pain before, I'm likely on course to discovering more depth, more answers, more freedom, and, Lord willing, more love.