A few things I don't normally tell you

Photo by Nelo Hotsuma

I get irrationally anxious in the passenger seat. Maybe it's new in the last couple years, or maybe it’s that now we live in a more congested area. It’s dark and we’re in the car somewhere between Washington and Richmond when I find myself yelling every few seconds, “watch out!” begging my husband to slow down or put two hands on the wheel or change lanes to get away from the Jersey wall or a truck. My chest is too tight to relax, even though the reason my husband is driving is because I was getting sleepy. I recognize that I’m a little crazy but I can’t seem to stop wincing with every curve in the road. "You need help," my husband says. "I don't want you to have a heart attack."

I get angry for minuscule reasons, often related to wasted time, money, or energy. Late to meet my family for lunch, I am driving around the block for thirty minutes looking for a parking spot and I begin to seethe. I finally park, and as I walk the block to the restaurant, I try to reason with myself. It's not my husband or parents' fault, so I should forget about it and just enjoy the rest of the time we have. When I enter the restaurant and find out what they ordered for me, it is one more unpleasant change I can't handle. I yell and berate and make myself a complete fool, hating myself as it happens. I recognize that I’m a little crazy but it’s too late for me to back down. A couple days later, my dad calls to talk to me about my behavior. I'm 29 and my dad is concerned about my behavior; I know I need help.

As an early step in the process of becoming a Presbyterian pastor, I have to go to Charlotte for a 2-day psychological evaluation: the first day for testing, the second day for interview and results with a psychologist. The first day consists of hundreds of questions about voices in my head, how much I yell, if I ever want to break things, how's my sex life, how often I feel depressed, whether spiders make me anxious, do I obsess about details, am I mostly happy or mostly sad or mostly crazy. After it is over, I am panicking. I am sure I am going to be found out, I am going to fail, they are going to tell me I belong in therapy, not ministry. But the interview the next morning makes me feel like a normal person again, and two weeks later I get the results: Ms. Ross presented as a pleasant, engaged young person who is very interested in the evaluation process. She took notes and asked questions, appearing open to feedback and suggestions for growth. 

I think maybe we are all a little crazy, all a little wounded or anxious or neurotic or just sad (which is not to undermine clinical mental health problems that are very serious for some people, but simply to say no one is perfectly normal). I think maybe the best thing I can give to my future ministry is to stop pretending to be put together, stop pretending I can handle my anxiety and anger since I'm a well-balanced person who usually knows how to keep a lid on it, stop getting by with being a pleasant and engaged young person and learn instead how to be a whole and honest one.

So this is what I am going to try. This is my version of New Year’s resolution—or maybe just the hope of someone who has become tired of getting by. And since I’ve learned that abstract aspirations never get me too far, I’m taking three concrete steps.

1)  This semester, I'm joining a small group of women who meet weekly to share their spiritual lives, and unlike the first time I tried to join this group, I'm going to prioritize it over school and work. Because these women just might become the kind of friends who can help me be real and whole.

2) I've signed up for a writing group at school which will help me to write down the truth, to face the feelings I need to process, at least once a week. Because I need help and accountability in confronting the truest things about myself.

3)  I am lucky to have access to counseling through school, included in my tuition, so I am going to try meeting with a counselor this spring. Because you don’t have to be in acute crisis to benefit from therapy, because I never want to be too proud to seek help, because it just might help me learn to be more centered and whole.

I tell you all this, I suppose, because I have a penchant for oversharing my flaws (though some of you, surely, are not surprised at these anecdotes). Or I tell you all this because I suspect most people think they're awful, at some point, and it might do some folks good to hear they're not the only ones. Or perhaps I tell you all this because if I write it on the internet, I have to follow through. 

And also: maybe you too have been getting by and maybe you want to take a concrete step towards being whole and maybe we can walk that journey together.

Open-hearted

To be open-hearted: this is my touchstone for the summer.

You may guess that is because I see in myself over the last couple years, a tendency towards walls, towards clenching, towards closed-heartedness. I am not sure why I stopped playing the piano and writing tears into my journal and keeping my soul open to the kind and unkind things that people said. I only know now, that it is easier to watch TV than to write in a journal. It is easier to tolerate people than to love them. It is easier to be busy than to be still.

To be open-hearted­ comes with such risk.

*

I was the epitome of an open heart, then. I was aching and frightened but so tender, so ready for healing, ready to meet God, however terrifying God might be.

So I sat, broken heart and all, fears and failures and all, on a roof under the stars in Tanzania and I said to two people whom I had met less than a week before, I am going to need community.

But who tells two people you have just met that you are aching from a rough year and desperately need their friendship? Deep needs should be reserved for a friendship of six months, at least.

The hazy, humid air was silent except with the buzzing of mosquitos, and I wished I hadn’t said it, but the words were unswallowable.

Wondering if you’ve said too much is a byproduct, I think, of life open-hearted. I was just naïve enough to hope these people might actually care. (I was lucky. It turned out that they did.)

*

This summer, I am trying to be naïve enough to imagine that people care.

To imagine that I might have something to offer to the woman sitting next to me who is just out of prison, motivated for her recovery from addictions, and desperate for a job. To imagine that she might have something to offer to me. It may be a long shot, but I have to be prepared for the moment when it comes.

To intentionally drain the demanding, sarcastic tone from my voice before I speak to my husband. Instead, to tell him how soft and vulnerable I feel, how unlike myself. Perhaps, in that one moment he misinterprets my tone, senses me accusing again, and snaps back, I will hurt. But I keep my heart exposed anyway, because the oxygen and the yearning will bring it healing.

To let theology be simple sometimes. “I don’t question God,” the man sitting next to me says at support group. “I just ask for help for myself and others for today.”

To return with trepidation to my long-abandoned journal, unafraid of what I might learn about myself, about God. Even if the truth hurts, it will set me free.

*

Church of the Saviour is a good place to be, for all of this. It is rather a way of life, here, to ask and be asked, “what is your deep need?” It is hard to get far here without sharing from an open heart.

In one of the groups, I am asked to share my “money autobiography”—all the thoughts, feelings, and experiences I’ve had around money throughout my life.

When I was in perhaps middle school, I asked my mother about how mortgage worked. This led into a conversation about her income, worth of the house, debt, and various other personal financial details. At the end of the conversation, she told me that I should probably not discuss any of the information with others. They are not the types of details that we share publicly.

They are not. And yet, in this community, sharing them is part of the practice of being open-hearted and together. So I try to share honestly about money—not dollar amounts, but the experiences of giving and receiving, of shame and conflict and generosity and hurt and acceptance and power that have surrounded my life as a person in an economic world.

I enter the room anxious, but when I leave, I know that we all have struggles with money, and no matter what the details—rich or poor, envy or shame—we are in it together. We need each other.

*

Three days later, on Sunday, there is a period in the church service where people can share aloud their gratitude, or their prayer requests.

In most churches in my experience, church prayer requests follow an unspoken rule of being restricted to aunts with cancer, travel safety, and grief for a lost relative. But here today, a woman’s voice is cracking as she speaks about her friend whose father is returning from ten years in prison, and another woman is crying with joy about her sister’s return to this country after two years abroad, and a man in the back shares that his work has, and a grandmother says she is just so grateful for her daughter-in-law who has been a pillar of strength as her son is going through a hard time.

You sit there listening, and if there is something on your heart, you feel that maybe next week you might be brave enough to share it. You feel like people really want to know what’s going on with you, like people are really willing to tell you what’s going on with them. You feel there is a sense of deep caring and deep trust. It gives you inspiration, and you think you feel the walls crumbling a little bit in your own heart.

The stories we tell and the secrets we keep

Photo by Nicki Varkevisser

Telling your story--I mean your real, honest-to-God, story--is never easy.

You start just because you need to say it, you need to write it, you need to get it out of your singular self and out into the world. As scary as it is to be real, it's even scarier to be alone. One day, you finally blurt it out--that thing you were ashamed of, that struggle, that thing about yourself you've always hated but are learning to accept, that marriage or that baby or job that should be a joy but has been so hard, that long journey that you're finally seeing in its glorious light of growth, of healing, that darkness that has been heavy on you, and is heavy still.

You start small, maybe, test it out on someone you have a hunch you can trust. Or you bust the wound straight open and blast it to the whole family, the whole community, the whole internet.

And then funny things start to happen.

First, you don't die. Nobody even yells at you, usually.

Second, you start to feel that it's okay to be yourself. You start to see God in the painful journey, maybe, or you find one tiny step that might be healing.

Third (and this is the bumpy part, because you will hurt people, too, and you will sometimes wish you'd said things a little differently, or thought through things more fully) your community grows. You start to correspond with a relative you'd never known very well. Your friends start to tell you that you have made them cry with understanding. You get little notes from people you hadn't talked to in years, thanking you for your words because they are not just your words now, they are words of resonance and similarity and love, and they belong to us all.

*

I share my story of faith and doubt in a church. People come up afterwards and commiserate with me about the evils of the secular world, the way college can threaten faith, when I truly meant to say the opposite. I meant to say that going down deeper into the questions has made me stronger, firmer. I meant to say that this whole messy earth, I've learned, is bathed in a kind of light and love and that God can't be kept out of any of it.

I wonder if I said it wrong, if I should have kept that sacred tale to myself, lest it be appropriated for uses I didn't mean. Lest it be turned against me. Maybe I have made myself too vulnerable, too prone to attack.

But then one person walks up to me and says simply, "I felt like you were telling my story." I jerk my head up and he is looking far past me into a memory, and he says, "Almost every single word could have been mine," and I remember again, why we share.

*

This sharing has become a big part of what I see as my calling. I have been changed by people's stories. Listening to people's stories, across lines of race and class and religion and sexuality and nationality, has changed me. It has let me walk for a few minutes in others' shoes. It has shown me how different we are, and how alike. This is reconciliation: the good news that Jesus breaks down walls between insurmountably different creatures--humans and God first, but also men and women, rich and poor, black and white and every shade of brown, gay and straight, young and old.

We are, all of us, wounded. The magic, I think, is that by simply being brave enough to tell it, we have the chance to be a part of the stories of each other's healing. And that is what I hope for, as I practice telling pieces of my story, as I practice listening to yours, as I practice creating spaces where we can all learn to tell each other the truth that is in our hearts.

Re-launch

After a good hiatus, I have decided to start writing again, only a little differently.

This time, instead of writing short little reflections for my blog, I’m going to start sharing more of the writing that defines me, the writing I think I do best—the writing which is most terrifying to share.

These are going to be posts about my life story: the things that have shaped me, the journeys I have traveled. It might feel more like memoir at times. Some of these stories I have shared before in some form with a few who are close to me. Some I have never shared at all. I will intersperse longer stories with short reflections, and old material with new, to keep the past connected to the present.

This will be my most honest writing, my most vulnerable. I write not for pity or congratulation or controversy but because I hope that in being vulnerable, I will also be relatable. I know that my favorite blogs and stories are those that are genuine and honest. I know that my story wants to be shared more broadly. I also know that sharing it is a risk. But risk makes writing worthwhile.

Know that my writing in the following weeks will come from the heart. I am sure you will treat these words with the same gentleness and grace that you have always treated me.

It might be hope

A little while ago, a friend and I were talking about a band we like, called The Innocence Mission. 

"Their lyrics are great," he said. "They're just so--"

"--hopeful!" I finished.

"Really?" he asked. "I was going to say dark, and sad."

Sometimes hope is a sudden joy, a spark of light, a new friend, a new opportunity.

But sometimes hope is dark, and sad. 

*

All weekend you were moved to tears. Watching a friend leave home just like you did a few months ago. Watching another friend say I do and embark on something beautiful and impossible, loving another person just as he is, forever. Watching the church come to communion together and feeling how inadequately we share ourselves and how deeply we need each other.

So today, on your 8-hour drive from what used to be home to what still doesn't feel like home, you play one song on repeat and just cry. Again and again. Because feeling your wounds might just mean you believe healing could come. Today, it's okay to just feel the loneliness. No disclaimers. You don't have to apologize to your single friends for feeling lonely even though you're married, and you don't have to apologize to your busy friends for feeling anxious even though you have lots of free time. You don't have to apologize on behalf of Christians everywhere for not always feeling joy and resurrection, and you don't have to apologize to your blog readers for not always believing the things you write, which you write because you want to believe them and because somewhere down in there you do. You don't plan out the eight thousand things you're going to change about your life when you get home this time, which you have never really changed.

You just let the tears come, and know that it might be hope of the best kind.