Speak

I have recently started to talk a little bit about the fact that I struggled with a speech handicap as a child.

It seems like a small thing when I type it that way– matter of fact, black on white. But it wasn't a small thing at the time.

My best theory has been for a while now that it stemmed from the fact that my family completely uprooted our lives and moved to a third world country when I was just shy of 2 years old, only to do the same thing 18 months later when we returned to the States. When we first got back from mission work, we spent a stretch of time hopping from house to house, staying with whoever had room– an experience that deeply troubled 3-year-old Mary, who was clingy and insecure. I am told children with speech handicaps often are that way because of some massive life upheaval in the years they're developing speech. I figure this qualifies.

The primary way it manifested was that I couldn't pronounce any "R" sound, and "J" posed significant difficulties. In part because I was aware of the deficiency, I often ended up stuttering or slurring to cover it up. I spoke this way until I was 11 years old.

Imagine this dorktastic mini-human speaking a high percentage of words totally wrong.

11 is old enough to encounter an awful lot of bullying for any child who shows signs of abnormality. I was ridiculed for it so often (by relatives, friends, siblings, even adults on occasion) that I learned very early on not to speak much. I also learned early on the alternative: writing. Every word I was too ashamed to speak got turned around, invested, captured on a page. My expressions were primitive at first, rough, like any child holding a new tool in their hand. But I accelerated, leaning into the words, finding in their potential a way to be weightless. By 11 I was reading Shakespeare and writing my first novel.

But of course that wasn't usually particularly clear to the outside world, a world where I seemed branded as slow and stupid for the fact that I did not speak in public, or if I did, I could not seem to speak correctly. And it weighed on me tremendously.

My parents believed for a while that it was a discipline problem, and found various ways to try to motivate or punish me into speaking correctly. After one such night where it was explained to me that I just wasn't trying hard enough, I locked myself in the bathroom for hours. I painstakingly repeated words over and over, trying to make their sounds fall into place, looking in the mirror to try to make my mouth work the way everyone else's did so effortlessly. I fought with my unwieldy tongue until I was hoarse and sobbing, 8 years old and deeply convinced of the truth: I was a failure. I somehow had to try harder.

When I was 11, my mom found a book that they used in special speech therapy classes. We couldn't afford those kinds of classes, but my mom patiently sat down and started to work through it with me on our own. The book had diagrams, descriptions, and exercises. Somehow it clicked. And after a few days, I was able to say my own name correctly for the first time in my life: Mary Rose. I remember it caught in my throat.

The first reaction was fear. I had sounded a certain way for as long as I could speak, and now the familiarity afforded by that brokenness was being taken from me (I have always been this way: I would rather the familiar hurt than the unfamiliar hope). But soon the realization of being able to do it right, no longer being an outsider in the realm of speech, overtook that apprehension. Within a few months, most surface level traces of my old habits were gone.

I've been turning this over and over in my head lately as I've been exploring my desperate need for approval and how to overcome it. In a lot of ways, I am silenced by shame these days as surely as I was 13 years ago.

When I first learned to talk honestly about my life and my faith, it was new and hard and not always perfect but so beautiful. And then I started to realize I wasn't always doing it right (by the standards of others). I was sometimes too liberal, sometimes too conservative. Sometimes too "Christian," sometimes too irreverent. Sometimes too feminist, sometimes too traditional. Sometimes too intellectual, sometimes too simple. So I stopped speaking what I believe about a lot of things, and then I became afraid to believe those things at all, afraid to call attention to my wrongness. I began to feel any opinion at all was more valid than mine.

And it started bleeding into every other area of my life. I have heard people saying that things I have experienced are not valid, that they don't understand them-- so I stopped speaking the truth of those things I have lived, started trying to erase them from my presentation of myself. I have become ashamed of almost every aspect of my story. I am aware that for every moment I have lived, there is someone somewhere with an opinion that would say that's not right.

I am not particularly sure when I started focusing so much on what is approved rather than what is true. But I am extremely tired of it. I am weary of being afraid every waking moment that I'm not meeting someone's standard.

Throughout my teen years, the old speech habits of my childhood rarely surfaced. I only saw them in college in moments of extreme stress, such as before giving presentations in class. But last year I found something that could wake it: a demanding job in food service and a life mostly devoid of tangible human support.

On the bad days, there would be a chain of anxiety triggers, small things stacking, until I'd be taking someone's order and feel letters dropping out of my sentences, slurring, stammering, scattering in the noise. I'd fight to hold my pronounciation together. On a few occasions I ended up dashing to the bathroom where I locked myself in a dirty stall and dry heaved until the panic passed and my words arranged themselves again.

In a way, the upheaval of the last few years has triggered more than just the recurrence of that childhood monster. It's silenced me in those other ways, silenced my story, silenced much of my ability to be honest even with myself.

I am aware that my honesty would, in many cases, cause discomfort, disagreement, and potential heartache. I am aware that in other cases it could cause healing, a sense of resonance from others who have experienced similar things and do not feel free to express them. 

So these days I am constantly weighing the question: where is it worth it? Where does the potential for healing outweigh the potential for hurt? I don't believe in speaking my mind just for the sake of speaking; that quickly turns into arrogance, or gossip, or group pity parties. But I strongly believe in honesty for the purpose of healing, for having conversations that matter more, for true soul-deep closeness, for shedding light in dark places, for uncovering and recovering truth.

That second kind of honesty is the kind I am trying to uncover again, regardless of whether it would earn approval from the right list of people (whoever that is-- sometimes when I ask myself who are you trying to please, I can't even pin down a name). And I am trying to uncover it in a way that provides more healing than damage to others in the process. I would rather (always) be kind than "right," but there has to be a way to do that without feeling the need to evaporate as a kind of self-regulated damage control. I want my silences to become motivated only by gentleness, not by shame that tells me you can't say it right, can't be right– your hardest efforts are not trying hard enough. 

I want to leave this world marked more by mercy than when I found it, not embedded with the shrapnel of graceless rants. I don't particularly know the way to get there. But it's going to look like some careful relearning. It's going to look like practice. It's going to look like letting go of the fear that I am not really myself without my shame. 

It's going to look an awful lot like learning to speak.

Colorado 2014: Hearing Echoes

I was looking out the window at the mountains, seeing their dimensions blur into just another item on the list of things to miss, just another trip relegated to nostalgia.

I stared at the Colorado landscape until it flattened out into the plains, and then I settled back in my seat, jammed my earbuds in tighter, and turned up the volume on my iPod. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, slowing my breathing to encourage my brain to shut down, to stop moving, to stop thinking, to stop feeling. Three or four songs later, I gave up. I opened the notes app on my iPod to write.

“I feel tremendous, unspeakable grief.

But at least I feel something.”

***

I’d been in Colorado for two weeks, and it was my third major trip of the summer. My first two-- first to Texas, then to Wisconsin-- had been similarly beautiful, full of the people I am closest to, full of adventures, full of a heart slowly opening under the warmth of beautiful moments and an awareness of God. Both times, I’d returned to Tennessee optimistic, brimming with a sweet, irrational hope. Both times, within a few weeks I simply felt nothing.

This has become the familiar status quo since moving out here as newlyweds, uncertain and isolated and broke. It feels like last week that we got here-- mostly because so few of the days between have seemed real to me. It’s hard to explain, but it’s like when I got here my ability to emotionally engage anything completely disappeared. It happened so suddenly and completely that it took me six months before I realized how numb I’d become.

For a while, earlier this year, I worried that I might be headed towards considering suicide again (a pattern that was so built into my existence as a teenager that I am always wary of it resurfacing). It wasn’t until my trip to Texas in May that I realized I didn’t want to end my life: I felt like it was already over, and a part of me was grieving. And it wasn’t until I went to Wisconsin later that I realized there was still the possibility of life, the reality of a different way, and it was going to have to be a spiritual mending, not a change of circumstances.

I don’t want to seem over-dramatic or present an unbalanced picture-- though I am discussing my struggles here, there have been successes as well as struggles. This has been far, far from my worst year. I have, in some ways, been healthier than I’ve ever been this past year, at least in terms of functionality. I am usually intensely self-aware, which is (like most things) both good and bad. But even that self-awareness has been dulled as of late, reduced to simply the thought I am not who I want to be.

Good things happen, and I struggle to be grateful for them, struggle to experience joy. Bad things happen, and even if I repeat them to myself over and over again, I can’t feel the weight of them.

And I’ve woken up in the morning countless times since moving here to find I’d been crying in my sleep, only able to engage when the walls of consciousness were obliterated.

I’ve realized what a large part of it is (although this is only one aspect of it, and it’s much more multi-faceted than this; this is only a blog post, after all). I am absolutely addicted to the approval of others. It wasn’t always this way, since for much of my life I received so few doses of approval an addiction to it couldn’t even form. But these past several years it’s become increasingly worse. And as much as I crave that approval, I am also painfully aware at any given time of how far short of that perception I actually fall-- I am plagued by that common fear if people really knew me, they’d think so much differently. This to say that I can’t usually accept the affirmation I’m offered, which makes it a spectacularly unhelpful and unhealthy addiction.

I’ve been completely isolated from the approval of most people for over a year now. Not just isolated from approval, but from their kindness, their interest, their friendship, as well-- simply because I am isolated from most people, as previously discussed many times. I have reached the place now where I have accepted I will very likely never have a community here, and I need to learn how to live with that reality. Which has meant I am left alone to face again a distaste for myself that I can’t even fully put into words.

I hate that I want people to affirm me, still, after all these years (my brain screams this is a middle school flaw everyone else your age is over). I hate that I feel so underqualified for every single aspect of life I’m facing right now. I hate that I can’t get over myself and just be content, that I can be so deeply self-centered despite years of fighting so hard to see, to love other people. And many days, even as I throw myself in frustration against the walls of my metaphorical isolation chamber, I know the vacuum of relationship is to be expected. Why would anyone like me? I don’t like me. I can’t blame anyone else for feeling similarly.

So I stop feeling. I know I am still deeply in need of internal change because of this: it’s as though without people to remind me who I am, I cease to exist at all.

***

I got to Colorado this year feeling, honestly, skeptical. I’ve started to hear this voice in the back of my head, whispering grown ups don’t have meaningful life experiences anymore. You’re married and employed and your name’s on an apartment lease-- it’s all over for you in terms of living vibrantly. You barely have time to talk to these people outside of this yearly meeting anymore. They won’t remember who you are, or you’ll all have changed so much there will be no relationship left.

I was proven wrong in the span of the first hour or two.

Between flipping stations in the car and critiquing the songs on the radio, cramming into a kitchen full of friends, downing multiple cups of coffee, being hugged half a dozen times, and getting into a conversation about theology and contemporary Western culture less than 30 minutes after “hello,” I started to realize that maybe life still happens to me-- in me.

Our group gathering was only three days this year, the shortest it’s ever been. It was rushed and certainly different from when we were all teenagers, but I was reminded over and over again that some things don’t change-- that things I believed to be lost are actually still very real, albeit in different forms. I would stay in Colorado for another week and a half afterwards, watching movies, running on mountain trails, lying under the stars, soaking in conversations about things that matter, trying my hand at honesty. I felt my faith waking up under my skin. It was like I’d been given permission to believe again, permission to meet God’s eyes and accept that maybe He was still steadfastly paying attention to me.

It wouldn’t be until I was on the plane home that I would understand it: that has ultimately been the question, this whole time since moving here. It was never why am I in a soul-crushing food service job? It was never why did I have to leave behind friends and family I love so deeply? It was never why can’t I make friends-- why can’t I even want to make friends? It was never why am I being placed in a job I am spectacularly undeserving of? I thought those were my questions, the ones that left me numb, but they weren’t. The real question was very simple: does God still like me?

I’m not going to pretend that two weeks in Colorado fixed that. But it tied some threads of grace to my heart that I pray will become highways for hope before they can be severed.

Because when friends who have known me long and listened to the worst of me told me I am kind, I began to believe I could be again. And when they told me they trust me, I began to feel like perhaps I was worth trusting. And when they told me that the things I think about God resonated with how they think about Him too, I started to feel for the first time in a very long time that I’m not a total failure of a Christian, that maybe grace is still absorbing all my doubts-- that He still thinks I’m worth the risk of Calvary.

By the end, I was feeling everything again, leaning my forehead against a smudged pane of glass on the airplane, crying in a movie-ready moment of catharsis. And I realized that yes, maybe I would lose the ability to feel. Maybe all my clarity would melt under the harsh pressure of isolation and routine. But it was only maybe-- not an absolute. The same God (who knows the worst and still stays) my friends echoed was in Nashville. That same God was with me on the plane. That first inclination of comfort, of freedom from myself, that I’ve felt in months-- it was from the One who, no matter where I go, I can’t outrun. I will never find a place where His grace is not.

In the office of a music industry icon who will likely not remember my name.

On the bedroom carpet when the anxiety comes like a maelstrom again.

In the silent apartment where I wait for hours for my roommate and my husband to come home.

Navigating the aisles of a chain grocery store where every half-familiar angle makes me homesick for my siblings.

Sidestage for one of my favorite bands.

Trekking across the scorched pavement where I run to subdue the lies I’ve heard.

He inhabits all the blank spaces left by the goodbyes I’ve said in order to follow Him.

And someday I think I’m going to hear Him say again that I’m forgiven, that I don’t have to hide anymore, that I don’t have to wake up every morning so ashamed of an existence that seems incapable of being what it should be.

I’m not quite there yet. But as I caught my second flight and ate the gluten free pancake and peanut butter sandwiches and Mickey Mouse fruit snacks a friend had packed for me… I felt a little closer.

A Heart With A Limp

Sometimes I write about my experiences with depression and anxiety.

But too often, like lately, I stay quiet.

I do this in part for valid reasons, but (if I’m painfully honest) primarily from fear. But lately something’s been tugging at the corners of my mind, inviting me to let bits of my story spill over the edges of the rigid regulation of my shiny social media image.

When my husband and I moved post-wedding, initially all my attention was focused on the tasks at hand: unpacking. Finding a job. Settling in. Getting stabilized financially. Finding a routine. Figuring out how to get to the grocery store without a GPS.

So it wasn’t until well into our time here that I started recognizing that I really hadn’t set up mental health habits well in this new location.

Over the past seven years, I have set certain routines in place to help with the healing process that I suspect will be ongoing for most of my life. If I keep the process moving, I am higher-functioning than I (or many of the people around me) would ever have dreamed I would be when I was a teenager. But when those habits get disarrayed, or when a trigger disrupts them, I begin to fray around the edges.

After May being the best month in a very long time, the past few weeks have seen days at a time where things unraveled again. The feelings of waking up with lead instead of lungs, of being suddenly too exhausted to move for no reason at all, of knowing with pain stronger than rationality that nothing will be OK again, of struggling to keep food down or even to breathe because someone used punctuation in a text that your hyper-analyzing, anxiety-fueled brain is sure means they suddenly hate you-- these things elbowed their way into my days again.

None of this is new, and for the sake of perspective, it’s nowhere near as bad as things I’ve faced before. But if I’m honest, that doesn’t mean it’s not intensely discouraging at moments. I keep refusing to let it win, refusing to let it stop me from being kind, trying to connect to people, exercising, cooking, working, laughing, reading, singing-- breathing. And sometimes my fear of being rejected or written off as an ungrateful complainer means I don’t mention the fight at all, a selfish lack of honesty which I know ultimately does more harm than good to everyone around me. But there are moments where I’m just impossibly tired of this.

I repeat my life back to myself like a list to remind myself that this isn’t all there is to me: I am named by Grace Himself, not by my actions. I am in love and loved, with a marriage that’s been so smooth it’s almost unnerving. I have a kind, grace-full apartment-mate who miraculously actually chooses to hang out with me. I have some of the most amazing friends in the world, and even if they’re distant most of the time, I get to do things like get on a plane to go see them. I am working my dream job with incredible bosses who I respect and trust, and coworkers who it is a joy to walk with. I have a family who I am fiercely loyal to, and who returns that loyalty to me.

And I’m thankful for all those things. So thankful that sometimes I spontaneously start crying because they are a grace I have not earned and barely dared hope for. I frequently need reminders that all these things are true. 

But one of the most frustrating things about depression and anxiety is that they often refuse to respect reality. I can wake up to face a day full of music and coffee and work that’s really more like play… and still feel like I’m breathing ash, like my life isn’t an event worth getting out of bed for.

This isn’t going to be a post with a tidy wrap-up message. Although as I write this I’ve had a string of better days, I hold them loosely, knowing I am still vulnerable. I have to give myself permission to admit to my incompleteness.

But what this experience does keep pushing me back into is this reality that I wrote about a couple months ago: there has to be more than circumstantial alignment, than relational ideals, even than wellness, to lend order to this disordered heart. I may not be able to resolve that tension entirely on earth, but navigating it is a huge part of my faith journey. Not because Jesus is a self-help method or a cure-all for the unpleasant (that is a version of “gospel” that I find incredibly hollow and untrue), but because in my personal story, I have rarely been so grateful for the presence of God as I am when Christ comes quietly into my aching and sits beside me. The Heart that weathered Gethsemane whispers simply I know.

Though I will by no means ever give up on getting well, on letting these experiences make me compassionate, on becoming more myself every day, there is a part of me that can be almost grateful for the fact that my heart walks with a perpetual limp. I will never have to look far for reminders that surface level success and circumstantial gifts are transients in my life. I carry in myself the constant reminder that I need a much more permanent kind of hope to move in to stay.

And for those of you who read this from the heart of a similar battle: if you’re breathing today, you are brave. Don’t give up.

I know one day all of our scars will disappear like the stars at dawn

and all of our pain will fade away when morning comes.

And on that day when we look backwards, we will see that everything is changed

and all of our trials will be as milestones on the way.

- Thrice

All OK

If I could tell the world just one thing

It would be that we’re all OK.
- Jewel

When I was 4 years old, my mom, two older siblings, and then-infant brother were in a very serious car wreck.

When they got home from the hospital after a day where I waited scared with my 2-year-old sister and a babysitter, my mom and my big brother (who had both sustained serious injuries) settled down to rest. The big brother I hero-worshipped my whole childhood was laid out on the couch in the living room, vivid stitches tracing his forehead in long dark lines, still and quiet as I rarely saw him. My mom rested in her bed, her face black and blue, her arm in a cast.

At the time our rapidly growing 7-person family was living crammed into a tiny house little bigger than your average apartment, so there was just one corner to dash around to move from one invalid to the other. With a deep sense of urgency, I dashed back and forth around that corner, breathlessly asking one question over and over: are you OK?

I didn’t understand how to help, but I was incredibly determined to try. I brought my big brother coloring books and crayons, I brought him some favorite toys, I sat at his side and anxiously watched to see if they would make him better. He seemed grateful, and also tried in his own way to reassure me. I watched him try to engage the things I brought him, but really he just needed rest, so eventually I lapsed into silence and stillness, broken occasionally by the same question all over again: are you OK?

It’s been just about two years shy of two decades since I was that kid. But the more I come to understand myself and the events that are significant to me, the more I understand that I’ve spent a very large portion of the past eight years of my life doing the exact same thing: running back and forth from one person I love to the next, knowing they’re wounded (everybody is in some way), desperate to help, earnestly asking over and over again if they’re OK.

The things that have caused me the most grief in my adult life have not been people who wronged me or betrayed me. Those are things I honestly barely remember more than a moment most of the time. Instead, I have felt the most heartache when I see someone suffering and can’t stem the flow of their tears or bind their ruptured heart’s arteries, when I ask if they’re OK and the lump in their throat makes it so tight they can’t even answer, when nothing I bring them seems to help them get well.

These things haunt me. I want to love people, to be kind, to be a conduit of the compassion I find in Christ. And yet half the time I feel like the 4-year-old dumping coloring books on the lap of her brother with a severe head wound. What can crayons do against wounds such as these?

When I was a teenager, I had to learn how to be OK with myself not being OK (a lesson I will likely spend a lifetime re-learning). Now I am having to learn how to be OK with the fact that the people I love won’t always be OK right away, and maybe sometimes it’s not my fault-- because honestly it’s not about me at all.

There is a kind of self-absorption to thinking that the only chance for a person’s life to be made whole is for it to be made better by me. I vividly remember a night many years ago now when a friend I’d tried desperately to help was nevertheless in a lonely psychiatric ward under suicide watch, and I felt beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was because I’d failed to love her adequately. One of my dearest friends sat with me late into the night, and at one point she told me very softly I don't mean to be harsh, but it’s arrogance to believe you have that much control over someone’s life, that it’s entirely up to you whether they live or die.

I suspect to some people that would in fact sound harsh, but to me it held unbelievable freedom. It gave me freedom to grieve with and for my friend without feeling the burden of belief that her fate hinged on me.

So I’m learning it’s OK to wait with people, to sit in the silence, to get comfortable in the chaos, to cry over the phone with them without needing to offer a these are five incredibly wise steps towards fixing all this mess. We’re people in process. We’re not there yet. And that’s a beautiful and hopeful thing in itself, if I allow it to be.

And sometimes maybe showing up with coloring books isn’t a bad idea-- although now for me instead I usually show up with cups of coffee and rock song suggestions and a few awkward hugs. And something I’ve learned is that even if I express my caring so imperfectly, the fact that I’m trying to express it at all sometimes is what matters.

While I wait for the smoke to clear,
you don't even have to speak.
Just sit with me in the ashes here
and together we can pray for peace.
- Jason Gray

Moments in the Press Room

I had a moment last night.

I’d spent a couple hours standing on a red carpet for a major Christian music industry event, toting a camera, firing questions at some of my heroes. Now I was sitting in a cold, dark, almost eerily quiet press room backstage at one of the most famous venues in the country, alternately watching the feed of the night’s event and photographing nominees and presenters as they took turns on our press stage. Much of the night had already passed, and I’d made a thousand memories I knew would stay with me for a lifetime.

An unassuming artist took the press room stage, her dark curls comfortably, beautifully disarrayed, wearing boots with her dress in an act of irony similar to my own perpetual converse-with-formal-wear rebellion. I’d met her earlier that night on the red carpet, shook hands, exchanged names, and managed all of the above without anything out of the ordinary occurring. But as she started answering questions, I found myself grateful for a camera to press against my face to hide the reality that I was rapidly blinking back tears.

She was answering a question about the stories her songs tell-- stories much darker than most others in her industry, stories most are afraid to tell. She talked about how she was drawn to the dark because unapologetically admitting to it enabled hope to be a more rich reality, the contrast driving truth deeper home. And as she talked about this, suddenly I wasn’t hardcore professional Mary with my stack of all access laminates in a drawer at home and the confidence to stand on the fringes of a stage taking pictures in front of thousands of people. I was 15 year old Mary, sitting in a dark room with one of this artist’s songs on repeat on my cheap MP3 player, rocking back and forth and trying to dive so deep into the music that maybe-- just maybe-- for two seconds the pain would stop.

I still get moments like this often. I’d had one earlier that night when in the midst of a totally professional conversation with Scott Stapp, he spoke his story and unknowingly echoed my own, and for a split second I remembered being a teenager hanging on every word of Creed’s “One Last Breath.” I had another one a few days earlier when Jon Foreman sang again the dare that’s chased me for the past seven years: move. I dare you. And I had it a few months ago when I stood sidestage during a Skillet performance and cried yet again through the song that started this entire wild music ride for me.

And these moments aren’t instances of self-pity or sorrow for the past and the person I was. They’re moments simply where the brilliance of truth stabs at my chest with sudden piercing clarity, where I remember who I am, where I came from, and why I’m doing what I do.

My involvement with the music scene has been kind of like the most drama-filled highschool dating episode imaginable, but as I’m settling into a new role and a time where (ostensibly) there is a calm in the emotional storm, one of the things I swear to myself is that I won’t forget what started it all or what’s kept me here even when I felt frustrated or like I’d defined the call on my life entirely wrong.

Because I’m not on the red carpets or stages or press rooms or mics for myself or for anyone’s approval. I’m there because music has so often been the only thing that brought me outside of myself, that admitted to where I was while whispering that maybe-- just maybe-- there was something better to come. And I’m there because I would wear myself out on a million weekends like this last one to help connect other people to that same experience.

I am of the philosophy that music isn’t always supposed to throw answers at you, but it sure helps an awful lot with wrestling through the questions, with keeping your heart beating long enough so you can reach those answers.

So no matter where I go in this field, I hope I never stop having those tear-stained moments where I’m 15 again. I hope I never stop singing the songs that meet me in my questions, in my journey towards truth-- towards Christ. And I hope I never, ever forget that I’m doing this because of the millions of other people whose lives would change if they had those moments too.

Soli Deo gloria.

For 16

Dear 16,

I have a confession to make. Or perhaps we should call it an apology, cutting through the crap of my careful wordplays, my gentle phrasing to lighten the load of reality.

I’ve blamed you for a lot of things in the past few years. I’ve ridiculed your clothing, your choices in music, your social habits (or lack thereof), your seemingly constant sadness. And I know why I do it: I’m treating you exactly as it so often felt like everyone else did. The only terms I ever learned from others in which to capture you are phrases carefully carved to let you know just how ashamed of yourself you should be.

I make jokes about the “emo phase” you’re in, and in doing so align myself with those words that you hate so much, those words that still demand I treat you as insignificant: it’s just a phase. You’ll be OK. But you know a very different story, 16. And I’m sorry for looking backwards with the same kind of contempt that once crushed you.

And I’m sorry for offering disgust or dismissal over the simplicity of your outlook on the world, the questions you’re afraid to ask yet, and the ones you are asking. You’re not failing to grasp things, missing anything major-- you’re just a few steps into the process of finding your faith, a faith that will become the multi-faceted, strange, sometimes fluid and less than certain, but most crucial foundational reality of who you’ll become.

You’ve been handed some hard, hard battles, and the fact that you haven’t quite figured out how to win them yet doesn’t detract from the incredible courage you have when you roll out of bed after another near-sleepless night and choose to send your fragile breath against the relentless march of another morning. You’re not being irrational or overreacting or just being angsty. The early stages of recovery is the hardest thing most people will ever do, and you’re doing it almost entirely alone, sent with just songs as stairsteps towards the starlight you can hardly believe still exists behind these rolling storm clouds. It may be that you are stronger than I am now.

So I’m hoping you and I can reconcile, make amends, agree to belong to each other again. The truth is, these things I’ve said about you so often-- the way I joke about you around others, the way I put you down-- is just another way for me to divert the distaste I still sometimes feel for myself into a more socially acceptable channel. 

Because if I’m honest, some days on the inside I am still you-- 16 and scared, facing odds I’m afraid will make victory impossible, buried under a mountain of shame, trying to figure out how to believe I could be forgiven. Trying to figure out how to forgive myself.

But I'm writing this because that is a process I'm not giving up on-- I still haven't given up on what you could become, I haven't given up on you. Because though you don’t know it yet, and some days I still don’t know that I know it… you’re worth it.

- Elraen

This Is Your Life

I was a foot or two back from the barrier, there in the press of people eager to be nearest to the stage, leaning in as if to be the most thoroughly drenched in the songs pouring from the stage. I have seen Switchfoot more than I’ve seen most bands, and usually it feels new every time, but that night I was so busy feeling old that its newness couldn’t seem to break the exterior of me, to draw me in again. So it was an old song that finally got beneath my skin with a question I’ve heard Jon Foreman sing so many times:

This is your life. Is it everything you dreamed that it would be when the world was younger and you had everything to lose?

The lyric lodged like a bullet in my ribcage. As I’d stood in line that night, without anyone I knew, surrounded by groups of college kids who felt like ghosts of my past life, I’d been keenly aware of the feeling that the best of my life was over, my young years (such as they were) are gone, and the worst of it is that when I was still so rich with possibility and relationships and a painful, breaking, but loudly beating heart, I had no idea how much I had to lose.

I was also curiously aware, as I have been often lately, that I feel deeply guilty for these emotions. I don’t look back at my own stories objectively often, but when I do, I understand why sometimes people are amazed when I express that I might be struggling. I graduated from an academically exceptional college with highest honors and zero debt, I spent a year living the kind of vagabond, on-the-move lifestyle people make movies about, I’m married to the boy I’ve been in love with since I was 15, I work in the music industry and routinely hang out with rockstars, I’ve recently lost over 75 pounds and am in the best shape of my life. But it’s taken living these things and seeing so many of my old dreams become reality to realize that none of them satisfy me.

Of course this is in part because for every item I listed, there is an incredible story of struggle, sacrifice, loss, and often tremendous grief behind it that has taken years to turn towards where it is now, as is true of most people. This is not to say that I am deserving in the least of the gifts I live, but to clarify that I am not, by any means, unscathed or unscarred. But all that aside, the reality is simply that I am discovering more and more that even under the most ideal conditions on earth, the perfect combination of circumstances could not make my soul whole.

Since I moved to Nashville, I’ve been borderline blinded to all my other blessings by one simple reality: I am bone-breakingly lonely, so lonely I’ve often lost sense of self, lost the context of my life with the lack of other lives to be tethered to. And a lot of my prayers have been God speaking some truth to me about who He’s made me, how He’s purposed my life, and me simply screaming like an unruly toddler “but God, I’m so lonely.”

I don’t want to in any way reduce the reality that I need people, that you need people, that we need each other because we’re human and we’re built that way. But after being given so many breathtaking gifts, many of them things I didn’t dare ask for and know I don’t deserve, and seeing how my heart is still hungry, this much I am beginning to understand: if I were surrounded by the most supportive community in the world right now, I still would not be fully satisfied. There are different kinds of aches that would come with community, and I know that deep. There is the ache of grieving with those who grieve, of recognizing that our love will not always be received or reciprocated, of changes in relationships.

Forgive the repetitive disclaimers (they are perhaps a symptom of my rather cowardly desire to be liked, to be understood-- the truth is that I’ll never be able to cover all of the bases of human experience in a facebook or blog post), but I have to state again that this doesn’t mean relationships aren’t worth it. They are. But they’re not going to sew up the tears in my soul.

My faith tradition does a very good job of naming this longing, of letting it be known, of admitting that we’ll never really be completely comfortable as immortals bound to a mortal earth. A lot of weird beliefs come from that, but no matter where you stand on the theological playing field, this truth is universal: the skin and bones of this world will never be enough to satisfy our souls. Maybe temporarily, maybe for as long as we can medicate away our growing sense of unease, but not ultimately. I hear this same sense echoed by friends from other faith or non-religious backgrounds as well, this seemingly universal longing for something bigger than ourselves.

Switchfoot’s songs finally named this truth in me again, resonated with the ache that’s been tearing at my insides for months now. Because the truth is that I am not who I want to be, and I feel so far from whole and from home. But even as the songs voiced this internal confession, they pointed to the things that are eternal, the things that make living even in this shadowland beautiful. Even if the skin and the bones of this world feel empty to me, the Jesus I follow talked about a Kingdom of Heaven that can fill them out and eventually become the truest world-- a Kingdom instituted through His love, immortalized in our breathing hearts.

I’ve been leaning on shadows for a long while now, because it feels so much easier to me than facing the blinding light of the Grace head on and dealing with the questions it raises. I don’t entirely know how to change this.

But I know that it means looking ahead at what will be instead of looking back and regretting that I’ll never get back what was. Nothing I’ve encountered in this world can meet the neediness of my soul. But every spark of hope I’ve ever had in my life stems from beyond this world, from the person, the mystery, the incarnate life, that is Jesus Christ. And so for me, knowing rest is going to come not from circumstances, but from knowing Him-- and figuring out again what that looks like for this stretch of life, in the highs and the lows.

Until I die I’ll sing these songs on the shores of Babylon

still looking for a home in a world where I belong.