A Writing Assignment

I come from Big Sky country.

A place where the sky rolls out like a map with no edges, and you can't help but watch the clouds go about their day. 

I come from an unbroken line of partially broken women who hold up the sky with their bare hands and broad shoulders. 

Women who go to church to spill all the secrets that don't fit inside and don't want to be hidden. 

Women who go to their kitchens like they are going to stop (or start) a war. Casseroles for the grieving. Meat and potatoes for the overwhelmed and alone. Meringues and pies for celebration. Every dish a prayer. Every crock pot a loaded weapon.

I come from don't talk it about unless you can do something about it. 

I come from so many things you can't do nothing about. 

I also come from long grass and pine needles baking in the sun. From short autumns and long winters. From the inkiest of nights with the brightest of stars. From untamed rivers and a once small town that swells against the boundaries made by mountains and water and sky. 

I come from the longing that builds and builds and builds when you have to hold so many impossibly beautiful, fragile things in the same hands that have had to hold up a sky with no edges.

There's been a lot of change in my life in the last 2 months. It's mostly in my job but that change has been constant and total. And through it all there are so many people asking me what I want. I am never any more ready for this question than I was the first time someone asked. It's not like I don't want things. I want lots of things. Things that feel both too huge and too fragile to bother putting on the list. 

The last time I had career ambitions, I lost too much of myself. Nearly 9 years later, I still feel that loss in a way that I can't explain to folks. But the last time I wanted something badly, I felt like I made a bad wish and I have spent nearly a decade cleaning up that mess. So I don't want anything. I don't care how much money I make compared to other people or other options, I just want to make enough to take care of my community. I don't care if the job is prestigious or worth talking about at the holiday dinner. I'm neither ambitious nor competitive. I don't need work to keep me entertained or make me feel interesting to others. I am a naturally curious and collaborative person. I want to solve problems, answer questions, and help other people. Give me a career that lets me do those things. There are so many jobs that I can do while doing that. Or there are none. I haven't figured it out totally. 

But everyone keeps asking "what do I want". Can you imagine? My supervisor asks, "where do you see yourself in 5-10 years? What do you want?" And these are all I can think of:

I want to be understood and accepted by my family. 

I want my husband's family to make an effort to understand him and express how much they value him in all of his neurodivergent glory. 

I want to make enough money for T and I to be able to spend more time creating things -- stories, art, woodworking projects, and huge, unimaginable quantities of jam. 

I want to be able to travel to my far away friends every so often. 

I want to be able to be healthy in all of the ways that there are to be healthy. And I want to help my friends and family do the same. 

I want to do work that I'm good at and I want the folks I work with to do what they're good at and all of us to celebrate the strengths we each bring. I want my coworkers not to be threatened by my competency or looking for the times when I will screw up. 

Sure, this list might be able to be used to make a plan to bring me from where I am to some place closer. A career is a tool after all. And these abstract, subjective things can be broken into more bite sized pieces. But I lack the faith in the system. I have seen that you can spend years working hard and find out that you've been had. Your employer can take your labor and run. They don't have to recognize you, promote you, or pay you fairly. I don't even think that my current employer plans to do any of that and they are the least terrible employer that I've had so far. 

So what is the point of wanting such ridiculous, impossible things? What's the point of agonizing over the perfect pieces to break these desires into so that you can fill out the goal sheet a little more decisively? 

Truthfully, I want to work at a place that sees me as a whole person and wants to support my whole person. I do my best to show up as a whole person as an invitation for other people to do the same. Some months, it can really feel like I'm the only one being vulnerable even when I know that's not true. In my earlier church life, I was taught that showing up with authenticity would be rewarded and that's also not true. Reality is somewhere in between. And I'm struggling to want to show up vulnerably and authentically in spaces where it doesn't feel reciprocated. Why should I admit to what I really want? Are you going to help me get there? Or are you going to join the dozens of other voices that immediately start trying to haggle the price of my happiness down to something cheaper and more manageable?

I can feel the Seasonal Affective Disorder playing in my peripheral. Not quite here but also not, not here. 

It is strange how familiar the transition from summer brain to winter brain has become. First, it is just the ghost of a thought, a blurred image in the corner of my eye, a heaviness somewhere between my lungs and heart. Not quite making it hard to breathe or beat -- just making it hard. The pin prick of emotion with no cause clouding the space behind my eyes. 

I think I would call the first stage of SAD, "the desire to feel melancholy.". Because that is what happens. I, ridiculous human that I am, will begin to gather and harvest sadness in all the places that I can find it. Music and books. Real life and fiction. Past and future. It's not hard. There's a lot of sadness in the world. And that's the tricky bit. How do you lean into the melancholy without being swallowed by the abyss?

Accepting my depression helps me locate this pull towards melancholy early and often. When I pretend that I am perfectly capable and healthy, I drown under the weight of misplaced emotion - both melancholy and frustration. Winter never makes any sense when I try to act like I have the same brain that I had in the summer time. The other side of accepting my depression is knowing that I have survived 30+ winters with their season of melancholy and the abyss has yet to swallow me. I visit but I don't stay. 

I say that even though I have known enough people who did not come back out of the abyss to know survival is not a given. Hope is such a fickle thing. 

I've been doing a couple of months of life coaching from someone who specializes on anti-racism, embodiment, and enneagram work. It's a really specific venn diagram and it's not for everyone. But I have loved it. I struggle to find "my people" and to feel understood even in circles and relationships where I have been known for a long time. I carry a lot of anger from the ways that being misunderstood has hurt me. 

Right now, I'm feeling my way through a lot of the embodiment pieces. They are hard. I don't live in my body. I live in my thoughts. My body is where I shove all of the emotions and thoughts that I don't know how to confront. The process of listening to and valuing my body, is a homecoming that I've long heard other people talk about. It never seemed for me. And I think there was a tiny sliver like belief that I was too fractured to come any more home than I already was. 

I've been thinking about this in the context of my own family. The way my parents did or didn't talk about their bodies. The ways they worshipped or condemned pleasure or suffering. And while my parents are wildly different, I realized that my young mind was trying to synthesize all of the messages about existing that I was getting. There was a clear hierarchy of being. 

Soul.

Mind. 

Emotions.

Body. 

But the soul and the mind were so important that they received 80% of the time, energy, attention and love. The emotions and the body had to make do with what remained. And if your body wasn't "healthy" (read: able and thin), then that last bit of energy and time was saved for fixing your body. Loving it much less thanking it was never part of the equation. Moreover, I learned a kind of loving that demanded constant improvement. There was no love in stillness and quiet and just being, especially for the body. What was a body for anyway? Just a temporary shell. Something that really spiritual people quickly outgrew. And yet, it's the only home I've ever known. Isn't that something? The home in which all these multitude of thoughts come together to find action and rest. The table at which all of the emotions dine and find their voice. 

Even within Christian theology it is unclear if there will ever be incorporeal life. The end times prophecies speak so much of a new heave and a new earth and the second coming of Jesus. For centuries, Christian tradition was to bury the body as respectfully as possible so that we could make use of them when everything is made new. So, truthfully, this body may be the only home I ever know in both this life and the next. Why does it get so little time and attention? How come the best kind of love many of our bodies will ever know is pride in their fitness and acceptability? A fragile love that will surely waver as youth slips away. 

31 years I have been with this body and it holds a memory of everything that has ever happened to me. Sometimes, it remembers even better than my mind. I am trying to take more time to stop and say "thank you". For the bodily knowledge that comes as intuition when I need to know something that the mind cannot grasp. For the care my body shows me when it let's me know that I am pushing too hard. For the endurance. For the room to hold both joy and sorrow. For the capacity to experience pleasure and suffering in their turns. These wild extremes held in this small home. 

Bodies are so fragile and so resilient. Prick them and the bleed so easily. Sleep a little funny, they'll let you know. But they don't give up very easily. It's a home that keeps healing as best as it can for way longer than my mind thinks is rational in the grand scheme of human history. 

Which brings me to liberation theology. Mainstream theologians criticize liberation theology as being to fixated on the suffering of Christ, of making his suffering mean more about our suffering than it really does, of not giving the resurrection the center stage that it is due, and finally of not emphasizing the forgiveness of sins nearly enough. And yet, this is what keeps me coming back to liberation theology. That mystery for me is that somehow Christ's body was necessary to his victory. It does not make sense to take a literal reading of the resurrection but to take a metaphorical reading of the importance of the bodily suffering and resurrection. It was his body that was broken for us. And in the last days of Jesus we see him crushed in all ways. Abandoned by his closest friends. God himself looks away. His body crushed. Stripped of every emotional and mental comfort. The resurrection is total restoration, and something most of us who have been betrayed and crushed can only dream of. 

Spiritualized suffering is worshipped. If I said that I was tired of my step dad's emotional abuse, my church would have been only crickets. So I learned to tell the spiritual story. You aren't' abused by your stepfather because his trauma keeps him from emotionally regulating and caring for himself, you're fighting a spiritual battle for his soul. If you say the former, the church would hush and stare and stumble over their words. But if you say the latter, they will clap and say hallelujah. But both were true. But liberation theology looks at the abuse and says words like "patriarchy" and "generational trauma" and so on until you know that it isn't your fault, you aren't alone, and there are solutions besides praying and hoping that some outside force intervenes before you break totally apart. In such a context, resurrection feels more hopeful and less likely to be more spiritualized nonsense. A real experience for both the body and soul. 

And isn't the body the battle ground for so many of us? I know the places that my body has tucked specific traumas and stresses. I know which years of silently suffering affected which muscles. So when Jesus comes to someone like me, I want him to touch those places in my body and bring healing there. When we are resurrected, I want this body to have a second chance not to swallow all of that bitterness. I feel the need quite often these days to apologize to my body for the ways I asked it to carry more than we could, for the ways I ignored it's messages that I was past my limits and hurting myself. 

What a long, long year. September is one of my "new year anchors". I kind of ignore January. Seasonal Affective Disorder means that I never feel like doing anything more or new or extra or healthy in January. And then there's my old friend February. But March and September are my weigh points. March starts with my birthday and ends with spring. A perfect time for new habits and reflection. 

September closes out the heat of the summer and has some of the most beautiful mornings and evenings. It also has both my wedding anniversary and my work anniversary at my current company (7 years for one and 6 for the other if anyone is counting). Lots of things to check in on and think about. Plus, autumn is like a second spring in the gardening world. Lots of plants need their seeds to experience the cold and damp of winter before they are ready to sprout in the spring. Lots of plants benefit from growing roots over the winter so they can really be ready for spring foliage and summer fruit. 

Today was the first day in long, long string of days that have been wrapped into a long string of weeks that I woke up clear headed and feeling like myself. Can you believe that I had actually forgotten that it used to be normal for me to pop out of bed with curiosity and chaos in my brain? Chronic pain is weird. It manages to both feel more and less terrible than I let on to other people. 

Most of my TMJ pain doesn't feel worth mentioning because most people just want you to tell them when you're better. But it's been 10 months and some days are better but a lot of days are just...the same. Most of the pain isn't very acute. And I sleep through a lot. It's not good sleep and I've been feeling worn down now for so long. On the pain scale where 10 is so bad, all you can do is try to count how many bones there are in your face that are throbbing but you don't have the attention span to finish counting so you just count and get interrupted by the pain, count and get interrupted over and over again, I live at a 2 or a 3. 

Spending 10 months at a 2.5 feels like being a car with the headlights left on. It's not a big problem, but then the battery gets drained and the car isn't as reliable as it used to be. How many times can you leave the lights on and drain the battery before other problems start to arise? Every night for a week? Four out of seven nights for how many months?

It's hard to call myself a morning person anymore. Mornings used to be my best time. And I loved mornings alone best. A secret hour or two before the world breaks in, speeds up, and has you running. But not anymore. There are no secret hours. Just ibuprofen and trying to nurse my way into functioning. I miss the way I used to be. 

I also miss just feeling alright without effort. Do you know how hard I work just to keep my pain at a 2 or 3? I stretch, take magnesium, get jaw massages, wear my night guard, am vigilant about unresolved conflicts that might leave stress hanging out in my jaw, neck, and shoulder. I devote hours each week to basic upkeep (or down keep) of all of the known triggers of TMJ. And I'm grateful that these things help, but I grieve the body I used to have and the time I used to spend on other things. 

I don't really feel like myself lately and I have definitely had less capacity for all of the relationships that require me to do any "heavy lifting". "I'm sorry that you need me to guess what you're feeling and comfort you, my emotional intelligence is at a record low because I haven't slept in 10 months." This has also made me significantly less empathetic. I don't mean to. It's just that the battery is dead. Trust me, I wish I could swim through your emotions with the ease that I used to and help you make sense of them, but I can't. I'll drown because I lack the stamina these days. May we all ask for what we need directly and with kindness. 

Oriah

I've started a coaching program and I think it's the best decision that I've made in a long, long time. Never have I had a group of people hold all of my pain and hopes so gently and so firmly. This week, we met to talk about the book "The Invitation" by Oriah which is an exposition of her poem by the same name. It's staying with me, coming back in parts and pieces. Today, the piece that comes back is this: 

"It doesn't interest me
if the story you are telling me
is true.
I want to know if you can
disappoint another
to be true to yourself.
If you can bear
the accusation of betrayal
and not betray your own soul.
If you can be faithless
and therefore trustworthy."

I think a lot about that last line: if you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy. I think about the people I have disappointed, the ways I have changed that they have not liked, the ways I have refused to change and so on. I think about my family, my relationship to religion, my career and so on. There is a sea of people's expectations and I am floating on this verse, holding my head up to catch a breath. 

I have this ache to be understood. And it is deep as well as old. As a kid who was often coached and coerced into understanding and extending sympathy to irresponsibly adults in my life without that call for understanding and compassion being reciprocated, I feel this like a wound I am afraid will never close. And I think I'm afraid that it will never get better. Maybe it won't. There are a number of family members who show little interest in understanding me rather than trying to change or educate me into something more palatable. Maybe we will always have this chasm between us. And I think I'm just trying to live my way through the question, "what then?" The answer is, "I will go on."

The Invitation
It doesn't interest me
what you do for a living.
I want to know
what you ache for
and if you dare to dream
of meeting your heart's longing.

It doesn't interest me
how old you are.
I want to know
if you will risk
looking like a fool
for love
for your dream
for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me
what planets are
squaring your moon...
I want to know
if you have touched
the centre of your own sorrow
if you have been opened
by life's betrayals
or have become shrivelled and closed
from fear of further pain.

I want to know
if you can sit with pain
mine or your own
without moving to hide it
or fade it
or fix it.

I want to know
if you can be with joy
mine or your own
if you can dance with wildness
and let the ecstasy fill you
to the tips of your fingers and toes
without cautioning us
to be careful
to be realistic
to remember the limitations
of being human.

It doesn't interest me
if the story you are telling me
is true.
I want to know if you can
disappoint another
to be true to yourself.
If you can bear
the accusation of betrayal
and not betray your own soul.
If you can be faithless
and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see Beauty
even when it is not pretty
every day.
And if you can source your own life
from its presence.

I want to know
if you can live with failure
yours and mine
and still stand at the edge of the lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon,
"Yes."

It doesn't interest me
to know where you live
or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up
after the night of grief and despair
weary and bruised to the bone
and do what needs to be done
to feed the children.

It doesn't interest me
who you know
or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand
in the centre of the fire
with me
and not shrink back.

It doesn't interest me
where or what or with whom
you have studied.
I want to know
what sustains you
from the inside
when all else falls away.

I want to know
if you can be alone
with yourself
and if you truly like
the company you keep
in the empty moments.

A Prophecy for the Privileged and Uncompassionate

There will be a day when you lose something--your health or comfort, your wealth or a person important to you. You will wonder if God has turned away. You will be crushed as all people are at one point or another, but it will not feel like an experience common to people. It will feel unique as though no one else could possibly grasp your personal suffering much less stand up under it. 

Everyone in your life familiar with suffering will be tempted to turn away. Many will. Everyone in your life unfamiliar with suffering will definitely pull away and distance themselves, cutting you twice. Those who help the most will be the people you have previously looked down on. It is an old story and it will someday be your story. 

Signed, 

a former pentecostal who still senses things from time to time