When I was a kid, I remember my dad using a turn of phrase that he had learned from his mom. It was to describe adolescence in a girl. What a weird time in the life of a human - to be an adolescent girl. "Too old for toys, too young for boys". That was it. It was meant to be a funny way to describe that strange pergatorial state of being so 100% of 2 totally different things. To be honest, I originally found the phrase to be insultingly hopeless.
It wasn't though. I get it now. I get it now, because I'm here again, but it isn't the becoming more obviously adult-like or the moving forward from the days of play. It's the becoming of myself a version that has grown more instead of just grown up, and it's the moving away from the thing that had stunted me - the dark.
I had a lot of dark days and even darker nights. I will never forget the countless nights I stayed up after everyone else in my house had gone to sleep and laying flat in the carpet to show humility to the God I hoped was listening as I wept long enough and hard enough to leave puddles in the carpet of my living room. It was like a wrestling match I couldn't win to just convince the One I felt confident could change everything to just go ahead and change everything. Each morning was such a sickening realization that, though the sun had come up, the day had remained as dark as the night that had ushered it in. Years of this. For years I felt almost tangibly this oppression - this darkness. It sucked the oxygen out of every possible happiness. It completely consumed me, and no matter how hard I tried to keep my hands clutched around the things that I wanted so badly, all that was ever left were crumbs.
Things have changed though.
Last month I went on a trip with some friends of mine. About a year ago, one of my sweetest and dearest friends of my whole life convinced me to join a direct sales company with her. She hesitated knowing how much I detest this type of business, but we sat and talked and messaged and video chatted for hours thereafter about how to do it all in a way that would work for what we actually wanted to have. The result has been that we have gathered into our fold a larger group of friends of ours from present day all the way back to the childhood she and I began together. This company held a conference, and a few of us were able to go.
The first night we were there, I stood in the bathroom at the sink getting ready for the evening, and as I heard in the same room with me friends that I had known really, seriously almost my whole life but hadn't seen in years, I thought "Gosh, this really didn't even cost that much to get here. I mean, it was tight for me, but we could do this every year. By next year it won't be a problem at all.......Geez. I mean why are we all just now doing this? We should have been doing this every year already! Why weren't we?" And then I felt the blush of embarrassment creep up the cheeks of my soul because I had insensitively blurted out in my own mind this thing that was so obvious - the dark. It hadn't ever happened because every good and right and growing thing had been forced to blend into the shadow or shrivel up and die under the eclipse that the dark had created.
But I was there standing in that bathroom listening to the music of these voices of precious friends, so...that meant...
If I could actually see all these people face to face and actually hear their voices and actually be in that hotel room at that moment, one could only conclude that the darkness had lost its ability to rip out of my hands and my heart the things that I wanted to keep. It was gone. It was powerless. All those dark days and the darker nights...were over.
I finished what I was doing at the mirror and went back to my collection of smiling, chattering friends and took my first opportunity to tell them what my heart had just realized. I choked back tears while my friends shouted through their own sympathetic smiles for me to not cry right now! I smiled through the fog in my eyes and exulted in my new reality.
The dark days are over.
There's this thing happening now though. In passing from the thing of the darkness, naturally I am also crossing TO something. The light. The breathable air. The freedom. But it's a transition. It is not something abrupt like the last measure of one song and the beginning of a new one. It's more like I'm in the chorus between two versus or those strange few notes at the key change. I'm supremely grateful for the fact that this new melody is quite obviously already here, but there is part of me that just doesn't....
I just feel like those strange few notes. I know I'm not the measures of song from before and my life is no longer the narrative of the preceding verses, but I feel so "in between" because I can't yet see or hear what it is that I'm about to me or maybe even most of what I have already grown to be as these "notes" of transition play themselves out.
I don't like it.
I am a very concrete thinker. Just as linear as they come, I think. This is why most of my prose is really a compilation of analogies. I have to have a way to anchor something so abstract as a feeling in a soul to something I know I've seen or have at least learned about. There is no anchor for the unknown. There is not map where surprise is the only choice you have.
I have a tendency. I like to go back to what I know. Through the course of this year, as I have grown out of the "too old for toys" parallel to my experiences, I have felt a lot like I have just floated. I mean, really I have just kept very busy. I have 4 children. My husband works 2 jobs. I am essentially and really starting a small business this year with a team of people that is constantly and beautifully growing in number to whom I owe everything I can possibly offer in the way of support and instruction. I work full time hours while I also perform all the wonder and privilege of full time care to my youngest child who does not go to daycare. I handle most of the household tasks mainly because my husband isn't realistically home enough hours to manage much (although he is the first to help at his first opportunity). So I have enjoyed the busyness, but there are moments of silence. Those are what leave me confused. Those are the times that leave me feeling a bit lost because...
I am a doer. I am tenacious. I do not understand giving up on the things that are important to me. This has gotten me in trouble in the past because there are pursuits I should have abandoned long before I did. There is this thing in me that makes me say to the whole world that obstacles are something that just require strategy and persistence. This is the part of me that has survived some things that have robbed others of all their hope. This is something that is fueled by a Hope that comes from beyond my own person, but it is there and it has served me well. It's just that I don't actually need that intensity anymore.
Have you ever been to someone's house or have you ever been the person that gets up during your after dinner conversation and starts fiddling with a shelf of fallen over books or scrubbing an already clean countertop and then says "I just am not a person that likes to sit down. I have to be doing something"? It's like there's no off switch. It can create an atmosphere of anxiousness because of this inability to lower their intensity level. It's usually not good, because that comment of "I am not a person that likes to sit down" is usually a response to someone that says "Why don't you just leave that and come sit it in here while we talk?" The counter scrubber or book straightener doesn't realize something so tragic - their audience is asking for their undivided attention. They actually need that from the counter scrubber, and the counter scrubber's response is...insulting. It is at best illogical but at worst, it sends the message that the question asker is less important that the counter scrubber's compulsion to feel productive by completing tasks instead of investing in the heart of the question asker.
My spirit is the counter scrubber. I have had to stay so hyper vigilent for so many consecutive years and be ready to push through such strange and intense struggles that I have fidgeted in the living room of my life until I find myself standing and fiddling with things while I listened to all the beauty and newly lit wonder that my present life affords me. In my mind, I'm still offering attention to all of this beauty, but I have, indeed, felt a little rude to it because I keep finding myself feeling driven to do things like figuratively scrub the surfaces of my circumstances when...they're already in order. It has felt very off.
So I know WHY my heart has done all this - I had no choice but to live in a state of being ready to conquer things that have been my wildest nightmares at an hour of my life when I should have been at rest. This happened for so long that it has been ingrained in me.
It's is, though, a problem. I have now noticed the inappropriateness of my timing of the expending of this nervous energy. It can't stay like this because why? Because even if I feel like I'm looking up enough times to meet the gaze of the beauty in my life, invariably, there is also time that I'm spending looking down away from it at something that no longer needs my attention. Even if I feel like I'm listening to every word the beauty is saying to me, the scratch of the sponge or the flow of water over it to rinse away problems that aren't even there is going to drown out some of the precious noise. And then there's what I'm doing with the hands of my spirit. What if the beauty in my life should be held in my hands so I can really feel it and have it near to me, but my hands are busy with work that fills a need of fake productivity that will yield absolutely nothing except the enablement of a version of me that no longer exists?
It's time to sit now and enjoy the beauty. This is going to be hard for me, but it's time, and it's really just a choice to be made. The threats that breathed down my neck before have completely died. The miles of journey away from the land of withered dreams and toxic air have been traveled. They are behind me now. I'm at the new place. There is no more fire burning away the beauty in my life. I don't have to protect myself from that any more. The sad notes of the old song or the previous verse have played, and the evidence of their noise is fading to a decibel no one can hear anymore. Yes I am still in a transition, but honestly, I'm at the top end of it now.
This is seriously terrifying to me. Do you know this part of life where, if you go through a higher incidence of repeated or constant loss, you just feel sure that every lovely thing is dangled in front of your eyes just so it can be cruelly snatched away? I guess that feeling is the transition. The thing, though, is that there have now been several years where lovely things aren't dangled in front of my eyes. They are wrapped up and then set in my hands - these times, these experiences, these changes in who I am, are gifts that I have now been allowed to keep. And now I am starting to see more and more and bigger and bigger gifts being sent in my direction, and the nature of these gifts is that they are impossible to steal.
So I need to have a seat, don't I? It is really finally time for my soul to rest and enjoy all of this, because we have pushed really hard to get here. We have walked all those miles and made it through all those wars, and now it's quiet. Now it's time to dwell in the peace that I was commanded to find. Now it's time to be healed.
