End

People talk about coming to the end of yourself. I’ve talked about it myself. I’ve been there and back, and I’ve half a God-desire to live there all the time, because that is where humility lives, in that deepest place of need.

But the other half of me… I don’t want to live broken. And I realize that as close to the end of myself as I may feel sometimes, I know I’m not really there when I feel myself pushing back angry. Sometimes it is only on the other side of my anger that I find the end of me.

I think I get angry because I am scared that the end of me is the end of everything. Because if I have one more need I can’t meet myself, I’m going to overwhelm everyone who loves me. Because I should have known better than to get to this point in the first place.

When I reach that point, when my anger boils over and my body betrays me, there’s nothing left to do but to fall in, collapse into whatever arm is there to support me – if there is one.

I’m living raw lately. Physical depression plays around the edges of my consciousness every day lately, and exhausted hopelessness about relationships and the course my life has taken.

I look at decisions I made years ago, and I remember what I wasn’t thinking then, hate myself for making them when there were others involved. It seems I lived better when I didn’t have choices, when my parents decided about the moves and I just found myself in new places, and made my place wherever I was.

I always wondered what it was like to grow up in one place, and I thought about it again last night, about finding a little of myself here, with my great-grandfather and my people who came before me in Charleston – it’s a little like coming home to live here. But I haven’t always lived here, and I don’t know the ways the people around me understand their lives in the light of the things that never changed.

All my life is change, and I am always the stranger, never the insider. I think people like me, we’re always the most at home with the ones we love. But when those relationships become strained, it makes us wonder where our place is, if we have a right to exist at all.

There is something about the will of God that comforts me now, something about His sovereignty, the knowledge that where I am now is where He knew I would be, that this day was a day He wrote for me in His book. It is as if He made the decision, and I can let go of my right to “choose,” find myself in this place, and make a place here, like being a kid again with a Father looking out for me.

I realized the other day that I hate my own drama. As if I have a place to determine whether it’s okay or not. As if the clay can say to the potter, “why have you made me this way? I could have done a better job on me…”

I’ve gotten emails and notes from a few of you who are praying for me. Thank you. There are things that have happened in the last few weeks I don’t know if I can ever write. Pete and I are both tired, so near the end of ourselves all the time lately. I have wondered some days if I am not in danger of a nervous breakdown. I feel a bit as though I am observing myself from a distance. Lately, I just want to know someone is near, that I can just be, and it will be okay. This isn’t all there is to me.

I am just a few projects out from finishing up the massive to-do list that backlogged behind my rebranding, and then I’ll be able to treat this mess in my body, be able to let down for a couple of months and find my place again. You know, after I find the end of me again. I’m praying that this end won’t be a real end, that it will lead to something new.