It’s funny how sometimes you run from words for what you feel. You dance around it, writing sentences, paragraphs, full stories that never quite speak of it; they are all seemingly unrelated symptoms of something more. And then you lie in bed at night, staring at the ceiling, realizing you don’t feel anything. Or maybe you do, but you don’t want to. You don’t want to think about it.
You don’t want to think about the ways you’ve failed.
You don’t want to think about the “no” that “is what it is.”
You think if you open the door to the pain, you’ll stop breathing.
But you always have pain. It isn’t just going to disappear. I think sometimes life is a slow mourning period for innocence lost, for childhood when even what wasn’t safe felt safe because we just didn’t know it all.
I feel all the time. When I’m asked to leave God out of my writing. When I’m expected to check me at the church door. When I react to – against – my kids. When I get rejection I knew was coming. When I try something and fail. When I receive criticism.
I get stuck between worlds. The functional daily routine pushes me forward in spite of the wounded parts of me, the little kid inside that is slowly being forced to grow up and leave hope aside. I can survive all right. But survival isn’t living. It doesn’t feel honest. It doesn’t leave room for love. It doesn’t make room for childlike faith in Jesus.
You have to look the pain in the face sometime. You have to open up and let it just be a part of you. You have to acknowledge God in it – because whether we choose it or not, pain is part of “all our ways.”
That breath you’re already holding? You have to take a deep one and plunge into the thing you think will stop it forever.
Otherwise, everything stops.
At least if you feel it, you know you’re alive.
“I think sometimes life is a slow mourning period for innocence lost, for childhood when even what wasn’t safe felt safe because we just didn’t know it all.”
There is a song by a woman named Plumb–I don’t know what that’s all about–that just undoes me. It’s a song from a mother to her daughter, and she sings:
“My heart is torn just in knowing you’ll someday see the truth from lies.”
That’s what your post reminded me of.
I linger between survival and living, and lately I think I’ve spent too long in survival mode. Not feeling is a horrible place to be. I am not there yet, where I can truly identify with the depth of my pain, pain that no one sees and that I cannot put words into. But I know it’s there. Thank you for sharing your heart today.