On Monday, she told me that it was time to let the real Kelly come out. My heart cracked, just a little, just enough. My mind went into slow motion, staring at her words, as my own words spun around us. I felt dizzy, a little disoriented, a little hopeful.
I have always written better than I talked. The words that flow easily from my fingers and sing away in my brain, they get all jumbled up in my mouth. The open air steals the magic that caused me to speak them in the first place. The look in the eyes of my listeners. The way they gloss over my words, my foot in my mouth, how I become invisible…
She said I need some time to unwind, maybe two or three months to process what my years have taught me. I felt relieved on Monday; now I feel small. I want to disappear. I feel too much, think too much, say too much. I am not spiritual enough, healthy enough, open enough, closed enough.
Someone once told me that I needed more life experience to be considered qualified to “be a speaker.” He might as well have patted me on the head as I am tempted to do with my four-year-old sometimes. I was twenty-four.
I didn’t think it would be hard to take this on. To come out of hiding. To identify my reasons for it, and to figure out a practical way to be me with others, without all the shame. But right now, there is nothing BUT shame. Nothing BUT inadequacy, certain failure. I feel like I’m letting go of my life to find it again. Like the life I’ve been clinging to isn’t life at all.
I wanted to be a child prodigy. I wrote two novels when I was seventeen years old. I submitted them for publication. I knew the grammar, the syntax, the formula. But I didn’t know what was realistic. I didn’t know that you couldn’t grow up as sheltered as I did, surrounded by books, and not know what life was all about. At least not the life everybody else was living.
“Intimacy issues…” The plexiglass feeling that locks me in on my bad days came into sharp focus, like an automatic zoom lens on a high-tech camera. My words stopped, like they’d hit the glass. There was no point in talking past it. Nobody would hear me anyway.
I had a friend tell me once that I needed to live life – not just observe it. I rolled my eyes at him. People-watching was my favorite thing. I loved watching them laugh, seeing how they loved one another, how they lived. I loved them by seeing them. But I was always curious. What if I tried…? What if I did…? What if I said…?
If there is one thing I know, it is that God wants my mess right now. He doesn’t want me to try to gloss over it, to attempt more spirituality for His sake. He doesn’t want me to be anything other than I am in this moment with Him or with anyone. I prayed for humility. This is how He humbles me, letting me see what I am not, showing me how to consider others better than myself. This is how I am learning to be kind, as old wounds rip open and my need for compassion is the only thing I can identify in myself.
I wrote in my journal once about the girl in me, twelve going on eighteen going on one thousand years old. I wrote how she was just beginning to venture into a meadow, emerging from the dark forest surrounding it, how for one glorious moment she found herself in the sunlight and ran with wild, spinning joy into the day. She was my picture of “abandon.” And in the next sentence I told what happened to her, how love itself threw a stunning blow that felled her, how she crawled back to hide in the darkness, no longer able to believe the light was for her.
I wrote of a heart laid out on a table, and of a pocket-knife used to rend it. I wrote things I have never said to anyone, only screamed wordless into the cold night as I collapsed into pain I had never known, pain I still don’t understand.
If the sacrifices of the Lord are a broken and contrite heart, if I am to be a living sacrifice, if I am to be nothing but clay containing Someone else’s treasure, I wish to do it without feeling. Without caring. Without being broken again. Without living or speaking or daring to enter the light again only to be shot down. I used to wish I could fly; now I want to be nothing.
I’ve really been through so little in my physical experience. I wasn’t abused or molested. I didn’t have eating disorders or do self-destructive things to myself. Almost no one close to me has died. God has been good to me. I have the husband I always wanted, children to love, family, and a few friends. We have enough to eat, and a place to live. I have a career and clients I love. I even have candles to light at night when I want.
I have all that I need – but I feel trapped and duped and invisible, and God wants me to become less before He’ll ever make me more. Or so I’ve been told…
“A bruised reed He will not break…”
“I have held My peace a long time,
I have been still and restrained Myself.
Now I will cry like a woman in labor,
I will pant and gasp at once.
I will lay waste the mountains and hills,
And dry up all their vegetation;
I will make the rivers coastlands,
And I will dry up the pools.
I will bring the blind by a way they did not know;
I will lead them in paths they have not known.
I will make darkness light before them,
And crooked places straight.
These things I will do for them,
And not forsake them.”– Is. 42:3, 14-16