A letter to my younger self.

Life is hard. That's normal and it's okay. Trying to figure out why it's hard isn't really worth it. Just know that things that are hard are usually worth it. Life is worth it.

Your thoughts and feelings may not always match what people say you should think or feel. Your goals and desires may not look like how others define success.

You may see things reflected in the world around you or in the church about how women should be and it makes you scratch your head because you and many of the women you know don't fit in those boxes. Constantly, you'll hear, you should, you should, you should ... but you don't have to listen to it.

That urge you have to shrink down in your seat, to cross your arms, to hunch over, to withdraw to the corner or apologize for taking up space is going to be there, but you don't have to listen to it.

That immediate response you have to apologize when someone bumps into you or when you stumble over your words will be on the tip of your tongue, but you don't have to say it.

You don't have to be anything or check off the should boxes.  You never have to make yourself small. You never have to apologize for taking up space.

You were meant to live big. To live into your gifts and into your strengths. When people stay true to themselves and live into who they were created to be...that's big and that's powerful.

You carry a lot of shame and that makes you feel small.

Shame knows no boundaries. It eats at our souls and constantly makes us believe we're not enough. But we don't have to listen to it.

Shame makes us believe something is wrong with us. That we are wrong. That we can't be who we are. But that's a lie.

Shame flourishes in the dark. It whispers that no one will understand, that we can't admit to this and we're the only one.

That's bullshit.

We are meant to be who we are.We are meant to take up space. We are not meant to be silent. We are meant to speak our truth.

So who should you be?

You should be you. Your full self with all of the messiness, anxiety, joy, love, anger, sadness, craziness, humor and personality that makes you, you.

You are powerful.

You are strong.

You are enough.

You can do hard things.

You can be brave.

So be who you are and by doing that you'll help others find the freedom and confidence to do the same.

What Living Means to Me.

Probably at least once a month I ask the question, What is life? What does it even mean? Why are we even here? What's the point? I basically have an existential crisis on the regular.

The other day while I was brushing my teeth I was thinking about this. (What...am I the only person who has an existential crisis while brushing my teeth?) Why do we get up and do life every day? What are other people's motivations for going through life? What's the point of life? How is it that someone who does a repetitive monotonous job every day can have more joy than someone who claims to be doing exactly what they want to do? The questions continued tumbling in my brain, but then a thought stopped the tumbling.

The point of life is to live.

Duh, right?

I think this idea "to live" can mean different things to different people.

To me "to live" means to be fully who I am.

It means to do things that make me come alive.

It means finding joy in the little things and when I can't do that resting in the knowledge that one day soon I'll be able to again.

It means to love and invest in the people around me.

It means finding gratitude in what I've been given.

It means embracing wonder and being remarkably curious.

It means moving forward and growing.

It means acknowledging all the seasons of life and understanding we don't always live in a world of summers.

It means accepting all the parts of myself, the parts I don't like, the parts I love, and the parts I would rather ignore.

It means desiring wholeness and doing the hard work it takes to live into wholeness.

It means resting in my God-breathed worth and doing my damnedest to treat each and every person I come in contact with knowing they have God-breathed worth too.

It means realizing the point of life is to live. We aren't here to just exist and float through life. We're meant to be who we are. We're meant to love each other well. We're meant to be a part of something bigger than ourselves that involves a whole lot of love and a whole lot of wholeness...some people call it shalom.

The world needs more people who realize the point of life is to live! One of my all-time favorite quotes is from Howard Thurman:

"Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive."

Figure out what makes you come alive. Figure out what living means to you.

Because the world needs you.

The world needs more people to be who they are and not who they think they should be.

It needs more people to come alive.

To live from our scars.

On the palm of my left hand, under my thumb, lives a scar. You can barely see it, but whenever I notice it I remember how I got it. My brother and I were little and we made a fort outside with old fencing as the barrier. My brother decided the way to get in was to jump over the fence. Because I wanted to do everything he did, I ran after him and took the leap. I didn't quite make it and my hand landed right on a spoke of the fence. There was blood, tears, a wound, but then healing and eventually a scar.

I recently heard Nadia Bolz-Weber speak and she made a statement that has stayed with me.

"When I preach, I preach from my scars, not my wounds."

When we preach or write or communicate in general, it can be easy to do it from our wounds. It's fresh, we're fired up, someone says something that triggers that wave of pain. Or we speak from that place where we haven't quite experienced healing.

It's okay that those places exist.

But do we live out of those places? Are we living from our wounds or our scars?

Think of your life like a water pitcher.  All the water inside is your life, your energy, your love. This sustains you and you can pour it out to others. At the bottom of the pitcher are rocks. When we're wounded the rocks float around in the water. There's a chance we could pour some of our rocks into someone else's pitcher.

When we've been wounded, it's easy to stay there. It's easy to not confront the hurt in order to heal. Hurt people, hurt people. People who live from their wounds, wound other people.

So how do we live from our scars instead of our wounds? Everyone is different with what that looks like, but I will tell you this. Everyone has wounds. Everyone.

Wounds can't turn into scars without healing and healing isn't easy. In order to get those rocks in the water pitcher to settle permanently on the bottom so they're there, but not being poured out into others, we've gotta heal.

When we live from our scars,  it's not ignoring the wound or the pain, rather it's acknowledging that it's there and is a part of us. It just doesn't dictate the way we live, the way we treat people, the way we communicate or the way we make decisions.

While I can't speak for what healing looks like for everyone, there are things I do that help me live from my scars rather than my wounds.

1. Counseling. Sometimes it's hard/impossible to walk through healing alone. Having someone to walk alongside you through that journey who has the skills and ability to hold up a mirror, to listen, or to affirm is priceless.
2. Time. I don't think the saying "time heals all wounds" is necessarily true. Time may heal all wounds, but the scar is still there. It's always going to be a part of you, but it doesn't have to define you. Do we take the time to walk through the hard things, to feel the grief, to lament what we need to lament, to not be okay in order to experience the healing?
3. Writing. I write to process and it's very clear the writings that originate from my wounds. Those are the ones most people will never see. For me it's writing, for others it's dancing or singing or running, whatever makes you feel most alive and helps you process. Figure that out and do that.
4. Self-care. The previous things mentioned are all ways I practice self-care and without them I would be lost. We need to realize that we must invest in ourselves if we truly want to invest in others. Remember the water pitcher? Doing the work of healing allows our wounds to turn into scars and settle to the bottom of the pitcher. Practicing self-care, engaging in life-giving practices and relationships allow life, energy and love to pour into our lives. When we do this our pitcher will overflow and we'll have what it takes to pour into others. Self-care allows us to love others and interact with them out of the overflow of our own life. It allows us to not pour our rocks into their water pitcher.

Everyone has blood, everyone has tears, everyone has wounds and everyone has scars. While one size doesn't fit all I do believe everyone is meant to experience freedom and healing so they don't live from their wounds, but from their scars.

I want myself and others to live healthy and thriving lives where we're able to come alive. We can't do that without doing the hard work of healing. This hard work leads towards wholeness.

Healing is hard, but it's worth it.

Living from our scars rather than our wounds is hard, but it's worth it.

Half.

We're not meant to be half. One of the worst sayings in the world is, "you complete me." Thanks a lot Jerry McGuire... and just so you know...no one can complete you. You're meant to be whole on your own. I believe everyone wants to be whole. No one wants to just be a half, or be just enough, or 2/3 complete.

I don't think everyone desires happiness, I think everyone desires wholeness.

I just finished reading the book, Learning to Walk in the Dark, by Barbara Brown Taylor and it's a great read. [I highly recommend all of her books] Taylor helps rewrite the narrative around darkness and our misconceptions and tendency to only associate what is good with light. She encourages readers to see what God could be teaching you "in the dark."

You can't have dark without light and light without dark. They're half of a whole. You need one and the other. You may not always want to acknowledge the wholeness that comes when there's light and dark because of fear or anxiety or uncertainty, but it's true.

Too often we try to be a half. We try to only accept the good. We try to only feel the happy things and push away the sadness, the anger or the unhappiness. We ignore that shadow side of ourself because maybe we don't want to deal with it or maybe because we were told it wasn't okay to have it. But, when we refuse to acknowledge that the hard times are just as much a part of us as the good times or don't take the time to realize that the sadness we feel is just as important as the happiness, we aren't living in wholeness. [Sidenote: Please watch Inside Out for further evidence of why this is important]

Barbara Brown Taylor has this to say:

To be human is to live by sunlight and moonlight, with anxiety and delight, admitting limits and transcending them, falling down and rising up. To want a life with only half of these things in it is to want half a life, shutting the other half away where it will not interfere with one's bright fantasies of the way things ought to be.

To be whole we have to accept the sunlight and the moonlight, the anxiety and delight, the light and the dark. To be human is to realize we can both fail and succeed, we can be happy and sad, and we can have limits and transcend them.

To be human isn't to be half...it's to be whole. And to be whole isn't about just "good" things or just "light" things...it's accepting all of who we are, all of what we've experienced and remembering that we live by both the sunlight and the moonlight.

 

Photo courtesy of pxleyes.com

Whole.

Today I hit a milestone and I am really excited about it. It's not like the jumping for joy, look what I did excitement, but more of a I feel at peace and feel like I can kick back and relax and it enjoy it kind of excitement. It took a lot of work to get here and it was probably one of the hardest things I've ever done. Almost a year ago exactly I started counseling. I wrote more about that here, but it has been quite a journey. I'm not shy about sharing my experiences with counseling and how beneficial I think it is for anyone and everyone and that it's been one of the best decisions I could make for myself. I highly recommend it.

About six months ago I started a type of therapy called EMDR, it's kinda hard to explain, but it's a process that helps you let go of painful memories, experiences or beliefs and helps remove negative cognitions that one has always had through stimulation resembling REM sleep. This stimulation helps your brain process things and resolve feelings and beliefs not yet resolved. Sometimes I just explain it like magic because of how effective it is and I don't really understand how it works so well, your brain and what it can do is cool, you guys!

Today I finished EMDR and boy, has it been a long journey! I'm not quite sure I knew what I was getting myself into when I agreed to try this. At times I thought I was going crazy, other times I never knew I could feel so many things, at other moments I wanted to quit, and most of the time I knew it was exactly what I needed.

One day within this process my counselor told me, everyone desires to be...I thought she was going to say happy, but she didn't, she said...everyone desires to be whole. And I thought, yes! That is so much better than just being happy. That is what I want, I want to be whole. I want to live my life making healthy choices that contribute to my wholeness. Yes, I want to be happy, but I know that's a fleeting feeling that is based on circumstances, but being whole is not. Being whole is knowing who you are, loving who you are, knowing that you're someone who is always growing, evolving and learning, showing yourself grace, acknowledging all that you feel, and the freedom to claim and live into your story and out of your wholeness loving others well. I want to be a whole person, that is what I desire.

Today's milestone of completing EMDR in counseling in no way says, hey I made it! I'm whole and that's it! I will always continue to improve myself, to continue to be healthy so that I can continue to be whole, but today I am excited that I have hit a milestone on this journey. I have shed a lot of tears, done a lot of work and gone through a lot of crazy to get here, but it's worth it.

I think if we asked a lot of people what they want it really can come down to wanting to be whole. Whole people, complete people, knowing who we are and staying true to that. I am so incredible thankful that this process has been such a huge part of my life and my wholeness.

So as I sit here, kicked back and relaxed, excited about this completed milestone, I'm thankful for the fact that it is because of this that I can continue to be the person I want to be on this great journey of life creating and living the story I know I am meant to live.