Showing up and telling the truth

"People are truth tellers. We are born to make our unknown known. We will find somewhere to do it. So in private, with the booze or the over-shopping or the alcohol or the food, we tell the truth. We say actually I’m not fine. Because we don’t feel safe telling that truth in the real world we make our own little world and that’s addiction"
I've been thinking a lot about stories lately. In one of my classes for school I'm knee deep in research on issues like gender identity and abortion and sexual abuse and eating disorders and self injury and I'm coming to conclusions about what the church should do in these situations. And as my fellow classmates pipe up with ideas about being a light in a dark world and holding to our convictions and not tolerating sin, I feel this tiny voice stirring inside of me that says "No! That's not the way its supposed to be."
There's something inside of me that doesn't sit well with creating opposing teams, creating an us and a them. Because, as Glennon Doyle Melton says, "We belong to each other."
Because I've been that girl and words spoken in a classroom about what the church should be doing are great but they mean nothing when the church isn't actually rallying around the people who are struggling, regardless of their sin, regardless of the nature of their addiction, regardless of their degree of 'not ok.'
Maybe this is a different story, or maybe its all part of the same story, but I don't feel called to be here anymore. Here being Bible College. Here being surrounded by Christians and the church. And its not that I don't love people that love Jesus. It's that I see Jesus in the eyes of the transgendered teen. When I look into the face of a baby at the women's shelter I volunteer at, I feel like I am looking at the face of God. When a teen tells me her story of living with an eating disorder or having been abused, I feel like I am being ushered into something sacred. And its not to say that all of those issues don't exist within the church. They do, we churchy folks are just better at putting on masks and pretending they only exist for people out there.
I've decided I'm one of the people out there. I'm tired of putting on the 'I'm fine' mask and not telling the truth out loud.
“I want to be outside with the misfits, with the rebels, the dreamers, second-chance givers, the radical grace lavishers, the ones with arms wide open, the courageously vulnerable, and among even—or maybe especially—the ones rejected by the Table as not worthy enough or right enough.”
I've been telling the truth. Just not out loud. I remember a moment a few months ago when I was in the middle of an episode where I found it hard to breathe and I texted my boyfriend the words 'I'm not ok.'
It was the first time I had ever admitted it out loud, to another person.
I write cryptically about how messed up I am, partly because I write naturally poetic and have a love for metaphors, and partly because I am afraid of my own darkness.
So I tell the truth in other ways. I tell it through a codependency addiction. I tell it through food, in a way that looks to outsiders like doing what my disordered body wants to do to survive but is really, underneath all the layers, a really neat and tidy form of disordered eating. I tell the truth through excessive time spent on technology.
In all of these things I tell the truth that I'm not ok.
I relate more to the addicts, the prostitutes, the bruised and battered. I understand their cry. At least they aren't pretending they are ok.
Part of deciding to be sober means I have to find new ways to tell the truth now. I thought beginning to figure out my life would be easy, but it turns out being sober gives me a clear head to think of all the things I was avoiding in the first place, and makes me want to go back to avoiding them again.
So I'm being honest. I'm not ok. I'm a mess actually. I'm a recovering everything and I have a lot of issues, as it turns out, with relationships and love and sex and being angry and I'm terrified every single moment of every single day that I am going to screw up this thing that I have now. And I'm trying to tell the truth but I find I encounter things like other people and expectations of who I feel I'm supposed to be and I don't know how to let go of those yet. I'm not ok, but that's ok. Because I'm showing up anyway, and I'm trying my best every single day to be present and feel things and live from a place of freedom rather than fear.
Maybe you're there too. Maybe you're tired of not telling the truth about your life out loud. It's a scary thing - why do you think I spent so long avoiding it? Actually being present in my life and sober is terrifying. People talk about how great it is all the time and encourage you to get sober and feel your feelings and embrace your life, but they don't talk about how hard it is. I thought it would be easy. But its not. I'm showing up anyway.
If you want to show up and tell your truth, there's room for you here. I'll create space for you. I'm on your side, regardless of what side that is. On second thought, I hate sides so I'll just say this: We belong to each other. I've got you, friend.
Let's start showing up
"I like to compare God's love to the sunrise. The sun shows up every morning, no matter how bad you've been the night before. It shines without judgment. It never withholds. It warms the sinners, the saints, the druggies, the cheerleaders - the saved and the heathens alike. You can hide from the sun but it won't take that personally. It'll never, ever punish you for hiding. You can stay in the dark for years or decades and when you finally step outside, it'll be there for you. It was there the whole time, shining and shining. It'll still be there, steady and bright as ever, just waiting for you to notice, to come out and be warmed."  

Hoarding: Buried Alive

Hoarder
I say the word sometimes, stringing it along with the other things I call myself in the dark, things that you couldn't possibly say aloud
Except that I did
I think there are parts of yourself, memories, that you keep closed off.
For me it's old relationships, that boy who broke me into a million tiny pieces, each boy that followed, hours spent fighting for my life and against it, the addictions you pick up in order to preserve your sanity (Everyone has them)
I cling to my stories, use them as protection, keep them in glass jars in formaldehyde on shelves in the cellar.
Grief. Pain. Loss. Depression. Addiction. Sickness.
Sometimes happy memories too, but I find that the moments that have rocked my world so profoundly are usually the ones where I have fallen to my knees in desperation.
I keep these stories, these moments, these memories close to me because they are mine, and also because there seems to be something sacred hidden in them.
There is something unspeakably sacred about the moments that have changed you as a person, and there is something to be said for writing about those moments for all they are worth. Turning them into poetry or a blog post or a journal entry.
This past week I haven't been writing much. I've been fiercely guarding my little story, tucking it up against my chest whispering the same words over and over again
"Shhhh, it's ok, I'm right here. You're ok. I love you."
I've been speaking my truth out loud, to others and also to myself. It is liberating, but also terrifying. I am realizing how I am the only thing standing in my way.
I am calling conditions, calling out my own crap and things that belong to others that I've been hoarding for far too long
The friendship that no longer exists, the relationships I haven't fully let go of, that one time when I slipped on that one day however many years ago
I realized how much I have been holding onto things that aren't mine, and holding onto all this stuff that is mine but that I've been convincing myself is necessary
I am learning to find that fine line, between being there for myself and protecting my little budding story, and calling conditions.
I think if you hold onto all those stories, the guilt and the lies and the shame and the pain, it will bury you alive. It did me.
I also think if you deny your story, and your truth, you will be buried beneath an entirely different sort of mountain.
I'm not there yet, but I'm trying. It is a constant tug of war, between letting go and holding onto and sheltering my story and throwing it all out there (I think sometimes they are the same thing) and in the end I have learned (am learning) I can only say this: Ok. I understand you are feeling... It's ok, I'm right here, and I love you
I am learning to listen to my own truth and it sounds a lot like this...
I am
I am
I am