When I was around 25 years old, someone told me that I live a life of struggle, and that it wasn't normal or necessary.
They framed it as a question, which quickly snowballed into a series of sharper, more irritated questions: why do you live a life of such struggle when it's not normal, and it's not necessary? why do you always have such terrible things on your mind? why do you always seem to be dealing with such awful things? more than any other person I know. do you enjoy it, or something?
On one hand: Reminiscing upon my 25-year-old self, I can't really disagree. I had a lot of baggage to deal with; some of it, from my childhood, was beyond my control, while some of it, accumulated in my young adulthood, was due to my own choices. I didn't have a great sense of forward regarding processing painful experiences; my personality is bulldog-stubborn and controlling in that, once I realized that I had some power over the painful experiences, I became a little obsessive in delving to the depths and trying to understand them fully from the bottom up. I want to have a handle on it. I want to beat it. I will beat it. And beat it, and beat it, and beat it, if I have to. I will kill this thing.
This isn't necessarily unhealthy, but it can be. Some of my reasons for obsessively exploring my pain were guilt-born: Surely there's a lesson here. I have to find it. I have to find the meaning. This has to mean something. God must be trying to tell me something. I'm not hearing it. What am I doing wrong. Must work harder; most probe more deeply; must listen harder.
The fact is: Painful experiences can never really be laid to rest. They'll always be painful. Always. Continuing to poke at the bruises, in the sincere interest of healing, exploration, and even inspiration, can creep toward anchoring one's identity in one's previous victimhood, which is, at times, a line I occasionally crossed without realizing it. The line's different for everyone, and I've thankfully backed away from mine.
On the other hand.
The center of those words was good, but there were too many words, and the meaning became a little of what it shouldn't. The words were offered briefly, and not in a full context. They spoke to my immediate coping habits, but my entire history also heard them, and every little girl I was, at every age, at the hands of every indignity, flinched to hear those words as an indictment. And the adult me flinched to hear those words in light of the very real difficulties I bore on behalf of those girls - the concrete facts of personal responsibility for problems that I had worked to fully own, that I might fully outgrow them.
Those words hurt. They shamed, and catted, and invalidated. They came from the heart of a person intending good, but whose personal frustrations sullied their attempts to speak truth into what they viewed as my shortcomings. They lumped everything of mine in one ugly clump of inappropriate. They spoke from the perspective of a person whose experiences with and definition of "hardship" were valid, but differed from mine.
I actually forgot all about them, until recently, as the stress of the past few weeks wore down my ability to be normal, do what's necessary, shut the terrible things out of my mind, not deal with the awful things. Just be. Just do, and as I slid toward the end of my rapidly-fraying rope, hands burning, I thought to myself, why am I doing this? why do I feel so horribly, horribly guilty for the past two years? why am I dealing with such terrible th - and then, I remembered. Oh. That.
Huh.
_____
Don't you just feel better when you operate out of a sense of grace? when you hear the words that are spoken to you through what you know of the person's intent, rather than through the clamor of your own bustling, chipped bravado?
The person who said those words to me: I know their intent. That person loved me. They wanted good things for me. They also didn't particularly like me, felt insecure around me; maybe it felt good for them to stick it to me a little, for reasons that will always be their own. But it doesn't matter how the bruise got there: all that matters, now, is that those words have become one of those bruises that I have to stop poking. They're the first words to fly up behind my eyelids every time I breathe deeply to process some new thing which, really, I'd rather not find myself needing to process, thank you very much. They silence me. And that's stupid.
Many of the worst things that people have said to me over the past eighteen months have sincere origins. You can probably remember times when the same has been true of what people have said to you. Recognizing that the state of your heart can affect your hearing isn't excusing the wrong in what people say; I guess, maybe, it's choosing to humble yourself enough to recognize that you're not above bearing the offense inflicted by a fellow human being; it's choosing to assign greater value the right in what they say. It's hand-in-hand with evaluating the truth of the message before considering the source and intent. Even a donkey can say cool things. [I feel like I've read that somewhere.]
I guess it's an equal-responsibility thing: Be careful with your words; and, maybe even more importantly, be careful, little ears, how you hear. And may grace abound on both sides. Because, as exhausting as it may sound to purposefully administer grace to the people in your life who have hurt you, it's even more exhausting to withhold it.
If you're asking me why so much struggle? - believe me, I don't know. I know others whose lives have also included lots of personal struggles, and they don't know why, either. If you don't understand it, consider yourself lucky, and keep the judgy-judgy to a minimum. And maybe throw calzones at me (good ones, or I'm throwing them back).
As I find myself in a completely different wilderness - one in which I feel as though my entire foundation has crumbled, and the path forward holds none of the hope and innate optimism I've had the energy to conjure previously - it's like being sucked under salt water, surfacing long enough for one quick, ineffective gulp of air before crashing beneath again. It is, amusingly, like an incredibly busy meal service - the thirty seconds or so when the board is clear, and you have just enough time to restock three-quarters of your empties, gulp some water, and maybe change one bandaid before the onslaught begins again. [and crap, did I throw away the old bandaid? yes. whew.]
All I know is that grace, in ridiculous, torrid, nonsensical abundance, for others, and for myself, is the surest way out.
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