Part 1 -Looking Out
“This was what could happen to you:
you could end up this far from where you thought you were going.”
I was sitting in my closet facing out my front window overlooking the cul-de-sac. It was 10:05 in the morning and the skies were grey and the grass was brown and the trees looked like skeletons with their decrepit little arms and spidery veins reaching towards the unseen sun. We didn’t know it yet, but the tree in front of our house was dying. That spring, it’s leaves would not return. There would be no green markers, no signs of life and rebirth or the the imagery we so love pointing us toward the purpose of seasons. No, that year, the tree would come down because an arborist would confirm, it was in fact dead.
It was January, the new year when we determine to be resolute, full of Hope and Belief. Any other year and I would have been penning a vision, capturing words to define my anticipation of the good things we would bring to bear in the next twelve months. On this cold morning, I couldn’t see past Grief.
I was only a few weeks removed from twelve years of Agency life; a freelance marketing and communications consultant turned small business owner in partnership with my sister, Ashley. This one place had been the depository for my entire body of professional work. We went from moms around the dining room table to teams inside an office building in a sudden and sweeping season of growth. We were boss ladies, entrepreneurs building the bike while we were riding it, in an exciting and daring adventure where we determined everything is figureoutable. Building. Tinkering. Growing.
From the outside, I appeared to be living the modern woman’s dream: bustling career, business owner earning the badge of Best Places to Work in our city, successful and handsome husband, two adorable kids and three dogs living in our custom-built home and long-time members at a mega-church in our community where eventually my husband would become an elder.
But below the surface, I was beaten-down and broken-hearted. Codependency crept in, my boundaries fell away and I stepped into a shadow of myself. I gave away yes’s like they were free and didn’t have a cost. I lost my true self in the dark side of this hollowed out life where I quit living with the kind of intention it takes to design a whole life you love, the one you really want to live, the one you were created for. That voracious hunger to keep everyone happy kept me sprinting towards a destination I wasn't at all sure I wanted to get to. I was living someone else’s dream and it started to feel like a nightmare. At the same time, the camaraderie, the creativity, the collection of people were more than Something to me. I loved each one of them. I felt we belonged to one another. I loved the work. I was stretching muscles I didn't even know I had. Leaving did not feel like an option until I started having thoughts that if I were hospitalized then maybe everyone would understand if I said no, I won't do this anymore. I was waiting for someone else to write me the permission slip that said, "Live YOUR life."
In this double down on change, our family said goodbye to our church of thirteen years at the very same time I was walking away from my entire career. Church, always a point of passion, now suddenly a loaded word. Another paradox. Another place where I put on a version of myself that felt like a scratchy sweater one size too small. Showing up as all of me - as a woman, as a leader, as a wanderer and doubter, as an LGBTQ ally and friend, as a business owner, as a person with a voice, as an autonomous woman and not just a wife - was too much. Eventually, I had to admit the misalignment and decide my spiritual life was mine to figure out. In both situations the cost of leaving was high but not not nearly as high as the cost of staying, which was my true self.
I wondered if anyone could see what was happening to me. Was another panic attack, my heaving sobs and desperate attempts to catch my breath with my head bent down between my legs in the back of Josh’s car while he and the kids ate lunch inside of his friend’s lake house enough? Was me sobbing in the parking lot of my own office building morning after morning? Or what about the scale sliding down edging it’s way towards two digits? Did the nurse notice as I discreetly placed my fingers on my neck to check my own pulse before handing my arm over to her during my annual exam?
Sometimes when you are swimming against a current you have to admit that you are going the wrong direction. Continuing in the wrong direction may simply be poor judgement no matter how many times you call it perseverance.
I felt stripped and raw, like the darkness of now was the only reality. My work home and church home, both sacred spaces of connection, love, investment, creative life and God-breathed miracles, cut off in a thoughtful, but desperate decision for change. It was like I’d lost a leg and an eye. I was limping and could not see.
My son, Eli, was four. I had a few hours in the house three days a week while he was at preschool. I was devastatingly alone with my new companion: Silence. I thought she was going to be a gentle friend. I thought I needed her; anything to make the chaos and cacophony stop. But she is anything but demure. Silence, before you get to know her is overt and deafening. She made me uncomfortable. She reminded me that Loneliness was there too. I couldn’t see Hope. I didn’t know where she’d gone.
I was searching for the words which I could use to cover myself and my wounds, to escape Silence and Loneliness. Words had always been my salve, my best antidote to the pain. Fear was there too and he said I left all my best words behind, I gave them away too flippantly and for all the wrong reasons and to all the wrong people: the church and the business and the clients. Fear said I did not save anything worth using. I was empty.
This was the story I told myself: you’re 34 and you’re finished. You may never make another contribution, if you've ever even made one at all. This choice to come home, this hope you have for restoration and healing and resolve is the end to the other chapter. Your creative working life is over and you will never find a church home.
The end.
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