I'm a Parrothead - 1-3-11

I’m declaring guerilla war on my misery. I’m going all out. How? By taking a vacation from my life. One day a week – at some point in each week – I’m deliberately ignoring everything bad. It’s not a New Year’s Resolution. I just miss my God, to tell you the truth. I’ve been avoiding talking with him because even when I’m doing great and feeling fine, as soon as I start talking, really talking, something about the inescapably raw intimacy cuts me to the quick and I start crying. It’s when I start talking to God that I feel things are at their most hopeless and that I feel myself so distant, so terribly far from the me I know I am made to be and from the we we used to be. I just avoid it. I feel clotted with the admonition to praise and worship, with the expectation of gratitude when, if I was really authentic with him as I used to be, all my misery would come out. And I’m so sick of crying. To be perfectly honest, I just don’t know what to say to him. I’m mute but full of unformed words.

And I’m tired of it.

So I’m declaring a state of vacation. I’ve been getting so bogged down with all the things I want not manifesting and feeling tremendous pressure to visualize better and feel good that I’ve snapped.

It’s too much to swear that I’m changing from here on out, that I won’t feel anxiety or discouragement from now on. As soon as I say that, I immediately feel – you guessed it – more pressure. That’s what’s been breaking the steady stones of my peace like a chain gang. And I’m sick of it.

I don’t have any answers, and the questions are still there. What am I supposed to do with my life? Am I going to lose my friends if I keep burrowing into my own head like this? Why am I not my size 6 again yet? Was two years of freedom all I had to expect? Will I always feel so cheated and bitter and dissatisfied by my choice to show love the door? Am I neglecting my relationship with God by avoiding him like this? Am I a patient enough mother to my fur-baby? Am I supposed to be more of a woman somehow?

ENOUGH!

For one day I don’t get to feel bad. I don’t get to worry. I’m not allowed to wonder, see, or feel anything negative. The constant simmering question of, “But if I let go, what if nothing happens because no one takes over?” is silenced. Every time something negative hits my brain, I will just open myself like a tunnel, a garbage shoot, to let it sing right through me. In one ear and out the other.

For one day I get to pretend that I am pretty and thin. For one day, I get to see myself as successful and fulfilled. I get to make believe my God is enough and all his promises are true for me. I get to be Mary and not Martha. I am allowed to dream and imagine that good things are actually intended for me, stamped with my name and address. I get to pretend I am good, and clean, and forgiven of my darkness and my black thoughts toward children and others, that I am pleasing to someone, that I am delighted in. I get to float along like someone who feels they actually deserve good things, like I have the right to dream whatever I want.

For one day, God, let’s get lost. Let’s spin out that lovely bubble lovers are so good at creating. Let’s forget all my failings and all your distance, and let’s make believe we are exactly as we are meant to be. Let’s get lost.

Tomorrow will be here soon enough. But it’s not here yet.

Another New Year, Dammit - 1-2-11

Another year. I can’t be so naïve as I used to be, wondering with happy anticipation what the year would bring. The old, old exercise of picturing the next New Year’s Eve and looking back on all that had happened. Would this be the year I would fall in love at last? Would this be the year I would go somewhere exciting, do something bold, be the woman I always hoped to be? Would this year I face some challenge and overcome it? The year I know who I am, what I want, where I’m going – would this be that seminal year? Would this be the year I see as the turning point in my life that angled my trajectory up a bit? Would this year my life actually invites me in?

God. How long has it been since I actually asked those questions, when my hope outlasted my winters? New Years 2008, I was giving up on love and dating and my parents bought me The Secret. New Year’s 2009, I was down to breathing in and out in my bed, counting down the minutes until my parole was up. New Year’s 2010, I was shattered. New Year’s 2011, I’m smart enough not to wonder what New Year’s 2012 will herald.

I do want to go forth and reintroduce myself to my life. I want to dig out from my barricaded burrow and see friends again. I want to stretch and start running with something worthwhile in my hands. And at the same time, I don’t want to move my flabbed self, don’t want to go to gatherings where I have nothing of my own life – and therefore of my own self – to offer. Part of me is stymied by the new truth of the falsehood of loneliness I always tried to believe. To accept that there really is no one out there for me, no one to notice me, no one to fight for me means there’s no one to prime myself for. So there is left only me to receive all I’ve worked for. So I am left with work as the only fulfilling thing to look forward to. A project, a job, a mission to better someone’s life. Is it enough? No. Will it be? Yes.

And even though I am trying to choose hope, to choose a belief that good things are coming, I dread the thought of 2011. The only life that ever invited me to its little party was loss and pain and disillusionment.

And I just don’t think I can take another year like the last three. I just can’t.

I mean, there has to be a break in all the bad. There has to be a point where the pain has to end. All those promises about victory and desires fulfilled and purposes found and plans to prosper and not to harm have to come true in this lifetime. They can’t just be for the afterlife. Why on earth would anyone come to God then? If decades from now is the only promise met and want given? There has to be some year in my life where I’m lifted from the rocks and rescued from the waves. That is the seminal year. Not when great deeds are done and great loves discovered. Just when the pain ends.

Letting Go and Holding On - 12-21-10

On Saturday, my Facebook app, “On This Day, God Wants You to Know,” gave me this word – and it is indeed a “word,” a truth I needed to hear:

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On this day, God wants you to know that love is the opposite of logic. Logic is argumentative, aggressive on the mind, splits the world into right and wrong, us and them. Love is generative, compassionate, embracing all creation. Logic pays attention to what is being said. Love pays attention to how things are said. Logic leads to debate. Love leads to communion. Practice love to be closer to God.

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And that’s really the crux of it, of this whole devastation of the last quarter of a year. Every time I’ve tried to accept God’s promise to lead me, to make his way known to me, and follow the path of that belief through the last year of my life, I get stuck on the logic. The logic does not add up. I get that faith is not always logical, that is, predictable. But I always held to a certain innate logic in faith in God’s promises: You receive the promise that he will lead you, you get led, and you find yourself in a place that corresponds with the leading. But my experience was not like that. I trusted that promise – the promise that really underpinned my entire faith and confidence in God – sensed exactly what that promise looked like being fulfilled (all the words and stirrings in my soul, the corresponding emotions) and saw my path remain straight and unwavering toward B____. Then come to find out he’s engaged and I can’t feel it’s right to keep drawing to me another woman’s man. The only logical end would be that he leaves her and comes back to me, and I can no longer believe such a development. So that leaves me with an end that completely flouts logic, which sends earth-shattering reverberations back through my analysis.

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So to get this word helped me to see what I am to think about that irreconcilable logic: let it go. Now, I am made to be logical. It is an integral part of my nature. It is my design. But I cannot love or trust God again as long as I hold onto this logic, as long as I own these questions and the desperate need for answers to them. So I won’t. I’m letting go. I am letting go of B____, of the question, “What the HELL!” of the dreams I dreamed that are merely still-smoking ash. I’m not owning anymore the how, the why, even the what. I no longer see clearly any of the desires of my heart except to be my size 6 again (every part of my life has been out of balance lately).

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God’s going to make it right because he said so. He’s going to repay the decades the locusts have eaten because he promised. He will give me double portion for my losses because that is what he swore by his name. Do I know how? Nope. Am I stuck on that anymore? Not a chance. I’m letting go of the logic that says, “If his ‘leadings’ ended up being wrong or misinterpreted, then how can I trust him to lead me right from here on out?” Not asking that anymore. B____ is gone. So are my dreams. So is my confidence in my desires. So is my ability to give a damn about it. But my God is not.

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He’s been there with me through the questions, the darkness, the grief, the anger, the frustration, the sense of betrayal, the inability to forgive. He’s been there when I was trying to reach him and when I didn’t want to be reached. Most of all he’s been with me through the unparalleled and all-consuming confusion and inability to trust.

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A few days before I got that word on Facebook, I read an article on a study done by a Dr. Kristen Swanson on the effects of miscarriage on couples. The last question of the interview – and her answer to it – resonated with me.

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What do you tell couples who are struggling with the feeling that they are never going to feel good again as a result of miscarriage?

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All of us on this planet are hardwired to deal with the comings and goings, especially the living and dying of the natural order. Sudden car crashes, losing a ten-year-old, these things are harder to rebound from, but the natural cycle of miscarriage and people dying in old age – we’re made to heal and deal from that. But we do have a healing process that must unfold. The wailing, and the crying, and the being confused (emphasis mine), the looking for answers – whether that’s in a glass of champagne or running three miles a day – those things are parts of our process, so lean into your grief. You were hardwired to do this and it won’t last forever.

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That statement about being confused especially struck a chord with me. A part of me resisted the “moving on” part of that process, balked at the prospect of it not lasting forever. I wanted to be free of the pain, but truly accepting everything as it stands would then mean I had indeed been wrong. That I really was like everybody else, that my story was utterly unoriginal, just a tired regurgitation of well-worn tragedies. I had always been different, and I had relished the idea that that could not only mean I would be weird and out-of-step as I’ve always felt, but also the other side of the coin – that I would get to be special, too, with a story, a destiny that was not to be found around every corner. So moving on and feeling better meant that this was all going to be firmly and finally consigned to the past, no appendix, no addendum, no post-script to save it from utter, meaningless obscurity.

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Well. I’m letting go of that as well. So what. It doesn’t matter. And if it does matter, let some other power or party make it matter, because I’m not holding on to it and making it matter.

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Shit happens. And I’m taking those lemons and – if not making lemonade – am at least not masochistically shoveling them into my mouth to sour everything I taste.

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I would like to believe I’m special. I would like to think I have a grand, unique destiny that means something. I want to do or be something that means something, that makes a difference. I would like to think that there’s true hope, not just the false stuff I’ve been choking myself on. I’d like to think there’s some hope for me, the foolishly, incurably optimistic. I’d like to believe in possibilities again, that everything I want is not met with a resounding NO.

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My friend, Delayna, posted this quote on her Facebook wall:

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I have fallen in love more times than I care to count with the highest potential of a man, rather than with the man himself, and I have hung on to the relationship for a long time (sometimes far too long) waiting for the man to ascend to his own greatness. Many times I have been a victim of my own optimism.

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Well, ain’t that a bitch. Mainly because it’s true. Of course in this case (as in all the others of my life), I just categorically wasn’t wanted. That may have had something to do with it. I just have to accept that that is my story and my disillusionment after a lifetime of trying and failing to live a life beyond such narrowly focused scope.

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There was also a section of an urban fantasy book I was reading the other day that I reluctantly admitted was what I had become, to a tee. It was in Alyson Noël’s Immortals book, Dark Flame:

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For example, let’s say you have a girl, she’s made a few mistakes, and she’s so down on herself, feeling so undeserving of all the love and support that’s being offered, so sure she has to go it alone, make amends on her own terms, her way, and ultimately becoming so obsessed with her tormentor, she ends up cutting off all those around her, so she has more time to concentrate on the one person she despises the most, channeling all her attention on him . . .

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Yup. That has been me. Every word. And I’m going to stop. I’m choosing to believe there’s hope and a future, and allow myself to want it. I’m letting go of the past so I can reach the future. I can’t keep hold of both. I’m holding on to Jeremiah 29:11, every word:

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“’For I know the plans I have for you,’ says the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’”

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Hit it.

Terms of Surrender - 11-24-10

Okay, here’s my concession. And my challenge. I am done trying. Done “putting myself out there.” I’m not even open for business. But if you have anybody for me, God, if my children are important enough to be brought into existence and into the arms of a woman who doesn’t even trust herself with children after the heights of rage one un-housebroken dog has brought her to, if there’s a man who will always be less for not having known me, then let me make him more by making him fight. I will never go through what I have been through, and I certainly won’t skip and jump toward it.

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I will be Rapunzel. Let that be my fairy tale alter ego. Sleeping Beauty was weak and no challenge at all. Let him get through the brambles that have grown up around me and then get to my walls. And let him figure out how to scale them without the ladder of my hair helping him along.

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Let me not fall so easily, nor even be twanging with awareness waiting for him to do something. Let my indifference be the tower. He wants me? He better be ready for a fight.

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Do I think this great hero will come? Do I think he’s actually going to see me, all closed-off and hermit-like, and be seized with the desire to make me his? Uh . . . that would be no. Am I giving myself over to romantic imaginings and wistful thinking, to follow hope like an underground current that this might happen? [See previous answer] But I am saying that that is the only way I will ever take on such titles as wife, or mother.

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I am not investing hope or hopelessness in this. Simply outlining my terms for surrender. And I am prepared for them not to be met. But you love a challenge, God. Those impossible circumstances. Well, I aim to please. Go to it.

Heroes and Damsels - 11-16-10

My mom sent me a video link by one of the speakers from The Secret about using the law of attraction to attract your perfect mate, how to understand it in the context of wanting someone back. I’ll watch it. I have no doubt it will communicate to me you can’t use the law of attraction to lure them back to you, to manipulate them into loving you, which I already knew. And tell me in one way or another he’s not coming back, which will hurt yet again. But at least I can say this. I’m not afraid of the pain.

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All along I’ve known I wasn’t afraid of losing him if God willed it. I loved God more. But I sure as hell was afraid of the pain that would inevitably follow. Oh, yeah. So that’s one good thing about wading chest-deep in the waters of grief and anger and pain – a little more pain won’t matter much. Just a raindrop in the flooded sea. You never feel the fortieth lash as keenly as you do the first. It’s the dreadful beginning you have to endure to get to the rhythm of the agony, you have to give the electrical current sizzling your skin right off a chance to settle into a steady hum over your body. I’m already on the rack; what’s another stretch?

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I’m sorry, truly sorry, for the wasted legacy of my choice to let it all go and have no more tries at this. And it’s not just my legacy which is tragic enough of a waste, though right now, that legacy doesn’t look like much, all chewed-up and frayed; it’s my parents’ legacy that is determined by my choice. I’ve gone through that sorrow before – understanding that they deserve for me to be married and a mother as much as I. This is not a recent revelation. But I don’t feel the full weight of guilt I always felt before. I have the conviction now of experience to know what I am doing and what I am losing by doing it. Or not doing it, as it were. But you have to understand, I don’t have any more of me to give.

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With just one man marked on my path, I am cocooned by pain, regret, foolishness, and anger. I am constantly reminded of what I thought I had and what some other woman actually has now. I can’t escape. I wish every time I see a Nissan Xterra that every one of them throughout the world would spontaneously combust and leave me in peace with no more reminders of him. I am captive, in bondage, curled up in my cramped cage of inward-aiming spikes of memories. An astonishing, obscene number of songs, films, TV shows, places, foods, you name it, has been sprayed with his scent. So you see, I quite literally can’t invite someone else in to leave his mark. I’d have nothing left. No refuges, no places to go from the pain. I can’t risk it not working, and quite frankly, someone else would just remind me of him more forcefully – someone who wouldn’t be as tall as he was, whose voice isn’t as rich as his was, whose hands aren’t quite so warm. No. No.

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The fairy tales are bullshit. Men aren’t heroes, and they don’t rescue us. Nor can we rescue them. There will be no rescue for me, except what God sends. And don’t get me wrong – there’s a certain quality to a rescue, an action by God that is epic, incomparable, moving. But I know how I came alive with the other one. The wonder with which I saw I wasn’t broken after all, that I worked just as I ought. And now I am quiet again, quiet all the way through. No one tells you that a kiss isn’t a fool-proof panacea for a narcoleptic princess. Sleeping Beauty can fall asleep again. So it’s hard for me to believe that God would be everything to me like he would for someone he called to singlehood when I so clearly am brought to life by romance. Earthly romance.

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So I will be rescued from this dead life by God and be grateful and still be discontented. Because they don’t make men like that anymore. If they ever did. They don’t notice or care about a sleeping girl, and the only hint that they are not following their design is a vague restlessness, a distant regret at their own nebulous failure. There’s no one to teach them to be men, to be heroes, anyway. They see a beautiful woman and they think they’d be a hero for her, but when faced with risk or masturbation, what do you think they choose? John Eldredge had the ailment right, but I can’t believe his cure.

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There is no hero to sweep me away. And I probably would not let him anyway because I am closing the door and going to bed.

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Those men. They’re so pleasant or organized or kind or goal-oriented, so good to their mothers and sisters, so reliable to their friends. And let’s face it – the “ man’s man,” the heroes, would probably just be brash and arrogant and annoy the hell out of me. They make me so angry, those men, all of them, but how can you not feel compassion for them? A towering, pointless compassion for their plight? They know they are not what they want to be, feel the same frustration about that that I do, and they just walk steadily through their days, doing nothing about it because they can’t. Poor babies. All those passive men who are better at running than fighting, and better at fighting than fighting for anything good or beautiful or worthy. They mill about and don’t notice all the tired women around them who are giving up the battle they’ve been waging alone and going to bed. All those Sleeping Beauties and their baby-faced, beardless princes lost in the brambles.

Deja Vu - 10-26-10

Déja vu. Didn’t I write that journal entry long ago that “I think it is done. I think I have finally given up”? Except this time I’m not giving into depression, I’m letting go.

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I can honestly say I wish I had never met him. Never knew he existed on this earth. I wish our worlds had never abraded each other’s. I wish I hadn’t come alive for a few weeks to feel the sting of death all the more bitterly. Except for the hope for a happy life someday with God, I feel the exact same as I did then. Why did he need to change me so much, to make me so much bigger than my life, when I would only have to shrink again, my skin tightening horribly, to fit it once again?

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I’m letting go of all the wonderings about the purpose of all those months, of what God intended from all that. I’m letting go of my love for that man and of my delight in the strength God was smelting in me. I’m accepting my own limitations and weaknesses, my humanity, acknowledging that I guess I’m not as stubborn as I thought, not as steadfast a warrior. I’m letting go of the horrible slithering question of letting down the people God gave to me, letting down my name. At least I’m in good company. How many times in the Bible do humans fall short and God does what he’s going to do for his name’s sake, for his own purposes?

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I’m just not getting any direction so I can only surmise God isn’t taking me anywhere right now. Still in the wilderness, but at least he brought me out of teaching. At least that hell is over. I really don’t know how I would have dealt with the last couple of months if I had to face that every day.

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It’s tough to leave all the questions and walk away. It’s tough to imagine God could possibly make this right. But he said he would replace the years the locusts had eaten, and they’ve eaten decades. I don’t know how anything or anyone could make all this wrong right. But if anyone is equal to the task, it’s God.

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But he’ll have to do it without me. I’m not turning my back on him or what he started, whatever that is. I’m just doing the only thing I can. I’m not certain of one way or another and therefore, I can’t breathe in or out. I’m just paralyzed. I need peace. And I know however God will work this out, it truly will be for the best, though my imagination fails me on that score.

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It doesn’t hurt, to let go. The prospect made my chest literally feel as if it was being broken from the inside, like a little beast was cracking my ribs. But it doesn’t now. It’s as if I’d been on the operating table all these months and my heart finally gave out that horrific night of August 26, and since then I’ve tried to keep my heart going, tried to resuscitate, massaged my heart, done chest compressions, defibrillated myself, and the jerking, jarring, unnatural rhythm has kept me from my rest, and now, after two months of this, I’m letting her go, this intense, tired woman whose heart is silent no matter what I do.

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He was just a blip on a flat-lining heart monitor, and now I’m still again. I won’t make any more efforts to find someone. I suppose it is tragic, but it’s certainly easier, that I don’t have a maternal bone left in my body, although I need now to start harvesting my eggs. I’m only a few months from 32, and I feel 72. I feel like I should give a press release to friends and family to tell them the patient is dead and we’re pulling the plug. There will be no more dating services, no flirting, no sidelong glances to size up prospects at church or the grocery store, no wondering how it will happen, no waiting for ghosts to come back to life. Because that’s what he’s been – a ghost – a virulent spirit clanking his chains and giving me no rest. Now all I have to do is wait for the echoes to die as well. But I won’t be in pain while I wait for that. And then the waiting will be over.

Faltering (Big Shock) - 10-15-10

It’s been a while since I wrote last and this won’t be a long entry. A lot has happened that needs to be recorded but it’s just been too daunting a task. I have to live it every day; I can’t bear the thought of having to relive it at night through my pen. Even now I pause and rally my strength.

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For Whom the Bell Tolls wasn’t whistling Dixie: it has been the best of times, it has been the worst of times and the not-quite-the-worst of times.

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I will start by saying despite my bone-rattling doubts and the horrible experience of having to tell my father I quit my job, despite having hope of starting at Central Corp early as a teller only to have it dashed, setting off a royal panic about my finances, God has provided. Truly he meets my needs every day – and no more. Some truly unexpected things have developed as a result of this ridiculous path I’ve chosen – I’ve realized I like setting my own schedule and working from home. I’ve realized with each passing day that I don’t want to work at Central Corp as teller or manager or at any similar job, and I am really getting into this internet marketing project (experiment, really) that cropped up in the void of a job and my hope as well. And it's such a blessing to have Mom give me work for this time when I get to pursue the information marketing for her, becoming so useful that she interceded with my father – put her foot down actually – and insisted she couldn’t lose me to a job just yet. I have until the new year to see what can happen with this. Oh, the grace. The next day after she told me that (last week) was the first morning I didn’t wake up with a ball of lead in my belly.

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And I will never go back to teaching. I would foreclose on my beloved house before I go back to slavery in Egypt. Often I am aware of the hell other teachers are enduring every day while I work on my couch in my sweats, and it’s a blessing.

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And my parents have really stepped up to make sure I feel supported in this. Even if my decision to quit my job was foolish to them, they at least understand I truly tried to make the right decision. I was conscientious to a fault and honestly believed it was the right thing for me to do. And as Mom especially has supported me through this and observed the path my feet have gone down, she’s even conceded, “Maybe you weren’t wrong when you thought you heard God.” Oh, the Balm of Gilead that was because I had doubted everything.

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How horrible this month and a half has been, with the doubts and the spiritual terrorizing. More than once in this shockingly brief span (has it truly only been a month and a half?) I have come to the point of being just. so. tired. So tired. Ready to collapse. It seems the longer I know God, the less I know of anything, including – maybe especially – how to withstand spiritual attacks and doubts. Before that awful, awful weekend when I despaired of my very life and my faith, I had dealt with my times of weariness, but I had had such faith, such pure faith that my desire to follow was enough and I would be led. I had far more resilience. And even though by this point I have examined again and again what it means to be “led by the Spirit” and my path fit the bill, I knew I was every day finding myself one step farther in a straight path toward B____. How many times did I ask if it was time to move on? How many times did I stand ready, pain ready to be unleashed in my chest but backpack zipped and boots tied, ready to follow? And I am certain that God would not have given me that sign had I not demanded it, and while I am aware of the valuable lesson learned about God’s timing, I can’t help but wish he had just said no. That he gave first-accident forgiveness the first time I really gave into my doubts in all these months of believing blindly in the impossible. And I am also just as certain that it was the Holy Spirit working in me to send that letter to B____ a week and a half before doubt slipped its hooks into me and the bottom fell out of my life. I would have gone on indefinitely waiting for God to bring B____ to me. In my natural self, I would never have thought it necessary or even appropriate to contact him. The conversation with Kelsey was the first nudge, the conversation with Jessica was the second. And then, that Wednesday morning when I was going to help Kelsey get her room in order at the new school, I was getting ready, and standing in front of the mirror I was really wrestling with whether or not this was the right thing to do. The best thing. The decision God would have me make, since of the three who would be affected, he was the only one who knew what would happen. And I felt this almost audible (but it was silent) sense of, “Yes. Do it. Do it now.” I was suffused with a peace, confidence, and sense of rightness, the same certainty I felt about resigning my job. That was not me. I wasn’t building on my good feelings and just trying to convince myself to do what I wanted to do anyway.

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And getting that sign that awful weekend was not attended by any good feelings, only bad. That’s not how God works when you haven’t been fighting him.

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But logic is a cold and unwieldy comfort in this case. I’m terrible now – so wishy-washy, so unconfident. I’ve struggled for a month and a half for some answers and been met only with silence. I finally had to come to the conclusion last week that just like you’re told when you’re a child and lost, to stand still or go back to the last place you were with someone, I had no choice but to go back to the last place I saw God. And that was right before that weekend. That was when I was believing whole-heartedly for B____. No idea how I would accomplish that, seeing as everything has changed, including me, but there I am. Still no clue. Still wondering if I’m back there in fact, if it counts when I don’t have the solid belief I had then.

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Don’t even know if I love him still in the first place. But I had to forgive. Realized that last Sunday. Realized I’d been unbalanced by unmitigated rage for weeks and feeling dreadful about it. I had been mostly angry at God, since B____ had managed not to have done anything wrong or dishonorable in this whole mess. But how do you forgive God? As blasphemous as it sounded to me, I knew that right or wrong I had developed anger, bitterness, and resentment toward God, as well as toward B____ and even my dog who ludicrously remains stubbornly un-housebroken. Who knew you could need to forgive a dog? For Pete’s sake, I had to forgive Faline for having accidents all the time in the house. I had to forgive B____ for being cowardly and weak not to even give me a real try, for going off and fucking some other woman and dreaming of making babies and plans and futures with her, and I had to forgive God most of all for my perception (even though I knew it to be inaccurate, I couldn’t convince my heart of that) that he had toyed with me, that he had played the cruelest joke to watch me languish alone, so alone, for three decades, then dangle like a carrot before me all I wanted, let me cling to that and then leave me desolate and utterly abandoned. Yeah, there was so much anger toward God. Still a work in progress.

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As am I, I hope. Because I have now, finally, become what I once was – not a woman, not a lover or a mother, but merely a female human, a female animal. I am ash. God has an unbelievable amount of restoration to do in my heart just to make me fit for my life, let alone for a relationship and a family. I’ve developed a habit of hurt. Pricks of pain have now lost their element of surprise and become commonplace. Everything reminds me of him. It’s not fair that six weeks – six weeks – should have such an obscene ripple effect. There’s music I can’t listen to, places I can’t go, shows I can’t watch, food I can’t eat because they have become nothing more than ghosts of him.

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And I’m stressed even more because I can’t find good feelings for more than a day to express my faith in a different future. I think it’s just that I honestly can’t remember how to feel good. It’s been so many years since I was a “happy person” that I no longer have the capabilities to get excited about things like a child, be thrilled or ecstatic or blissful. I try. Man, I try. I try all day. Try everything I can think of. I’ve cut out pictures to make a vision board, I have encouraging verses taped to my bathroom wall, I have oodles of verses bookmarked on my phone’s browser, I listen to motivational tapes, I try to dredge up gratitude and love. I can’t do it.

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I honestly wonder if I’m depressed. Laughable that I of all people can’t recognize it. I have hope that it’ll get better. It has to get better. Things have to be easier someday. It can’t always be this hard. There has to be some happiness in store that I don’t have to work and scrape and visualize so hard for. This can’t be as good as it gets.

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But oh, is it hard to feel that. I wonder if there’s something wrong with me, that God has shown me many kindnesses that I recognize during this time, that he has shown me such grace in my work that I have a chance to pursue this without the horrible dread of job-searching, and yet I can’t be grateful, I don’t feel appreciation, can’t manage to feel joy. It’s never enough.

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I’m stone in my heart, I’m enraged at petty annoyances, and I weep almost every day. And I couldn’t even say it’s just one thing. If he resolved the thing I’m crying about on Monday, I’d be crying about something else on Tuesday. Will anything ever be enough? I’m so tired of crying, I’ve started avoiding my quiet times with God because something about being alone in the dark with him just turns on the waterworks. I finally just had to excuse myself today. I had expressed everything, I had communicated, and I was still crying and that wasn’t doing either of us any good.

I’m so keenly aware of my shortcomings and imperfections, of my faltering heart and disappointing faith. I have to trust – blindly yet again – that he is as compassionate and patient as he says, to take my mustard seed and make it into anything at all. It has to get better.