It's been over a year since I've written on my blog. A whole year since my dad was sentenced, a whole year since the adrenaline of newly inflicted trauma and my fight/flight responses that had been carrying me for over two years since we'd first begun to realize the darkness of the evil and secrets cloaking my family crashed. My family was centered around my father. A man who pretended to be godly and good and giving and moral, but who was in reality deceptive and manipulative and sick and sexually abusive.
During the time when my adrenaline was carrying me I was on a roller coaster of extreme highs and lows, there were sleepless nights, and legitimate fears keeping me awake, and panic attacks where I would suddenly start to feel like I couldn't breathe. Sometimes I'd have to pull over while driving, sometimes it would happen as I lay in bed at night, sometimes they would come while I was trying to navigate a hallway strewn with my kids toys to put laundry away, sometimes they would come in the kitchen with an island full of groceries to put away when I didn't think I had the mental energy to do it. Emotion was at its full force. I was wrecked. Wrecked with anger at the horrific and completely sick and heart breaking facts and stories I was learning on a daily basis. Wrecked with grief over the loss of all I thought I knew and thought I had. Wrecked with passion to pursue justice and stand up and fight for these beautiful souls who had suffered so much and been so marginalized. Wrecked by my own love for my parents and the way my heart would feel weak and like it was betraying me by still longing for the life and family I thought I'd had. Wrecked by my need for Jesus. Wrecked by loneliness, especially in the beginning when we were so shamed into still keeping things quiet. Wrecked by the highs of more truth being revealed, and the hope I felt that God was really bringing it out. Wrecked by pain and betrayal, and feeling so completely and and totally abandoned. The emotion of it all flooded out of me and through me and in me and coursed through my veins night and day. I am a feeler. I have always been a feeler. I want to dive down into the depth of whatever the emotion is and walk with whoever is feeling it, through the pain, through the joy. I come alive in sharing the humanity of what moves our hearts.
But something happened to me that I couldn't see clearly until now that I'm more removed from it. In the immediacy of the sentencing this time last year, the finality of some type of resolution, and feeling somewhat safe again for the first time in several years, the roller coaster of emotion broke. It gave way to mostly just grief. There was exhaustion. There was sad. And so, so tired. And where there had been hope that maybe this time when I asked my mom again to go to counseling with me, there was just more rejection when she said no. This ride was not wild and flying and full of highs and lows. This ride was a tunnel. A slow moving, low, dark, hidden place beneath the surface. This ride felt like watching life pass by me on the other side of a a piece of glass. It felt scary in a different sort of way. Why was the sun shining and I couldn't feel it on my skin? Why was there laughter around me that didn't move me? Why could I not cry even when I wanted to? Why did my soul feel like a dam about to break, but nothing could crack it? I could hear and see pain, and want to connect, but I felt like I was standing on the other side of a chasm, disconnected and isolated. On the last day of a vacation we waited all summer for all I could do was silently cry as I packed our things to go home because I felt like I hadn't even been there. Decisions felt impossible for me to make. It was paralysis, and numbness, and heaviness. Do people talk about this? Is this ok to share? Our victim advocate in the justice system told us court is not therapeutic. You don't leave feeling better, or even good. Justice is right and necessary and godly. But it is not happy or comforting. It is sobering. Is it ok to say that in the face of something we fought for and pursued for almost two and a half years I can look back and see now that I went into depression?
Life is complicated and messy and not linear. Grief is not a straight forward process. Things work their way out of our hearts in a different order, at a different pace. I can't rush my process. All I can do is embrace it. I'm still somewhere on the journey. Last fall, just before Thanksgiving I came into a place of acceptance. Of accepting that all I can do is offer to go to counseling with my mom, I can't make her go. Of accepting that this IS my life, and I want to own it and live it fiercely. Of looking around me at what I still have and being intensely grateful for it. Glad even, that I was no longer working so hard for the acceptance of manipulative parents. I felt joy again for the first time in months. Like, belly laughing, contagious joy at being alive. I chose to stop caring what anyone might think of me if they saw me moving on from my grief and living my life happy again. I decided that it was too high a price to pay to spend the rest of my life grieving over things that were beyond my power to change. I started to make decisions, and plan things and write things on my calendar more than a week out. I wanted to host again. I thought I'd crossed a threshold and arrived in the stage called "acceptance" and that now there was no going back, only forward. And while this was a huge step for me, I realize now that maybe there isn't an Arrival Point when grief just suddenly slips away. Not in huge and traumatic life events anyway. After all, grief is the price you pay when something you love is gone. And I genuinely loved my parents with my whole heart. I've felt myself go back into bargaining several times since that big moment I had in the fall. I've been able to identify it and move through it back to acceptance each time. But I'm not going to condemn myself for still feeling grief even when I really just want it to all be over. I want to always feel like that fierce, passionate, surging with life and energy girl that I know lives inside of me. Sometimes I do, and sometimes I don't. And I think that's ok.
There are still residual battles raging inside my heart and mind. Finding out the truth about my dad was the epicenter of the earthquake that upended our lives. But the ripple effects moving outward have revealed truth about many things I couldn't see or didn't understand before. When everything you know or have been taught is woven together from your childhood, and then a huge piece of the braided thread that connects the way you've learned to think gets yanked out, things inevitably start to unravel. This past year has looked like the hard, hard work of learning to be fully honest about who I am, and what I think and feel, without fear of rejection. It's looked like the hard, hard work of trying to figure out who I am, and what I think and feel for myself. It's looked like my subconscious relentlessly upending and flipping over every thought and memory and belief I've held dear, testing, questioning, evaluating. If things can't hold up to my questioning, then are they worthy of my loyalty and belief? It's hard to hold onto things that have been used to manipulate me in the past, even when I want to. My faith and my emotion were used as weapons against me for most of my life. They are such huge parts of who I am that being in this season of holding them both in my hands instead of my heart and evaluating them under a microscope makes me feel empty inside. It's hard to share this when I'm still somewhere in the middle of this process, hopefully closer to the end, but I can't see the other side yet. What I know is that I'm fighting for my faith. And I'm fighting for my emotion, for my humanity. I'm longing to get to a place where, after they are both subjected to the fire of my mental analysis of them, they will again become part of me, only this time not as weapons in someone else's arsenal, but as powerful forces that belong fully to me. I can feel my emotion pressing in on me again. I can feel the pull to surrender to it, to step back under the waterfall of our human experience and let myself be swept away without fear. I can feel my faith knocking inside my heart, asking me to trust it. I don't fully know how to break the dam that will let them rush through me again, but writing this all down today and sharing it felt like an important piece of that process.
I've wondered a lot of times this past year how the disciples felt after Jesus was crucified. The cause that they left everything for and gave their whole lives to was suddenly gone, and now what? In those days between his death and his resurrection, how did they feel? Empty, lost, confused? Betrayed, alone, afraid? Did they wonder if they'd made a mistake, or did things feel like they'd unraveled? I can't imagine the trauma of seeing Jesus killed the way he was, or the fear that maybe they were next. What tantalizes my heart with hope though is thinking of how it must have felt, after the passing of the darkest hours of those first days after his death, when He came back to find them. Thinking of how it must have felt when Peter went back to what he knew, and was fishing again in the quiet of the early morning, when Jesus came to find him and make him breakfast on the beach. What hope that longs to resurface in my heart. And that is where I find myself. Doing what I know to do, and waiting for Jesus to come and find me again.
So it's been another year. Another year of living with my eyes open. Another year of navigating a complicated life that I have to be willing to forge a path through. I would not change anything. Even this season I'm in now (although I might be tempted). My one hope in writing and sharing when I do is that whoever you are, you won't feel alone. That you will be validated, and encouraged, and fearlessly embrace your journey. There is space for each of us in this world.
