Tag Archives: emotions

Failing a Psych Test by Lauren Mooney

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Posted by kritzau on May 17, 2012 – 3:56 pm
Filed under A Beautiful Mess, Growth in Change

Lauren Mooney is a work in progress that definitely won’t be complete this side of heaven. She loves being crafty, seeing the moon in the sky during the day, and smelling the Earth after it rains. And if she’s brave enough, one day she’ll be a full-time novelist. But for now she’s content being people’s friend, Scott’s wife, and God’s daughter.

 

Mackie huffed at me as I handed him my computer on my last day of work. “You’d fail a psych test now if you were enlisting,” he said staring up at me over his wire rim glasses.

A life-long military man, Mackie parlayed his wire-tapping skills into a second career as an IT guy. And from behind his gadget-cluttered desk, he brazenly questioned my sanity. Working with Mackie for four years, I’d come to understand his often gruff, sarcastic approach concealed a fatherly heart. But to tell me I’d fail a psych test? That seemed a bit extreme.

“What are you talking about?” I played off Mackie’s insult. “I could totally pass a psych test. Besides, enlisting in the Air Force is the last thing I’d do.”

“Nah, man,” he laughed. “Do you realize what you’re about to experience? The Air Force would never take you. They’d see all the changes about to happen in your life and they’d say, ‘Nope!’”

Two and a half years later, Mackie’s words resound in my ears more frequently than I ever imagined. I’m definitely not crazy – well, not most days – but I failed to really hear Mackie’s advice at the time. He was trying to tell me extreme change can debilitate someone. Instead I puffed up my chest and told him the changes would be good for me; they were proof of growth, proof of something I’d long desired.

When you’ve been begging God to change something – anything – in your life for several years, here’s what I don’t suggest telling Him you’re capable of handling within 18 months

  • Meeting your future husband
  • Beginning a long-distance relationship with him
  • Asking for your job to be eliminated so you can move from your bachelorette pad into your boyfriend’s parents’ home three states away and live off unemployment
  • Job searching every day in a new city
  • Trying to figure out your role in a new family
  • Getting engaged
  • Planning a wedding
  • Getting married
  • Moving into your new husband’s house
  • Finding a job
  • Learning to be a wife while your husband works full-time and gets his Masters degree
  • Getting a promotion into a totally new job
  • And finding out you’re going to be an aunt for the first time

The majority of these changes created amazing experiences and I have precious memories from those 18 months. But the overall feeling I remember during that time is utter exhaustion.

And if I rewinded my life to re-listen to my prayers back then, I’d predominantly hear petitions for life to change just enough to be better with a few requests sprinkled in for life to stop changing all together. Mackie’s warning had become reality but I wasn’t quite ready to admit it.

The ironic part of praying for things to stop changing is that, well, they usually do, and right when life settled down and I began to find myself again and nothing much was changing, my prayers and conversations switched to ones of discontent.

I was desperate for something – anything – to change. Again. Just like I had been prior to Mackie’s warning. It felt as if I couldn’t breathe if something wasn’t changing.

In my eyes, so much needed changing. Everything was wrong with my job and I wanted a new one. I didn’t like the way I looked and resented the fact that I’d gained weight since our wedding. I wanted to get my Masters. I was beyond impatient waiting for my sweet husband to find a new job now that he had his Masters; I wanted to know for sure if we were moving somewhere or staying in our home.

Oh – and then there was all the anxiety over when and how to start a family. A quick glance at Facebook any day of the week proclaimed news of due dates, teething, and first steps.

When I’d have coffee with girlfriends and they would ask what’s new, I was embarrassed to admit that not a whole lot was new. Life hadn’t changed much and it made me uneasy.

I’m tempted to blame behemoths like Apple, American consumerism and tiger moms for my lack of contentment with life not changing. But the reality is somewhere along the way I mixed up my value and identity with my ability to prove my life was ever changing.

I had put discontentment up on a pedestal and glared down at God, threatening Him with continued tantrums if He didn’t change something soon.

I neglected to consider the fact that I can grow – that God can grow me – even when everything else remains the same around me.

Mackie had called me out on my addiction to change several years prior but I was too wrapped up in change’s whirlwind to see a different path to sanity.

Most days I still fight to stop myself from orchestrating or demanding change, but I’m striving to remember it’s not about thinking growth comes only from change. Growth, improvement, betterment, whatever you want to call it, is not necessarily synonymous with change. Even when everything stays the same, abundant growth is possible.

Even though on the outside it often looks like things are falling apart on us, on the inside, where God is making new life, not a day goes by without his unfolding grace. 2 Corinthians 4:16 (MSG)

The Prompt by Melanie Dosen

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Posted by kritzau on May 10, 2012 – 9:34 am
Filed under A Beautiful Mess, Growth in Change

You may remember Melanie from a couple months ago. Now you can see her because the pictures are working again! Her beautiful words from our open mic night inspired me and here she is again sharing her own transition and reflection on her dear grandmother. 

 

“Growth in change” spurns several images in my mind: small green sprouts emerging out of a sea of concrete, flower petals of vibrant hues blooming in the midst of frost, beautiful buildings constructed on devastated land. I saw bright colors contrasting darkness, symbols of hope and future existing in counter-intuitive places. Images of life, even though all things point to death.

Right now, death seems to be pointed to from every direction, particularly in the life of my grandmother, Nani.  Nani is experiencing a pretty significant, harrowing change: her body and mind are breaking down at an ever-increasing rate, and eventually will succumb to that degeneration.  Her body will not know what to do anymore; her mind won’t know what’s going on.  My grandmother has Alzheimer’s Disease—a devastatingly slow change that does not result in growth, but rather, it’s antithesis: in decay.

The funny thing about my relationship with Nani is that I’ve been anticipating her death for decades, as Nani has spent most of my life constantly reminding me of everything I’ll inherit when she and my grandfather pass away.  As children, she would take my sister and I on tours around their house, asking us to point out what we wanted to receive when they were gone.  Nani has gone so far as to write our names on the back of pictures and on the bottom of trinkets in the house.  “Everything, “ she would say proudly, “will be yours.”

Nani’s desire to prematurely delegate her things out to us was silly—a little neurotic, but mostly endearing.  It would be the quip I would use to contribute to the “Grandparents say the darnest things” conversations with friends.  It became rather taxing, however, to hear your still-quite-healthy grandmother constantly talk about the end of her life—focusing on the inevitability of her future death rather than on her present experience as one of the living.  I realized recently that my perception of Nani has not been as a woman who lives, as one who contributes to life or has a story to tell, but as someone who will pass away.

I’ve been carrying this conflict of Nani’s life and coming death around with me for months now, trying to sift through the typical mysteries that one toils with in the face of the death of a loved one.  Questions like, who was Nani?  What’s her history?  How does she know herself, and how does she want to be known?  I find myself wondering if Nani understood herself as someone whose purpose was to give to those who she loved, never to receive.  I felt that I loved Nani by receiving from her, and shamefully realize that I never established a habit of giving, of learning, or of asking.  Now, when I want to drink in every word she says, I feel awkward, bumbling through my questions and comments, trying to break the habit of many years of our relationship being based on shallow exchanges and (at times forced) smiles of gratitude.  My devastation is made even more acute in knowing that as I am trying to change and grow in our relationship, she doesn’t realize it, or can’t.  For the first time, I am the giver, but she cannot receive.

I am not sure what it means to attempt to find growth and life in the ashes of death.  The finality of everything is overwhelming, and I often wondering if I am just grasping for meaning when maybe there just isn’t any there.  In a world that creates meaning out of history and shapes understanding out of stories, it’s tempting to understand Nani’s quieting story as a tragedy—that all of what she is composed of is slowly slipping away, and once she is gone, she will never truly be known.  I really want to believe that all is not lost in the deep, inaccessible crevasses of Nani’s memory, but that her hopes, dreams, and thoughts that constitute the deep fabric of herself are held in the memory of God.  A God that generates life counter-intuitively, and when the creation He set in motion is fulfilled in death, there is still a promise of life.

Death is the changing of something that was once known in one fashion, but now exists in another—body to spirit, consumption to decay, active story to living memory.  In reflecting on her death, I realize that I am Nani’s living memory: her death will just be a change, a transition.  I will carry her life, her pride of her family, her gentle and sweet spirit, her desire to care for all who she loved.  I am her voice that transcends her death, that tells her story, creates meaning of her experience.  My growth emerges from her, and propels who she is into the future; we, everyone who she loved and who loves her, are the life that survives her death.  Which, maybe, is what she wanted in the first place.

The Wisdom of My Ever Changing Good Body by Cissy Brady-Rogers

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Posted by kritzau on May 8, 2012 – 7:34 am
Filed under A Beautiful Mess, Growth in Change

Cissy Brady-Rogers is an embodied woman who changed my life.  If you’ve read A Beautiful Mess, then you know her impact is amazing.  Her job title would read marriage and family therapist, eating disorder specialist, spiritual director, yoga instructor, and adjunct psychology faculty at Azusa Pacific Univ. However, she would say, “Personally, I am a woman with a genuine story of growing through my own food and body related challenges. My overweight childhood and puberty, a date rape in my young adult years, and a mastectomy for breast cancer at age thirty have been among my greatest teachers on the journey to loving my body. I have mined the treasures of the dark places in my story and gleaned much wisdom. I look forward to an opportunity to share these riches with you.” (from her website, which you should check out) This story is a precious one full of wisdom once again and I’m honored to share it with you today.

 

I celebrated my fiftieth birthday in March.  Twenty years of healing my own disrupted relationship with my body and accompanying others on similar paths has taught me that wisdom is born amidst both expected and unexpected changes. It comes through accidents, like the one that inspired this post. It comes through diseases, like the cancer that took my right breast twenty years ago. Yet most bodily changes are part of nature’s rhythm.

Our female bodies go through necessary bio-psycho-spiritual cycles that birth and sustain life. Our younger bodies abound in hormonally-driven changes that add fullness to our physiques, draw us to relationships, enable us to bear children and activate our nurturing capacities.  The reduction of those same hormones in our midlife bodies turns our energies to guarding and guiding the future generations in ways we could not if we were busy with our own children.

The world tells me to fear these changes and employ fat-fighting or anti-aging methods to stave off anything that doesn’t conform to current beauty ideals.  I am even told in a thousand different ads to be afraid of my body.  But my midlife wisdom tells me that no matter how much I work out, eat well, and do all the things Dr. Oz says will keep me young and healthy, my body is not what it was ten or twenty years ago.

I’m not the same woman I was in those years, thank God.  At thirty I was busy trying to save the world, or at least some of you, through my good works as a therapist and church worker–and in therapy twice a week trying to heal my inner turmoil.  At forty I was busy writing a book, leading workshops, building a successful private practice–and blaming and resenting my husband for not being the man I wanted him to be.  My body was more toned in those seasons and the skin on my neck didn’t droop, but if decreased muscle mass and sagging skin are the price of compassion, wisdom and joy, so be it.

My latest opportunity for listening to my body came on New Year’s Eve.  I didn’t plan to celebrate in the emergency room after dislocating my shoulder in a favorite yoga pose.  Arthroscopic surgery in early February and months of limited mobility sleep challenges, and dependence on others weren’t on my calendar either. But that is the nature of life. It happens while we are busy making other plans.

I could react to this with fear of my aging muscular-skeletal system that gave way on that fateful Saturday morning.  I could work harder and longer and fight my way back to practicing advanced inversions and backbends. Other fifty year old women do it–why not me?

Yet at this point in my life, working my way back to where I once was doesn’t feel loving or wise. Yes, it might look valiant and noble.  And it would surely satisfy my ego need to be admired for my high level of fitness and flexibility.  But that would be more about returning to my thirty or forty year old self than maturing into my midlife self.

I want to respond to this change with the soulful discernment of a wizened fifty year old, not ego driven reactivity.  My “good choices” to eat well and exercise regularly during my first thirty years were more about controlling my weight than good health.  My breast cancer diagnosis at thirty, along with clinical work with eating disorder patients, shifted the focus of my fear from fat to disease, but I was still more motivated by fear than love.

Over time, my relationship with my body became more compassionate as I walked alongside girls and women who had adopted the fear of fat messages and harsh body control offered by the health, diet and fitness industries and whose lives were being destroyed.  I learned from my clients that fear of fat or disease is never a good motivation for self-care.  It may make our bodies stronger, leaner and even healthier, but it sucks the life out of our souls.

We need to respond to changes in our bodies, whatever their source, with compassionate attention. The monthly upheaval of menses, the challenges of pregnancy, motherhood, (or non-motherhood when others are mothering) and menopause, invite us to reflect on our lives. Along with nature’s cyclical changes, injuries and illnesses also become opportunities to pause and listen more intently than we do during ordinary seasons.

  • What wants to be born in me through this change?
  • What needs to die in order to make more space for the new?
  • What is the hidden treasure in this dark place?
  • What do I sense, feel, need and want?

Part of my current self- conversation with is about honoring the limits of my body.  My midlife body isn’t the same as my young adult body.  My weight and general fitness level have remained steady throughout my adulthood, but hormonal changes, wear and tear from years of an active lifestyle and natural aging processes need to be respected as I consider my mid-life pursuits.  Athletic yoga poses, like the handstand dropback to backbend that injured my shoulder, were safe when I began a serious yoga practice fifteen years ago.  They might not be most advantageous now.  Perhaps the risk of injury outweighs the benefits.

So I choose to take time to see where my yoga practice will go from here. Each day, I choose compassion and curiosity as I recover mobility and strength in my shoulder.  Last week I experimented with downward facing dog at the wall.  It felt good. I tried happy baby pose and decided I wasn’t yet ready.

I choose to be present, vulnerable, and open to what each day, each moment brings on the path of healing. I choose to receive the fullness of life that comes in ways I didn’t ask for and wouldn’t expect. I choose life in my good midlife body, with my good shoulder, just as I am.

Inheriting home by Tara Owens

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Posted by kritzau on April 26, 2012 – 10:00 am
Filed under A Beautiful Mess, Growth in Change

Tara Owens is a beloved granddaughter, daughter, wife, step-mom and soon-to-be grandmother and aunt. A spiritual director who speaks, writes and leads retreats, she’s learning to live into enough and out of productivity and perfectionism. She loves good poetry, the Colorado rockies, watching her husband cook and her rescue dog Baloo. She’s at work on an upcoming book in InterVarsity Press’s Formatio line on spirituality and the body.

Inheritance, obsolescence, growth, change—these ideas have been haunting me over the past few weeks. This haunting—and the slow but difficult revelations that have come with that haunting—started when I was sick with the stomach flu. While struggling to feel even remotely human, I got a phone call from my sister telling me that my maternal grandmother had been found unresponsive in her home. She was in tears and on her way to the hospital, her husband at the wheel. I couldn’t be there, couldn’t even think about being there, and it tore me to pieces. As I lay helpless and wondering if I’d ever hear my grandmother’s voice again, ever feel her hand press against mind or see her smile as she repeated the story of The Two of Us and The Plasticine, I began thinking about the gifts she has given me. My inheritance.

And there it was. Inheritance. It’s not a word that we think about much in modern contexts. No longer obsessed by lineage and taxed deeply on property that moves from one generation to the next, society actively discourages us from passing things on. We’re obsessed by things that don’t last, rather than by things that do. (iPad HD, anyone?) We get our hands on the “latest” technology only long enough for it to become obsolete, and we don’t think about what this is doing to us.

I’m a self-professed technogeek. I’ve always been on the edge of what’s current in communication and its tools. Heck, I was BBSing back in high school, which, for those of you who don’t know, was blogging before blogs existed, Facebook before Zuckerburg imagined it. Raised in an international immigrant family, I’ve never been afraid to get up and move, to try something new, to took toward the horizon.

And move, I have. Southern Ontario, North Carolina, the Greater Toronto area, Washington, DC, Northern Virginia and now Colorado are all places I’ve called home at one point or another. Each has marked me in specific and indelible ways, shaping me. I can’t say that each place engendered growth in me, but I was changed.

To this day, I’ve never lived in one location for more than six years. I like to think that I come by this ability to uproot myself regularly and still survive the transplant honestly. My Granny has lived in more than 10 countries, having given birth in five of them. Uganda, Seychelles, South Africa, England, Tanzania—her list shocked my rooted husband who, until his visit to Canada to meet my family, had never left the United States.

I like the fact that I’ve taken lived out Granny’s inheritance well. I am a woman willing to take risks, to change, to make a place for myself even when one isn’t readily offered to me.

What haunts me now is perhaps what is haunting my entire generation. I don’t have a good grasp on how to grow without change.

When my sister arrived at the hospital, she wasn’t allowed to see Granny. She had to wait, as I did thousands of miles away, until they had figured out what had happened. It was hours before they announced that my vibrant, cheeky 88-year old grandmother suffered a massive stroke. Moyra Eleanor went from living independently, visiting sick members of her congregation in nursing homes to immobility in a hospital bed, unable to communicate or move her left side. As nearby family—all five of her grown children—rushed to her side, I realized I’d only lived half of her legacy, only allowed her to give me half of what I stood to gain from the riches that she so freely lived.

I realized that I’d taken my inheritance and run for a foreign country (both literally and figuratively). It’s a country steeped in fast living, things to which I could easily prostitute my soul. I haven’t been living with the pigs, but I’ve been darn close.

I’ve never thought of myself as the prodigal, although I’m sure my immediate family would disagree. My tendency toward a life of change wasn’t something that I consciously chose, nor is it something that I see as necessarily detrimental. But being unable to talk to or offer anything to grandmother as she (and my family) live into her new, limited reality brought me up short.

Over the past ten years, my whole extended family has been quietly living a life of stability. While I wandered, they put down roots. While I sought change, they experienced growth.

I don’t deny that my years since college have been beneficial. I’ve learned incredible lessons, been given amazing gifts. It wasn’t until after college that I became a Christian, stumbling my way first to a renegade church then to seminary then to a practice as a spiritual director. But, until my marriage three years ago, I’ve been on move.

The year after I moved into our humble house in Colorado Springs, we built raised beds and planted a vegetable garden. I’d always professed to black thumbs, but I found that this new stability brought with it a little bit more patience and self-awareness. I was able to see that I watered a little too often, and then disappeared a little too long thinking that I’d done enough. I learned that uprooting things, even to move them to another area of the garden, leaves them weak and vulnerable to disease. I began to see that change isn’t always the thing that produces growth—sometimes it’s the very thing that stunts it.

The irony of this journey is that I’m beginning to root here, away from the family whose lessons I could have learned so much more quickly had I been willing to stay rather than go my own way. I’ve watched the tree outside my office window for three years now, and I am beginning to see how slow, stable growth produces change. After a lifetime of learning the lessons of change that forced me into growth—learning to make new friends quickly and with candor, choosing for self-confidence in new situations rather than self-doubt, recognizing and making room for the truth that change is first experienced as loss and making a companion my own grief—I’m beginning, oh so tentatively, to accept that there are lessons of growth that will produce change in me. And that’s harder to trust than I would like to think.

In two weeks, I’ll make the journey back to Canada. I hope and pray that I’ll get the opportunity to hold my Granny’s hand one more time. Without words, I’ll tell her that I’m ready to receive, to begin to receive the other part of my inheritance from her. I’ll tell her that I’m learning to settle, to grow where I am planted, even if it is far away from blood family. I’ll tell her that I’m beginning to see that what she’s given me is more than just an adventurous spirit, but a heart in need of the lessons of stability and belovedness. I’ll tell her—slowly, slowly—I’m coming home.

 

Letting Go by Sarah Scheidler

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Posted by kritzau on April 11, 2012 – 10:35 am
Filed under A Beautiful Mess, Growth in Change

Sarah loves all things organic… Her soul is fed by a good challenge, coffee & old dusty stuff with potential. She meddles in all things artistic… but adores photographing people (you can find her work here)… She is a mother x 3 and a wife to a wonderfully creative type. Former avid blogger… gone hotwheels racer and baby chaser…

 

Growth in Change: Letting Go

It was slow as molasses…yes in January…  A change that came out of nowhere and yet… over much time and many discussions, in retrospect, my husband and I should of known what was coming…

God wanted to do something different than we had planned… Damn. It. All.

I am not a risk taker by nature. I am loyal, responsible & calculated and I married a man who is equally conscious, reliable and planned. Together for nearly 8 years we lived together happily buying and selling homes, living within our means, wanting for nothing, sharing and enjoying all that we had, the best we knew how…  It was a good life.

We remodeled our craftsman house (read: 2200 sq ft beauty with 3 car garage) in Pasadena, Ca… and as we moved back in… in to a much larger, better planned out space… I kept finding myself wanting to purge… and purge more of the things we did not use regularly… I didn’t really think much of it as it happened but gradually it became obvious… we had plenty of space to store things… and few things to store…

A few months later, during my husbands sabbatical from pastoral work, my sweet but entirely burned out husband, and I began to do some soul searching… and real questioning… you know the kind that starts with “Do I really have a need for 15 pairs of jeans?” and moves to “How can I be a good steward of  today, Lord?” and “God how can you heal my soul?” and “What do we really value & desire?” and maybe even “God help us to dream..” … My husband also took a motorcycle training class… we tried to connect with others… but made very few connections, after many attempts…

In this space there was much hurt, more loneliness and layers and layers of disappointment in people who were called to care for others, but did not care for me…

So we prayed. And prayed. And at the end of my husband’s sabbatical we agreed that we needed to begin a conversation with the church about what we believed God had done and was doing… Quite honestly, he wasn’t sure exactly WHAT God was calling us to but he was pretty certain it was NOT his current position/job…

I remember sitting in the living room of our lovely craftsman home…  sharing tears… realizing we were going to have to move… away from our neighbors… 8 months pregnant with our third munchkin…  and down size our living space, significantly…

The purging I had started a few months prior to this was nothing compared to this mass purge, lots of tears, putting our craftsman up for rent, saying bittersweet goodbyes to our church family of 10+ years and the hope that God knew what He was doing even if we had only a glimpse. I revisited our finances a few (million) times, we met with wise folks to make sure we weren’t overlooking something… I researched places to live… From Portland, OR and the greater Los Angeles area… We searched for housing and jobs…

God was calling us to something new… something unknown… something ridiculous really… something creative…

 

We trusted and we leaped.

 

Exactly one year later, we have found ourselves surrounded by an amazing community. Literally. Surrounded. Our church community lives sprinkled among the streets surrounding our sweet little postage stamp sized rental home.  There there are people who live what they believe… humbly and intentionally… and it heals our souls… It heals me to walk down an unmarked alley to even more nondescript doors… down stairs into a basement to meet for church… in a place where my children, who may be found brake dancing in the back during worship, are joyfully greeted… It heals me to have ladies that will let me contribute to their lives… if even by a grocery run… It heals me to be invited to showers (baby & wedding) where guests are welcome with or without a gift… welcome even without knowing the one celebrated.

Tim is slowly, but surely, pursuing his own creative journey…  I continue to search for time (& literally space) to carve out for my love of all things creative… and/or growing… my children included…

Our little family has LOVED learning to love being together so much, so closely.  The boys have learned the neighbors have a small farm, clubhouse and trampoline.  Tim’s appreciation for the little things like a good cup of coffee has grown. I have learned to shop for less, less often.

Shortly after we moved into our little place, I remember saying to a new friend “We are exactly where God wants us”… but it stung quite a bit… I welled up with tears often when speaking of where we came… how we came… where we are. Even now, some days I daydream and wonder if one day we will suddenly find ourselves in our former life… With the big house… enormous yard…  our own master suite… a custom made place for everything and then I remember.

 

I am EXACTLY where God would have me… and I. Love. It. Right. Where. I. Am.

 

 

 

Hope in failure by Kristin Ritzau

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Posted by kritzau on March 16, 2012 – 2:04 pm
Filed under A Beautiful Mess, Finding Hope

Kristin here, I haven’t posted yet about hope. This post may have come from the first caffeinated latte’ I’ve drank in three years, but Brene’ Brown led me to hope today, so I felt I needed to share.  Thanks for letting me.

 

I am obsessed with TED talks.  (click here to learn more).  I have input as a strength and that doesn’t mean I like to interject with my opinions, that means I like to take in a lot of information.  TED feeds this cute little gremlin inside of me.

In the last year, for some reason, people like posting this talk on my wall and three separate people have said, “This reminds me of you.”

It’s Brene’ Brown. It’s her talk on vulnerability.  I show it to every class I teach and I watch it almost every month. I am flattered, but it also scares me a little bit.

Good news is she posted another talk this week.  Bad news, it reminded me of me – that might not be so bad because it forced me back into what I know I’m good at, pulling the sheet off of myself.  And I pulled out my notepad.  It is a talk about shame.  Not about the action of it, but what it feels like at our core.  What we are taught to value and do and not the empathy that we desperately need to function holistically.

I had a meltdown last week.  Like the kind Heather talked about.  I got into my Ph.D. program and I didn’t get a scholarship.  Did I feel entitled to one?  I’m not sure, but I felt it said something of my worth, of my ability, and I felt an overwhelming amount of another gremlin named Shame saying, “Maybe you shouldn’t go back to school.”

Unfortunately, this kind of second-guessing hasn’t come just from inside me. Brene’ has some hard words to hear – words like “women are harder on people than others.”  I have heard the most doubtful questions from women about my changes in my life.  I don’t know what to do with that.  I appreciate the life-giving questions even if they are tough, but I am not talking about those.  I’m talking about the critical eye, the working moms versus stay at home moms debate that I am scared shitless of entering into when we start trying to have kids. Let’s be honest, I’m already a front row spectator to this debate just as woman.

I’m also scared about other things: That my voice won’t be good enough to be an expert in something; that I won’t get a job; that money will be wasted; that people won’t invest in me: in what I have to say, in developing me, in helping me, in letting me help them.  I’m wondering if people are asking, “When will she fail?”

My mom’s words when I told her I got into my Ph.D. program after she told me she was proud and she loved me were, “You do everything right.”  And it scared me so much because I thought, Does she see me?  I don’t want to be told “you’re great” – I want to be seen.  But have I also “engineered a life that keeps me small – keeps me under the radar just enough to still be pretending I’m okay,” as Brene says.  Am I limiting my own God-given abilities because the cultural narrative says stop trying so you don’t fail? Only let others, including those who birthed me, see my good side?

Does one desire failure? Desire for others to know the truth? Especially when it isn’t perfect or successful? I’m not talking about Eeyore syndrome where you spill yourself all over everyone all the time.  I’m trying to find what is true. I watched my parents fail and never admit it.  I’ve watched friends fail and turn to addiction.  Most of all I’ve seen that in myself.  Perfection is my addiction, now more than ever.

In raw honesty – baby showers scare the bejesus out of me right now, because they play directly into my addiction to perfection.  All of the stuff and advice and I did it this way, I did it that way – the permission for everyone to give advice, for the men to absent, for the diapers versus clothe things, for the breast feeding, the discipline models, the nurseries on pinterest… it’s enough to already feel like I’ve done it wrong and we haven’t even started.

“You’ll figure it out…You’ll be a great mom,” Some friends say, and I appreciate that, but I need to know that people will be there when I can’t figure it out and when I’m not a great mom (and IF I am a mom). I want to tell my kids the truth.  I don’t want to be by myself with spectators to my life saying you do it right all the time. I feel this way about school, babies, farming, the workplace. That’s what leads to numbing emotion for me – the need to feel like I have to have it all together before I’ve even started.  Vulnerability is my only way out of this cycle.  Failure is my teacher and hopefully being honest about it will provide safe spaces for others who feel this way.   I know that’s the hope that I need. I don’t need pat answers or exclusive clubs, I need authenticity.

I had an honest conversation my 20 year old self this week and what I told her surprisingly is that she will learn more by failing than anything else.  I met with someone this morning who feels like she has failed; I talked to my girlfriend last week who thinks her work is a failure.  And I as I told my friend, I have to tell myself, you’re right – you did… but not in the way you think.  It’s death and rebirth – it’s failure that is learning.  Too often I was told to not fail, to not cry, to not be seen – and what did that do to my soul?  I have been starving for truth.

My shame has taught me to move on and power through instead of being exposed and honest. My biggest fear is that I will wake up in 10 years, be 40, and have missed it all because I was so worried about exposing myself and embracing the mess…still. So I must keep writing.

Brene’ talks about how we try to make ourselves bullet proof and perfect before entering the arena of life, but when we get there people want to know our vulnerable stories.  So true.   When I tell my students stories of my life, they stop texting.  And they are not success stories.  They are just real stories.

Thank you Brene’ for reminding me of that. Of pushing me once again to expose these voices in a public place because if all of this is for one person, then it’s worth it… I just might be that one person.    If I can’t deal with these voices, they will haunt me and I will miss the life I’ve been given because I was trying to be skinny and perfect and nice.

I wrote a book about perfectionism when I was 27 because I wanted a different model.  And I wanted to be seen.  I don’t think I have figured it all out, but if there is one thing I do know, there HAS to be another way.  Hopefully authenticity will lead us there.

So it would be nice to know – are you with me as we move into our true stories?