Holding a Place No Longer

The new blog is up and running thanks to the handsome and sexy Jonathan Worent. Come find me at gabrielle.worent.com.

Old Hurts

I happened to mention to my chiropractor the other day that my knee was hurting. What followed was no fun at all, an exploratory rotation and feel, that nod you never want to see and then a quick twist and shove. He’s helped so much with chronically sore places in my back that I trusted all this twisting implicitly. I walked away assuming everything was all good now. A mere flight of stairs disabused me of this opinion. Nope, nope, nope- I still hurt only now it aaaaaached even when I wasn’t running. Or walking. Or doing anything other than sitting or, perhaps, lying in bed trying to fall asleep.

I’m not very medical so I was very proud of myself when I came up with a reason for why I was hurting. When I first hurt my knee due to a very simple tweak during an evening of bowling, I babied it, doing rehab at the gym instead of powering through the pain. Lots of slow paces on the elliptical and knee strengthening exercises. Only I never had anyone make sure I was strengthening the knee back into alignment. I thought that since I was taking care of the hurt knee at all I would be fine.

Only now it’s not fine and not only is it not fine, but now there is a whole heap of muscle I so carefully built up that holds my knee in the wrong place. I can function just fine, live a nice painless life until I put stress on that knee. A minute of running and I can feel every out-of-line ligament and bit of cartilage. I healed it, but I healed it wrong.

There have been tumultuous times of my life, times that tweaked my soul out of alignment. If you’ve followed this blog for any length of time you might already know the sorts of times I’m talking about. These times hurt me deep, in places I never identified. I either healed those hurts up or ignored them but either way I healed them wrong. And I go along just fine until some stress comes along and then I feel every single out-of-line emotion and memory.

I’ve been seeing a counselor for the past six months or so, trying to put back some of the things that healed wrong. He says I make counseling easy, that I already have the framework of insight, self-awareness and introspection ready for him to build on. That makes me feel like the A+ student of the crazy ward. And it doesn’t help when everything hurts, when we work together to wrench my out-of-joint soul back into alignment. There are just so many muscles built up to keep it in place.

It has been an amazing six months or so, times of healing. I told him this week that I can run my fingers down the walls of my mind and only catch them on one or two issues. There used to be sharp edges everywhere. There is so much progress happening it seems petty to whine about some pain that’s happening along the way. But my knee really hurts, even while I try to build up new muscles to hold it in its rightful place.

I’ve had to learn how to do rehab on my soul. Some of this involved a job that gave me mind-space to do that rehab. Other exercises involve learning what self-care looks like for me. I’ll give you a hint- it’s not a spa day or a shopping spree or a hot bath or anything that I expected self-care to look like. For me it’s a book that makes me think, a movie that makes me want to create something, media that births thoughts in my mind and then the space and time to cultivate those thoughts. There is little that makes me happier or feel more fulfilled than having a mind full of thoughts.

So I’m sitting at Leaves N Beans on Main, my foot up on a chair to ease the ache in my knee, telling the world about my counseling to ease the ache in my soul. I’m in the midst of the healing process so everything hurts, but I can see the end in sight. I will run again someday. I will be whole again someday.

Now is the time to do the work.

Thinking Again

Since leaving Midstate I’ve been finding that I once again have enough brain space to think.

Y’know, that was going to be the opening line for a bog post about what I’ve been thinking about. I’m sure that post would have been fantastic, it having been written by me after all, but let’s take a moment and celebrate the fact that there are once again thoughts in my head.

 The books I’m reading have enough space in my head to bounce around a bit, ramming into other thoughts and sticking loosely, like a ball of Silly Putty bouncing around a room. Connections are formed, this thought creating associations with that until there’s a web of connections, some reaching backwards in time to thoughts I’d forgotten about. I consider ramifications, turn the thoughts over and over, trying to see how they fit into the larger construct I’ve been working on for decades I like to call “How Gabrielle Sees the World”.

I feel like someone who digs out their old paints, the brushes awkward in hands that used to know every splinter and groove. The first few canvases might be ham-handed and overdrawn, colors badly mixed and lines out of whack, but they’re bright, colorful, full of the joy of rediscovery. The old skill will return in time.

Today I shall think about this return to joy. I will dwell on the feeling of happiness, like little bubbles, on the ricochet of thoughts that shakes other idea loose. Perhaps tomorrow I shall think about something else. 

Life Ambition #73

It was roughly three years when I took up running in an attempt to get in shape and lose weight (spoiler alert: it failed). I came up to a stop sign, all sweaty and out of breath, seriously wondering if this running this would ever be for me (the jury’s still out). A car pulled up next me, a vaguely thuggish looking guy leaning out the passenger side. He yelled something to me, something that startled me so much it wasn’t until after they drove away that I thought to react.

“Hey!” he yelled. “Keep up the good work!” Then he gave me a big smile and a thumbs up.

Someday, I want to do this for someone.

Getting It Done

I have never had much ambition. Any driving goal that you might be able to identify in my life is not so much something I was to accomplish, but a person I want to be. It’s solidified for me, recently, into a phrase my brother said about someone else. That person “got shit done” and so was invaluable to his organization. I turned the phrase over in my head and realized that, without being fully cognizant of the specifics, I have been striving to be someone who gets shit done. It’s a sort of “When I grow up…” idea.

It’s a great ambition, in my opinion, this capable dependability no matter the circumstances. It does make transitions rather difficult, though.

I have been at Samaritan for three weeks and I feel like the opposite of someone who gets shit done. I’m the newb, the beginner, the *shudder* trainee. I went from being the trainer to the trainee, making mistakes and plodding along. Since my feeling of worth is so intricately connected with my ability to get shit done I’ve felt like a failure, like a burden on the ministry and my coworkers. Yeah, it’s over-dramatic, but I asked a grocery store employee to dance the hulu today so over-dramatic is about par for me. In my defense, he was in a grass skirt and had a lei around his neck so it should have been expected.

The past three weeks have been difficult. On the one hand, I feel very privileged to work with the people I work with. They are lovely souls, full of grace even when I make mistakes. On the other hand, I have felt the sharp jolt of starting over, learning a new system and new skills. That jolt shook up my sense of self, never very firmly anchored, from its place and bounced it around my insides.

Thursday someone helped strap my sense of self back in. I was telling him about our Opening Ceremonies parties, on the Friday of my first week at a new job while we were giving a friend rides to and from her third-shift job and had spontaneously decided to kidnap my six nieces and nephews overnight. He laughed and, understanding everything else going on in my world, said that no matter what was happening at work, I was still, clearly, someone who got shit done.

And something eased in my soul, a breath that said, “That’s all I’ve ever wanted to be.”

Of Dreams, Rage and Coffee Cake

I haven’t been sleeping well the past couple of days. I feel like I’m mostly just dozing which is when I have the worst dreams. I even did that thing I swore I’d never do, where Jonathan says something mean to me in my dream and I wake up holding it against him. This morning I had a dream that was disturbing and confusing and oddly satisfying.

It featured a friend of Jonathan’s named Dane (no, Jonathan does not have a friend named Dane, nor does he have a friend who looks or behaves anything like Dane. Dane is named Dane simply because I now spend all day looking at names and I thought Dane was kinda cool). Dane was staying with us because he was down on his luck, though our house didn’t look like our house and I’m not entirely sure that we didn’t move in with Jonathan’s parents halfway through the dream.

Welcome to dream logic. Just stick with me.

Anyway, we were helping him, we were trying to take care of him, to give him a place to stay while he pulled himself together and not only did he ‘accidentally’ walk in on me in the shower, but he ate my coffee cake! I have never, not once in my life, made coffee cake, but in my dream this was a violation of trust on the deepest level. I’d apparently been saving that coffee cake or was planning on taking it to an event or something. He tried to apologize, crumbs all over his mouth, but I was furious. I walked over to where he was sitting at the table, Jonathan trying to explain that his behavior was unacceptable, and I flipped the table over.

Just grabbed it and flipped it.

Standing outside of myself, watching myself in my dream, I was shocked. Then I felt this conscious decision to just go with it, to stay mad and drive home the point. Amidst all the shocked feelings and disbelief that I was behaving like this there was a certain satisfaction. I was actually stepping up on my own behalf to someone who had made me feel vulnerable and who had been walking all over my kindness. I wasn’t just taking it anymore.

Someone at work suggested I run my dreams through a dream interpreter, but I hardly think that’s necessary in this case. I have no concept of what this means for the rest of my life, how it connects with turning the other cheek and all that. It feels like a momentous moment, even if it only happened in a dream.

Plus, now I want to make a coffee cake.

Worthy of Love

In my quest to read 24 new books this year I’ve had to get somewhat creative with finding new books to read. I do not have the strength of Ideation so coming up with new ideas for what to read is difficult for me. Browsing through my Kindle library to get spark some ideas I happened upon a book I’d preordered when it seemed like a good idea and then hadn’t read when it’d been released- Altar Ego by Craig Groeschel.

The premise of this book is that we govern our lives according to the many labels and names we carry. Some of them are valid but since many of them were given to us by our fellow man they are faulty, mere lies that we come to believe so deeply they affect who we think we are. The aim of the book was to identify the wrong labels and figure out who God says we are. His labels are perfection, a guidebook of who He made us to be and, as Craig said many times, if you know what something is called then you’ll know what it’s for.

I’m on a recent Brene Brown kick, watching her TED Talks about vulnerability and, soon I hope, reading her book Daring Greatly. Today I watched her first TED Talk, “The Power of Vulnerability”. In this talk Brene makes a couple of what may turn out to be life-changing assertions. She says, the only difference between the people she studied who were able to accept love and who had a feeling of worthiness and those who were always struggling for it was that the first set of people believed that they were inherently worthy of love and acceptance. It is truthfully as simple as that. And because of this inherent believe these people lived in a way that she called Wholehearted. They were able to be compassionate with others because they had learned to be compassionate with themselves. They were able to connect because they could let go of who they thought they should be and be who they truly were without the fear of being rejected. And since they weren’t constantly on the hunt of something to numb the feelings of inadequacy and shame, they were able to feel all the good emotions like joy and gratitude.

Okay, so follow me here- It seems like what we need to live as Wholehearted people is that inherent surety of our worth. The question remains, though, where does that surety come from? And, if we don’t have it, where do we get it from?

Well, who are you?

At your deepest, most fundamental core what is your name?

You dig down deep enough and you’ll find that your name and mine are the same. We are all of us made in the image and likeness of the most perfect and most holy God. He crafted us, decided on us when we could not decide on ourselves. No matter how disparate our experiences, you and I both share the fact that we did nothing to influence our conceptions. No matter what your parents tell you, that you were an accident or a mistake, you were decided upon by the truest embodiment of Father. You are, at your deepest level, worthy of love.

My hope is that if I keep telling myself this then I’ll be able to tell it to you at some point. Then you’ll tell it to someone else and they’ll pass it on and maybe we can actually come to a place where people can love each other, show compassion and connect in deep ways. We are a country of people living together alone and it is killing us. The data seems to say that in order to heal we must first be loved, believe that we are worthy of love.

We are worthy of love. It’s part of our DNA, part of our truest names. Now is the time to live like it, to live wholehearted lives in a broken-hearted world.