Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

wholeness

These past few weeks

When my doctor first told me I’d be off work for at least four weeks, I was devastated, and it wasn’t just the thought of not having a paycheck for a month. It was all the other stuff I wasn’t going to be able to do. Things like driving or helping with housework. I briefly had visions of dedicating this time to writing but the reality of healing and recovering from surgery was more intense than I expected.

I have not been able to put together words like I had hoped. Sitting down to write something, anything has felt like too much work, even when I’ve had the smallest of desires.

These past few weeks have not been a waste, though. I’m slowly starting to see that. Aside from the physical healing of my body, these weeks have shown me some things about myself. 

Like, how far I’ve come. And how far I still have to go.

Photo by Olivier Guillard on Unsplash

—

Two years ago, I sat on a couch in our friends’ living room celebrating Thanksgiving by sobbing. The source of my sorrow was the prospect of getting a job. At that time, it had been 10 years since I’d done anything outside of the house, and I was afraid of all I would lose by giving up hours a day to something else even with the promise that those hours would come with a regular paycheck.

These past few weeks I have felt (heard?) the echoes of those days before I stepped out of what was comfortable into something that was ultimately better than I could have imagined. I have both embraced and resisted the hours stretching before me with nothing scheduled. In the first few days, those hours were spent in bed, reading, watching Netflix, listening to the world that is my household go on without me. I rested and slept, took medicine every few hours.

I cried. A lot.

My perceived helplessness and the effect it had on my family saddened me. I felt guilty for being so incapable of even the smallest of chores. I had small measures of hope that every day would get better, that my body would return to its normal, but fear lurked in the shadows. What if it was always going to be like this?

Photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash

I reached a low point as I wandered around the house for the umpteenth day wearing pajama pants with nothing on the agenda except the choice between a Netflix binge, reading, and a jigsaw puzzle. On this day, it was easiest to choose the Netflix binge because it meant I didn’t have to move much from the couch. And while we were overwhelmed with food from caring friends, almost everyone brought dessert with the meal which meant there were a lot of sweets in the house and me, unsupervised.

I think I’ve gained 10 pounds since I’ve been home recovering, partly because of the desserts and partly because taking a walk has been a scary prospect. I haven’t begun to think about what returning to running will look like.

The pajama pants, the inactivity, the too-many-sweets. These are the echoes of my former life, and in the last two years, I’ve worked hard to reverse what were for me some negative habits. A month at home recovering from surgery has felt like the largest of setbacks.

But the experience of those two years is what keeps me from total despair.

I know how my life can be different.

—

Photo by Caleb Woods on Unsplash

Two years ago, I had lost myself. Or maybe I was hidden from myself. The past two years have been a gradual act of discovery, of becoming a person I didn’t even know could exist in my body. I sensed the change. Others could see it. The past two years have been some of the most fulfilling and purposeful of my entire life.

And these past few weeks, I’ve worried that I’m losing myself again. It is too easy to slide into old habits and patterns when there is little to no structure to my days. To force myself out of the house, off the couch with no outside force acting on me.

But this is not the same thing, I tell myself. This is not a season without end. I might have to start over, in some ways, but I haven’t lost everything I gained in the last two years. The me that I’m becoming is still there, even if she’s slumbering for a bit.

All is not lost.

—

And yet I wonder: What do I have to show for all this time off?

I joked about trying to write a novel for National Novel Writing Month since I had an unexpected month of “free” time, but I knew early on that wasn’t going to happen. What I’ve learned about myself in the past few years is an unstructured day is not conducive to writing for me. I get more writing done when I have to squeeze it into smaller chunks of my day. At least, that’s how it works for now, while I’m still learning and developing my skills.

Photo by Andreas Klassen on Unsplash

What these past few weeks have taught me is I’m addicted to productivity. My worth is equal to what I can or cannot do instead of in who I am as a person. I’ve felt like a burden as my husband and kids go to work and school and then come home to take care of me and the house. I have felt needy and vulnerable–because I am–as friends have dropped off meals and stepped in to help with transportation and care for the kids. I had no idea how independent and self-sufficient I had become until I had to be utterly dependent on others.

I measure my days by what I accomplish, so when I look at these past few weeks and wonder what I have to show for it, I try to list the things I’ve done: the books I’ve read, the Netflix shows I’ve watched, the crossword puzzles completed, the progress on learning Spanish via Duolingo, the minimal amounts of housework I’ve been able to do.

What do I have to show for this time?

A healed (healing?) body.

It is enough.

I am enough.

—

One of the books I finished these past few weeks is Glorious Weakness: Discovering God in All We Lack by Alia Joy. I had started it before my surgery and found it an appropriate companion on my healing journey.

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These thoughts, in particular, are the ones I can’t let go of:

“I am a whole version of me even when I am broken or weak or sick.” (p. 172)

And,

“The world expects you to grow forward, march down a line. Do more, be more, have more. Then you will see the hand of God and his blessings. … But God is not about upward mobility so much as inward expansion.” (p. 220-221)

I am confronting my need to do all the things. These past few weeks, when I’ve been unable to do much more than live, breathe, eat and heal, the world has spun on without me. My kids have done housework. Or housework has gone undone. My husband has shared the load. I have asked for help and not been rejected. I have not “produced” and I am still a valuable part of my world.

So.

What does this mean when things go back to “normal”? I’m still a week away from what I hope will be my return to work, and I can already sense the pressure to do, do, do.

The only antidote I can think of is to be, be, be.

This, I believe, will be my focus in the year to come. When I choose a word to guide my year, it will have less to do with achievement and more to do with the inner work of becoming.

The pressure to produce will be hard to resist. I know it will be a struggle.

—

I did not ask for these past few weeks. In all honesty, I did not want them. I wanted life to go on as it had. (Don’t I always?)

Rarely do I recognize this kind of thing as a gift from the start, but it has been a gift, even when it’s been hard.

Life will return to some sort of normal soon. My hope is that I won’t forget all that I’ve learned these past few weeks.

—

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Broken and Whole

I came home crying from work one day last week. This is not something I make a habit of but it’s been a stressful few weeks with more stressful weeks to come, and I was fed some misinformation by someone whose intentions were good but whose word I should not have trusted. This was the kind of ugly cry sobbing that scared even me because I couldn’t control it. Thankfully it was a day my husband was home when I got there and I could get it all out of my system in a safe place and way.

For weeks now, I have felt strong and capable, convinced that whatever life has to throw at me will not break me. I have said these words in my head, “This will not break me.” And it is stunning to hear my inner voice say something so definitive. I have convinced even myself that whatever “this” is, it will not break me. I used to be the girl who thought any small criticism was the end of the world, any deviation from the plan a disaster. (Confession: I’m still sometimes that girl.)

So. Many. Things. are wearing me down right now, but I no longer feel like my house–in this case my mind,  my will, my spirit–is made of straw or sticks. It is a fortified house of bricks, a shelter from the blustery wind outside.

This will not break me, I say to myself, and I live as though it is true.

—

Part of this newfound strength and resolve has to do with my diet, i.e, the food I’m putting into my body.

For the last 30 days I’ve embarked on an experiment with food called Whole30. (If you aren’t familiar with the program it’s a 30-day elimination process for foods to help you reset your body and discover the effects certain foods have on you.) For 30 days, I have cut out sugar, dairy, legumes, and grains, and focused on eating high-quality meats, veggies and fruits along with good fats like avocados and olive and coconut oils. It was nerve-wracking at first and a little overwhelming to attempt but I made a plan and bought ingredients to have on hand in my house and a few days before my official start, I started thinking like I was doing a Whole30. I began the slow elimination of the temporarily forbidden foods.

Before this, my health was already improving. I had lost 12 pounds since the beginning of the year, partly due to having a job outside the home for the first time in almost 10 years and partly due to a commitment to running two to three times a week. But I needed to take this next step to reset my relationship with food and try to discover what exactly was causing me such distress.

I won’t chronicle everything about the month for you. Maybe at some point I’ll write more of it down, but at the end of these 30 days, I feel more amazing than I imagined I could. I happen to look good, too, in my own opinion, but it’s the feeling good part that has me convinced that some of the foods I’ve been eating are not doing me any favors.

I still don’t understand the mental shift that takes place when you change your eating habits and I’m about to enter the phase of the process where you reintroduce your body to the foods you eliminated, but no matter what the scale says or how my pants fit, I cannot deny the way I feel. Even in the midst of stress, I have not been paralyzed by anxiety. Even though I’m still sometimes impatient, I haven’t felt like exploding as much as I used to. I still get tired, but I don’t feel exhausted by the middle of the day. I feel too good to go back to how things were.

It’s called the Whole30, I think because of the nature of the foods you eat while doing it, but in my mind, this process has made me feel more whole, like I’m giving my whole self to my life now. And while I don’t consider myself to have arrived or finished the work of healing, the Whole30 has been like finding another piece to the puzzle of me. When I stripped away some of the comfort foods and crutches I’d relied on to see me through tough times, somehow I discovered that I was stronger than I knew, that I didn’t need those things to get me through.

It’s confidence building, and I’ve never had confidence in abundance, no matter what it seems like on the outside.

—

Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash

“The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”

This is a line Ernest Hemingway wrote in A Farewell to Arms. I’ve not read it, or if I have I don’t really remember it, but this quote is tossed around often and that last part sticks in my brain like a piece of food between teeth. The more I try to free it, the more stuck it becomes.

Strong at the broken places. I think I know what it means. I think maybe I’ve even experienced it. Or I am experiencing it now. If the quote ended there it would be inspiring and encouraging, but anyone who has read Hemingway or knows about his life knows that inspiring and encouraging are not really his jam. Which is why the next line makes a lot of sense, too.

“But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially.”

Now A Farewell to Arms is a war novel, and I might have to pick up a copy just so I can find this line in the story and see if its meaning becomes any clearer, but I get it. Sort of. Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe Hemingway himself didn’t understand it. I know all too well how it is to be a vessel for words. I can’t pinpoint the origin of many of the sentences I string together. I sit down to write one thing and something else entirely emerges. Maybe Hemingway knew this. He is the same man who said, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

It is like that, sometimes, when I’m ready to let it, like bleeding my thoughts and feelings and observations onto the screen. It’s hardly ever about gratuitous attention. I release my thoughts so I know what I’m feeling, so I can make sense of the world. If you also take something from that, that is a bonus side effect.

I don’t know if Hemingway meant “broken places” as an actual physical location, like the site of a battle, or if he was meaning metaphorically, like the places inside of us that are broken, but I believe that experiencing brokenness can make us stronger.

—

There is a broken place in my heart. Not the literal one that pumps blood through my body but the one we talk about when we talk about spirit and emotions. A crack runs right through it. Probably more than one. The broken places are many. And they are mended.

There were days–and weeks, months, and years–when I was sure I would be broken beyond repair. When I thought the breaking would kill me.

In a way, it did. A part of me died, but even the broken places allowed some light to penetrate. Growth springs from cracked and broken all the time. Look at the trees whose stumps sprout with new branches. Look at the cracks in the sidewalk where flowers and grass and weeds push up, straining and striving for the light.

Photo by Abhishek Pawar on Unsplash

Sometimes all it takes is a little bit of light to convince you you’re not finished yet. Sometimes you’re broken and think you’ll always stay that way. But all the while you’re healing and you don’t even know it until one day instead of feeling like life is beating you down with every chance you get, you stare it right in the face and say, “Bring it.”

You are strong because of the broken places. Somehow the cracks have contributed to your strength. Maybe you could have been strong without them, but maybe you couldn’t. Maybe you needed the broken places to prove you couldn’t be broken forever. Or that you could be broken but you would survive it.

It is a weird thing to feel strength in your spirit when you know how weak you have been. It is almost like you are a different person. Or you had a dream about someone else’s life.

I think Hemingway is right that the world breaks everyone. We all have a breaking point, and maybe that changes based on the day. Maybe we are not always strong at the broken places or anywhere. But maybe we could be. Maybe we hope to be.

I wish I had a formula to tell you how, but all I have are years of life experience, much of which I wouldn’t wish on anyone. All I can say is if you think you can’t survive it–whatever “it” is–give it another day.

—

I don’t fully understand the relationship between broken and whole, how they can work together and how you can sometimes be both at the same time. I have known seasons of broken that I thought would never end and I’ve had glimpses of whole that I wished would endure, but what’s happening now is like an ebb and flow, like the tide coming in and out with regularity. I no longer believe I will only have one or the other but they will both be present, maybe in equal measure, maybe not. But I have hope that the broken won’t last forever and the whole will come, and I have confidence that the whole will be more than a fleeting glimpse.

This week I have felt them both. They both make up a part of me. They both contribute to my life.

I am broken but not destroyed. I am whole but not yet finished.