...the choice to Feel...

I can recall clearly, being in the car, driving down 110th street, in 2008. It was January. I was cold. I was broken. ____ broke my heart. I don’t even give him a name because the way he handled my heart and everything else about me was so careless that he does not deserve acknowledgement. And I said to myself, why is it that I only go for guys that are emotionally not able to support me, emotionally unavailable? That are unable to attach and can’t ‘’need’’ me. The easy and obvious answer is that I was living in a pattern shown to me my entire life by my mother, which was shown by her mother, a pattern then deceptively reinforced by movies that told me that if a girl were GOOD ENOUGH, then the guy WOULD change himself for her and suddenly be able to connect and love her in a way which he had previously been incapable. 

What a pack of lies. Or something else, but cursing is immature. Those movies are all deceiving young minds though, AND OLDER ONES too I'm sure! They entertain us because they show us what we WISH would be true, but what IS true is different. REALITY tells us that learning how to love and form healthy attachment isn’t something that happens in an instant when a boy sees a girl a’top the stair case in the perfect dress, or when he stumbles across her picture while unpacking after a move and suddenly realizes, "SHE is what I want to live for each day." That’s what MOVIES tell us. But that’s not real life. And, if it were real life, if we did go on to indulge in those relationships, they’d eventually crumble as we, the people inside them, sucked each other dry.

In real life, I was following a pattern back then, when dating. And even though for many years after that day, I thought the pattern had been broken by my realization that I needed to go for EMOTIONALLY AVAILABLE GUYS, I now… almost 10 years later … KNOW that it was not. I didn’t stop looking for a guy to NEED me and to COMPLETE me. I wasn’t cured. Yes I married Jesse. Yes. He showed little-to-no-emotion in our early days, and one could even accuse that he isn’t too emotional these days either. SO maybe one would think, like I did when I was dating him, and engaged, and getting married, that I was with a guy and was fine, an independent, differentiated woman who didn't need such affirmation OR to be THE ONE that fulfilled all his hopes and his entire world. 

Reality is that I married a guy with attachment issues (which he has worked very well on), and told myself I was cured. However, I neither came to terms with nor eradicated my needs. Just ask him. It wasn’t long before his pretty young wife was demanding he meet those needs! And what was wrong with him that he didn’t even attempt?? Shape up or ship out buddy!

But even then, I told myself my needs, my emotions, my longings, my desires, were ALL wrong. I felt guilty, inside, that I had them, AND I spent many, many years stuffing my feelings away. Rather than see that my desires and needs were GOOD and that I was just looking for them to be FILLED at the wrong fountain, I said the pain I felt was just bad. So I stuffed the pain down.

The problem is that a person can’t stuff some pain, or some feelings, without pretty much stuffing all of his/her pain or feelings. I started stuffing my feelings away in 2008, way before marriage, because I didn’t want to hurt anymore, and I stuffed away pain for years and years. The climax was in these past years when I was going to further and further extremes to eradicate my feelings, extremes that were leading to chaos and downfall. FINALLY, that clued me in that something wasn’t right. Because, at first, I stuffed in the more ‘safe,’ and ‘godly’ ways. I said I was carrying my cross, and as I’d say those words, I would deny myself the moment to be vulnerable and weak with someone, deny myself the opportunity to admit that I was lonely, missing my family, wishing I was married, sad, feeling unappreciated in ministry. I was too prideful to acknowledge that I was that ‘weak,’ and I didn’t want ANYONE to look down on me (the way I looked down on others), so I kept it in. I hid it all. SO ASHAMED. I was so ashamed of what I felt. I thought it was all wrong. All a picture of HOW I was disobeying God…. I had no clue. I needed help.

I can remember sitting at a piano in the Spring of 2009, feeling homesick, and feeling GUILTY for my feelings! A 26 year old woman believing that she needed to feel guilty for feelings such as sadness and homesickness, that there was no space for them in the Gospel….  Megin couldn’t let herself feel! She felt CONTEMPT toward herself that she FELT! And no one wanted to hear anything about depression! Keep that away! By January of 2011, A 28 year old Megin had figured out a way to stuff her pain and get through the day. She could meet everyone’s expectations. They’d be pleased with her. And that was all she needed.

She was hooked.

This lasted for a while. I had to rework my game a few different times to make sure I kept my ‘’high’’ of being able to produce and provide what everyone needed, be, to some degree, what they wanted. I structured it, tweaked it, figured out a way that would work. I nuanced my standards and carved out my notch. I was fitting the mold, and I was making myself mean something! No wonder within a year, I was at my lowest point since 1998 when the world broke apart the first time. No wonder.

No wonder Jesse and I ended up sitting on a couch in front of the HEAD of the counseling department at Redeemer Presbyterian Church. Yeah. They gave our case to the BIG LADY. No small cookies for THESE guys. No wonder. 

...family trip to San Fransisco. We held on tight,
and good thing, because we had no ground upon which to stand...

You laugh. It was bad my friends. In some ways, I look back at both that younger Megin and that younger Jesse, and I have a bit of empathy for them. They had no idea the amount of baggage each one of them was bringing to the marriage. They thought they’d warned each other adequately enough, but their spots were about to get ‘put on blast.’

….

…….

………..

I remember standing in the middle classroom with Aunt Esther in 2012, talking to her about how the world was falling apart. She said she could tell I was different than when I first came here. I knew I was. I didn’t like it. But it was true. She hugged me. She helped me. It would take time.

------

When Bryant went to jail, I could barely breath. I recall like yesterday the first day I got the call and found out he could potentially be arrested, that they had pictures. I sunk down on the bed, phone to my ear, felt like my heart was in the pit of my stomach. But if I thought THAT day was bad….

I had no idea about what November 2013 was going to be like… the text from mom to say Bryant had been arrested again, in the middle of the night...  and I had not the slightest CLUE about March 2014, when I’d face reality- court- talk to a lawyer- and realize this    was    no   joke   …    or October 2014, when I’d visit my baby brother in a state prison, seeing him wearing the clothes a person wears while in jail. I.knew.nothing.of.that. 

...in Savannah, when I visited Bryant.
Behind the smile are tears that do not cease....

I can’t even put into words how deep the pain was, and since I’d been stuffing all the smaller pains away for years, since I’d pushed them all down so deep, where was I to put this??? There was no more storage space. All my storage space was used up! But…but… I couldn’t DEAL with this pain… I didn’t have tools to DEAL with this pain, TO GRIEVE this loss… LOSSES??? I couldn’t take those anymore. So what was I to do?

I don’t know how I much made it through the day-to-day. Well, I do, and it wasn’t pretty. I made it through that night in October with Jack Daniels and diet coke, just enough to take off the edge and put me to sleep…. until I woke up in the middle of the night…faced with the cold reality, and no more buzz from the alcohol. What was I going to do? I barely spoke to anyone in my family for the rest of the time I was in Georgia. I flew back to New York. I had so much anger. So much grief. So many conflicting emotions. So many things I wanted to SAY! I was mad at so many PEOPLE! I needed to be HEARD!! MY BABY BROTHER! But I didn’t think my family could hear… and I didn’t know how to say it rightly… yet. So I told it to God and my counselor. But mostly, I told it all flatly while I numbed myself out with the newest remedy I’d found to keep me focused on anything but the REALITY of life and the BIG questions I had to answer:

1.       What if God never redeemed my brother’s life? Would I still serve him? What if my brother died in prison? Would I still follow God? Would I still believe in him?

2.       What if my extended family never healed, never got beyond the chaos of what life was like then? Would I still serve God?

3.       What if I never had a child? What if Jesse and I were never happy? What if I never felt okay again, would I follow God?

Honestly, I couldn’t even answer those questions because I wasn’t letting myself feel the depth of all the pain thinking about them required. I’d take it in pieces, chunks, periods of journaling and crying. But mostly, I put on my brave face each day, my face I’d fitted for the world, behind tons of eyeliner and mascara and the best outfit I could create, and the cleanest apartment one could keep, and I’d go. And I’d live to the best of my ability, the perfect perfectionist, pleasing and presentable, an end I’d seek by any means I’d need. AND IF YOU CROSSED MY PATH TO MESS WITH THE NAME AND MY GAME, THE WORLD I WAS CREATING FOR MYSELF, MY METHOD, AND MY MINISTRY, MAY YOU BEWARE. I could have unleashed at any moment… and I often did… on the unsuspecting. 

Yet, I had no idea. I had no idea I was doing this… Not at first at least… toward the end, then I started to realize. But it took a while to recognize the cold ground that had become my heart.

I don’t think I really started to FEEL again until after Eli was born. Because even while I was pregnant, I just focused on the "next big thing!!" – having a baby. I lived for being the best pregnant woman I could be! The healthiest and fittest! I planned out how to approach birth in the best way I could imagine so that my attempts, at least, would be above reproach, even if nature took a different course. The problem is, when nature started taking a different course, as one might suspect, I flipped out! I wasn’t used to anyone or thing upsetting my plans. I needed to ACE the birth and parent thing. I NEEDED IT so that I would MEAN something and could feel GOOD about me. Nothing else would make me feel like I mattered or had any hope. There was too much PAIN AND LOSS not grieved tearing away at me inside. Too much telling me why I DIDN'T MATTER and why I was a FAILURE. 

Headed to the hospital. Everything
controlled to a tee... no idea what
awaited me....

So imagine what it was like then to be forced into labor by doctors because it was medically necessary, and then to be trapped in the hospital for a week afterward because not only did I have PRE-ECLAMPSIA, BUT NOW I HAD POST-PARTUM PRE-ECLAMPSIA and my blood pressure wouldn’t go down…. even on medication. Forced. Trapped. Those words explain how it felt. The truth is, everyone was doing their absolute best to take care of mine and Eli’s physical needs, BUT MY EMOTIONS- those were the things that were probably in the direst straits. Most of the brave souls who did tried care for my emotions got pushed away because I was still under the guise that I needed to handle my emotions on my OWN in order to be GOOD ENOUGH and wise. I was deluded, deceived by the master of lies, and by myself, by my own bent toward sin.

But God… He broke in. He allowed me to go so completely out of control that I reached out again in the ONE way that had ever helped make sense of the chaos before. In fact, I’m pretty fortunate that this pattern was forged so early in my childhood. I called my counselor at Redeemer, no not the BIG LADY, but the other lady, the women who had become like my soul sister in the past 3 years, my safe person, and she helped me. She helped Jesse. She helped us. She showed us how to help ourselves. And when I said, “where is God?” She said, “He’s right here. That’s why you are here. God brought you back here. You’ve told me what’s going on. You guys are getting help. You’re safe. THIS is God. He's.RIGHT.here.”

She was right.

……

Slowly I started to consider feeling again. It still took nearly a full year until I was willing to risk it completely- the wild chance of raw emotion. It took months and months of contemplating it, and sticking my toe in the water, only to run away scared to death. But finally, finally… God made it too appealing. He made life too appealing. He showed me enough of Himself that I could not say no… and so I’ve been learning since then, relearning actually, because I’ve felt these things before, but this time, this time God has blessed me with many more skills with which I can feel them. This time, I know where to put these feelings... where they can go...

This past year has been a year where I feel like I have been reintroduced to myself. I have literally met parts of myself that I forgot existed. It has been exhausting, and blessing upon blessing as God has done this. But this past year has also been a year of having to grieve. I have grieved so many losses from my past 34 years JUST in this past year… God has been BRINGING THEM UP! Out of nowhere- memories are triggered, and I am right back there in the moment, and everything is fresh. I’ve read through countless old journals and emails to understand what my state of mind and circumstances were like during these times, and He’s helped finally process a lot of losses and traumas that I didn’t have the tools to process as they occurred in ‘real time.’ I’ve started to feel again… on a daily basis. I’ve been able to go into the world without my brave face of perfection… I’ve been able to open up and let everything fall out… but the thing is, it’s not like it’s just falling out random and without meaning.… each thing that spills out of me seems to spill INTO some SPOT. I don’t mean to say that I am at perfect peace with everything that has ever happened or no longer feel sadness or pain or anxiety or fear, but somehow, all these "things" that have been in my life are finding a place to "live" and to give birth to God’s REDEMPTIVE purposes in this world. They are allowed space to breath instead of getting pushed away, buried inside dark cavities of a darkened heart and mind.

February, when God brought Mercer to Megin since she couldn't come to Mercer!

It's funny. Because I have this album that I listened to on repeat CONSTANTLY back in 2007-2008. It was one of my favorites, but then I suddenly stopped listening to it, and I haven’t listened to it since. Literally. There were times I have thought about going back to listen to a song from the album, but each time I would start, something inside me would stop me and I’d say “no, go to another song.” And I’ve even scrolled past this album on my ipod many times over the years and thought “why did I ever like that album? I never listen to it. It wasn’t that great.” Literally, I have thought that A MILLION times.

Well, yesterday, for some reason, I saw it, and I thought to myself, LISTEN to that album… LISTEN! So I did. I didn’t even really put much thought into it. I’ve gotten into the habit as of recent of obeying some of the seemingly nonsense that comes to mind like that. Holy Spirit? I don’t know. But as I listened, all the sudden it hit me, 

"OH MY GOSH! THIS ALBUM! THIS ALBUM EXPLAINS MY LIFE. I’VE FELT IT ALL- EVERYTHING. THIS SONG IS ABOUT THIS… AND THEN THIS ONE… ABOUT THIS… AND THEN THAT ONE… OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG!!!"

I was shocked. The album is AMAZING, well to me at least. It’s by this random Christian singer/songwriter who never became famous, but I remember that when I first stumbled across her writings in October 2007, I related. Her work ACTUALLY sounded a lot like many of my own songs. Our pieces tell our stories, right? Hers were telling mine! In actuality, some of the lyrics to her songs are vague, so one could read them various ways, but for me then, I read them for my own life, perfectly. They sounded like how I heard my own songs in my head. And they conveyed many of the same messages that I sought to express in my work. We even had some similar titles and discussed parallel subjects! It was CRAZY!

In Nashville, FINALLY, for the first
time... at the SING! conference...
feeling I fit without trying...

And then it all made sense… I stopped listening to that album in 2008 because that’s when I started to teach myself not to feel anymore. And I couldn’t go back to the album, because I couldn't confront "the album of my life." I couldn't talk about what her pieces were talking about because I needed to live in the lie that I was actually better or somehow different than I really was! 

meeting Joni Eareckson Tada, a woman who has given
me strength more times than I can explain

And not needing to apologize for who I am,
or anything, because I was finding myself in Him...
and loving being HIS.

Ironically, one of the songs on the album talks about how we deceive ourselves. For me, it speaks directly to how I lie to myself regarding how I really am and how I am coping or measuring up in order to garner for myself purpose, build for myself worth, dignity- find for myself meaning in this world… or in Christian terms, attain my own righteousness. I don’t live in the actual present. I’m not honest with myself… 

One of the best lines in the song is this: “Honesty come and save me from myself and everything I can’t admit I am tonight…” And I mean that line, just as it is written. Another line, I would change. She writes, “Don’t take the truth from me; the only thing that’s real. And save me honesty from the way I feel.” And actually, I don’t think my problem is that I too easily come inaccurately to believe things as a product of my feelings. I am more apt to IGNORE the feeling, deny it… for me, I need to listen to the feeling… but then as well, I need to listen to what God speaks INTO the feeling. I cannot just follow my own ideas or the world’s idea for handling my emotion. I cannot blindly trust my emotion to guide me. I can trust it to be honest about what’s going on inside of me, and that is import. Because, as the rest of the song says, “I know how to lie as well as I know right from wrong.” IF I’m not careful, my actions are easily lies.

So in summary, well, I can’t really summarize these five single-spaced pages of typing. Instead, I suppose I’ll try to state where I’ve ended up. And what better way, than through lyric… paying close attention to the last three lines… letting all that is before become the preface, and the last three lines become the choice…

“Today I learned that faith cannot be obtained like a place I can go.

It’s more like a choice than a feeling.

And more like a wound than healing, and the act of believing in You.

And I guess I need to choose, and today I am confused and losing ground.

And maybe this is where I grow.

When I admit that I don’t know.

When belief becomes the only way to You.”

And that’s where I want to go… to You, God… and so I’ll feel first… I won’t push the feeling away, and then I’ll choose. I’ll choose to sit in the wound of the feeling and let it speak truth about what is going on, and then I’ll look to You and see what it is You say as well. Then I’ll believe instead of knowing, and I’ll walk to you even as my legs give way and ache… and I’ll grow, becoming more and more who You have created me to be… becoming more and more like You… but it will all be a choice, one that I will make by Your grace and Yours alone, because left on MY own, well, I've seen what happens then...