I want you to imagine something with me.
Pretend that you are in the middle of a
terrible storm. You are walking down an unfamiliar road and you’re only thought
is to return home. You are cold and shivering, with only a light hooded jacket to
protect you. The wind and rain are beating down on you so hard that you draw
the hood around your head and you hunch over trying to minimize the force of
the wind and rain battering you relentlessly. The only things keeping you warm
are walking and your thin, hooded jacket. All you can see ahead of you is a few
feet of rain-soaked pavement, and your drenched shoes, as you put one foot in
front of the other.
Imagine this continues for days, weeks,
months, years. This darkness, this coldness, this discomfort – and even pain –
are all you know; they are all you’ve ever known.
Then one day you stop. You just stop
walking. You see that there is no water on the pavement. You feel that there is
no wind or rain pelting your hunched form. Your shoes are dry, but your feet
are weary and throbbing from constant movement with no rest. You try to stand
up straight, but your back screams in protest from being hunched over for so
long. Nevertheless, you remove the hood and look around you. You don’t really
recognize what’s around you because all you’ve seen for so long is dull, gray
pavement.
The storm is gone. The sky is blue with
puffy, white clouds. The grass is green. The valley you’re in gently sweeps up
to rolling hills, which become tall, jagged mountains. You see rivers and
waterfalls; wildflowers, trees and forests. You hear birds singing nearby and the
unfamiliar warmth of a zenith sun. It’s beautiful and breathtaking and
completely foreign. This is not the world you know. You feel more lost now than
you did before.
You want the clouds to gather and darken.
You long for the wind to pick up and the rain to fall. You don’t want to see
vistas and panoramas; you want your vision filled with the few yards of
pavement that you’ve grown accustomed to. You just want things to back to the
way they were because that is what you know. That dark, cold, wet, furious
world is what you know.
This new world is terrifying. It’s so open,
so uncertain, so vast. There is no safety out there – there is only safety within
the hood of your jacket. But you can’t help but wonder, “when did the storm
end? How long have I been walking in this terrifying sunshine and not known it?
How many miles have I traveled hunched over, alone and scared?” And even more
terrifying, “what do I do now that the storm has ended?”
This is what life is like for me right now.
The storms of my childhood were criticism, bullying,
neglect and sexual abuse. The hooded jacket I wore was inferiority, self-pity,
self-doubt and fear, because I learned to use these beliefs to protect me from
the storms. This is all I’ve known. As I have aged and received much
counseling, I’ve come to realize that the storms of my childhood are over. They
no longer rage, though I have no idea when they stopped, because I never stopped feeling the storm!
Yet, I look around me and I see that the
world has changed. My circumstances have changed. I no longer need to walk
through life as if in a storm, because the storm is over. But this is a new
world that I don’t know anything about. I don’t know how to navigate a world
where I’m allowed to have desires, wishes, hopes and dreams. I don’t know how
to live in world where I don’t have to suffer anymore. And a part of me wants
that suffering to come back. I want the storms to return, because it’s all I’ve
known. I may be in pain and uncomfortable all the time, but it’s familiar, it’s
what I know.
I see that I create negativity in my
life. The storm around me did not end, it simply moved within. I needed the storm.
I needed the suffering. I didn’t know there was any other way to be. What the
storm taught me was that I wasn’t worth sunshine (being loved). I didn’t
deserve wide open spaces (freedom to be myself). I thought that I was a
mistake; that with me, God had messed up. That’s just the way things were! It
was just an unchangeable, immutable fact. All mankind can be saved… except me,
because I’m not worth saving.
Having your eyes “un-blinded” is
terrifying. You would think that seeing a world where good, beautiful, hopeful
things exist would be welcome, but it’s not. It’s terrifying in its
unfamiliarity. The implications for regret over living a life in fear (i.e.,
not knowing when the storm ended) are soul-crushing because it forces you to
ask: “how long have I lived this way… and DIDN’T NEED too?!?”
This is the crossroads I am at in my life.
I am looking at the immense and open world around me, seeing the hope and freedom
it offers, but longing for the familiar storms to return. I am asking myself, “what
do I do now? How will I survive a world I know nothing about? How do I begin to
believe that I have worth, when I
have never known worth?”
