Will the real me please stand up?

I'm writing this sitting in Caribou Coffee, my favorite nearby coffee shop, where I come sometimes on Sundays or free evenings to journal and be, surrounded by the smell of freshly ground coffee, curled up in one of their worn, brown leather chairs, my legs curled under me indian-style or stretched out on the stool they lovingly provide. ;) It's been a tough week. Emotionally, physically, spiritually - sometimes I feel like I'm barely holding it all together. Monday and Tuesday I was really depressed. I can't really tell you why; all I know is that sometimes my life doesn't feel like mine. It's like for 9 months I was living in an alternate reality, one that I try to tell people about but one that they can hardly understand or connect with, much less accept as part of who I am now. And yet a reality that is, in many ways, more real to me than the one in which I find myself every day. I had so much space there to just be with whatever. I slept a lot, read a lot, spent a lot of time alone. I taught and I practiced, I traveled and learned the basics of a foreign language. But mostly I just stopped the whole American rat-race of living up to ideals and expectations. Now I'm back...and I don't know how to hold onto the inner stillness I discovered while away from all this craziness. Is it even possible? To maintain inner stillness when there are schedules, demands on your time, people who want to see you and be with you, work to do, things to get done? It has to be or it's not much good. What good is anything if it can only be achieved in total isolation away from real life? And yet the idea of being still inside, connecting to and walking with God, while meeting the demands of normal living overwhelms me so much that sometimes I feel like throwing up. I think that's where the depression is coming from. I've been getting this message in various ways, sometimes a gut feeling or another night of not being able to sleep, sometimes a headache. Today it came with words: "You are not handling this well."

What is "this"?

It is the displaced feeling I've had ever since getting home two months ago.
It is the loneliness that comes even though I am surrounded by people who love me...coupled with the craving for aloneness, time to thinka nd be without bearing someone's expectations or assumptions about me.
It is the lack of physical health.
It is the uncertainty about the future.
It is the not-knowing, the deep question at the core of my being that wonders how I'm supposed to "do" it all...pursue my dreams, become financially independent, physically healthy, emotionally stable, full of love and grace for everyone and their dog...
It is the fear.

Fear has become a frequent visitor. Sometimes he hangs out for a while, so long that it's easy to forget what life is like when he's not around. The other night I whispered to the darkness that I was tired of being scared. I know I'm not supposed to be afraid, or live from fear, or choose from fear. It just feels these days like something I can't banish. If I had to put words to it I think it would sound like this: I'm afraid the way things are right now is the way things always will be - in other words, the end of the story. Of course somewhere in my consciousness I know this isn't true. But it feels true, and sometimes that's more crucial to the story than what is actually true.

I don't belong here. I've mentioned that before but I feel it more acutely every day. But where do I belong? I don't know. I struggle with the in-betweenness of this year, the constant reaching, nothing settled. At the end of the day, I'm tired of being human, of other people being human, of all of us striving and failing, making judgments, messes of our intentions to love and live fully. I am overwhelmed by expectations - other people's expectations of me, my expectations of them, my expectations for myself, and tired of the failure of all of us to meet those expectations.

Maybe it wouldn't be so hard if I had a more solid sense of who I am...but the story I am living doesn't feel like me. So much change has occurred in the last four years that sometimes I literally look at myself in the mirror and ask, "Who are you? How did this happen? How did you get here?" It's hard to explain to others because on the outside so much is the same. It's internally where things have shifted, and inside I no longer feel like me.

Oriah Mountain Dreamer writes:

-
"Questions about how to use our time and energy and resources, how to structure our relationships, are ones we all deal with. But most of the time we deal with them by creating a story for ourselves and our thoughts and feelings about the roles we play in these stories. Identifying with these stories, we unconsciously allow them to shape our decisions, to determine which of our constantly changing thoughts and feelings to act upon. It enables us to go on automatic pilot, gives us a sense - the illusion - of knowing who we are, of understanding ourselves. It allows us to go to sleep.

"I am in between stories. The old one is gone, and the new one is just beginning to take shape. When we already have a story we are heavily identified with, it is difficult to stay awake. A clear story about who we are makes it hard to wait and let our actions arise from the deep and open emptiness of experiencing who we are right now, makes it difficult to allow actions to arise that may be inconsistent with how our story says we should move.

"And I find in this time of change that all the things I took to be me, all the roles and reactions and responsibilities and conditions I identified as my self, reveal no self at all. This convergence of so much change in a relatively short period of time shows me that these roles and their corresponding thoughts and feelings always were perpetually changing, even as some "I" that is beyond or behind them remains constant. This in-between time is not a trial to be endured, although at times I admit I have found it difficult to simply stay with no story and no seld. This emptiness at the center is not a bewildering loss to be outrun. This gap in my story allows me to see how I am not what I do, allows me to create and play within new stories, new roles, without identifying exclusively with them.

"How much of the story you have created do you mistake for who and what you really are? How much does it confine you, dictate which thoughts and feelings you follow into doing?"
-

There is a marked lack of control within my story right now. I can't control my health; no matter how hard I work I cannot control the graduate school process; I cannot control the people around me who make up my cherished relationships. I've never considered myself a control freak, but in a way, aren't all of us humans somewhat of a control-freak? Things go better when they're figured out, categorized, formulated, explained. There certainly was a time in my life when I thought I had it figured out. I had neat little categories for my beliefs, formulas for how things were supposed to work, explanations for, well, everything. That's all gone now. It's been a gradual stripping process, lasting back several years. I don't know what brought me here, exactly, except that I have a hunch it has something to do with a God who wasn't interested in my answers, my formulas, my categories, my explanations. A God who systematically emptied me of all of that so that he could fill me with himself. Don't get me wrong. There is a constant tug back towards control, towards figuring out, towards demanding an explanation for everything. I don't *like* the emptiness in my center, the mounting uncertainties, the sense that I'm broken, bleeding, weary to the bone of living a human life meant for glory but marred with sin. Yet I'm reminded of a prayer I prayed almost four years ago in a moment of instanity, one of those moments where you are so connected to the person of God that you're not afraid of the pain anymore. I told God that I want all of him, and I wanted him to have all of me - *no matter the cost*. Of course I didn't know, at the time, what the cost would be; I suppose I still don't. I didn't care. And there is a small part of me, even here, even now, that breathes that same prayer. It is this part of me that hopes, that believes, that is willing to risk wildly for the adventure of being alive. Answers? I have none. Understanding? Not really. Certainty, security about the future? A joke. But what I do have, I realize in a moment of blinding clarity, is all I truly need. I have God who is walking with me, I have his ferocious love for me, I have his word that he has good for me. The rest - the doubt, the fear, the humanness - I can let rest, let be, without answering or explaining - I can indeed embrace all these things as that which renews my daily desperation for more of God in my life.

Maybe this is grace.

Maybe this is surrender.

Because He Lives

Because He lives, I can face tomorrow
Because he lives, all fear is gone
Because I know, I know He holds the future
And life is worth the living, just because He lives.

Sometimes little choruses like this bug me because they strike me as trite. Other times, like yesterday when I read this one on the IM profile of a friend of mine, I sit dumbfounded because of the beautiful simplicity they express. The last line especially jumped out at me - life is worth the living, because He lives. Christ's resurrection power lives in me. A simple, profound truth that I don't connect to often enough. I sit here and internally go through the junk that fills the closets of my heart...categorize and label my fears for the future...question just what it is I have to live for...and in so doing, live a waking sleep, oblivious to the most important fact of my existence: that Christ lives. There's a deeper question that haunts me. Have I become so, I don't know, put out with Christianese bullshit tradition that I let truth slide out the window alongside the junk that I'm deliberately tossing? A truth as simple as, Jesus lives? Have I seen a truth like this applied too many times as a Band-Aid cure-all, applied dispassionately and sometimes even abusively to hurting people, so much so that when I hear it, I am filled with the stories of cold people who have been told "be warm"; hungry people who have been told "be filled", grieving people who have been told "go in hope" - all because "Jesus lives" - and yet the church will do nothing to actually warm, fill, or grant hope?

And yet there's still the moment of surprise when the truth - not the words - gets behind my cynicism and pierces the wall I have up towards churchianity. Maybe it's not as difficult as I make it sometimes....