Dear Sarah,

 I won’t tell you to do things differently. I’m not here to give you advice. We both know that with the pain and suffering and messiness of life, there is also great beauty. You’ve always known that, somehow. Even as a child, you held out hope for what would come after. You had that annoying silver-lining view on life. You kept right on believing you would be fine, no matter what was going on around you.

I don’t want to take that away from you. I wouldn’t change that about you for anything. Your hope is what will carry you through.

But I will tell you this: It’s going to be hard.

It’s going to be much harder than you ever imagined anything could be. There will be darkness so thick you’re pretty sure it's impenetrable, and you’ll wonder if you will ever find light again. You will feel a hopelessness so heavy and tangible that it suffocates you. A loneliness so deep it becomes a physical ache.

You will find yourself standing on the edge of giving up. A place you never thought you could be. Not brave, tough, hopeful Sarah.

You will lose yourself. The Sarah you think you know will disappear piece by piece, very slowly, until you wake up one morning, look into the mirror, and wonder who is looking back at you. You will forget the things you once knew - without question, without doubt - about yourself.

You will get knocked down. Hard. And you will think about not getting back up again. You will think about closing your eyes and allowing yourself to drift into an endless sleep. Not because you're weak, but because you are tired. So tired.

I'm not telling you this to scare you or discourage you.

You will make choices that no one agrees with, that will set you apart. You will lose some friends and outgrow some people and push others away. It's okay. The best ones will find you again, or be there waiting for you when you find yourself again. Your choices will lead you right up to the door of pain and suffering, and you will step right in it.

But I need you to know that you don't give up.

You find a way to pick yourself up and keep crawling on until you can stand up straight again. You discover pieces of yourself along the way and begin to put together a new you. Someone better than before, someone even stronger.

You are beautiful now, even though you can't see it, and you will be even more beautiful for the stretch marks and scars to come.

When you find yourself in the dark, scared and alone, hold on to your hope and remember what I’m telling you. You’ll be okay. You’ll be better than okay. Someday.

I am writing this to you, my past, but also to you, my future. None of us ever arrive. Not in this lifetime, anyway. What's that old saying? "Life is a journey, not a destination." You always liked cliches because they're comforting, and they're usually true.

Love yourself.

Love,

Yourself

A really scary thing happened the other day. My husband shared my blog on his Facebook page. Then there was a tiny explosion here in my small and previously undiscovered corner of the internet. I resisted the urge to obsessively re-read everything I have ever written. 

It was scary because up until that point, I had invited very few people into this space. Four, to be exact. I did not even share it with my own parents. Those four people occasionally asked to share with another person and sometimes I'd get a drifter from Instagram. But that was it.

I was mostly okay with this because I just wanted to write. Anything. I made this space for me. And also, I was terrified. I am terrified. I have lived my whole life afraid of putting myself "out there" in any way that might matter. I have basically made being invisible a vocation.

But my fear was not even something I was aware of. I didn’t always know that choices I was making were a result of a fear that lived deep inside me. Fear of being wrong, of making mistakes, of embarrassment, not being good enough. So many fears controlling me all the time.

When I became a mother, it was so consuming that I didn't have to think about being anything else. It was even kind of a comfort to be so consumed by it. I put on the mantle of Mom and, for a while, forgot that I was even allowed to be anything else. I could be a Mom and I could be good at it and that was good enough for me.

Somewhere along the way I stopped feeling like a person who mattered. I think this is pretty common among mothers. We get caught up in taking care of everyone else and tend to forget about ourselves. So much so that a running joke for the last few years has been that I want to be the poop emoji for Halloween. It's one of those funny-because-it's-true jokes (or maybe it's only funny to me, laughing to keep from crying and all that). That's how I felt on the inside: like a pile of crap with a smile plastered on my face. 

I reached a point where I felt completely crushed down. I felt like I was drowning, very slowly sinking, unable to hold my head above water long enough for a full breath. I was holding myself together on the outside, but inside I was dying.

It wasn't just the loss of my sense of self. It was so many other things happening at the same time, so that it seemed like my world was falling apart around me.

"For innumerable evils have compassed me about: mine iniquities have taken hold upon me, so that I am not able to look up; they are more than the hairs of mine head: therefore my heart faileth me." -Psalm 40:12

The image I carry of myself during this time is of a little girl, crumpled and alone at the very bottom of a black hole, with bits of broken earth around her.

I had to sit down there for a while. I could have run away, I guess. Historically, I'm very good at running away when things get tough. But I had to sit with my pain and my fear and suffering and really get to know them. Because I didn't want to just run away, I wanted to heal.

My old self needed to be torn down, so that God could rebuild me from the ground up. (Cathedral, remember?)

This space is part of that new self. (A very small part - I'd say maybe God is up to my ankles in the rebuilding process, but who really knows. Maybe he will get to my knee caps and have to start all over.)

I have always been a writer, although I never would have been brave enough to call myself that before. Now that I can see my fear more clearly, I'm finding ways to undermine it. I'm making a conscious effort to be courageous. It's pretty scary.

"And he hath put a new song in my mouth..." - Psalm 40:3