Autumn’s chill showed up this week, like a slightly annoying neighbor who wears too much coral-orange lipstick saying, “Remember me? I’m baaack!” The only possible comfort to be found is in those two glorious words…
…hoodie weather.
I wish I could wear one every day, a size 2XL, swimming in it like a blanket with my ridiculous multicolored striped pajama pants and a pair of clean white cotton socks.
But that’s hardly “business casual,” and so I’m grateful for my two capey, sweatshirty Bobeau wraps, lovely garments that feel as forgiving as a hoodie but look drapey and flowing and fabulous.
I’ve been paging through the SoulPancake book and lamenting the fact that it’s so full of really thought-provoking questions and I never take the time to sit down and write or really think about them. I also want to blog more consistently, but don’t always feel like I have anything terribly interesting to write about.
You guessed it. Two birds, one stone.
So when I don’t have anything else I want to write about, I want to try blogging through some of the questions and quotes in it, completely haphazardly and not at all in any kind of order. Which I think is the way they’d want me to do it anyway. I’d also be really curious to hear other people’s answers.
Here goes.
What one eye-opening experience should every person have?
My mom has talked with me a few times about how she’s never been through a breakup. She and my dad have been together since she was a freshman in high school, they got married when she was 18 (She’s always quick to say that she was “almost 19” – as if that makes it more normal!). And heaven knows she’s seen me go through my fair share of breakups (probably more than my fair share… for a long time I had a bit of a “broken picker”).
It’s so strange to me that there is this huge chasm in experience between me and the woman who is one of the most important people in my life, and definitely the most influential female. She’s never gone through a breakup, and I’ve never been even close to going through an almost-40-year marriage, although I hope to share my life with someone. And as awesome as it is that my parents’ marriage is lasting in a world where so many fail, I really can’t imagine what life would be like if I’d never been through a breakup.
Not just any breakup. The gut-wrenching kind. The kind that brings with it buckets of tears and the searing terrible fear of being foreveralone and carries along a crate full of records by the Smiths and the Cure and Tori Amos. The kind where people around you don’t know what to say to you and you know you’re making them uncomfortable. The kind that hurts not just emotionally but physically. The kind that changes you, the kind where you learn the real meaning of the phrase “if you’re going through hell, keep going.”
I’m in love. And I hope I never have to go through a breakup again. But my breakups have brought out the best in me, too. It was in the middle of a rapidly disintegrating relationship that I found my way back home to the church, and it was in the wake of that breakup that I discovered my sense of call to ministry. I didn’t date for 3 years, and I developed better friendships with women and also found ways to have genuine friendships with men that weren’t just about flirtation or my ego. It was after another breakup that I lost about 70 pounds.
It’s maybe an indicator of how much I still have to learn about being in relationships, but I’m really good at going through breakups.
I know that it’s okay to be sad, even devastated, and it’s okay to let yourself cry as much as you need to cry.
I know that for a long time it seems like you’ll never have a day that you don’t feel the loss like a gaping emptiness, and then one day you’re okay being alone.
I know that it’s the absolute best time to start a self-improvement project. I know that it’s okay to embark on a self-improvement project purely out of spite or the hope that they will see you and regret breaking up with you, because you’ll improve anyway and the spite will go away on its own.
I know about discovering how much you enjoy your own company and realizing how awesome you really are.
I know about finding out they’re already (seriously?!) in a relationship with someone else long before you even felt almost ready to date. And I learned that you can get through that, too.
It’s not that I think breakups are great. I think they’re one of the most painful things we endure, especially if they come with the realization that the other person never had the golden promise of a forever future together in their imagination the way you did.
But they’re definitely an eye-opening experience.
And as much as they hurt, they’ve also always been the context in which I grow the most. They’ve been the context in which I am reminded of all of the other wonderful types of relationships there are, like friendships and familyships and even surprisingly-compassionate-co-workerships.
And they’ve been the context in which I discover who I really am, where I can confront honestly what I did and didn’t do wrong, my own part in the disintegration of the relationship, my fragile human failings, my jealousy and my fear of confrontation…
…and where I can also acknowledge that I tried my legitimate-damnedest to love and was not loved in return, and in that revelation find the ability to forgive myself for being hopeful enough to get hurt, and the ability to forgive the other person for being human.
I want to always be hopeful enough to get hurt.
I want to know that I tried my legitimate-damnedest to love.
I want my heart to break open and open and open until the pieces scatter and the light inside pours out on everything that does and doesn’t deserve it.
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