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Emotional Hypothermia, Part 5: This is your life

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on October 6, 2014.

Continued from Part 4

I remember when
We used to drive
Anywhere but here
As long as we’d forget our lives
We were so young and confused
that we didn’t know
To laugh or cry
Those nights were ours
They will live and never die
Together we’d stand forever…
– Skillet, Those Nights

The first week of February 2014 at around 4:30 am, I was driving my little white Toyota sedan that I named Journey somewhere between east Houston and Beaumont, Texas, floating through bayou fog and the darkness before dawn.

I adore roadtrips. Few other activities allow my brain that raw time stretching as far as the humming asphalt between my tires for pondering my life’s direction and my purpose.

No school, no work, just hours and hours of listening to music and calling friends or chatting with anyone in the car I’ve managed to kidnap. I can just be and enjoy existence. Roadtrips make me feel alive.

Two of my housemates traveling with me had fallen asleep in the backseat a few hours before. Our little escapade is still nicknamed “that one time we drove an extra 15 hours to have a 20 minute conversation with Mullet Jesus.”

We’d left Colorado Springs around 11pm Friday night, arrived in Dallas around 1pm, napped and visited friends, and now I was in the 4th hour of the 6 hour drive that Saturday night stretching into Sunday. The remaining itinerary involved church, a 9 hour drive to Lubbock to see Skillet at the Rock and Worship Roadshow, then 7 hours back home.

Despite the Monster drinks and beef jerky, I knew I was nearing my limits. I turned up the speakers and scrolled for Switchfoot’s Beautiful Letdown on my iPod.

Don’t close your eyes, don’t close your eyes / This is your life and today is all you’ve got now / Yeah, and today is all you’ll ever have…

The rhythmic, deep buzz of the opening notes blended with my thoughts. Don’t stop feeling this semester. Don’t forget how you learned to be alive, I reminded myself.

This is your life, is it everything you dreamed that it would be? / When the world was younger and you had everything to lose…

I imagined my 5-year-old self. What would she think of adult me? She’d be slightly ecstatic, I decided. I was finally going on adventures my heart longed for, and at last I had friends.

– – – – – – – –

Since recovering from repression, emotional honesty has been crucial.

My counselor told me summer 2013 that other people, including my parents, wouldn’t understand me unless I told them how I felt.

And I’ve found abundant, vibrant life in community and artistic expression.

Late nights driving around town with my friend MangyCat and the Midnight Muse writers and making miniatures in my friend Kim’s cozy basement were staples of my first year living outside the box.

But last spring, I took an entire semester of courses for pure enjoyment: Acting, 2D Art, Koine Greek, Poetry Workshop, and Choir.

My heart is in theater, both inside the church and beyond it, which I admitted to my friend Cynthia Barram last month when I volunteered to act for Haunted Mines, a local haunted house.

“Honey, everybody uses theater to work out their emotional problems,” she replied.

Slam poetry, which I discovered 6 months before moving out, became my catharsis, a safe place for open and honest expression. Almost like a new form of church.

My two favorite slam poems are Confession: For the Christian part of me (Joel McKerrow) and Letter to my 10 year old self (Susan Peiffer, of Hear Here, the Colorado Springs local slam team).

I heard Joel perform his poem live at an open mic in the campus pub one Friday night in October 2012. He said he felt privileged to perform it in Colorado Springs, among all the religious tension. He begins:

For the Christian part of me,
not for the Christ, but for the Christian,
I am sorry.
For when I look at the book and look at my life,
when I look at the Christ and look at the church,
the two are as black and white.
So for the way I have silenced you,
with words that I thought were the only truth,
for every preacher that has yelled at you
every Bible that has been quoted at you,
every megaphone that has damned you,
every friend that has judged you,
every parent that has guilted you,
I am sorry.

And Susan’s poem sparks new beginnings for me through my old scars. I love how she ends:

And Susan, one day, occupy your body again.
Realize and understand the gentleness of touch.
And let this realization convince you
that you are much, much more than a product of your past.
You are the manifestation of some dream whom destiny means to last
and you will always have words.
Words will never leave you.
I don’t have much else to tell you, Sue,
because it gets better, yeah, but it gets worse, too.
Remember, beloved, you are made of poetry.
Stardust, wanderlust.
[….]
You will fall in love, and you will be partially fixed.
And if you miss your youth one day,
You are secure enough to say
You feel twelve again
All over like it should have been
Even if it takes ’til 36.

One day, I want to shout out my story as they have, unashamed and no longer silenced. But for now, I am learning how to feel every day until it’s like breathing.

Emotional Hypothermia, Part 2: Dare You To Feel

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on September 23, 2014.

“We’re talking about anger here, Fraser, a human emotion.
Are you human? Because if you are, human beings feel things, okay?
They feel anger, they feel love, they feel lust and fear, and sometimes,
and I know you don’t want to hear this, sometimes they even cry.”
– Ray, Due South (2.17), “Red, White, or Blue”

My wall shattered one morning.

I was merging onto I-25 early on a gray Monday in January 2012 to head to campus.

The weekend before, my family had been out of town and I’d watched some brand-new Faith Lessons by Ray VanderLaan, a Biblical archaeological DVD series, and sobbed for the first time in months at the idea of radical love, acceptance even when I failed to measure up. That I was worth love simply because I was alive.

And then Switchfoot’s song “Dare You to Move” came on 103.1 WAY-FM. I lost it.

I’d made a pact against crying around the age of 8 or 9. Crying showed vulnerability and weakness, neither of which I felt safe exposing around my family or church members. I prided myself on my refusal to cry at Passion Plays or sad movies. My mom would recount the entire Easter story with A Beka Bible flashcards, depicting the scourging in graphic detail. She cried. Not me.

I could hold it in when no one else could. I told myself over and over: “I am ice. Ice does not melt.”

I did Elsa’s whole “Conceal, don’t feel” thing before it was cool.

Well. Then I couldn’t cry at all. Even in private.

Most of my teen years were spent reversing the choke hold I’d imposed on my tears. And halfway through college, the rest was crumbling. “All the walls you built up / Are just glass on the outside / So let ’em fall down / There’s freedom waiting in the sound.” (Tenth Avenue North)

I described the experience to my friend Elraen later that cold wintry week on chat during one of our all-nighters.

I said, “I wasn’t really expecting it. It was one of those times when Jesus really gets your attention, and you realize just how much He really loves you, and you cry your eyes out. Somehow…I’d had two experiences like this in high school…but nothing quite like that since late 2005.”

“I guess I thought maybe experiences like that were over in my life.”

Elraen knew what I meant. She responded, “I hope that more and more God can bring moments like that into your life, breaking through the walls that have been put up to shield yourself from hurt […] I hope that healing comes and drives deeper and deeper into your life. Because He DOES love you. So, so much, no matter what [people] say about you or accuse you of — His love does not ever change.”

My soul was reawakening, but I’d have to fight my tendency to lock up. Numbness felt like being a ghost in my own existence, but at least it kept pain at bay.

The next few months, I felt like this little bubble of hope protected me, which I needed for the “coming of age” phase of my life story.

I still questioned the wisdom of feeling over the next two years. Doesn’t it take more energy than necessary? In late high school, when I read through all four Gospels twice, one detail stuck with me.

Jesus is about to be crucified. He is offered a drugged wine to dull the pain. He refuses.

“And when they came to a place called Golgotha (which means Place of the Skull), they offered him wine to drink, mixed with gall, but when he had tasted it, he would not drink it.” (Matthew 27:33-34, ESV)

My Nelson study bible explained that “Jesus refused it; He wanted to drink His cup of suffering fully aware of all that was happening.”

From a logical perspective, this seems incredibly stupid, like refusing anesthesia before surgery. But often love isn’t logical.

If you wanted to identify with someone else completely, to live in their skin, you’d choose the full emotional and physical repercussions. Not out of cold obligation. With fire in your chest.

I know. Because I chose this once. I wanted to know the everyday struggles of my friend in a wheelchair. So I didn’t take the gloves she handed me or the foam seat cushion. I wanted noodly arms and a sore butt at the end of the day, because it would be a more honest reflection of her experience.

And this is how I realized that really choosing to live, embracing love and peace, grief and pain without censorship, requires a bravery I was still discovering.

Part three of this series will be about how I learned to be honest about my anger.

Room To Grow

I’m a country girl from way back. Rumor has it my family is related to Daniel Boone, the man who continuously moved west, opening new territory because he needed “elbow room” and because, so the story goes, he felt that if he could see the smoke from his neighbor’s chimney, they were just too close.

Whether we were related or not, I can empathize with “Old Boone”. Driving down the highway, I tense if a car is closer than three car lengths ahead or behind me. I hug the shoulder, especially when being passed- being less than a car width away from another driver is just uncomfortable to me.

Walking or standing, there is an imaginary buffer zone we keep around us, called personal space. Some people don’t need much. Others need a lot. I’m one of the ‘a lot’ people. I can understand if someone reaches out to shake my hand. But I’ll meet them half way. The cashier who hands me cash and casually brushes my hand in the exchange disturbs me, because she unwittingly entered my space. Warn me about those frontal hugs, please. I much prefer shoulder to shoulder hugs. Even then, I need to mentally prepare for a few seconds before contact.

In the malls and on the streets, and especially at church, people constantly invade my space. I’ve watched others pile together like puppies, and I laugh at their antics. But I prefer to stay on the outskirts of such activities. Fun? Oh, yes. But put me in the middle and I’ll act like a cat over a bucket of water.

Friends begin to realize that my personal space zone is pretty broad. They are careful to stay out of this space, or to give fair warning before entering it. I’m grateful and much more comfortable for their understanding.

Spiritually, I need space too. Room to grow and react in. Space to be myself, to live up to my potential and to realize my dreams. Too many rules, and I begin to feel stifled. It isn’t that the rules are bad. I can even enjoy them at times, and I understand why others might need or enjoy them. But I need to be given the opportunity to decide which I will follow, and to grow into them on my own.

Having people to be accountable can also be great, but again, people need to warn me before they step in my spiritual space. I don’t care to be watched and hovered over. I need people to trust me and allow me some independence. Perhaps I’m like the teenager who never questioned parental authority. Still, if the parents don’t give me a chance to grow up, I will find a way to grow around the restrictions and overcome them, even if it means distancing myself from them. Like the tree next to a barbed wire fence, I’ll either move the fence or I’ll make the fence a part of me, but I will grow, whether the fence or the farmer want me to or not.

We need boundaries to grow, but we also need space. The amount of space we need can change through the years. But we all need some amount. The sooner we recognize and respect our space and others’ the sooner we can become what we are meant to be.

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