Dear Lauren,
A few days ago, you read a post by Ashley and it made you think a lot about yourself. You wrote to her that you’re actually quite bad at being your own best friend. That you often find yourself disappointed in who you are. That you lack confidence, and don’t always trust yourself to make the right decisions. That you quail away from anything that challenges you in a real way, because you’re scared to death that you’ll make the wrong move. That it’s like your mind has grown comfortable in a little hole and doesn’t want you to venture out and discover who you really are. That it saddens you to think of yourself that way, because you do want to be so much more. That you’ve realized that you’ve had this co-dependence, not necessarily on any one person, but on the idea of having someone else there, so that you have somehow deluded yourself into believing you’re not alone. That part of you would like nothing more than to move somewhere big, say, New York City, and push yourself to make it somewhere completely different than where you live now on your own.
Maybe a year ago, or a few months even, you would have said that you feel like you should be seeking the comfort of God in your solace. And in many ways you still feel that is true. But you have to remember that God made you who you are. That He is in you and of you and around you, and that He made you the way you are for a reason, and until you can find peace in that you will never find contentedness in yourself. You will fear the idea of living in a New York City by yourself. You will allow thoughts of loneliness and laziness and an unwound mind to chase you away from all that you could do. You wonder why people do this to themselves, why people make something so simple as having a dream so complicated. You wonder why you can’t sit your mother down and say, “This is how it is. I’m an artist. I let your doubts about my art drown me in college. I’m not going to let that continue to happen. I love you, and I know you mean well, but accounting or nursing or business is not what I’m made for. I know this, because the answer is within me, and it doesn’t lie there.”
Yesterday you took some sunglasses to your father that he left in your car when he took it for an oil change. You almost expected him to ask you for lunch, but he said he’d left a machine on and had to get back to work. You wondered if he wanted to, but was afraid of the idea. You wonder sometimes if he’s just as scared of you as you are of him. When you left his work, you wondered why things were so complicated between the two of you. You thought back to Saturday night at your grandparents 50th anniversary party as the two of you carried things out to his truck at the end of the night. You watched him pack plastic bags full of candles and food and flower pots into the backseat of his truck. You wondered what his reaction would be if you had the guts to ask, “Did you ever hate your father for leaving you?” You suddenly wanted to know all about his childhood, how he dealt with an absent father into adulthood, if he ever wondered about him.
You talked with God on the way home and asked Him why your father got so angry, why he treated you the way he did when you were growing up and even now. You asked him why your father didn’t say, “I remember the way my father and step-father treated me growing up. I don’t want that for my daughter.” Sometimes you think he couldn’t have possibly resolved that, because he had a way of getting angry that made your throat hurt from holding back tears. You think of these things, and you remember standing behind him at the truck why you couldn’t ask him such a question. “All the things I learned about your daddy, I learned from your Uncle Bobby,” your mom told you once. “Your daddy never liked to talk about the past.”
You can sometimes feel the wrinkles ironing out in yourself. Today, for instance, you drove to the grocery store and felt more at ease about your father. You felt that, despite the worries you create in your mind, life was not bad and there was still hope. If only just a kernel. You realized that hope was subjective. It was only as big as you felt. You realized that hope rests within you, that it can swell you but never deplete you, that you carry it around like a doorstep and only the truly brave can turn the knob and see the home inside themselves.
