I had a serious medical scare this week, and the last two days were spent curled up on my bed, crying. I was terrified. I thought my life was about to change forever. It was one of those times, one of those many many times, that I thought to myself, there’s no way I can get through this. I prayed the prayer of the truly desperate, a repetitive “help me help me help me” that I chanted like a mantra hour after endless hour. I knew God was there, I knew God could hear me, but I was too frightened to quiet down and listen for an answer to my pleas.

This morning I remembered a book I read recently, Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. I remembered a passage from the book where she spoke of her own desperation, and they way she reached out to God. I remembered it because God answered her, directly, clearly, specifically. On page 54 Elizabeth writes,

“What I write in my journal tonight is that I am weak and full of fear. I explain that Depression and Loneliness have shown up, and I’m scared they will never leave. I say I don’t want to take the drugs [antidepressants] anymore, but I’m frightened I will have to. I’m terrified I will never really pull my life together.

In response, somewhere from within me, rises a now-familiar presence, offering me all the certainties I have always wished another person would say to me when I was troubled. This is what I find myself writing to myself on the page:

I’m here. I love you. I don’t care if you need to stay up crying all night long, I will stay with you. If you need the medication again, go ahead and take it- I will love you through that, as well. If you don’t need the medication, I will love you, too. There’s nothing you can ever do to lose my love. I will protect you until you die, and after your death I will still protect you. I am stronger than Depression and I am braver than Loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me.”

This is her god, she explains. Loving her. Answering her. Protecting her.

So this morning, remembering all this, I closed my eyes. I quieted my mind. I asked God for help, and then I picked up a piece of paper and a pen. This is what I wrote:

I love you. I will take care of you. You will be okay. I will never leave you. You are strong, you will persevere. You are my child, my daughter, my beloved. I am always with you.

I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that this is my god. Loving me. Answering me. Protecting me. And I will be fine.

I was talking to someone yesterday about shame. Shame is a powerful, powerful thing. Once submitted to, it can control you, shrink you, morph you into someone unrecognizable. I have lived with shame for so long. I was ashamed of my depression, my cutting, my drug use, my promiscuity. Ashamed of being raped. Ashamed of failing at everything I tried to do. Embarrassed about marrying so young, and ashamed of letting the marriage fall apart. I felt imprisoned by my shame. Not only did it make me feel like an absolute shipwreck of a human being, but it prevented me from ever growing or evolving. Shame drowns you; it wraps its spindly fingers around your hair, pulling you down beneath the surface until you can’t breathe anymore. And if you don’t fight it, if you don’t kick and struggle and swim towards the light, the shame can eventually kill you.

But things are different for me now. I did fight it, and it doesn’t define me anymore. As I was explaining this to my friend, I started to think about our resilience as human beings, our ability to heal.

“Think about our bodies,” I told him. “If we cut our skin or break a bone, our bodies know exactly what to do. They send out the troops to stop the bleeding, grow new skin, reconnect the bones. And all of this takes place without any input from our brains. We don’t think to ourselves, ‘ok body, time to heal.’ It just happens. So think about it. If our bodies can do all of this completely without the direction of our conscious selves, imagine what our minds and our hearts are capable of.”

We’re amazing, us humans. My own resilience has astounded me on more than one occasion. My strength and persistence and will to survive, even at my deepest and darkest moments, is miraculous. And every time I overcome something big, like shame or guilt, I grow and become better. I am just that much stronger and able to deal with the next hurdle I encounter. I feel so blessed to be here on this earth, living in this body. I may hate my thighs, my eyelashes may not be quite as long as I wish they were, but my god. Look at me. I am a living, breathing, fighting, healing wonder. And I think that’s amazing.

Something interesting happened to me last night at the gas station.

I was filling up my car, when the woman at the pump next to me began to mutter. She was visibly upset; apparently the attendant wasn’t at the window, so she couldn’t pay for her gas. She had six one-dollar bills crumpled in her hand, and she was clearly in some kind of a hurry. She was pacing back and forth, pink pajama pants swishing as she walked, raging quietly at the absent attendant. When she noticed me watching her, she smiled and asked me how I was doing. “Fine,” I told her, “How are you?”

“Horrible. Just horrible. I’m getting out of a bad situation and I need to get out of here before he finds out I left. He’s not beating me anymore. I won’t take it anymore.”

“Good for you!” I said.

“I’ve got six dollars to my name- he took my paycheck last week. I packed some clothes and I left. I have to get out of here before he figures out that I’m gone. Look at this…” She opened her mouth and took out her two bottom teeth. “These aren’t real, he kicked my teeth out six months ago. I’ve got to get out of here. Where’s the attendant? I have to pay for my gas and leave before he finds me! Oh he’s back! Thank god.”

She went and gave him her money, and came back to the pump. She was only able to get two gallons. I felt like I had to do something.

“Look,” I told her. “I don’t have any cash, but I can fill you up on my card. Will that help?”

“Oh my god, thank you so much. Oh, I would have kept my cash. I’m starving. I haven’t eaten all day. We only eat when he wants to eat. He took my paycheck. I would have kept my cash- well, that’s ok. Thank you so much. I’m driving all the way to T—–. He won’t find me there.”

I gave her $30 worth of gas, but I didn’t feel quite right. I didn’t feel like she was being honest with me. But what else could I do? If she was telling the truth, she did need help. I’m not in any position to be throwing money left and right- I don’t even know if I can pay my bills next month- but here was a woman in some kind of trouble, and I had to do something.

As we both drove away from the gas station, she waved at me from her car and headed off towards the highway. I could see her a few cars ahead of me as I drove towards home. But instead of getting on the southbound ramp to go towards T—– she pulled into another gas station. I tried to catch a glimpse of her in my review mirror when I passed by and drove away, but I couldn’t see her. And now I wonder: did I do the right thing? Is it right to reach out, to offer help, if you don’t know for sure that you’re actually helping? If she was lying to me, trying to scam me, is it still right to believe in her and help her? I would have felt terrible if I hadn’t done anything, I know that much. But I’m not at ease with what I did. $30 is a lot of money to give a complete stranger, money I need to feed my children and keep us going, when I may very well have just been scammed and taken advantage of. I like to believe in the goodness of people, but it hurts to think that my goodwill and generosity may very well have come to nothing.

I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t matter what her intentions were at all. Maybe all that matters is that I did something good. I put something positive out there in the world. I believe it’s my responsibility as a human to do that. It’s her responsibility to take that and do something good with it on her end. But if she doesn’t, maybe it doesn’t negate my act of love. I just feel so unsettled. What do you think?

Kari

Quiet, still, serene. She sits across from me in her office, hands folded in her lap and legs crossed. She’s regal, elegantly long and delicate. Her legs are long, her arms are long, her hands are long, her hair is long. When she’s onto something deep and important she runs her fingers through the white-blonde strands, pulling it up and away from her forehead in one swoop. Her expression is impossible to read, years of experience keeps her mouth and eyes cool and impassive. Nothing I say can ever shock her, there’s never a raised eyebrow or bitten lip that suggests I’ve affected her. But sometimes, every once in a while, my jokes can make her burst out into uninhibited laughter that opens her face- just for a moment- before she regains her queenly composure. I’m intimately acquainted with her legs and feet- I’ve stared at them for an hour every Friday afternoon for the past four years. I direct my monologues at her toes, unable to meet her eyes when I’m speaking. Those toes have heard my deepest, darkest, ugliest secret thoughts, but I have yet to see them recoil in horror at the inner workings of my mind. They rest there at the tips of her shoes, motionless and relaxed, receiving the most shameful and embarrassing parts of me. Tiny, inconsequential comments I direct to the little toes, the ones that look the most immature and insubstantial. I could never give these baby toes anything dark and important. But the terrible things, the giant and wild and frightening things, I tell those to her big toes. Solid and pretty and lacquered in red polish, I trust these toes. And when I’m done speaking, when I’ve unloaded it all, I let my gaze drift upwards, finally connecting with the green of her eyes and a softness around the corners that I’ve come to understand as her way of telling me that I matter.

Bill

He’s not a tall man, slight in stature but strong and rough, his skin weathered from years of working outdoors. His hair is thin but healthy, almost always pulled back into a sleek ponytail. When he wants to look nice he wears it loose and it flows in soft peppery waves behind his ears and past his shoulders. On those days he also shaves his stubble so cleanly that his cheeks look soft and pink, an endearing contrast with the tough and crinkled spaces between his eyes and temples. A pair of brittle glasses are perched low on his nose, the lenses smeared so thickly with grime that it must be impossible to see through them clearly. He refuses to wipe them clean because if they’re held too tightly the left lens never fails to pop out. He swears like a sailor but every once in a while he says something so soft and honest that it breaks your heart. His speech is thick and muffled from the wad in his cheek- not of tobacco, but a generous handful of sunflower seeds. He sits at the meetings methodically shelling each seed, spitting the empty husk into his palm and lining them up, soft and soggy, on the table in front of him. On his wrist he wears a piece of chain he found on a pallet at work. He’s added a special link that opens and closes so he can take it off whenever he needs to and sometimes he’ll remove the bracelet and lay it across his knee, as if his arm needs a break. If you touch it the metal is warm from his body heat. His wardrobe consists of threadbare t-shirts and ill-fitting jeans that sag and bunch in all the wrong places. His shirt today is black, with faded white writing on the front that says “Keep staring. I might do a trick.” He acts tough and horribly masculine, but he’d go to the ends of the earth to protect his grandbabies. He’d give a stranger his last dollar. He always cries when he talks about his friends.

Christie

She bubbles. The air around her hums and buzzes with the most intoxicating, effervescent energy. Her blonde hair is thick and slightly curly, and when she wears it down it bounces just above her shoulders. Her face is round and open, always holding an expression of warmth and gentle understanding. Her pink lips purse ever so slightly, bow-like, when she’s thinking hard about something. Nestled in the soft space between her bottom lip and her small pointed chin is a pencil-thin white scar- a reminder of an unfortunate collision with a swing at age two. Her shoulders are strong and square; they’re no-nonsense, teacher shoulders. I can imagine her staring down a rowdy ten year old, hands on her hips and shoulders thrown back in a way that means trouble. The strength in her upper body offsets the gentle curves of her breasts and hips so prettily, giving her an overall air of carefree femininity. She could scramble up the face of a mountain or slink by in an cocktail dress with equal success. She’s smart- quick-witted with a clever sense of humor. She can guide any conversation with her effortless charm and ready smile. If you can make her laugh you feel like she’s given you something special. A delightful, fizzy gift you can roll up and place in your breast pocket so that it rests against your heart in that private place you reserve for lovers, mothers, and best friends.

I’m starting to have this flutter, this tiny little feeling flickering at the base of my spine. It’s telling me that maybe- just maybe- I have something worth saying to this big, vast planet. Blogging is good, but I blog for me, not for anyone else. I blog to get me through. But now I’m starting to feel like maybe I have something I can actually contribute. It’s an itty bitty little feeling, fragile as a candle flame, and easily extinguished by those giant winds of shame and self-doubt that whoosh and rattle through my bones. But lately when that small feeling flickers and dies, I’ve found myself fumbling for matches in the dark, determined to get it burning again. It’s something I have to protect and nurture, shield from the harmful forces of myself until it’s strong enough to handle the unpredictable winds of my insecurities.

I signed up for a four week writing course that starts tonight; the quote in the brochure said, “It’s none of your business what you write!” I like that. I like the idea of paving a road in myself for my writing, bypassing all my crazy head tricks and letting it just flow out on its own. I can do that, I think. When I saw Anne Lamott speak a couple weeks ago, she said two things that really stuck with me. She said to space out a lot. As much as possible. And don’t be afraid to screw up big. I can totally do that, the spacing out and the screwing up. So maybe I can do this writing thing, too.