I just came home from hearing Anne Lamott speak and read from her new book Grace (Eventually). I am so so so moved. Now I finally know what I want to be when I grow up. I want to be like her.

Anne Lamott seems to have exactly want I want in life. Not in terms of money or fame, but of self-understanding and acceptance. She’s imperfect and a little bit nuts (aren’t we all) but instead of pretending those parts of her don’t exist, instead of painting over them and hoping no one notices the weird crackly spots on the walls, she embraces them fully with the knowledge that it takes all parts of her to make the whole human that she is. I have never heard such real and honest words before. This woman is one hundred percent authentic, and it is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Even though she lets her neuroses shine through, she has this sense of calm about her that envelops anyone standing near her. You feel her power, her womanness, and you just can’t take your eyes off of her. If I could be half the woman she is, I would consider myself a true success as a human being.

I recently read her book Traveling Mercies, the first in her three book series on faith and spirituality. It’s one of those books that reaches down inside you and scrambles up your insides. When you’re done reading it you’ve been jumbled up, laid out flat, and put back together a completely different person. It’s that powerful. It was a life-changing read for me, and seeing her tonight was life-changing as well. She said of grace, that it finds you where you are, and always leaves you somewhere new. And I think the same can be said of her, and her writing. She is so real and true, and the things she writes about speak to people so profoundly, that you come away better and prettier and smarter. I wish there were more humans like her on this planet.

The other night we were watching TV after the kids went to bed when the fish all of a sudden went ballistic. He flipped around and ran into the sides of his bowl and splashed water all over the place. I got up and peered into the water to find a fly floating upside down above the plastic seaweed. I grabbed a paper towel and attempted to scoop the dead bug out of the water, when he was suddenly very much NOT dead. His lifeless little body began to wriggle and his legs reached out to grab the paper towel and hold on for dear life as I pulled him out of the water. It’s so weird, because even though flies deeply disgust me (they like to eat poop), seeing that bug grasp at his last chance for survival like that kind of… did something to me. So instead of flushing him down the toilet as I had been planning to do, I went ouside and gently set the half-dead fly and the sopping paper towel on my welcome mat. In the morning the fly was gone.

For some reason, every time I think about the way his legs stretched out to grab hold of the towel, it makes me want to cry. And then I kind of want to puke, because I am crying over a stupid bug who likes to eat poop. Maybe it was witnessing that instinct to survive… Maybe I can identify with that somehow. I remember having this same feeling last spring, when I was trying to coax some sweet peas to sprout along my garden wall. Every morning I would go out to check on them, measuring their slow progress, and clearing away the weeds that popped up overnight. Every time I pulled a weed I always made sure to get the entire thing, roots and all. And every time I was amazed by how deeply the roots had grown in one night. Even though they were unwanted, I hated having to kill them. They fought so hard, growing right on top of each other, some of them reaching out tiny tendrils to pull themselves as high as they could go. Even with one night of growth, the weeds towered over my reluctant sweet pea sprouts. All they wanted to do was live. And it kind of broke my heart to be the instrument of their disposal.

Ugh, what am I saying? Why am I empathizing with pests? I mean, house flies and weeds. It’s kind of… pathetic, isn’t it? I wish I could identify with the sweet peas, who by the end of the summer were flourishing, providing me with bouquet after bouquet of sweet smelling blooms.

But all I could ever think about when I buried my nose in their blossoms were all those weeds who struggled to live, but were ripped out of the soil just so I could have something pretty.

I wish I didn’t have to write about that ridiculous fly. It is seriously embarrassing to try to explain my awe for this disgusting creature’s will to live. I am grossing myself out here. But it did awe me. And I do have to write about it.

I guess… maybe the reason these things strike me so deeply is that I have spent much of my life feeling as unwanted as those weeds, as disgusting as that fly. I too have struggled so many days to just survive. So many times I prayed, not for happiness or fulfillment, but just for stamina to make it through. Somewhere in me I believed if I could just grab hold of the towel and make it out of the water, everything would be ok. If I could just dig my roots in deep enough, I would figure out what to do next. And eventually, I really did get the hang of the “surviving” thing. So maybe now it’s time to finally start praying for happiness and fulfillment. I can start to loosen my white-knuckled grasp on just trying to make it through, and start focusing on actually living. It’s not enough to just be any more. I want to be happy.

And wherever that gross little fly is, I kind of hope he’s happy too. Me and that fly, we’re survivors.

Oh, sick.

Ok, I can see now that looking through my high school journal last night was not the greatest idea. After going through a week and a half of life under a strange medicated haze, my days and nights have gotten all mixed up. So for the past two nights I have lain awake in bed, unable to sleep until the wee hours of the morning. We’re talking very wee here. As in, 4:30 in the morning wee. So I was maybe not in the most stable frame of mind when I decided to flip through the pages of my past.

Luckily, I have a fantastic therapist who is very forgiving of her gimpy patient. She called me ten minutes after my appointment was supposed to start, and when I saw her name on the caller ID my mind slugged through several difficult shifts. Honestly, I wasn’t even sure what day it was, so the realization that I was late for my appointment was slow in coming. She suggested that we have a phone session today, so we talked for 45 minutes and I was able to process some of the feelings that arose from reading my old journal.

I told her that I feel like moving out of my parent’s house and starting my life as a wife and mother doesn’t play out in my mind as a normal passage of time. Instead it seems like those years at home, the ones written about in that journal, were lived by a very sad and scared girl. Then there was an end to that girl’s life, and across a great chasm of time another person’s life began, and that’s who I am today. It seems like another life, lived by another person. And because of that I don’t have the events that occurred during that time filed away with the rest of my memories. They are locked up in a dusty old box and shoved to the back of my brain. I’m unable to think back on that period of time in my life without feeling like that box has been opened and is overwhelming me by the sudden deluge of its contents. So in order to protect myself from such a painful onslaught, I just try not to think about it at all. I can remember the feelings and emotions of that period of time, but when I recall specific events (such as this one) it feels like I have thrown my body into an icy lake. The cold sucks my breath away and as my muscles begin to freeze and I sink down into the water, I start to panic because I know there is no way out. These memories have a way of paralyzing me. They launch me back across the chasm and remind me what it felt like to be that girl. And oh, how that hurts.

Kari’s response surprised me. She said that it seems like I have stopped feeling guilty for the things that have happened, and that the shame I associate with those memories is evolving into grief. And grief is such an amazing step. If I can grieve for that girl, for her pain and her losses, then I can heal. And then, praise God, I can finally move on. Seeing how far I have already come from the sad girl I once was gives me hope that someday I’ll be able to look back on her and feel nothing but pride that I made it through such a crappy adolescence and became a stronger, more compassionate woman because of it.

I closed the comments for last night’s post because it felt too raw for feedback. I didn’t want reassurance, I just wanted it out there. I have received a few amazing emails though, and to those of you who cared so much to send me those kind word I thank you with all of my heart. This is an ugly process, this growing and healing thing. It’s ugly and it’s frightening and it takes a really friggin long time. But it is so necessary, and I am grateful I have so many of you who are willing to help me along the way. Someday, I hope, I’ll be able to live like that quote on my sidebar. I’ll let go. I’ll jump in. And I’ll find beauty.

After reading Jessica’s post today, I got all hopped up on the idea of submitting one of my own high-school journal entries to the Cringe Book. So I dug out the old spiral notebook and started flipping through it, trying to find something extra juicy and cringy. I assumed I would laugh and roll my eyes at my young stupid self and my idiotic high-school shenanigans, but instead I just ended up feeling sad. I did not have a goofy adolescence filled with friends and boys and pop quizzes. Instead I was fighting to make it through every day. My journal is filled with pledges to myself that I’ll stop cutting and start smiling more and maybe then people will like me. It has smudges of blood when I broke down and had to cut. There are heartbreaking poems filled with pain and loneliness. There are snippets of conversations I had with my parents, immortalizing the hate-filled, scarring words that were exchanged.

The entry I wrote 6 days after my fifteenth birthday pretty much sums up my life at the time:

February 8
This is a pain beyond sorrow. A pain beyond pain. Infecting my heart, my soul, my body… Immeasurable; an ocean too deep, a mountain too high. This hurts to the extent that I can barely think or write or cut. Here I sit, drowning in it. Being suffocated by it. I am dying inside.

Those words could be amusing if held in the context of the life of a regular teenage girl. Maybe she was jilted by the “love of her life”. Maybe she failed a math test. Maybe her mom told her she couldn’t go to her friend’s party until she did the dishes. Coming from a normal teenage girl, endlessly dramatic and self-righteous, an entry like that could almost make you smile. You would shake your head and think about how much better it is to be grown up. So what happened to me that day that inspired me to write such a heart-wrenching entry?

I woke up.

I woke up and I was still me and life was still the same and I was still depressed. I woke up and looked at the day and wanted to die. I was a walking tragedy.

What the hell am I supposed to do with a past like that? There are pages and pages of entries where I poured out my soul, trying to figure out who I was and why life hurt so much. In between that tattered cover, held together by a filthy, ragged ribbon, is the worst part of my life. Every fear, every awful thing I ever thought or did, every desperate wish to escape from everything. It’s all there.

What am I supposed to do about that.