My friends love to send me memes and quotes, book recommendations, notes of encouragement, and prayers. I have the greatest friends, and no words of gratitude are sufficient enough. There has been no season where I have needed my friends more than this last, very long, transition season I have been walking through.
Maybe ‘sliding through’ is a more accurate take on it.
When your bones are tired of carrying everyone else’s problems, and when your lungs are tired of breathing life into other people, return back home to yourself for a while. Shift your energy back inwards. Reunite with peace again.
Billy Chapata
The truth is that I did not need my life to fall apart thirteen years ago or the rollercoaster of entrepreneurship the past dozen years or three years of intensive therapy, or even a twenty-four-month roadmap experience with God to know that I was a people pleaser. I used those words to describe myself years before that, but there is a big difference between using words, knowing words, and having a deep comprehension of those words or how they apply to your life. It is only in the past eighteen months that I began to understand the extent of my people-pleasing and how it was harming my relationships and my life. How it was harming me, my spirit.
So, while there are so many gifts from my sabbatical last summer, maybe the number one was that my world, the world I lived in, was finally able to get quiet. And in that quiet, I was finally able to hear my thoughts, feel my own body, and rest. Not a good night’s sleep or a lovely afternoon nap. Rest. Deep. True. Intense. Day after day.
There is this beautiful scene in the film Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (one of my favorite films, the best book series, and the loveliest of authors whom I had the pleasure of meeting a few years ago) where the lead character Viviane Joan "Vivi" Abbott Walker, in a fit of trauma, runs away from home (husband and several children) ending up in a motel on the coast with nothing but the slip and coat she was wearing and falls asleep. Days later she wakes, calls the front desk and inquires what day it is before she returns home. Sometimes the greatest response to trauma is to lay down and let your body rest.
I have always loved I Kings 19:3-9 where Elijah is throwing up his hands and ready to die and God has him sleep and then eat. My family likes to reference that story when I get hangry. The truth is it is a beautiful lesson for those who have spent their lives living life as a never-ending race we are running to where? For what purpose? If you ask them, they rarely can answer. Oh, they have words. I always had words when asked. I never had a good answer. That is the problem with a race with no rest. You lose sight of your ‘Why?’
During the final month of my sabbatical, I wrote some long letters via e-mail to a dear friend of mine. I re-read a few of them this week after a fitful night of sleep (unusual for me these days). I was searching for something in them. I still do not know what. I digress. I bring them up because what I was struck by was the clarity of my words, and yet when I landed stateside a few days/weeks later that clarity simply evaporated.
So does the body. The mind. The heart. It all remembers. Put yourself back in a place you once felt unsafe or loved or happy or sad, and you will respond. All of you will respond.
When I got back stateside, it was if I stepped off the plane and immediately returned to my factory settings. Or in this case, my pre-sabbatical condition. It was shocking for me, and I did not handle it well. At all.
I wish I could say that it all worked itself out quickly, and my initial response was simply the shock of it all, but it did not. It has taken months. Seven months to be exact. Only now do I feel like I am coming out of “it” whatever it is. My best comparison is what it felt like coming back from Haiti. The “re-entry,” as I nicknamed it, was brutal. Every single time.
I am sitting here watching the trees bud and the grass turn green, and though I do not believe our seasons of life have to correspond with the seasons of nature, there is no doubt that I am entering my own spring. I am stretching and growing and blossoming just like the flowers and trees surrounding me. My easy smile, loud laughter, and sideways looks of wonder (or questioning) are flowing naturally again. I do not have to pretend I am happy as I have felt I needed to be these past months not wanting those that love me so dearly to worry. I am genuinely happy. It all seems to have sneaked up on me while I was otherwise occupied working on a book proposal for a new book.
I will not be so bold here to declare that my current season of transition is completely over, but I will declare that I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
When I was little, around three or four years old, I was “lost” during a Sunday afternoon potluck at church, and someone discovered me on one of the church buses making smiley faces out of yellow construction paper and taping them to the windows. That night while one of my great uncles was leading worship, he told the story and then and there nicknamed me Sunshine (it went through some variations, but he landed there). There are only two people, to this day, that I allow to use it. It has always felt a little sacred to that simple, calm season of my life. The calm before the storm. Because four years later, that life was gone, and so was my innocence.
A month ago, as I began working on the new book, my sweet mentee and friend Katie made a declaration that at fifty-two my life was finally starting back up after it had stopped at age eight. She said, “Everything between then and now has been a journey to get you here, to this moment.” She encouraged me to find a photo of myself at that age and look at it while I was writing. I followed her instructions except that I grabbed a photo of me at age three or four. It is in my view now.
Trauma often holds a memory, an experience, or a season in purgatory. Freezing it in time. Freezing pieces of us in time. Life goes on. Outwardly we may grow and change, but there are pieces of us that are stuck. What I learned in therapy years ago was that so much of me was still that eight-year-old girl. I often would joke that an eight-year-old was running my life, and emotionally that was very true. I did the work of integration. I have the receipts. Therapy is not an end-all-be-all; it is just one more tool in our toolbox. The sabbatical was yet another tool and something that I plan to incorporate into the remainder of my life.
Then there is writing.
The truth is that left to my own devices, I would have ended up a mother, a preacher, and a teacher. I highly doubt I would have had such a lengthy, successful career in business. I was always a reader (my father taught me to read at age four) so it feels like the writing would have birthed naturally at some point. It ended up flowing out of a need for me to process what was happening to and around me. That remains true today. I honestly do not know how I see the world or a person or a situation until I sit down and write about it. Writing is how I process…everything.
So, but of course, someone who knows me so well sees this season of writing and dedicating my days to learning how to be a better writer, as a full-circle moment for me. The next step in the journey finding me picking back up where I set all of my dreams down when my family dropped their basket (you simply have to read the Ya-Ya book series).
And as I leave the comfort and security, I found being part of a writing cohort the past month, Spring is here to greet me. Encouraging me to embrace the joy, confidence, and enthusiasm I have rediscovered in myself this past month in the cohort and in writing about this transition season. As I smile remembering this past month, I look up again to see that photo of young Heather, and I whisper to her, “Thank you.” She held me together until I could find a way to fully heal us, and I owe her the life I have lived, and the life I have yet to live. And now more than ever, I believe…the best is yet to come.
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Author’s Note: The working title for the new book is The Best is Yet to Come, and as someone who has used that catchphrase for more years than I can number, it makes me instantly smile to read it on the cover page. Those words are my mantra for my life. I deeply believe them to be true. I would not still be walking upright if I did not. Scout’s honor.
The beauty is in the journey. Love all of this.
This is beautiful Heather!