I was thinking about this in the shower today, and it occurred to me that I could blog about it.
"Ha," I said to myself. "Nope."
And that's when I realized that posting about this felt like ACTUAL vulnerability. Not the transparency and openness I use so often on this blog, but actual vulnerability. As in, this will allow people to take educated guesses about my insecurities and fears.
I'm sweating XD
And it's funny because when I get into it, you're for sure gonna be disappointed. It's not even a big deal. Like this intro is going to feel like clickbait when I get to the point, even though I'm not lying or exaggerating the way it makes me feel. It feels vulnerable to post about this.
*clears throat and begins the post the way it came to her in the shower*
Do you have any recurring nightmares, or themes in your nightmares?
I have two in particular that stand out to me: 1) tidal waves and 2) not being able to scream.
People who know me well know that I am big into dreams. I have dream dictionaries, I love Bible stories about dreams, I recorded my dreams in a folder on my computer for years, and I ask a handful of people pretty regularly if they've dreamed. (If you're not in the handful, this is your open, standing invitation to tell me your dreams. Believe me, I want to know.)
I've had all the standard dreams/nightmares: misshapen/missing teeth, being in a runaway car, showing up places naked, ummm...what are the other common ones... I don't know. Those. I've had those, many times as well.
But the tidal and the not being able to scream...those hit me different.
~Tidal Waves~
There's...nothing you can do about a tidal wave, or a guess "tsunami" is more accurate. You're standing on the beach, and suddenly, there's a wall of dark water rising up in front of you. It swells higher and higher, and absorbs all the sounds in the world as creation holds its breath, waiting for the inevitable. It's a gasp with no more breathing. It's the period at the end of everything.
It's that jolt of adrenaline. The sinking in your chest and stomach. The way your soul goes dark.
I think it's the inevitability of a tidal wave. There's no running. There's no swimming. There's no diving through it to the other side. You're frozen, and it doesn't matter. Even if you weren't frozen, what could you do? Nothing. It's a crushing wall of death.
Tidal wave dreams aren't nightmares to me. I actually love nightmares. I find them exciting and dangerous and they show me my true colors and buried reactions in new ways.
Tidal wave dreams are like something turning off the light in my soul. They reach up and yank the cord on my soul lamp, and click. Everything winks out. That's it.
I don't like that.
Oh, and the wave never crests in my dream. The photo for this post is misleading, but it's also pretty and teal. The waves in my dreams are just impending walls of water and then...well, you know how dreams are.
~Can't Scream~
The theme of not being able to scream recurs too. Sometimes it's that I can't get my mouth open (Think Neo in The Matrix), but more often it's that my voice is hoarse. I am screaming, funneling the energy of every cell in my body into the act of making sound, but a weak little croak comes out. I bend my whole body into the scream, hands on my knees if I can, throwing my chest into the scream, but it's a fragile whisper of an exclamation.
No one can hear it, and anyone who does, doesn't understand the depth of it, because it just sounds like a little croak. It doesn't sound like someone urgently screaming for her life because something is about to destroy her. It sounds ignorable. It sounds minor. It doesn't sound like every cell of her being is crying out, like her chest is about to cleave in half with the effort.
And, as with the wave, there's nothing else to be done. I've done the one thing I can do in whatever the dire situation is—it's always a last resort in the dreams—and that fails too. No one can hear me, and those that can, don't get it.
I get what the dreams mean. I told you, I have the dream dictionaries XD I know I'm overwhelmed by life and feel like no one can support me. Conversely, I know that I can handle all things with God and the people who love me, and I know that there are DOZENS of people who love and support me. I get it.
There's really nothing left to say, and the things other people could or would say, are the reasons I'm hesitant to post this in the first place.
As always, do with all of this whatever you will.
So. Did you dream last night?
~Stephanie
"So, what do we do about that?" a friend said to me. We were talking about the clothing designer for Target who got fired because he was openly a Satanist. "Do we support Target for firing someone with beliefs like that? Or do we not support Target because they're firing someone based on their beliefs? Like, what if a Christian got fired because they were a Christian? What do we do?"
"Maybe we don't 'do' anything," I said, having this thought for the very first time. "Maybe we just...live our lives."
And if someone confronts us about our stance, we can say that: we don't know what our opinion is. We're still thinking about it, for XYZ reasons.
This was a brand new thought for me, and one that is very counter to how I've always thought and lived. In the era of social media especially, it feels like we have to take a side, post for or against, share some hot take. But we if we don't have to do that? What if we don't have to "do" anything?* What if the world needs and Jesus wants something more mundane than that?
The Jews were expecting a leader who would rescue them from the evil, corrupt government and restore Truth to the world via war and politics. What they got was the exact opposite of a political leader. Jesus largely ignored the politics of his day, not even taking the "right side." He spoke in riddles to force people to talk to each other, and loved children to highlight the importance of faith, and toyed with religious leaders to prove they didn't have all the answers, and ate with sinners to model doing the contemporarily unthinkable, and overturned temple tables to mourn the house of worship becoming something commercial and gross.
Jesus did do things, but not...not what I see a lot of Christians doing today. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think Jesus would be posting all over his social media—or even boycotting or not boycotting Target. I kind of think he'd be talking one-on-one to the person your Facebook post is mocking, and buying food at Target for the homeless guy.
Jesus never delighted in making fun of people—and in fact, the people he came closest to "making fun of" were actually the religious blowhards who saw the world as black and white and thought they knew everything.
Maybe when we see or hear things that outrage us, our reaction doesn't need to be to DO something, but to BE something? I wonder if Jesus is unimpressed with most of the actions we take, if he feels like we're missing the point. Like, posting Bible verses and labeling sinners is one thing, but have you tried loving your neighbor?
I'm tired of being told I need to be mad about something or DO something in response to every little thing. Maybe it's not that deep. Try your best to live like Jesus, and trust him to sort out the details.
~Stephanie
* This will need to be a longer post at some point, but I'm NOT saying I think Christians should stand by while atrocities and injustices happen. I think Christians are called to advocate for people who are abused or endangered, whether by systems or individuals. There are definitely times when we should "do" something; I just wonder if the something is more personal, less performative than what we've been doing.
I've never considered myself to be a "yes" person. I've never considered myself to be someone who finds it difficult to say No.
But I think I've been considering myself wrong, for a while now.
Maybe I used to be a Non-Yes-Person, a person who found it easy to say No. I can imagine that part of my personality being so loud and so effective as a child that it was inconvenient for those around me. I can imagine being trained out of my easily accessible No.
To some extent, we all have to do things we don't want to do; that's part of life. But it's part of life; it's not all of life. Somewhere along the road, I completely lost that distinction. I began should-ing all over myself, 24/7.
I don't know if it's being a Christian, a southerner, or part of a pastor's family, but I internalized a ton of "shoulds." If people expect you to, you should. If no one else is going to, you should. If you can, you should. What you want doesn't matter. What you feel doesn't matter. You do the things anyway. I am strong enough to do what I don't want to do, all the time. My feelings don't matter. What I want doesn't matter. This is the way things are, and it is right and true.
(And then I married the King of Feelings, who not only acted on his feelings, but did not see the need to support them with anything else, like, I don't know, reasons. Ask us about the first several years of marriage sometime XD We have each walked about a billion miles just to meet in the middle.)
In this headspace, it became impossible to know what I wanted—ever. It's like a brand of overthinking. It became impossible to answer the question, "Do you even want to X?" I would sit and gape at the question, butting against firewalls of Shoulds and cringing against their blaring alarms. Do I want cake? I shouldn't eat cake; I've had enough sugar the past few days. Do I want to go to church? I should go to church; the Bible tells us fellowship is important, as is keeping one's commitments. Do I want to go to my friend's birthday party? I should go; the friend has always been supportive of me. Do I want to stay inside and read? I shouldn't; I should go walk outside instead so I don't waste the nice weather.
Do I even want to do X? The muscle that answers that question has well and truly atrophied.
For years, a very small percentage of my Yeses have been real, biblical Yeses. This isn't anyone's fault but my own. It wasn't that people were forcing me to say yes, it's that I didn't and don't have the neural pathway to say yes and mean it. Everything gets routed directly through Should Station and exits as whatever the "correct answer" is. Feelings and desires don't matter.
After therapy, reading Boundaries, and having lots of conversations with Gabe, he and I have decided that I basically need an Anti-Should Bootcamp for the next six months. For the next six months, I'm not going to do anything that I simply "should," unless I feel a seed of genuine desire toward the thing.
This sounds INSANELY privileged and indulgent to me, and I think long-term, it would be. However, I think healing from wounds and (very little T) trauma can only happen in a space of absolute safety. I need to practice saying No until I start to believe that I have the freedom to do that. Only when a person can freely say No can she also freely say Yes. I need to prune away the weeds of all the Shoulds in my heart and see what healthy interests, desires, and joys might be trying to grow. What do I actually want?
I don't think I'm a lazy person anymore. I don't think this six-month bootcamp is in danger of turning me into a spoiled, capricious prima donna who thinks the world revolves around her desires. I think this is something I need to do in order to grow and heal, and I think I'll "come back" in six months happier, healthier, and able to show up spiritually to all the things I decide to say Yes to.
Because it's not a Yes if you didn't believe you could say No.
~ Stephanie
Disclaimer: There's a chance I'm just in a bad mood [June 24]. I may still decide to publish this, for tRAnsPaRenCY, but we'll see.
A minute ago, I was flipping through old posts on this blog and I found these: "That Hurt My Feelings": Part 1 and "That Hurt My Feelings": Part 2.
Those posts feel so far away*. I had forgotten that for twenty-five years I didn't know the difference between being "open" and being "vulnerable."
To be honest, I feel nostalgic for the person I was back then. Remember when nothing hurt my feelings? Remember when I was fine? Remember when I could handle whatever? Those were the damn DAYS, man.
And I could go back to them, easily. I can turn off my feelings. (Gabe compared this ability to a vampire's ability to "turn off their humanity" in The Vampire Diaries. Accurate.) When I'm watching something that might be heartstring-tugging, I can turn off the part of me that would feel it. I used to live like that 24/7 because...well, to be honest, I don't think I knew another way to be. I don't think I realized that there was a doe-eyed little crybaby lurking inside of me. I thought non-vulnerable me was me. And maybe she was/is, I don't know.
Ever since learning about the Enneagram, I've been making an effort to grow in this area. I've been trying to tell more people (and by "more" I mean like two, in addition to Gabe) when they hurt my feelings. I've been trying to feel more.
Telling People When They've Hurt My Feelings: A Review
"4/10, cannot recommend yet. More than half the time it ends with a 'Sounds like a You problem; you're too sensitive.' The other 40% of the time, when the person owns it and apologizes, it makes you feel instantly sheepish and embarrassed, like you were in the wrong for being hurt in the first place. I give the practice 4 and not 0 because I'm trying to trust the process. I trying to believe that one day it'll feel like progress instead of masochism."
Feeling More: A Review
"3/10, cannot recommend yet. I'm sadder more often. I have to be more careful about what I watch/read/listen to, if I'm gonna do it with my feelings turned on. Gabe appreciates my effort. I think his Four heart is encouraged to see me feel more. I'm sure he'd defend what he sees as progress. It doesn't feel like anything to me, except being weaker."
So far, trying to become a more vulnerable person does not make me feel stronger. It makes me feel weaker. I don't know if I'm not doing it right, or if it's a process that takes—apparently—longer than three and a half years. I can't think of ANYTHING I've tried to do for that long and felt no progress on. I feel like I'm touchier, moodier, and less fun to be around. Regular life feels like a battle I've decided to walk into without armor.
I think maybe I'm just in a bad mood right now. I told someone [not Gabe, obviously] that he hurt my feelings today and he responded by saying I was being a "brat" and a "baby." Most of me agrees with him. The temptation to "turn off my humanity" is so strong. I could absolutely stop feeling. It's difficult for me to remember why that's not the best option for everyone.
On an intellectual level, I understand that broadening my capacity for sadness should also broaden my capacity for joy, but I was pretty joyful before all this junk. I would not say that I experience more joy now than I did then. I definitely experience more sadness.
Is this normal? How long is it supposed to take before vulnerability and feeling things pays off? Or maybe this just isn't for me?
I'll try to come back to this when I'm not feeling...like this.
~ Stephanie
* Oh jeez, I just realized that that's the time I said I'd been struggling ever since. Have I been struggling because of this openness/vulnerability revelation? Did I accidentally break myself in 2019? XD
