I get so scared sometimes. Do you? Yes. Why? I don’t know.

I have these moments where I get so afraid…

And suddenly homework can barely be concentrated on, food has no taste, words seem to hollow out, and I cannot think. Always in the back of my mind–or perhaps in the back of my heart–there is this feeling of fear and panic that threatens to take me. Not fear like a huge, tsunami-type wave that will crash down on my head. But fear like a constant tide, coming, inevitable, always.

It used to be this way with restlessness, but these days I feel more afraid than restless. Less like I can’t catch my breath and more like I am scared to breathe in the first place. Like something is wrong, like the calm before the storm, only I can’t place it…I can’t place it.

I’ve been feeling like this all day, trying to appear normal and keep down this rising tide. I don’t know why I feel so afraid. I don’t know why something that feels very similar to panic is shadowing me. I just know that I feel this way and I am scared of feeling scared.

And with the fear comes loneliness so strong I wish I did not have to feel in the first place. Who in the world can explain how and why I feel the way I do when I can’t? How could I explain this to someone? And how can they comfort me if they can’t understand me?

My thought these days have been like a kite on a too-windy day, thrashing outside of my ability to control. Dark thoughts, thoughts that terrify me. Not constantly overwhelming, just present enough to re-frighten me every few hours. How I wish shutting my eyes actually kept out the darkness. An instinctive reaction, the reaction of a child, and a reaction that does nothing to help.

Is it dramatic to say that I feel haunted? Not in the sense that a ghost is chasing me, but haunted all the same. As if something cold and dark is hovering near me, enough that I can sense it but too far away to grasp. I have nightmares, if not consistently than also not rarely. And if not nightmares, dreams where I am afraid all the same. Dreams of people leaving me. Or dreams of people hurting me. Sleep that is not restful.

More than anything else, no matter how unrealistic or child-like the desire, I want to feel Jesus’s arms around me, feel his closeness, his solid comfort, and hear him say, “It’s alright. You’re fine, Rachel. I’m here, and I’m not going to let you go. I love you, don’t be afraid.” I want to feel his love, to feel it so completely that I will never doubt it again. I want to hide under his strong presence and find comfort in his arms and feel the fear melt away. I want to stop feeling afraid. I want to stop feeling lonely. I want to experience Jesus so tangibly, now in this time of darkness more than any other time in my life. I want it so badly.

“Did you ever know loneliness? Did you ever know need?
Do you remember just how long a night can get?
When you are barely holding on, and your friends fall asleep
And don’t see the blood that’s running in your sweat

Still I’m so scared I’m holding my breath.
While you’re up there just playing hard to get.”  

“I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.”

 

When Adam ate the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, he gained understanding of his own humanness. He started to see as God saw and he was ashamed. And we are still ashamed. Adam ate the fruit and the shame ate him and so he covered himself with fig leaves to hide his nakedness. He was clothed in his nakedness, and we are still clothed in our nakedness, and a distant part of me wonders if there is any biblical truth that is not paradoxical. When Adam ate the fruit, he gained some, but he lost so much more. He forfeited his identity. And we are still forfeiting ours. He forgot who he was, whose he was, and we are still forgetting. In many ways, I cannot help but feel as though humanity is frozen in this place of constant forfeiting and forgetting. What should never have been is now our constant reality. And we spend our whole lives trying to regain and remember what was meant to be ours from the beginning.

 “Am I living?’…I forgot myself, and sank into dim and watery oblivion.”

And yet it takes us so long to even remember to ask that first question: are we living? It does not occur to us until years and years into our lives to question ourselves, our lives, our walking. “Am I living?” Am I carrying out the purpose that I was somehow created to carry out, whatever that purpose may be? In the process of driving you may forget that you are driving. In the process of living we often forget that we are living; and in forgetting, we no longer live. And it is frightening. “I forgot myself,” Annie Dillard says, and as I hear her say it I realize that it is time I said it myself. I have–I am–forgetting myself. Who I am. Who I was meant to be. The life I was meant to live. The hope I am called to have. The child I have never wanted and always needed to be. I do not want to forget how to live. But if I am helpless in forgetting, I am even more helpless in my forgetting that I am forgetting.

“I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again”

And the natural question is, of course, on what note does it end? The forgetting or the discovering? We are all ourselves struggling to remember the truths of our own humanity, truths that never should have been forgotten but that were lost in the garden. It is not unlike trying to awaken from a dream that calls us back to itself, back to sleeping, back to forgetting. We come awake for little moments–at the sorrow in music, or the haunting beauty of language–and then the last note fades and the words lose their meaning and we fall back asleep to the world, to our life, to ourselves. And we can only hope that in the splitting at the garden, the Master left us enough of ourselves–which is really to say, enough of Himself–to recognize his call even in the layers of our sleeping.

“At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman.” Albert Camus

And this is my question. What this existentialist evidently sees as absolute, I beg to see as ambiguous. Is the essence of humanity–the deepest layer of it, the truest layer–is the essence of humanity something beautiful or something devastating? It does not have to be mutually exclusive, but that does make things much easier. This is my question, something that has haunted me for a long time. Should we strive to hold onto our humanness, or is it something we are trying to shed, like a snake casting off its skin for a fresher one. Whatever it means to be human–and we have been arguing that definition for ages–whatever it means, is it a good thing or a bad thing?

“Confusion now hath made his masterpiece.” -William Shakespeare

Throughout this post, I have written in general terms, using “we” and “us” and “our”, and speaking of humanity as a whole. And I have done this because what I am trying to question, the essence of what I am trying to figure out, is not simply myself but life, people, existence, meaning. But there is something…deeply personal to me about this questioning, this line of wondering. Something in me says, “You’re too young for this, too young to think like this,” and yet I cannot escape these thoughts. Shakespeare was great because more than the beauty of his language and despite the archaic words that he used, he wedged a knife into the question of humanity. But perhaps his simplest statement, his quietest admission, is what I resonate the most with. “Confusion now hath made his masterpiece,” and if I am any masterpiece at all, is it Confusion’s. Because I don’t understand.

I am a Christian, and so I can’t help but see and perceive out of the lens of my faith. And yet those lens often feel so similar to those who do not have faith. And I have questioned my own genuiness several times, questioned my salvation for this very reason because my mind seems to still think in the same way as anyone else’s. But it shouldn’t. I should have more hope, more courage, more understanding. But I don’t. I don’t understand why things are the way they are. I don’t understand why God created humanity in a way where we are constantly having to relearn what the word “humanity” even means. I don’t understand why we are living in a place of constant forgetting, constant forfeiting. And most of all, I don’t understand how to find the meaning in all of this. In a life that seems to revolve around relearning these truths that instinctively I should already know, where is the meaning? I feel as though I am searching and searching, and as a Christian perhaps I should have already found the Answer to the search but I am searching still, searching anyway. Does that mean that I am not saved? Is there something “broken” in what I believe that I still question and wonder at things that maybe He already answered? Is it wrong to feel like this, to feel even angry at a God who allows me to understand only that I do not understand, who allows me to know only that I cannot remember, who forces me to search for what I should already have?

And yet I concede that I am small. Even to myself I seem small, and so I cannot imagine how small I actually am. I know that I am small and I am tiny, and my understanding of what is true is so entirely limited. Everything I possibly know can be only one page in a volume of understanding. I think that I am in the last chapter, the last paragraph, the last word, and that there is nothing more. But I see only what is behind and in front and beside me; I cannot see outside of my world. And my world, the world that I thought was an ocean is really only a fishbowl, big enough to seem a world only to one as small as myself.

“I’m a pilgrim on the edge, on the edge of my perception.
We are travelers at the edge,
We are always at the edge of our perceptions” – Scott Mutter

there is a comfort in unrecognizable shapes, blended colors, deaf words

And as a surgeon to his dying son,
With shaking hands and a conflict of interest,
I press my hands to my wound and attempt to staunch the bleeding;
“You will be okay,” I plead with myself. “You will be okay.”
Bandaging the hurting with my stained-glass words
Praying no one will point out their inadequacy
While Nature asks of me the unnatural—
To allow myself to be tossed by greater Hands
To restrain from an antibiotic for the pain
But instead to wait
And to trust
That I am made of more than fleeing blood
More than shipwrecked pride
More than a beggar’s alms

 

This surgeon without her latex on is afraid of cutting too deeply.

ten·sion /ˈtɛnʃən/ [ten-shuhn]: the act of being stretched or strained

I am a thousand ropes.

Thin. Fraying at the edges, taut in the middle. Gridlocked, constantly gridlocked in a strain so intense that it does not waver even an inch to the left or to the right. Held rigidly in place by its elastic counterpart. Weak because each of the two halves is so strong.

 A rope.

 Meant for tying.

 Is unraveling.

I am a thousand ropes, and the tension, the tension is what defines me. I am a thousand ropes, but not only that–I am each end of the thousand ropes. I am pulling, pulling, pulling against myself, and if one side were to win I should be afraid because my winning will also mean my losing, but if neither side were to win I should be even more afraid because the strain of the rope and the pain of the burns is more than I can bear… It is more than I can bear.

Ropes. A thousand of them. A thousand chances to rebind. A thousand chances to unwind. A thousand connections. A thousand knots. And the more knots, the less of me, until I am smaller…and smaller…and then nothing.

It’s not about you. If there’s one thing you know, it’s that it’s not about you, and that is the most beautiful truth that exists, because if it were all about you, you would have left a long time ago. And yet…it has to be about me. My “I” refers to me, this person, this heart, this mind, this questioning existence, this questionable existence. How can it be about me? But how can it not be? Look at all this pain…just, look at it. Look at the nights of suppressed tears, look at the loneliness that all the words in the world could not deny. I want to help them… Of course I want to help them. But how can I, when I can’t even help myself? It’s not about me. But it is about me. Because me is my “I”.

Tension.

You know that this is all true–the things that people have been telling you, for months and for months, those same things that you’ve been telling yourself again and again…you know it’s true. That you are not alone. That He will be faithful. That there is a reason. That you are loved, no matter how elusive that love seems to be, no matter how meaningless it seems to be. You know it’s true. You just don’t believe it. Don’t understand it. Don’t trust it. It’s all up there, in your head, in your mind, in that place of rationality that you have always exceled at. Until it came to this. To the here and now. Then suddenly all those people who have told you that you are a thinker are made into liars. Because suddenly rationality and logic–those twin cores that defined your existence for so long–no longer mean anything. The cool thoughts and isolated beliefs are nothing compared to the onslaught of emotion–the anger, and the fear, and the hurting. Is truth defined by your mind or by your heart? I don’t know and so the half of me pulls and pulls and pulls, and the other half of me retaliates and I am at war against myself, and there are no survivors, no survivors.

Tension.

And the difference between desiring what will satisfy my humanness and desiring what You desire for me…the difference is enormous. A couple of miles could fill the gap between the two. I want out. I want escape. I want a release from the hurting and a stalemate between each half of me to stop fighting, stop fighting… Yet the tiny, microsopic part of me that wants what You want desires that I grow. That I learn. That I become more like Jesus. And I cannot have both. I can’t both escape the pain and grow. The human part of me wants to be strong. The spiritual part of me says that Your strength is made perfect in weakness. The human part of me says this is the end. The spiritual part of me says I already know the end, and it doesn’t sound like this. And I must choose. Which voice to listen to. Which desire to feed. I must choose. And the battle in me sounds something like this: God, it hurts…please stop the hurt. But maybe this is causing me to grow. I should “rejoice in all suffering”…. No, no, no more. Get me out…just get me out. Yet not my will but….y-y-yours. But please, God…don’t break me more than I can bear. And they fight, my human desire and my spiritual desire. And I feel more human than like a child of God. I feel too human.

Tension.

I don’t want the thousand pieces of rope to split because then I will split, and I will be broken, so broken… But I don’t want the thousand pieces of rope to be locked in an eternal struggle of self against self because my strength cannot last forever, it cannot last….

 And so the last tension…is the tension.

My last words are borrowed. The best ones always are.

 “In the darkness..

 Lord my God, who am I that You should forsake me? The child of Your love, and now become as the most hated one, the one You have thrown away as unwanted, unloved. I call, I cling, I want..and there is no One to answer, no One on Whom I can cling, no, No One. Alone.

 My God, how painful is this unknown pain. It pains without ceasing. I have no faith. I dare not utter the words and thoughts that crowd in my heart and make me suffer untold agony. So many unanswered questions live within me-I am afraid to uncover them–because of the blasphemy.

 When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven, there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul. Love, the word, it brings nothing. I am told God loves me and yet the reality of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul.

 In spite of all, this darkness and emptiness is not as painful as the longing for God. The contradiction I fear will unbalance me. What are You doing my God to one so small? When You asked to imprint Your Passion on my heart..is this the answer?

 If this brings You glory, if You get a drop of joy from this, if souls are brought to You, if my suffering satiates Your Thirst, here I am Lord, with joy I accept all to the end of life..and I will smile at Your Hidden Face always.”   -Mother Teresa

 

Shh.

Don’t tell anyone I’m here. I can trust you, right? You’re my friend, right? Don’t tell anyone I’m here.

Why not?

I’m playing a game. It’s called Hide and Go Seek. The trick is, I’m hiding and seeking. I’m hiding because I’ve lost someone, and no one can know that I’ve lost her. And I’m seeking because I’ve got to find her.  I’ve got to find her.

 What does she look like?

She’s not very tall; in fact, she’s around 5 feet. She has short brown hair and brown eyes. Small hands. Quick legs. (That’s what makes it hard to find her)

Actually, she is a lot like me. Except, instead of all this anger, she has a peace that transcends.

And instead of all this fear, this crippling fear, she is courageous and unafraid.

And instead of this sadness, she feels hope.

And most of all, instead of this shame, she feels love.

You see, this girl—she may look like me, but we’re nothing alike.

While I am weak and crippled, she is strong and whole. While I am lost and wandering, she is found and rebuilding. While I am tired and scared, she is alive and well.

And I’ve got to find her. God, how I’ve got to find her.

Why don’t you just call her name then?

Have you not understood anything of what I’ve been saying? They can’t know that I’ve lost her. No one can. It would be…oh God, it would be terrible if they knew. No one would look at me the same. They would shake their heads at the sight of me; they would wash their hands clean of me.

Aren’t you being a little hard on them? They’re your friends, after all.

You don’t understand, do you? You don’t understand the way things work, do you? We never see people for who they are, just for who we are. We never see the person who really exists, just the person who fits into our triangles and knots and picture frames. (“When do we see each other face to face?… We are just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade, but never seeing inside”). You see what you want to see. And they saw not me but what they wanted me to be. Now I’ve lost her and I’ve got to find her again, before anyone finds out, before they leave me. Oh God, please don’t leave me.

You’ve got to help me. Please, you’ve got to help me.

 Where should I look?

Anywhere. Everywhere. Beside empty words, on the table next to someone’s broken heart. Check underneath the recycling bin of people’s dreams, or on top of that bleeding soul. She could be anywhere. But really. She could be everywhere.

And in literature. You can’t forget to look there. Dig through Tennyson’s Memoriam, through Frost’s Desert Places, look alongside Keats and Whitman. And fumble through Potok, through his exiled Asher Lev, his angry Michael, his tired Reuven. Check the pages of Tolkien, inside Frodo’s weariness and great inadequacy, inside Aragorn’s shadows, inside Denethor’s bitter pride. Examine Lewis, and the unbelieving Susan, or the betraying Edmund, or the Ungit-Orual. She might be in there. She tends to go places she can relate to.

Thank you for looking. It’s crucial that I find her. I have to find her. I’m afraid that she’s left me—forever.   And then I will be alone—forever.  

And I’ve got to find her soon. Because the cracks are starting to appear. I can’t glue them all back together. Some of the pieces will have to go missing. And then they will know.

So please. Help me find her.

Help me find her.

I need to find her.