On Vulnerability

Can I tell you how it feels to be vulnerable?

Utterly and completely.

To be split down the middle,

With all my love and fears,

Slipping simultaneously, uncontrollably out of my insides.

You

Do you see all of me,

Feel what I’m feeling, see where I’m coming from?

Do you notice the quickening pace,

Of my heartbeats cadence,

Underneath the rise and fall of my chest,

As my breaths become shorter, more shallow.

Will it ever feel safe,

Will I ever experience freedom in this state?

Or will this glass house crack and crumble under your persuasion?

Will we succumb to joy or pain,

Or are both inevitable outcomes?

To be sure, we will have to continue,

Sojourning through this life together.

I’ll try to fight the urges to reinforce my fortress, if you’ll be gentle.

I’ll sit with my skin as flushed as the flowers on the table,

Again and again, for you, my Achilles heel. 

Disarmed

I’ve never been one to go along easy or take the path of least resistance. I like to fight and grapple with real or self-made obstacles. I’ve spent my whole life building fortresses and sharpening my weapons of mass destruction. If you are one of my friends, you know that I don’t take kindly to criticism of any kind even though I say I welcome “constructive criticism”.  Truth is even when I solicit advice, I narrow the responses I’d like to hear and if you respond outside of what I want then I brush your advice aside like garbage.  I choose from my arsenal of excuses to divert myself from the truth no matter how beneficial it might be. I tell myself things like “they just don’t understand” and “if they were really hearing me they wouldn’t be so judgmental.” Its tiring, all this fighting, and all my defensiveness wears thin on my relationships.

However, recently I’ve engaged in some of the best, open conversation that I’ve experienced in a long time. It comes by way of a gal I’ve only known for a short amount of time but she already feels like a close friend. The best part about her is the way she totally disarms me. Without lacking any honesty she strips me of any reason to be hostile and through the course of conversation I find myself laying down my weapons of defensiveness. I don’t need to make jokes because I feel insecure and I don’t have to hold back the truth for fear of rejection or shame. Sometimes I feel a little naked knowing how much she knows but more often than not the freedom that comes with feeling known outweighs any amount of awkwardness or discomfort. She is teaching me how to love well in relationships and my hope is to love her well in return. 

Lyrics

Prompt 13

I’m a sucker for one-liners. I like to hear people zing witty banter back and forth and I love hearing short, profound sentiments. I think that’s why I love music so much. Every day I listen to music, all day. I’d like to think I have a healthy appreciation for most genres, and consider myself a music aficionado. However, the reality is I just latch onto musicians that other people like and based on their lyrics and sound, love them or leave them.  That has been the case for my most recent musical obsessions. For example I found my love for Mumford and Sons and The Civil Wars based on (cower in shame) episodes of Grey’s Anatomy, and my love for Sara Bareilles based on this blog post.

I find so much satisfaction in listening to these artists sing sweet melodies and spill out poetic verses, hooks and bridges that seem to explain where I’m at so perfectly. It’s as if they stepped right into my mind and plucked out how I feel about Jesus, my relationships, and the direction of my life. Often the actual subject matter of the song has nothing to do with what I’m experiencing but somehow these artists use a few lines to sum up the pages and pages of my Moleskine that I’ve filled trying to decipher what I feel.

Won't somebody come on in and tug at my seams?/ Oh, send your armies in of robbers and thieves/ To steal the state I'm in I don't want it anymore

I know that she is singing about a man and pleading to get over him. She calls herself a basket case and gives examples of why she loves him. That couldn’t be farther from MY situation except for maybe the basket case part. I have a loving and faithful husband, but those lines are closer to home than I’d like to admit. I NEED to be moved out of the state I’m in; I’m pleading in a similar way to be pushed, pulled or dragged into a better state of mind. Truth is for months I’ve been struggling to mutter a prayer for myself other than, Please, Father be patient with me.

I’m balancing between a desire to dive deeper and thinly veiled apathy. I want to be robbed of fear and insecurity. I want shameful and painful memories to be stolen.

I hold on to worry so tight/ It's safe in here right next to my heart/ Who now shouts at the top of her voice/ Let me go, let me out, this is not my choice

I’d rather stop worrying and move forward in freedom. I want what I should believe to be what I really believe instead of cluttered with questions and doubt. I realize it’s all a bit dramatic but I’m okay with that. For now, I’ll sing along to popular songs and plead their melodic prayers until I feel closer to where I need to be. I'll rely on poetic verses and concise lyrics to say it better than I can because something is better than nothing. 

The First

It seems like we all have a fascination with firsts. We carry fond memories of the first time we rode our bikes or flew on an airplane. There are all sorts of emotions tied up in firsts, most of them include excitement and adrenaline but some of them include heavier emotions like pain, suffering and disappointment. Up to a certain point in my life many of my firsts were all enveloped in guilt and shame and lies. I don’t remember my first lie, but I know that I became imposingly good at it. It felt quite natural to string together a delightful sounding phrase to confuse or distract whomever I was duping.

I did just that the night I had my first kiss. I told the boy I wanted to kiss that he had to help me finish a scavenger hunt, that I had to find the cutest boy at camp and kiss him for ten seconds. He obliged even though we were in front of campers and counselors and he was 5 years my senior. I was quite surprised that my lips felt tingly and even more surprised when I felt his tongue touch mine. I found that to be weird and a little disgusting but I played along like I knew this whole charade backwards and forwards. When a counselor approached to break up our little love fest (after all it was a Christian camp) I spouted off another lie blaming a giggling group of nearby girls for daring me to commit such a scandalous act.

The truth is I didn’t know those girls and I didn’t even know the name of the boy I had just kissed. I didn’t have a scavenger hunt to accomplish nor did anyone dare me but I did know that my older sister had a crush on him and that she had just seen the whole thing. So when someone asks about my first kiss I say it was a boy at camp mainly because the only thing I remember now is that he wore a neon green backwards baseball cap and had bad breath. It was as unromantic as my second kiss which occurred in the middle of the dance floor on homecoming night my freshman year of high school. I assured my date that he was the fourth or fifth boy I’d kissed and I made sure all my friends saw our sloppy session during “Amazed.”

I continued this trend of deceit with many firsts that followed my first (or second) kiss. The first time I slept with someone and the first time I drank too much I pretended like I was a seasoned veteran and I recounted the stories like they were normal occurrences. All those firsts were a train wreck, a desperate attempt at social integration and acceptance but there is one first I’ll never forget. A first that makes all other firsts pale in comparison. I’ll never forget the first time I felt loved. There was no shame or deception, no lies and no plea for acceptance, just love. There was adrenaline and joy, excitement and anticipation and for the first time I didn’t have to be anybody but me.