Finding The Courage To Be Found

A homecoming

Some of the best things in my life I didn’t have the imagination to dream of or ask for. In the past, this would stir up self doubt. How can I trust the things I want? How can I trust what I imagine for myself? It’s been several years since this harrowing time in my life, and so much more pain and confusion along the way. Try living with a broken trust in God and yourself. Where do you turn?

You turn to apathy. Fatalism. Sleepwalking through life. You turn to survival.

Or maybe you are not turning at all.

After all, repentance is a return. Return to self, return to all the places you’ve left, abandoned, betrayed, tried to erase, and find God there—waiting for you.

My first existential crisis started during the early onslaught of the summer before my senior year of high school. What did I want to do AFTER I got into college? I had spent 4 years beelining towards entrance into my dream school so once the chances of acceptance looked promising, I quickly moved onto the next goal. Except, I hadn’t thought that far, and I had to declare a major when I applied, and I didn’t know what I wanted to study. Why didn’t I? It haunted me for months.

My first bout of depression began that infamous summer of 2016, even as it was littered with unforgettable moments like forming a new friendship who would soon become a kindred spirit (as one of my favorite characters Anne of Green Gables would say), a heartbreaking crush, and a home life that was splitting at the seams.

I wrote about this mental health crisis in my school’s newspaper, The Verve months later as I was beginning to see the light again. This was a revolutionary act— and it changed me. Writing became an act of liberation, an act of self realization, a first step of a journey towards wholeness. Towards return.

The bravest moments in my life are marked by unflinching courage and unwavering honesty. This was the first of those moments.

And I had forgotten about this brave act until I was going through old boxes that had been living in my closet since high school (9 years ago!) and found a yellowed newspaper with this very article on the top of the Op-Ed page ( which I was editor of during my last two years of high school).

I had forgotten that my honesty wasn’t new, it had just been stifled. Stifled under insecurity, imposter syndrome, perfectionism, anxiety, white guilt, trauma, death, heartbreak, toxic work environments, job loss, friendship loss, church family loss, home loss, and the most recent: the death of my Grandma.

This was a loss I had known was coming for 10+ years, and when it came, I found myself with so much to say and then nothing at all. Words fall short in the face of the important things. And yet they were there all along— mostly living in my journal, a one off Substack post, a quick scribble in my notes app, a long text to a friend, or emails to my therapist.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about words. Why they matter, and yet don’t seem to be enough. Not enough to encapsulate all that you’ve felt and experienced and known deep in your soul. When my grandma died, I knew I would speak at her funeral. I put off writing my speech till the day before (classic procrastination move). It was rambling and long and took sharp turns and when I was actually speaking it out loud I could feel the chaos of it all, the desperation to show the world exactly who my Grandma was and why she was important to me. But there aren’t enough words. That’s what I kept coming back to— I actually said this in my speech.

Ever since preparing these words to speak at her funeral, I knew I had novels inside me that had to be unraveled through the messy process of putting the abstract into the concreteness of the human language. Well, I’ve always known that since I was a little girl, but the courage to write is hard fought and hard won. The times I write something and actually let it see the light of day are rare, but I want it to be more regular. Writing is my way of being. It is a calling I’ve buried for far too long.

As the prolific American author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston said, “If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.” Your story is YOUR story, and no one can take it away from you, if you are brave enough to tell the truth.

So here’s to the courage to being found. Welcome

.