I don't know that yet
Hi! By some stroke of luck you’re reading, “Yes, I Am A Hungry Woman.” Have you subscribed?
The year is drawing to a close. I will not be writing a newsletter on the Monday after Christmas, so this is my last chance to write to you in 2022. I like even-numbered years. The odd numbers always start off so untidy. I always think at the end of a year, “So that was it, huh? Did I accomplish what I wanted to?”
What an unfair question to pose myself. My years rarely go to plan, or trundle along exactly the way I prescribed for them twelve months before - whose year does? As a kid, my dad used to urge us to make new year’s goals (“Not resolutions! Goals! You need goals to make forward motion in life!”) and they always depressed me a little: which items did I want to choose this year, and therefore insure I did very little about them? Because as soon as I wrote out those neat lists of goals, carefully filed under categories of “mental,” “physical,” “spiritual,” and “misc.”, I loathed each thing I’d written down. I just hate new years goals.
As an adult I do not make New Years goals. What I make instead, are thoughtful assessments of my current life, and the direction I want to grow. Last December I heard two very good questions that helped guide my growth this year:
“What kind of Rachel do I want to be a year from now?”
-and-
“What steps can I take to become that kind of person?”
(Of course this is a sort of pseudo goal-setting tactic, but one that makes sense to me and feels attainable.) It was not asking me to prescribe an exact course of steps, or promise to swear off my favorite habits for a twelve-month. It was gentle, empathetic, incorporated a lot of understanding for being a human and not an AI machine. All in all, this felt like the right footing to start off on.
Accordingly, in the late days of 2021 and early days of 2022 I charted course to become a little more like the version of Rachel that I envisioned being a year out. Instead of actual changes, I made two columns in my journal: “Less of” and “More of”. This practice may have been inspired by Mari Andrew (I think it was), and in those columns I listed the things that felt needing a rebalance in my life. More honest communication. Less baking. More seasonal produce. Less procrastination about medical visits. I haven’t revisited those journal entries yet, so I can’t say that I can tick every box and claim that I am exactly the version of myself I wanted to be a year ago.
What I can tell you? I am a different Rachel than the girl I was in 2021.
This year has been patches of rampant beauty spanned at the corners with brutal emotions. It’s been a lot of incredible inner and spiritual growth paired with a near-perpetual state of uncertainty and occasional spires of anxiety shooting above the horizon. I wrestled daily to face my Enneagram 7 phobia of pain and heavy emotions as I skirted fears I had held my whole life regarding my future: what if there is cancer? unresolved infertility? emotional pain so deep it could swallow me? I could hardly have told you exactly what I was afraid of until this year, so assiduously had I avoided checking into those shadowlands in my heart. Not in 2022 though. I wanted to bring it all to light, to familiarize myself with every part of the menagerie of worries, to acknowledge where they were reasonable, and laugh at where they were only bogeymen.
My library reading list alone would tell you how dedicated I was to facing it all. Books like No Cure For Being Human, Bittersweet, My Inner Sky, The Salt Path, Foreverland, and others lit the way. These, along with memoirs of people from every walk of life, became my companions as I dove into a slew of medical appointments, diagnoses, difficult feelings, strong communication, and healthy boundary-making. They helped me feel less alone, as all stories do: my fears had been feared by others before. Some of them came true. Most of them made it out into even more beauty and joy and fulfillment on the other side of the Most Terrible News Ever. That gave me courage: even if my fears came true, that didn’t mean they’d be the end of all things. As a Christian, I know that my ultimate healing is coming. As a human girl who really loves life, loves living here on earth, the idea that anything would shorten my lifespan, and the general concept of human suffering, are both ghoulish to me and always have been.
2022 was my year to not just seem courageous (I’m afraid of very little besides cancer, suffering, and unbearable disappointment), but to really become courageous - or try. To say it wasn’t an exhausting process would be lying. It was. I’m tired. But I’m tired in that good way you’re tired after you have a big cry. I wrote on Instagram earlier this year that I was a quarterly-crier, having a big cry only once every few months. And while I still don’t indulge in big cries all that frequently, I am pleased to announce that 2022 taught me to cry again…in a good way! I’m Cameron Diaz in The Holiday, leaving Jude Law and tearing up for the first time in twenty years.
The tears were always in there. I was just afraid of them too.
I think a really great outcome of this year of gnarly, beautiful, scapegrace growth has been how…free I feel. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I’m still scared at times. I still have moments where my escapism is triggered and I have to trace the breadcrumb trail back to the fear I’m trying to jettison away from. But instead of being a slave to that fear, or to the avoidance of owning that fear, I am a curious, anthropological observer. At the start of this year I put a Ted Lasso sticker on my water bottle. “Be curious, not judgmental,” it says. Initially, I thought of it as a reminder for other people; after all, I consider my native curiosity to be one of my finest traits. But over time it became a reminder to me in this process of becoming courageous: I could observe my fears and be curious about them, not judge them right away and pounce on the lid of that Pandora’s box before the creepy-crawlies came out and ate me alive.
So yes, I am still scared. I am still deep-breathing each time I remember the seven doctor’s appointments coming up in January/February. I still worry each time something odd goes on with my vision, my hormones, or some other part of my body that could mean a condition I’m caring for is not getting better and is maybe worsening. But I am also approaching those feelings with tenderness and empathy, and even curiosity. When I journal about it, I’m not just spitting pages and pages of vitriolic fear (usually); I create a list of each of the things I’m worried about and what exactly I’m worried will happen. I keep a running list on my phone of Things I Haven’t Learned Yet. When something that feels giant and irreconcilable arises in my heart, I put it on that list. It is not something static and complete itself - it is something I haven’t learned yet. Like subjects that do not interest me. Instead of “this is boring and will always be boring” I’m teaching myself how to approach from a different angle. So now the panic I feel over being bored translates to: “Something I haven’t learned yet: how to find things interesting when they bore me.”
We miss out on a lot when we think we know enough. Shauna Niequist wrote a runaway bestseller this year on this very subject: I Guess I Haven’t Learned That Yet, so there is no great need for me to rehash the point. However, reading the book didn’t pioneer new categories of thought in my brain - it brought out and developed in me ideas that had been fermenting for a couple of years at least. Mainly, the idea that the richest life is that of a curious and humble person who is willing to be a beginner at things.
The most interesting people I know are the people who are not those who can assure you they know all about it, but those people who are open about what they don’t know. In recent months Andrew and I led a small-group at our church full of (mainly) middle-aged-to-elderly people. In the early weeks before we knew the group very well, I remember being surprised - and delighted - by one woman, nearly eighty years old, who responded to a topic under discussion by saying, “Teach me about this. I’m unfamiliar with this concept.”
My life was richer in 2022 for being a beginner, taking baby steps toward bravery, and approaching with curiosity. I grew so much this year and it makes me excited to step into 2023 with the same heart posture. I believe God rewards those who seek Him. Maybe not with the exact thing we are asking for, but with His presence and closeness. I felt that in 2022 and it soothed my fears and continues to soothe them. Life - even the hard and holy bits - is intensely beautiful. Shauna Niequist wrote in I Guess I Haven’t Learned That Yet:
“I know now that I'm strong enough, brave enough, whole enough to hold it all - how it was and how it ended. What I got wrong, what I made right, who I was, who I wasn't, who I've yet to become. What I miss, what was lost, what's still unfolding. I'm not perfect or shiny or bulletproof. The story of my life is not a fairy tale. It's not a horror story. It's just a story like most stories - dark and light and beautiful and terrible and still being written.”
And that’s what I see here. As story like most stories: dark and light and still being written. In this season of Advent I’ve done a lot of reflecting. Last week I journaled about a memory that arose: the very first time I can recall feeling afraid of sadness. I was so young - probably three years old - and my Dad or Mom would read Christmas books to us. The Crippled Lamb - the classic by Max Lucado who (let’s be real) loves to write tear jerkers on purpose - was a “favorite” of mine. I put favorite in quotation marks because I was so terrified of the unbearable bittersweetness of this story, and I also craved this story. My whole little body was taut as my dad read the story, because I knew what was coming in the pages: the poor little lamb left behind because he was too slow and crippled to go to pasture with the shepherds; the old cow who comforted him; and the way the crippled lamb was the first to see the baby Jesus and keep Him warm, all because of his handicap that had kept him from the green fields. I hated that part in the book where all the sweet, sad, kind, beautiful story comes to a climax because it made me cry every time, and it felt agonizing. Sometimes I would hide the book so we couldn’t read it. Or hide my face so nobody would see me crying. It was just so keenly bittersweet and all I knew is that it made me sad, and sadness hurt. And I wanted to avoid that at all costs from now on.
I think, even at three years old, I recognized the awful, practical truth: that all of us, in some way, are the crippled lamb. We each have something that gives us a limp, leaves us behind, makes us unfit for XYZ. And the obvious point of that story is that to Jesus, those handicaps don’t matter a bit; in fact, sometimes they position us to experience something exceptional.
But three year old Rachel (and thirty year old Rachel, if I’m honest) hate that we have to be crippled in any way. We are yearning to be the one to keep the Christ Child warm and also yearning to be free, unencumbered, high in the green hills with the rest of the sheep without a shade of pain or grief.
Both.
That’s what I’m learning. We are both. Here on earth, we are crippled. And honestly, crippled lambs have some really special, beautiful moments. And in eternity, I’m going to be free from any fear, any possibility of anything sad, any holding back. And rather than grieve the fact that life is bittersweet and we have to take them together, the bitter with the sweet, I am going to be thankful for the echo of eternity in the heart of all Enneagram 7s that knows there is a place where nothing will ever be sad or hard or heavy.
As we enjoy our last week and a half of 2022, I am thankful, and winded, and truly looking forward to another twelve months of curiosity and learning. Here’s to continuing delicious yoga practices and long walks at the speed of the soul, more of the vegetables and seasonal produce I did lean heavily on, more healing, more ideas, and more service to others. I hope that your own years come to a gentle landing, that you disembark the 2022 plane in good health and happiness. I myself have a neurology follow-up on the second to last day of the year, which feels strangely fitting for the way Growing Past Medical Anxiety defined my year. I’m hoping for good news. Regardless, I will be curious. I haven’t even started to be a Rachel in 2023, but I’m looking forward to learning all about her.