How a Heart Comes Back Together

For some of us, heartbreak comes like a summer thunderstorm. It pounces on us, hammers down heavy drops for a furious few minutes, and passes, leaving us stunned.

For some of us, heartbreak comes like heavy snow on a winter night. It coats everything in white and convinces us for a short while that all is beautiful and tranquil until the weight becomes too heavy for the limbs and lines, and there is breaking and collapsing and crashing.

For some of us, heartbreak comes like drought. We soak in the sun, and...

slowly...

slowly...

slowly...

...our lakes and rivers recede, our throats feel like sand, and we shrivel, and shrink, and crawl to a stop.

For me?

For me, heartbreak was like hurricane season. I came to expect it, anticipate it, brace for it. I lived in constant fear of it. Before I had even finished the repairing and remodeling from the previous season, the winds were upon me (again). The roof was ripped off (again), the basement took on water (again), and I began the work of recovery (again).

Year, after year, after year, after year.

After one too many storms, my home, my heart, lay strewn about in pieces amongst a haphazard scattering of cracked mementos, splintered trust, collapsed vows, and water-logged years.

If you've experienced heartbreak, you've experienced it in your own way, I'm sure. How long we stay in it, how we cope with it, how we recover from it all varies. Mine honestly feels like ages ago. Another life, almost. Somehow, my heart came back together. Here's how it happened, for me:

It was a lot of angry questions and, "God, why have you forsaken me?"

It was a white-knuckle grip on any strands of hope I could find.

It was listening to people who didn't know me well say, "You haven't done enough. Fight harder." It was listening to those who know me best say, "You have done enough."

It was knowing my friends were shedding tears when I had sworn to stop shedding them.

It was drowning in a flood of emails and text messages that said, "I will wade with you," "We believe in you," "We will hurt and heal with you," and "We love you dearly."

It was the extra few foot-pounds of pressure in the hugs people gave me.

It was putting my head down and throwing myself into work and grad school.

It was reaching out for help when I became paralyzed with indecision about work and grad school.

It was choosing to celebrate my friends as they got married and adopting their joy when I felt like I had none of my own.

It was a thousand other little celebrations, mine and others'.

It was sitting in a counselor's office and hearing him say, "Looks like the dreamer in you hasn't died after all these years."

It was lines from songs, like "Nothing is wasted..." and "A better life is waiting..." and "You've held your head up / you've fought the fight / you bear the scars / you've done your time..."

It was distracting myself with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Netflix, Feedly, and everything else bright and blinking.

It was turning everything off and listening to the sound of my heart coming back together.

It was giving up the security of relationship. It was agreeing to the possibility of being single forever, deciding to not settle out of fear of being alone, committing to live the fullest life possible.

It was experiencing God's goodness in it, through it, and because of it.

All that to say, it was some combination of incredibly hard work and overwhelming grace. Gritty determination and utter helplessness. Intentional steps and blind wandering. Daydreams and harsh reality. Company and solitude. Joy and grief.

It all worked together, we all worked together, to rebuild my heart.

We built it bigger this time. More square footage. On higher ground. Instead of reinforcing it with more concrete, instead of erecting walls and barbed-wire fences, we put in floor-to-ceiling windows. We built it to be open.

It took a community. It took everything, all I had, and it took all of you.

Thanks for that, friends.

From deep within my reconstructed heart, thank you.

***

Feature photo ©2012 Nicolas Raymond

An Open Letter to My Fear

We first met when I was young. You wore a crisp, black suit with a black tie. You knelt down, shook my hand, and introduced yourself as a friend.

You were selling me security, safety. My parents, of course, were on board with this. In the beginning, you started off with simple lessons:

Don't cross the street without holding someone's hand; you could be hit by a car.

Don't play with Dad's razor; you could get cut.

Wear a helmet when you ride your bike; you could damage your head.

After a little while, I started to trust you. You became more and more a part of my life--you moved in, you came with me to school, to church, to the park. You followed me, always just behind me, always ready to jump in and save me from myself.

Still, I made you crazy at times. I could be stubborn. Like the time I ignored your screaming at me not to play with fire. That was the day I almost burned the woods down. I spent 30 minutes stamping out little flames, and you scolded me the whole time. I still think it was one of the funniest days of my life.

It took something a little more close to home for me to listen to you, though.

You remember that night, right? The night my girlfriend told me she was upset because I had ignored her, that she spent the day with that one guy, that she ended the night with her lips on his?

I was lying on the floor, pieces of my heart scattered around me, when you laid your hand on my shoulder like the gnarled claws of a vulture and whispered in my ear, "You see? You see what happens when you open your heart? You see what happens when you make a mistake?"

I did see. You helped me up, and you wrapped your arms around me, and you said, "I know what's best." I nodded and rested my head on your shoulder. You smelled like a hospital room.

***

Every day, I affixed all of the pieces of armor you wanted me to wear under my clothes. To protect you, you would say. And I would drag myself, clumsy, clanking, toward the door to face the dangerous world outside.

For a while, I walked only where you allowed me to walk. I tried only what you allowed me to try. I shared only what you allowed me to share. I loved only how you allowed me to love.

I would see someone living out their dreams, but you would be there, just over my shoulder, to point out that I could never do that. Tsk, tsk. Too risky.

I would start to speak up about what I wanted or needed, but you would put your hand over my mouth and remind me that she might leave me. Shh. It's not important, then.

You worked so hard to get me like that. You miss those days, I'm sure.

***

We were in the middle of a fight, you and me. Who knows anymore what set it off, but I was standing there in all my cumbersome armor and telling you how claustrophobic it had all become and how I hated living like this and how I didn't think you actually cared about my well-being after all.

"Without me," you said through clenched teeth, "you wouldn't survive."

I looked at you and began to peel off the armor you made me wear. They fell to the ground until I was surrounded by cast-iron flakes of skin.

"Do your worst," I said.

You pulled a revolver, black as your eyes, out of your coat and pointed it straight at my heart. I followed the barrel with my eyes to your hand and up your arm and shoulder and to your sick, still face with all its quiet hate.

I thought you were bluffing.

I was wrong.

***

After you pulled the trigger, after you left me a bloody mess there on the floor, you thought you had finally broken me for good.

You thought you had made me your blind Samson, shackled and docile, with nothing left to do but grind grain and wait for death.

You were wrong.

***

I saw you, Fear, do your worst, and realized my heart was still squeezing blood to all corners of my body, my lungs were still feeding me air, and that your gospel of safety and security and self preservation was a slick sales pitch designed to steal my life, not protect it.

Now that I've seen you for what you are--not a friend, not family, not someone who wants what's best but a slimy, slithering parasite--I want you out. Gone. You're not welcome here anymore.

No more following me like my shadow. No more whispers in my ear. No more scary stories at night while I'm trying to fall asleep. I'm done with that now.

I'm sure I'll find you on the sidewalk outside my house begging to get a word in, or that I'll find some messages from you late at night trying to tell me about how dangerous it is to put my heart on the line or dream dreams or risk disappointment. I'm sure you'll do everything you can to work yourself back in.

Go ahead and try.

I stared down the barrel of your gun.

I watched you pull the trigger.

I felt your bullet tear through my flesh and lodge itself in my chest.

On what should have been my death bed, Love found me, reached inside and pulled the bullet out and reconnected my blood vessels and pieced my tissue back together and set my rib cage back in place and told my heart to beat and my lungs to expand and stood me on my feet and looked me in my eyes and said in a voice simultaneously as powerful as a waterfall and as soft as the dew:

"Fear no longer has power here."

Love has moved in now, and I only have room for one.

I hope you'll understand.

Farewell, fear.

***

Feature photo ©2008 AppleDave | Flickr | cc

On My Mother's Gardening

At the house in Pittsburgh where I grew up, we always had a garden.

This garden was my mother's labor of love. My father was very good at tearing things down, ripping them up. Our house might as well have had an "Under Construction" sign permanently affixed to it--there was never a period of time during which a wall didn't have a large hole in it, a floor wasn't stripped of its tiles, or some wires weren't hanging lifelessly from a spot where a light or switch should be. Many of those projects went on for years because my dad was skilled in the art of demolition but wasn't particularly adept at making things new.

My mom, though--she knew how to grow things. All along one side of the house, she kept a garden she maintained as long as I can remember. Most of what she grew supplemented a Korean diet. On the side closest to our front door, she grew lettuce--we would use this for wraps that included rice and Korean beef. Next to the lettuce were the pepper plants--these were spicy green peppers. We'd dip those peppers in a crimson-colored paste made from another pepper. When people ask me nowadays how I can eat such spicy food, I attribute my tolerance to those peppers. Tiger Woods' father started him on golf early on; my mother made me eat spicy food. Thanks, Mom.

Farther down in the garden, she planted a Korean variety of Perilla called Kkaennip, which produces green leaves kind of like basil, kind of like mint, but not quite either. She'd pluck these leaves, marinate them in a spicy sauce, and we'd have them with almost every meal. To this day, I crave these leaves. The very few places I've been able to find them don't make them quite like my mom does--they taste like disappointment, every time.

In addition, we always had tomatoes (regular and cherry), green bell peppers, and some new, short-lived experiment like radishes or carrots or cabbage.

I learned so much about the process from my mom. She always had me helping alongside her. We'd churn up the earth with cultivators and our fingers, and I'd freak her out by holding out an earthworm I'd found because she's code-red, meltdown-level terrified of anything that resembles a snake. We'd put stakes into the ground and tie the top-heavy tomato plants to them to correct their terrible posture. We'd put up chicken wire to keep the groundhogs and rabbits from freeloading on our supply. We'd yank weeds from the bed that didn't belong, and I'd learn that some are sharp and would fight to stay. We would throw our hands up in the air when we saw that our plants had been turned to shreds by insects or the rabbits broke through our defenses. We'd water them with the hose or the sprinkler or a mason jar depending on when we last had rain and how hot it was.

I learned that to create and sustain life in that garden was work.

That was my mother's lesson to me: the grit that comes with life. The dirt under your nails, the sweat falling from the tip of your nose, the blood and scratches that would paint your fingers and hands and arms.

My mother was the one who woke up before the sun, drove to church, and dropped to her knees every single morning to pray. Pray for me, pray for my father, our family, our church, and, I can only hope, herself.

My mother was the one who taught me what it meant to endure. To persevere through the discomfort and pain of my situations.

She taught me to dig, water, and wait--because life would sprout up and blossom somewhere on the other side.

These days, I don't have a garden. It's been years since I've had to plunge my fingers into actual dirt. But I still garden each day. I've moved on from lettuce, tomato, and pepper to people. To me, and my loved ones. We do this thing together.

Our hands are stained with brown and crimson as we turn up each other's dirt.

We erect fences to keep ourselves from addiction, from temptation, from complacency.

We hold each other up when our heads are heavy and falling to the ground.

We remove, sometimes violently, that which has moved in and is stealing our nutrients.

We weep when we find ourselves destroyed by what we could not prevent.

We cry out for water in our droughts.

We work, and we toil, and we create life.

 ***

Feature photo ©2011 Sarah Horrigan | Flickr

When Pain Enters Your Story

If you grew up in a school in the suburbs like I did, there's a good chance you took one of those tests online that tell you what you're good at and what careers would suit you.

I don't even remember what I got because I dismissed any formal career immediately. I wanted to be a musician, an artist. I wanted to avoid the interstates the masses all drove on and take the winding back roads.

Regardless, my high school counselors had the same phrase locked and loaded for all of us: "You can be whatever you want to be."

It's with this extreme optimism, this sense of control over our lives and our futures that we were sent forth into the world.

***

I'm afraid we were partially misled. That's not to say I don't believe we can become almost anything we want, do almost anything we want. What was left out of all of the feel-good future talk is how much we would face that would be out of our control. What our counselors never talked about is what to do when the unimaginable happens, when the levee breaks and storm waters reduce us to rubble.

I know this myself, and I know this of many of my friends.

Pain has entered your story--it has forced its way in the door and jarred you from the peace you once knew.

There are more than a few of you reading this who've been blindsided by that which you did not want nor choose.

You didn't choose to lose a child.

You didn't choose to have a child with health complications or a learning disorder.

You didn't choose to be cheated on.

You didn't choose to have cancer.

You didn't choose to have anxiety, or depression, or bipolar, or OCD.

You didn't choose to be abused by your boyfriend or husband or aunt or uncle or nanny.

You didn't choose your afflictions or your burdens, but they've found you. They've leveled you. They've pulled you until you've nearly come apart at the seams. Some of you have come apart and are trying to gather your insides that have spilled out.

This is not the life you wanted. This is not the life you dreamed of in the library of your high school. This is hard, so much harder than you could have predicted.

But this is your life, and you still have a say in what direction it goes. Naive dreams and easy mantras are not enough to get you through this. But hope is.

Hope isn't some warm-and-fuzzy, cop-out way to live life. On many days, hope is a battle. It looks like clenched fists, like blood and tears.

It's a battle worth fighting.

You are not just bone and sinew, blood and tissue.

You are not just nerve endings and electronic pulses firing back and forth.

You are soul and spirit, and soul and spirit are stronger, more pliable, more regenerative than your atoms and cells.

You are not done. You are not finished. You are in the fog and forest of your story, in the rising action, in the complication--there is more story for you to write.

Keep writing.

You may be using blood, sweat, and tears as your ink right now, but let hope shape the letters.

***

Feature photo ©2006 madamepyschosis | Flickr

Knowing What You Want

I get a craving for Dairy Queen at least once a day. If and when I finally walk into one, I could have a tough decision to make. After all, they have a lot of options: 22 variations of blizzards, 11 sundae options, Royal Treats, Arctic Rushes, shakes, Moolattes, smoothies--and did you know they have salads?

So many options.

And yet, it takes me all of two seconds to order at Dairy Queen, every time, without fail. Wanna know why?

Because I know what I want.

No, I don't care about that Butterfinger Blizzard or the Marshmallow Sundae. I want a Large Twist Cone.

That's it. Every time. Always. I have laser focus when it comes to ice cream.

Why am I telling you this story?

I've been discovering how important it is to know what you want in life and begin to align your decisions with that. I've been hearing more and more stories of friends with headaches and heartbreaks that stem from decisions that were made that are contrary to what they truly desire in their lives.

One of the most obvious areas where this applies is dating. It's sometimes bizarre to talk to someone and hear what they want in a guy or girl, and a week later, they're dating the tooliest of tools.

Some of our actions reflect that what we really want is to just be with someone and/or get married. And if that's what you really want, then it makes sense to go out with the first person that comes along or anyone that's cute enough. But if you want more than that (and most friends I talk to do), that strategy doesn't make sense. Sometimes we act contrary to what we really want. That's why we date people that aren't the best for us. That's why we agree to go out with that girl or that guy even though we know they don't share some crucial values or treat us the way someone should.

When you know that you want a guy or a girl who treats you a certain way, who has goals in life, who's going the same direction as you, you don't get distracted by all of the flashy items on the menu when they wink at you or flirt with you at the bar. You're looking for that twist cone, and they're not it.

Too many of my friends have had their hearts broken by or gave the best of themselves to someone who wasn't what they wanted in the first place. Or have found themselves in complicated scenarios that are eating up their time and energy. Don't we have enough to worry about as is? Who has time for unnecessary relationship drama?

Knowing what you want and matching your decisions to that applies to way more than dating. Here are some of the things I want, and what that does for me:

I want to be about hope, not cynicism and negativity. Cynicism sucks. Really, it does. It drains you and the people around you. I'd rather have hope and spread hope. Because of that, when I'm tempted to write a super sarcastic post or tweet that rips into a politician, or religious leader, or another blogger, I stop. On a bad day, I hit "send" and after a jittery few minutes of biting my nails, I delete it. I don't like the feeling I have when I post something negative about someone, I don't like the culture it creates, and I don't want to be known for that. That's fine for someone else to do, but I know what I want, and what I want is to stay out of venomous interactions. I've realized that I'm at my best when I talk about hope and lift people up. So I'm doing that.

I want to be the same person on Monday through Saturday that you would see on a Sunday morning. Within reason--I shift my personality slightly depending on which friends I'm with, but my values remain the same. You're not going to hear me talk about respecting and honoring women on a Sunday morning and then find me at a strip club on Friday night. Because of my jobs at the school and the church, it's hard for me to go anywhere without running into people who know me. I find that helpful more than a nuisance. I know every single time I'm at a restaurant, there's a chance the server knows me or knows someone who knows me. I don't have the luxury to skimp on someone's tip and assume that I'm just an anonymous face. (I can't tell you how much that actually happens in restaurants.) There's freedom in not having secrets, in living your life in the most authentic way possible as much as possible.

I want my life to reflect that people matter most. When school is in full swing, I'm teaching full-time to 7th and 8th graders, taking two grad classes, and making stuff happen for church every week. I could easily disappear from everyone's lives, and I'm sure most of my friends would understand. There's danger in that, though--it sets a precedent that grades and career goals and work have a higher value than the people in my life. If what you want is to be at the pinnacle of your profession, then yeah--you're probably going to have to sacrifice people on the way. That's not what I want. I want the people in my life to know that they matter to me, and maybe I see them less than I normally would, but I see them. I'm intentional about it. Sometimes it means I lose some sleep, but I'd hate to get done with grad school in a year or so and realize that I've missed out on my friends' lives.

All that being said, knowing what you want isn't a magic formula to get what you want. For example, you can't make someone fall in love with you. You can't create a job opening at your dream company. You can't do anything about it if Dairy Queen doesn't have twist ice cream (which happened a couple of weeks ago, and I may or may not have berated the pie-faced teenager at the counter).

But when you know what you want in life, you make infinitely better decisions and many less stupid ones.

And you make it far more likely to reach your goals and have what you truly desire than if you keep settling for less because of fear, lack of discipline, or lack of a plan.

I'm not perfect, not even close, and I make mistakes every single day. But because I know what I want, I'm making less of the same mistakes. I'm making more decisions that I'm proud of. I'm closer and closer to living the life I truly want to live.

So what do you say? Let's go get that twist cone.