The Lost Child

Last night, I gulped down an orange-flavored melatonin drink, knocked back a cortisol manager pill and a magnesium capsule, and slathered on some lavender-smelling cream meant to calm the adrenal glands. All of this in the name of sleep, which has been difficult to come by during this summer of unemployment. Sleep seems to be a reward reserved for tired people, folks who pour their energy into jobs or families. It isn't for those seeking gainful employment, and it certainly isn't for those seeking themselves.

In the warm, fan-stuttered darkness, I kick the sheets and toss pillows, hoping to get comfortable. I wrap my arm around my partner, bury my face in her neck, pull back to scratch my cheek where her hair tickles my skin, turn over so as not to bother her, bump into my cat who rubs his toothy gums across my jaw and jams his paws against my throat, set him at the foot of the bed, get up, go to the bathroom, head to the kitchen, drink some water, return to the bedroom, crank up the window AC, pop in a pair of earplugs, settle under a sheet, close my eyes, breathe...breathe...breathe, silently ask the darkness to carry me deep enough for dreams, hold my breath, breathe, sigh, and click on my smart phone.

Maybe I'll find what I'm looking for on the Internet.

* * *

The world wide web is rife with death. A couple of clicks in, and I’m reading a story about two young brothers who fatally stabbed three of their five brothers and sisters and both parents in Oklahoma, leaving only their 13-year-old sister in critical condition and their toddler sister unscathed. Another click takes me to a story of a California teenager’s charges in the abduction, sexual assault, and murder of an 8-year-old neighbor girl he stuffed in the apartment complex’s recycling bin once he’d finished torturing and killing her. Tap another headline, and a passenger plane disappears, sending hundreds of lives into the void. Click again, and a large cruise ship sinks halfway around the world, filling a river with bodies.

People who can read horrifying news stories deal with the narratives in a number of ways. They might chalk up tragedy to life’s natural cycles, saying with near-boredom, “That’s just life,” or “Not again.” They may invoke a religious or political figure: “Oh, my God!” they’ll exclaim; “The devil is at work”; “This is Obama’s fault.” Some will distance themselves from the details with generalizations that render the story meaningless. “What’s wrong with this world?” they’ll ask, not even a rhetorical question, but more an automatic response.

Some readers don’t know why they keep clicking, each tap leading to somebody’s grave. But I know why I do it. I read the stories because I’m drawn to the place where the darkness meets the light. I want to know what the killers’ darkness looks like. Is it the same as yours, or mine? Darker? Deeper? Larger? Smaller but denser? Does it burn? Or freeze? Throb, or stay? Expand or contract? Is their darkness a wall to be scaled, a ground to be dug, a shadow to trace? Do they live in it full time, or is the darkness just a temporary hiding place? 

I want to know how victims thrust into the dark get back to the light. Will the teen who witnessed her family’s traumatic demise ever recover? Will the families of the passengers on the missing plane lose themselves, too? 

* * *

At some point, I started looking without seeing, touching without feeling, smiling without meaning. By the time I realized what was happening--what had happened--I was almost entirely gone, like a pencil line erased, a faint gray ghost.

* * *

In Portland, Oregon, it is not unusual to seek spiritual help from a shaman, especially when feeling forsaken. So, several years ago when I recognized I was missing something, I didn’t know what, something I sensed I couldn’t get back myself, I made an appointment for a soul retrieval.

In a dimly lit room, inside the warm beat of a drum and the shaman’s song, I closed my eyes and disappeared.

 * * *

What happens when a ghost closes her eyes? Does she vanish entirely?  Does she lose herself to the dark? Or is this closing off to the world the only hope she has of finding herself?

 * * * 

The drum changes the darkness, bringing shape to its flat expanse, warming its shadowless space. It wraps around me like a blanket, and I fall into it as the shaman travels into otherworldly realms, seeking pieces of my soul separated by trauma.

She time travels, digging into my past, and is quick to find shards from broken relationships, personal disappointments, smashed expectations, unthinkable betrayals. The parts of my soul appear to her as younger versions of me. She calls out their ages, names the wounds that caused the pieces to depart, implores my soul to return, promises safety and love. 

She goes back and back, to the first spark of my life, to the bright speck of me in my mother’s womb, this little light that wants so desperately for her mother to want her, to see her and rejoice. But she can’t. She won’t.

* * *

A couple years ago, my mom sold the house I spent half my childhood in. The news seemed to come out of nowhere, though her decision to move hadn't been a secret, and I'd agreed that it made sense. She didn't need such a large space. My brother, sister, and I had long since grown up and moved out, and maintaining the 5-acre property had always been a challenge, even when my stepfather had lived there. Mom's job had relocated, and the commute had become unreasonable. 

I knew she was right to do it. But to know I'd never again sleep in my bedroom overlooking the woods where deer and foxes used to slip through the pine trees like sunlight through the windows, to know I'd never again play another nighttime game of capture the flag with my neighborhood friends, never again run alongside the creek with my dogs (no matter that they died years ago), to know for certain there was no going back--that killed me.

* * *

There is a shamanic death ritual in which the initiate digs their own grave in a remote place and spends the night in the hole, predators loping along the periphery, demons preying upon their minds. Buried in the earth, under the weight of the darkness and the stories they've created about who they are, the initiate dies.

* * *

Some say when we die, we don't leave our bodies. Instead, we travel inwards towards the light that first cast us into the body. When the world becomes too heavy and dark to bear any longer, we close our eyes and go home.

* * *

When I can’t sleep and not even the world wide web offers reprieve, I close my eyes and journey to my childhood neighbor's field, the one alongside the back edge of our woods, where fireflies shimmered through so many summer nights. Each little light pulses through me with impossible brilliance, illuminating the empty spaces where some unnamed sadness lives. Grief twinkles, hot and bright, like an August night around the campfire by the old dead tree, all us kids roasting s’mores and telling ghost stories. 

This visit to my former life, my former self, is a trip to the cemetery, and I cry like anyone grieving the loss of a loved one. But my tears are cold, like they've been waiting a long time, or have traveled a great distance from some dark, forgotten place.

***

My mother couldn’t see me. But my father could. 

When I was still young enough to enjoy bubble baths and bed time stories and to need a night light, yet old enough to know what the wolf in the fairy tales wanted, my father would bury his tongue in my belly button, curling the tip around the rim, wriggling in while I was half asleep. He’d breathe his hot breath all over my skin. “No, Daddy!” I’d squeal while pushing his head away, his ear filling my tiny palm, my fingers catching in his hair. He’d laugh as his beard chafed my belly. I’d pinch my eyes shut. There was no fire in the darkness, but there was the chance of escape. My father would laugh, his mouth on the place that made me, his tongue probing, I’d kick and squirm, diving into the darkness, his hands on me growing fainter as I fled deeper into myself.

* * *

There is one piece of my soul that refuses to return. She is in her second year of college. She’s living with her girlfriend, working, earning good grades. Her whole life is ahead of her. There is no reason she should not be happy. But there is a heaviness in her life she can’t identify.

And then in the midst of her depression, her father disappears on a solo backpacking trip. He is presumed dead.

Whenever she closes her eyes, she sees him wandering in the darkness.

The darkness is everywhere.

Her father is everywhere.

Her girlfriend, her only real friend in college, is a life line. When the relationship comes to an abrupt end a year after her father’s disappearance, she locks herself in the bathroom of the apartment she and her girlfriend share and cradles a bottle of pain killers and prays for a way out.

The shaman says this soul part has trodden a deep path between the realm of the living and the dead. The soul is in limbo, always looking back towards the shadows for solace, never fully embracing the light. The girl who befriended the darkness is not ready to re-enter the world of the living. The shaman cannot force her return, but she leaves the door cracked, just in case, and for a long time my soul hovers around the opening, considering coming out of hiding.

* * *

When I was in first grade, the ostrich was my favorite animal. I loved its fleshy bulb of a head, the thought of it buried in the sand like the world's largest q-tip. The idea that staying safe could be as easy as closing my eyes. I didn’t know the story of the ostrich hiding its head is a myth. I didn’t know they hide in plain sight, their bodies prostrate, camouflaged by the earth, their lives trembling on the surface for all to see.

* * *

In third grade, my whole life was underwater. My parents had divorced, and my mom had moved the three of us kids from a California bay area suburb to Pompano Beach, Florida. Our days took on a routine rhythm. We'd bike to school in the morning, pedal home in the afternoon, and jump in our backyard swimming pool to cool off. Sometimes we'd throw ourselves in even as lightning flashed across the sky and thunder boomed its warning. I'd stand on the diving board, tilt my head back to catch the rain, and launch myself out over the water, my arms spread wide for the swan dive, my reflection fluttering on the surface below.

A quick flash upon entry. Swirls of white swiftly churning to transparency.

Underwater, the world was silent and sure. I stayed there for a long time, until my lungs burned and my heart’s thunderous protestations finally drove me to the surface. If I could have found a way to live in that clear, quiet space, I would have stayed down there forever.

* * *

When I was nine, a headhunter spotted me at a fair, and shortly afterwards I enrolled in modeling school. I thought it would make my mother happy. I had no real hobbies, nothing to differentiate me from my brother and sister. I thought maybe I could be a model. Paint my face, do the catwalk.

My father called a week into the program. He was very excited to hear about my new aspiration. He wanted pictures. 

I quit modeling school a week later, citing the burden of the expense and my inability to walk gracefully in heels or apply makeup as deftly as the teenagers in my class.

My mother didn’t care. My father was disappointed. I became a ghost again.

* * *

When I was ten, my appetite suddenly vanished. Then, gradually, so did my left knee. I watched as, over the course of several weeks, the skin around the joint swelled, little by little each day, eventually overtaking the kneecap. It was like watching an island disappear beneath the waves.

Moving became a chore. To turn over in bed, I had to lift my leg with both hands. Subsumed by pain, I hardly slept. The joint was waterlogged, the knee locked in place. I ground my teeth when I walked and wore pants even on warm days. I stopped exploring the woods around my house, holed up in my bedroom, and prayed no one would notice. For a long time, no one did.

Finally, the day came when I could no longer walk. I used all my energy that morning climbing down my bunk bed ladder, hobbling to the bathroom, and leaning into the railing on the long trek downstairs to the living room where my grandma was watching television. Fever burned through my bones and exploded in my knee. I tried not to cry as I lifted the hem of my nightgown to show my grandma. It was the last day she’d be watching us; my mom and stepdad were due back from a trip that afternoon. As soon as they walked through the door, she outed me, and with one glance at the melon that had replaced my knee, my mom immediately whisked me off to the hospital.

I cried in the waiting room. Everyone could see me--how pathetic I was. There were all these people with broken bones and ragged coughs, people in real need. I hated myself for not being strong enough to keep my secret.

Even after the doctors told my parents I was gravely ill, that my white cell blood count was in the hole, even after numerous tests and mystery medicines and a week in a hospital bed followed by months of in-home care, I wished I had never said anything.

* * *

When I was twelve, I fell in love with a girl in my English class. She had long brown hair and a musical lilt in her laugh. Her brown eyes sparkled all the time, and she smiled at me whenever I picked up her pencil, which I did a lot on account of having a seat near hers, our desks having slanted tops, and my attention always being focused on the way her slender fingers curled delicately around her pencil.

I couldn’t tell anyone about my crush. I didn’t even know that’s what it was. I had no context for my feelings. What I knew was I was more excited about English class than I’d ever been about anything in my life. What I knew was my twin sister and our friends had a lot to say about boys, and I had no interest in them beyond a vaguely scientific curiosity of their anatomy. What I knew was I daydreamed about holding a girl’s hand and running my fingers through her hair, and none of my friends seemed to share these aspirations.

I hid my feelings like my family hid our problems at home. When I was twelve, my mom and stepdad had been married for two years and together for four. He’d been meting out severe punishments for minor infractions since I was eight years old. I had spent hours locked in bathrooms for back-talking, had endured the pain and humiliation of both private and public spankings, and had been screamed at and chased so often, my stepdad’s rage had almost lost its power over me. 

It wasn’t just the familiarity of the violence that made it mean less. My stepdad had softened a bit, too, at least regarding me. He had been the one to nurse me back to health when Lyme Disease nearly killed me. He had been the one holding my hand during my weekly IV replacements, he had been the one getting up in the middle of the night to come to my bedside and inject my meds. He had been the one who cried at the thought of losing me.

Still, my stepdad was a tyrant. He hit my mother often enough for us kids to stop wondering if she was going to leave him. My brother began choosing places in his room other than his bed to sleep, just in case my stepdad decided he wanted to hurt him in the night. But he didn’t hit my sister. Maybe he knew something about her we didn’t. Maybe she would have told on him. Or maybe she would have fought him. She was bigger than my brother and me, several inches taller than either of us, and stronger, too. So my stepdad tormented her with words, instead. He particularly got off on calling her fat, even though she was only on the heavy side of average. My brother and I sometimes resorted to this insult, too, but we were kids, and kids say all kinds of mean things to each other. I knew it was different when my stepdad did it.

So one day when I was twelve and my stepfather, in a fit of rage, called my sister fat, I lost it. “You’re the fat-ass, asshole! Pick on someone your own size!” I hurled at him, knowing they might be my last words. And they nearly were. Though he was at least 250 pounds, he moved quickly, and before I knew it his knuckles were grinding holes in my breastbone as he jammed me up against my bunk bed guard rails, my feet dangling dangerously close to his crotch. His eyes boggled wildly. Red veins throbbed in the jaundiced white space around his blue-green irises as he shouted an inch from my face. I tried to kick him and he shove-threw me onto the top bunk so that the wooden rail left a long, deep welt across my back. 

I was cornered. But I was also further from his reach. He tried to grab me but I kicked at his hands and leapt off the other end of the bed. I practically threw myself down the stairs he would, sometime that year, throw my mother down. I launched myself out the front door and ran, making the mistake of looking back. In that moment, his fist grabbed the neck of my shirt, and he kicked me in the lower right side of my back. My scream must have satisfied him because he loosened his grip enough for me to stagger forward across the gravel driveway and into the woods between our house and the neighbor’s. I hoped he’d finished, but he was simply catching his breath. I hid behind a skinny pine tree and watched the sweat pouring down his face. My back hurt, but I couldn’t let the pain distract me. I knew if he caught me when he was this mad, he’d kill me, whether or not he intended to.

Luckily, I knew the woods. They were my safe haven, full of gentle creatures and sturdy trees. I crept through the bushes, ran over the pine needles, leapt over fallen branches, slid over the dirt, crouched low in the leaves. I hid in our five acres of woods and waited for the darkness.

* * *

“You tucked your heart into a box when you were a child,” the shaman told me. “Hid it for safekeeping.” Since then, I’d walked through my days smiling and pulling my own strings, a puppet with a painted face and a hole for a heart.

* * *

My sister found me in the woods. She called for me, over and over, until I whispered back. It would be dark soon. She held me. We didn’t know what to do. My back ached.

And then he found us. He had spotted us from his car at the bottom of our long driveway. He ordered us to get into the car. Something in his voice. The light had gone out of his eyes. He looked tired. We didn’t know what to do. We got into the backseat. He drove us back up to the house. The sun went down. He never hit me again.

* * *

When I was fourteen, my stepfather broke my brother’s eardrum when he threw him across the kitchen. I found out days after the fact, when I was called out of class to meet my sister in the school office where we were told that my brother’s eardrum had ruptured while he was swimming with his friend’s family over the weekend, that the friend’s parents had brought him to the hospital, that the doctor had flagged the incident, that a restraining order had been placed on our stepfather, that our stepfather had immediately suffered a strange case of paralysis and been whisked off to the hospital in an ambulance, that it was safe to go home.

At home, my mother had a lot to deal with. She was discovering her son had been more severely abused than she’d realized. She was discovering her husband had been giving her son alcohol. She was discovering her son was an enthusiastic drug user.

My mother did not have the time or energy to raise three teenagers. She dedicated herself to helping my brother climb out of the hole he was in. My sister and I earned good grades in our honors classes. We didn’t do drugs. We didn’t drink. But we wanted her attention. We needed her help. Instead, we got the silent treatment. Even when I screamed at her to say something, anything, tears streaming down my face, she didn’t look at me.

Have you ever felt invisible?

From that moment on, as I privately struggled to come to terms with my sexuality, as I wondered what life would be like without a parent who might hurt me but who would at least acknowledge me, I knew it wasn’t safe to be who I was. It wasn’t safe, and furthermore, it didn’t matter. I didn’t matter.

* * *

The soul retrieval helped. The confidence I’d lost growing up in a shattered household was restored, and I began healing parts of my life that therapy couldn’t touch.

But after a couple of years, I recognized that though I felt stronger and more whole, I still didn’t know who I was or what I wanted. I was working a lot, doing too much, spreading myself thin, but I didn’t have any better ideas. So when another shaman hoping to grow her practice offered me a session, I gladly fell under the spell of her rattle.

Amidst a twirl of feathers, she said she saw me wearing masks. At the time, I tried to make this make sense--for her sake. It's funny now, of course.

* * *

There is no way to live in the world from behind a door.

When I was seventeen, I came out of the closet. My sister hugged me and asked me about girls. My brother and I were not really talking. My mother didn’t say anything.

I dated. I got my heart broken. I survived. And then I went to college and fell into the deepest depression of my life.

* * *

If one of the two people who brought you into this world doesn’t want to see you, and the other one sees more than you want him to see, and then you fall in love with someone who wants to see you but whom you don’t want to be seen by too clearly because you are afraid she will want nothing from you or too much, and then you start to close your eyes on your life, and then your father disappears in the woods, and then your girlfriend cheats on you because you disappeared on her, and you want to kill yourself so you can stop playing hide and seek with your life but you don’t kill yourself because you stubbornly believe in God and you know God can see you, what happens to you?

If you’re me, you talk to a therapist. You try to make the therapist see you. You worry that he doesn’t. You worry that he does. You worry that it doesn’t matter, either way. You want to die. You want to live. You talk in circles. Your therapist is patient. Your therapist gently prods you out the door, gives you instructions on how to make friends, techniques you’ve forgotten or possibly never had. You try. It works. You begin to understand that relationships require you show yourself. You worry. But since you almost died--since you almost killed yourself--you realize you have nothing to lose.

You smile in class. You laugh at lunch. Friends yell your name across the quad. You go out for coffee. You stop crying yourself to sleep. You stop closing your eyes and wishing you’d never wake up. You decide to put your heart back in your chest. What’s the harm now? It beats back the darkness. Your life is feathered with light. You stretch out across your bed at night and thank God you’re alive.

* * *

The tricky thing about living is that it must be done every day. Like they say, use it or lose it. 

It is easy to slip back into the shadows. The light can be harsh and even demanding. The darkness demands nothing. You can cloak yourself in it, hide in its comfortable folds even as you walk in the light of day. You can even come to believe the darkness is necessary, a buffer between you and the real darkness in the world. It can allow you to watch the news at night without crying. It can allow you to effortlessly pass by people sleeping on the sidewalk. It can even shield you from the trauma of more personal losses.

But you don’t control the darkness, and it is easy to get lost in it. Though it muffles your sadness and fear, it also keeps you from fully feeling joy. The shaman knows this. The shaman warned me I could not live in both worlds simultaneously without losing my heart. But I’d been living that way for a long time, and I was still alive. A wonder, to realize you can go on living without your heart. Of course, what is life without your heart?

* * *

After I saw the shaman who told me she saw me wearing masks, months passed, and nothing changed. I still felt cloudy and directionless. I was beginning to worry that the reasons I’d once found for living had disappeared. I wasn’t suicidal, just confused. So I returned to the shaman who did my soul retrieval and told her I was afraid I'd lost my spark. Life was a passionless dance, and I wanted nothing. I was living full time in a camper in the back of my truck so I could easily get away to the woods on weekends. I’d been inspired to adopt this lifestyle and had hoped it would help me reconnect. I thought I might write more and my life would snap back into a happy place. And I did find some enjoyment in getting away, in living more simply, and in writing more. But lately I’d had issues with the plumbing and electricity so what was supposed to be my means of relaxation had instead become a source of distress. 

The shaman pointed out that my home’s lack of foundations and electrical grounding could be a very clear message to me. She assured me that once I'd created more stability in my life, desire would return. So I moved into my friends’ house, and things did get a little easier. I even began dating again. But there was still something missing.

* * *

About a month after I moved out of the camper and into my friends’ house, I began feeling a bit...wild. There is no other way to describe it. I didn’t feel quite like myself. Yet somehow, I felt more like myself than I had in a long time. My libido returned in full force. Yet I was also experiencing mood swings. My emotions were amplified and close. Anger that had once lived only in my head migrated to my chest, spreading through my shoulders and skin. I’d burn with it one minute and wipe tears off my face the next. I found myself crying on the bus or into a bowl of soup a friend had made. I didn’t feel I deserved the soup. The fact that I didn’t feel I deserved the soup stuck out to me. It was as if someone with less control over her emotions, someone with less confidence, had moved in. 

And then it hit me. She was back. My teenage soul part hovering at the threshold of life. She had finally, two years after the soul retrieval, decided to join the pack. When I accepted this idea, I immediately knew it to be true.

Why she had decided to come back now was a mystery. I wondered if my shaman had pulled some strings behind the scenes. I certainly had my spark back! But I also felt my soul’s return could have had something to do with my recent graduation from a CoDA 12-step study group. There was also the possibility that my soul knew I needed her. Just a few weeks after she arrived, I began seriously dating someone. I wondered if my soul had returned in preparation for the relationship. I needed to be whole, even if it would take time to fully integrate that teenage part of me. At last, I thought, I was free.

* * *

The part of me that came back brought a lot of pain and anger with her. As the year progressed, anger became a nearly constant companion. I saw injustice everywhere, and it infuriated me. I couldn’t hide my feelings about it, not anymore. I was working closely with historically oppressed students on campus, and every time I heard one of them talk about some horrible discrimination they’d endured in their life, it took all I had not to go on a crusade. Whenever I could reasonably fight, I did. But it never felt like enough.

Finally, I went to see another shaman who came highly recommended. I would have gone to see one of the practitioners with whom I was already familiar, but I felt I needed the particular brand of services this new one offered. I was told she could channel her client’s spirit guides, and I was desperate for direct guidance. I had my spark back, but it didn’t feel like the joyful enthusiasm of my youth. It burned through me, a rage I couldn’t locate. I didn’t know what to do with it, but I was sure the session would shine some light on the issue.

The shaman listened to my concerns and opened the channel for one of my guides, who had much to say about my anger and the way through:

But being in your body, being in your consciousness sometimes is going to frustrate you because there is also an awareness of something much greater...you know that people can do better...and sometimes you get impatient, and sometimes you have to fit that impatience into something that makes sense, so then you become mad about people and their actions or inactions, but I want you to know something--that anger, that surge--it’s not so much about what is in front of you, but what is driving this fierceness inside of you is so much desire to evolve.

Your spirit is actually pushing you over the edge. Your spirit is wanting you to take a big leap. Your spirit is saying, okay, it’s time for transformation, change, and sometimes that looks like what we’ll call shamanic death. Do you know what that is? That is when the things that you think are the buoys keeping you afloat suddenly deflate, and you realize that none of that really mattered, that none of that can save you, and none of that is going to lead you where you need to go, and it’s uncomfortable. It’s uncomfortable because it tests your faith. It’s uncomfortable because you meet yourself at the edge of what you’ve been trying to avoid, which is that place where you don’t feel in control, and you cannot see, and it is a mystery, and it’s not the kind of mystery that feels supported always, and the reason why we are telling you all of this is because we’re telling you, you can make a choice here...

You know, your mental mind, it is much more in the area of the mystics than it is in the area of the engineers, and yet, sometimes you force your mind into the practicality of the engineers, where everything has a place and it’s a puzzle and you can control it, and you can put it together as long as you’re aware of all of the pieces, so you keep yourself awake, trying to come up with all of the possible ways that life could go or not go so that you stay safe, and now we’re going to say, burn the plans, throw the pieces of your life into the river. How do you do that? In your practical life? Well, it is a choice, but there is room for you to make that choice and to still be safe, responsible, and in the working world, but it is going to require, if you choose and if you desire, a turn towards something that might make you feel incredibly uncomfortable, which is a turn towards sitting in stillness with your spirit and saying alright, I’m ready to surrender...

At the end of the session, the shaman crafted a flower essence intended not to quell my anger, but to send me over the edge. She chuckled as she dropped in essence of volcano and confided that my guides had assured her I could handle it.

* * *

“I’m a coward,” I told my partner a little more than a year into our relationship and about eight months after my last shamanic session. She thought I was being ridiculous.  But I had to stop myself from running over to the park across the street to sprint through the ancient fir trees screaming “I’m a coward!” like my life depended on it.

I’m not scared of the things other people say they’re scared of--namely death and public speaking. But that doesn’t mean I’m brave. It just means my fear lives in other places. I’m scared my life will be meaningless. I’m scared of making choices I can’t unmake that might lead me to places or feelings I don’t like and can’t escape. I’m scared of failing. I’m scared of succeeding. I’m scared I’m not enough. I’m scared others will not see me clearly; I’m scared they will see me clearly. I’m scared I’ll confuse my wants and my needs and mess up my whole life. I worry I will disappoint my loved ones. Worse, I worry I’ll disappoint God.

Of course, all of my fears are, in actuality, extensions of the fear of death. While most people fear physical death, the death I fear most is figurative. There is no death more terrifying than the death of the self. But there is no death more gratifying, either. 

Sometimes I lie down on the carpet in the apartment and stare up at the ceiling and ask God what he wants from me, over and over. When no answer comes, if I’ve had an especially hard day, I’ll cry. If I lie there long enough, I’ll drift through memories of my childhood. My mom wiping my face clean with her moistened thumb. My dad carrying me on his shoulders. My sister’s finger puppets. My brother’s earnest voice and sprawling laugh. I’ll go back to the woods where I contracted the disease that nearly killed me, where I hid from people who might hurt me. I’ll go back and know I can’t ever really go back. I’ll pray for peace, for the strength to let go of my desire to live in the shadows, to lurk in the moments that have come before, that have already been lived, that hold only the memory of light.

* * *

Jesus said, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it” (Matthew 16:24-25).

I am not Christian, or even religious. But I believe in a higher power and in the wind, the heart, and the drum. Most of all, I believe in death and the power of surrender. The serenity prayer has been a helpful guide, and I have spent many years considering the meaning of Step 3’s advice to “turn your will and your life over to the care of God.” But I have only recently realized that whoever resists life’s invitation to the dance will lose themselves in the darkness behind the mask, while whoever surrenders their fear of change will find themselves unmasked--and seeing and feeling clearly--in the light.

* * *

You know those people who avoid watching the news? The ones who cover their eyes during violent scenes on t.v.? The ones who cry listening to sad songs? They might even tear up when someone announces a pregnancy or birth. And when you tell them your stepfather whom you haven’t talked to in years has suddenly died, they will hug you and say something so thoughtful and full of love that it will slip through the shadows guarding your heart, and though that morning you were able to eat your breakfast and run your errands and do your life, you will not be able to focus for the rest of the day. You will remember that grief is a form of love, so when you close the door on it, you are really closing the door on love. And you will wonder how anyone can move through the world with their heart door just hanging open all the time; how do they get anything done?

You’ll remember that you used to be that vulnerable, that you used to cry easily when you lost someone, or when someone close to you lost someone. You’ll remember this best late at night when you can’t sleep despite the melatonin in your system and the lavender scent in the air. You’ll remember and wonder, as you dangle in the space between your old life and your new one, how brave you’ll have to be to make room for that kind of light once you’ve tossed the pieces of your old life in the river. God, you’ll whisper, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. When you wake up, you won’t even remember closing your eyes.