I like to keep my issues strong.

This is my current theme song. Listen to it and you will fall in love and then fall in love with me and my musical taste and you will probably want to send me money so I can get those little owl earrings I want from etsy. Also, I have a total crush on Florence and I want to be her when I grow up.

 

So a few weeks ago, Noah was sitting in the backseat of my vehicle, when he oh-so-casually asked me to take him to church.

You can’t really refuse a request like that, y’know?

So I got online and started looking at churches, just like I google everything else in my life. I didn’t want some stuffiness. I didn’t want judgment. I like the gays. I am pro-choice. I’m a drinker, and a curser and a sometimes-hedonist … I didn’t really know if I would find a church that would appeal to me.

So I googled “most liberal church in Athens, GA”

I know. You aspire for your religious walk to be like mine.

At least I’m honest.

Anyway. I found a church, and I took Noah, and he loves it loves it loves it, so we keep going back. And I’ve been reticent to get way too involved, to listen too hard, because I was afraid of what I might hear.

You see, I was raised as a Christian. I am a firm believer that Jesus had excellent ideas. I have a major problem with a lot of Christians these days, though, and so … yeah.

But this church, I couldn’t help but like it, even for little things. And then, on Sunday, the pastor spoke about Nehemiah, who rebuilds this wall around a city despite efforts to foil him.

He rebuilds this wall, and there are no gaps in it.

For the past year, well over now, I’ve tried to rebuild whatever was torn down inside of me. I’ve worked on fencing and wall-building and recovery, and I think I’m doing okay until I hear something or see something or smell something, and then I feel completely lost. I feel so angry. I feel so betrayed. And I’ve realized this anger and betrayal goes much deeper than because of The Man Who Used My Heart for a Pinata. It goes to me, to my parents, to my raising, to my God. It goes to a deep, dark, insecure place that lives inside me, that always told me I was too difficult, too uninteresting, too this or that, to have someone love me unconditionally. And then, when I met Shanon, I felt like I could love someone. And then, when he walked away from me, I collapsed, and all those little evil thoughts were finally, definitely justified and oh! catharsis! in some strange backwards way.

Finally, I was my own self-fulfilling prophecy.

But the fact of the matter is that while he did damage me in some way that I’m still not entirely sure of (I see glimpses, in my inability to trust, inability to relax, inability to be forthright, inability to be touched, inability to be who I was before he was) I have used his deceit to further damage myself.

I have wallowed.

I still wallow.

Obviously.

Why? Because I am good at wallowing. I am good at being broken hearted. I am good at being sad, at feeling dark, angry things, at writing sad poetry and being tortured and frowning and being damaged. The early-twentieth-century writer who lives in me thrives on this, and somehow, somewhere, along the lines, that person became this person — the one I am dealing with on a daily basis instead of during creative spurts.

But, Sunday, sitting in church, not wanting to listen to the sermon, not wanting to apply it to my life, not wanting to even be there but rather be on my couch watching a Law & Order: SVU marathon, fantasizing about hot angry cop sex with Elliot Stabler (because, seriously, y’all, who doesn’t?) I thought about the way my mind had veered and turned.

I have gone from sobbing, to “I’ll never love again!” to “I dislike you a great deal, thanks for not deleting the history on my laptop” to “Maybe I should post every single email and conversation we ever had, just because” to “Maybe I should just DELETE all that shit and stop being a crazy person” to “Who cares anymore? It was all a joke to him, which takes the meaning out of things anyway” to where I was sitting on Sunday, which was with a heart that was both heavy and carefree.

So I took a deep breath, and I asked God — the one who I have been so very angry at for fourteen months — to help a girl out.

Who knows what will happen … I know what I’d like to have happen: peace. I don’t want anything tangible. I just want to feel at peace.

 “But I realized they were plotting to harm me, so I replied by sending this message to them: I am engaged in a great work, so I can’t come. Why should I stop working to come and meet with you?” Chapter 6, verse 2