Greetings, friends!
Welcome to the start of a new journey, a fresh blog, and the launch of a new career: “author.” (My, that’s terrifying to actually write…) Thank you for joining me on this adventure.
From the beginning, the first moments of (hopefully) many shared together, I’d like to be honest and tell it like it is. In a world of edited photos, hand-picked perfect moments to share on social media, and increasing numbers of “technological” friendships in some form or fashion more than face to face relationships (as in, you can smell if I still have coffee breath, not Facetime), it’s easy to see everyone else as expert jugglers as we watch our own selves drop far more balls than we catch and frantically try to throw more in the air to increase our odds, all the while losing brain cells as the ball parade rains down on our heads instead of into our hands.
I stand here with you today, proud to have completed The Lavender Envelope. After two and a half years of wrestling through the writing, editing, and publishing of this work of art, I grin each time I pick up a copy of it and hold the smooth cover in my hands. No accomplishment in my life to this point has combined such academic effort with the level of emotional investment (*ahem* vulnerability) I have put into this book.
I am proud, yet I am terrified.
It is one thing for a writer to write a work. It is a very similar thing for a writer to revise a work. It is an accomplishment for a writer to publish a work. It is a whole other thing for a writer to release a work into the world. Throughout this writing process, I have returned again and again to the metaphor of bearing a child. For years, this “baby” has grown inside me before I painfully labored to bring it into physical form. I thought this was the most difficult part until the Lord challenged me one day that, once you birth a child, you then have to raise the child. Just because I had published The Lavender Envelope did not mean I could go back to hiding in my delightfully “safe” cave, trusting that He would magically put my story into the hands of those who needed to hear it while I moved on to the next writing project. No, He asked me to pick it up and hand it to the people I encounter. He challenged me to carry it with me, not leave it at home in the name of “moving on”, and, for Pete’s sake, to quite trying to assume I know who needs this book and who doesn’t.
I heard a friend once talk about the amazing experience of overcoming fears by doing the very thing one is afraid to do. I expressed that I couldn’t weigh in on that very well because I can’t think of a single fear I have overcome by forcing myself to do that very thing. I have overcome fears by growing out of them. I have overcome lesser fears by facing greater ones. I have done things I was afraid to do and still remained afraid of them. No, I cannot say I have overcome a fear by merely facing up to it. However, I think there is something very brave and beautiful in gently doing the things we are afraid to do, knowing we may still be afraid of them when we’re finished.
My best example of this comes from climbing in the Red River Gorge several months ago.
It was Angela’s thirty-second birthday, and we were determined to fulfill her dream of climbing at “The Red.” The last day, our happy little group found an “easy” but fun 5.8 we wanted to climb. It was sixty feet tall, double the height of anything I’d been able to convince myself up the few times I had gone to the gym with Angela, but I was determined to do this. I was at The Red.
Several people were line to climb, so we sat and talked and waited. As we waited, I watched person after person climb that sixty-foot route. Some climbed with finesse and ease, others struggled their way up, but I didn’t see a single person stop short of the top. For two hours, I “sat with” that route.
Finally, when everyone else had climbed it, and it was my turn to cinch my harness snug and give the “yank of death” on the rope to make sure it would hold me if I fell, I pulled myself up onto the rock and began climbing. Each time I moved upward, my friend below pulled the slack in from the rope. There was no going back, and there was a strange sort of security in the knowledge that the only way was up. Several times I hit the point I had hit before where I was tired and I was higher off the ground than I’d ever been before and my adrenaline was pumping and I was not comfortable. I had determined to finish this route, though, so when my arms started to shake and I felt the fear well up inside, I yelled down “I’m taking a break!” and, once I felt the rope cinch tight, I leaned into the rock and released one hand from its hold, shaking my whole arm out behind me before repeating with the other.
As I did this, I took deep breaths in and released them out slowly, calculating their release to activate my parasympathetic nervous system and cool the adrenaline rush. Each time I didn’t know quite where to go next or how to make the subsequent move, someone from below shouted up a piece of direction or encouragement. Finally, at long last, I reached the anchors at the top, caught my breath, and braved the almost equally terrifying descent without glancing down. It was enough to reach it. It was enough to stand on the ground and scan all the way up the rock face to the top of sixty feet and know I had climbed that far.
Releasing this book feels a lot like climbing that sixty-foot route.
I’ve spent years sitting with the idea of writing a book. I spent months sitting in front of The Lavender Envelope proofs, picturing the covers wrapping around the essays inside. I visualized looking people in the eyes as they received the gift that this book is meant to be. I also witnessed the vulnerability hangover following the publishing of my guts on paper and felt the bite of walking through this season with no one quite so invested in this venture as myself, but there was no going back. I decided as an eighteen-year-old girl that I was going to write a book about these things, so there was no way but forward.
I’m glad there is no video of me climbing that route at The Red. If there were a video, it would not portray graceful climbing with stunning form. No, I actually knocked my knees into several chunks of rock, threw my body into awkward angles in an attempt to reach holds, and discovered my “power grunt” – the throaty yell from my mid-range as I strained to transfer force of movement from foot to calf to thigh, through the glutes and abdominals and bicep into forearm, culminating in fingers latching onto a fresh hold. No, it was anything but pretty. Most of this launch process has felt the same way. At every turn, things haven’t gone quite according to plan. Circumstances beyond my control have removed “Plan A” from the board of possibilities, filling my brain with all the ways I could have done this better “If only I had…”
I have spent most of the last two and a half years healing, learning to rest, and writing. Two months ago, however, I simultaneously introduced a new job, a book launch party date a month away (not to mention a book to launch period), and a ninety-six mile walk for which to train (accompanied by an international trip to plan). These things have had me working six days a week from 9 a.m. until 11 p.m. most weeks, and, even then, there haven’t been enough hours in the day to do all that needs to be done. I am so grateful for the friends who have stepped in to lend their talents and expertise in areas I am weak. They have helped accomplish things I never could have done alone. It still hasn’t been enough, though.
I have had to learn to choose which balls I will throw in the air or leave on the ground, which ones I will catch or let fall. It’s humbling to admit I can’t do it all – or to pull back the curtain of this stunning website, beautiful book, and the accomplished persona of “author” and let you see that my bed is covered in clean clothes I washed a week ago, my dirty ponytail is flapping behind me as I hop in and out of the car, running around town, stopping to slather hydrocortisone cream on my feet because, on Sunday, I stepped outside of a friend’s birthday party to have a necessary conversation on the phone and didn’t think to look for chiggers on the cement steps.
In the midst of this crazy season, I endeavor to do the things before from a place of rest. I have driven myself through many seasons of my life in “go mode”. I know how to run myself into the ground trying to do everything just right but never quite doing it well enough. This is why I am learning to let things fall – or to stop myself from picking them up in the first place.
There are more people I could have invited to the launch party. There are things about the party I could have done better. I really should never have let myself into the position where so many things clamored for my attention at once. Yet, this is where I have found myself. Can I find peace and rest in the midst of it? Can I take what I learned about boundaries and caring for myself in the seasons when I was hemmed in and apply those things out here in the open spaces? Can I keep putting one foot in front of the other as I move forward into this thing I am both excited and terrified to do?