Trust

I read Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings over Christmas break and I was struck by these words:

"I wanted to be a woman, but that seemed to me to be a world to which I was to be eternally refused entrance."

If that doesn't sum it up, I don't know what could.  It has everything to do with growing up fat and those awful abuses, what I was taught about men, and learning to need and want nothing.  It would appear that I've grown leaps and bounds since then, but I read that quote and realized it's still painfully true for me.

I could start this at the first day I realized I was fatter than the other girls and wrong at the core because of it.  I was nine.  But I'll start in college, with music and a scholarship.  How do you stand on a big, metropolitan stage in an evening gown, in a 300 pound body, and perform to an auditorium of professional career musicians when you don't think you have a place in the world?  It really doesn't matter whether or not you know that you have an incomparable gift.  You still feel worthless, invisible...judged.  I walked away.  I've never forgiven myself; no one has ever judged me more harshly than I have myself.

Working at the casino in the years to follow, I met Derek.  A month after we met, I could only offer him a look of horror as he asked me to join him on a company-sponsored canoe trip down a 15-mile stretch of remote Wisconsin river.  I am terrified of deep water after a near-drowning experience as a child.  He held my face in his hands as he said, "Amanda - I would never let anything happen to you!"

Tears sprung to my eyes as I replied, "But what if I fall in?"

Derek was an ocean-trained lifeguard; he gave me an amused but sympathetic smile. "I will come get you!" 

And he did come get me all three times that we dumped our canoe in the river.  He swam to me first, even when we were near to shore, even when our coworkers were already miles ahead, and even when it meant that my camera floated away along with half of our food, our smokes and an oar.  And I trusted him.  I trusted him when he promised me he was fine to drive.

Except he wasn't fine.  He did let something happen to me.  Something horrifying, something excruciating, something life-changing.  He died.  And I had to figure out how to navigate that alone.

Mike had been a coworker and friend for nearly two years there at the casino.  He wasn't someone with whom I'd have a relationship or even date, really, but rather someone with whom there was just that chemistry.  He was terribly jealous of Derek and I, always trying to get us apart.  When I came back to work, a broken and different person, he would have done anything to "fix" me, and I desperately wanted to let him try.  I was desperate to fill the gaping hole in my soul. We agreed that if either of us found someone our secret affair would be over.  Two months later I was wondering how it was possible; he told me he'd had a vasectomy after his marriage.  He insisted I must have been with someone else; I ought not to have been surprised to find he had a similar "arrangement" with at least one other woman.

He was gone; I haven't seen him since.  I miscarried a few weeks later.  There is still some confusion and turmoil around the whole of this event for me, but my sister and I reflected recently on how my son or daughter would have turned eleven this Christmas time.

Steve was someone I'd known since high school who came back into my life through my relationship with Derek's mom.  I would call it my first and only experience of what I think people call "dating."  Not only did he share my career, he was also a musician/theater nerd, just like me.  It was perfect.  Four months in, after asking for an explanation about being stood up, he broke up with me by e-mail - yes, e-mail - but assured me he still wanted to be friends and keep in touch.  (Are you shaking your head at me for believing that? I still do.)  I had taken up crocheting to occupy myself in the year after the accident, and he used to love this afghan I kept on my bed.  He asked me to make him one, picking out the colors himself, and I had just finished it when I got that e-mail.  Seeing as I certainly didn't want to keep it, I called him twice to see about dropping it off (no answer) and finally just left it at work for him on a night I knew he'd be there.  That earned me the accusation of stalking him.  (Whaaa?!?)  He even tried to interfere with my future employment at that company. 

Glad I still had a lawyer at the time.  Ha.

And then there's Jim.  We fell into each other's lives at school.  We started studying together and just sorta fell into a relationship...an apartment...an engagement...a new house...and eventually a marriage.  It was convenient for us as we'd both been hurt and abandoned before; it was safe to be in a relationship in which neither of us felt deeply connected.  We never really came around to knowing each other deeply or being a part of each other's lives.  He belittled my faith, refusing to meet me spiritually after promising to do so before we married.  He hadn't filed taxes for two years before I'd known him - surprise!  We almost lost our house when he ignored the IRS, causing Minnesota to pull his license and his employer to take him off the truck. He joined the military having never said a word to me about the idea or the intention, and then told me I was the one who had been holding him back from this dream for two years.  This was after he'd been gone for three years finishing medic school, a program which I had to chosen to quit myself so that, financially, at least one of us could finish.  And oh yes - at this point he also told me that I couldn't go back to school myself, even though that had been our agreement - because it would "be hard on him."

I sat on the couch and waited for him one day.  I told him I wanted a divorce.  The only time he cried was when I said I was taking the dog.  Not long later he left for boot camp, but not before I learned he had been sleeping with a coworker. (He'd borrowed me an old cell phone which had text messages from her on it.  Are you kidding me?)  I dealt with the divorce, the maintenance and sale of my house, shuttling my dog around like a toddler, and everything else, alone.

I go back and I read this post so far.  I think about Maya's quote. I think about the five and a half single years since. Is it any wonder that of the many men who've shown an interest in me, invited me out, all the simple coffee dates that my dear friends have tried to set up for me, all the messages I got on eHarmony, I couldn't bring myself to accept a single one?

I was - I am - afraid that being in a relationship would strip me of my voice.  My education.  My commitment to my body.  My dreams.  A future that is mine to own.  I was - I am - afraid that I am worth no more than being lied to, used, never truly seen, never truly desired, and certainly never met halfway.  It does sound unreasonable and irrational when I read it, but truthfully it's the only definition of relationship I've ever known.

I want to heal myself of the conviction that I have to have everything accomplished, everything sorted out, everything completed, before I dare to risk my heart again.  If I truly don't want to spend my life alone, I need to disabuse myself of the notion that all men are worthless, liars, cheats, selfish, and only interested in what they can take from me.  I want so desperately to believe this.

In anticipation of a challenging conversation that would hopefully lead the way to healing or closure this past weekend, my therapist encouraged me to just "let it be."  Stop resisting, stop analyzing, enter with a willing heart, and start speaking the truth - all of which were thoughts I'd already been repeating to myself like a mantra.  I shared with her a quote I read a few weeks back which I'd recited ad nauseum to myself this week in an attempt to get my head in a better place:

"Does it matter whether I'm right or wrong? Just give it up and choose peace." 

I also shared with her the lines from a message I listened to last week, lines that made me sit on my yoga mat in meditation for a long, long time:

What can't I see?
What don't I know?
Where might God be in this?

I reflect on my story and how I've let it define me, the unspoken and even unrealized beliefs.  I want to move past it.  I want to trust my heart, trust this life, trust God and that He cares for me.  I don't know how to do this.  I only know it has to happen.