God Bless This Mess(19)
“Mama,” I cried. “I just don’t know my purpose!”
“Oh, Hannah,” she said, brushing the hair from my forehead.
“I just feel like God has a purpose for me, but I just don’t know it!” I cried. “I don’t know what I’m passionate about that’s going to be my purpose.”
My mom was so sweet about it. “All right, baby,” she said, brushing my hair back over my ear and telling me it was gonna be all right. “You do, you do have a purpose. Of course you do. But we don’t have to figure that out tonight. You’ve got to go to bed. You have school tomorrow.”
I have gone back to that moment so many times in my life, and that has been such an overwhelming fear of mine—not knowing what my purpose is or what my passions are to be able to fulfill God’s wishes.
As a young girl I danced, and I was still dancing then, long hours, every day—but I knew it wasn’t my passion. I liked to color, I liked art, but we already know what happened to that passion. Plus, it never felt like my particular talent, and it didn’t feel like it was my purpose. I liked to play kickball. A lot of kids do. But I wasn’t on a kickball team, and it definitely wasn’t my passion. So what was it?
Oh, my gosh, I remember thinking. I don’t have anything.
And that left me feeling like I was failing God.
Talk about anxiety! What could be bigger than failing God?
*
In addition to Oprah and Ellen, I would usually catch the tail end of The Montel Williams Show on TV when I came home from school. Once a week he had Sylvia Browne on the show, a psychic who claimed to be able to talk to the deceased relatives of people in Montel’s audience.
Watching Sylvia tell these distraught families that their loved ones were still around left me so curious. Were Aunt LeeLee, Robin, and Trent around me, too? And if so, was there some way I could talk to them? Was there someone who could tell me that they were okay?
I thought about them all the time.
After birthday parties and celebrations, whenever we were given balloons to take home, instead of taking them in the car with us, we would let go of our balloons and send them into the sky for Robin and Trent to play with. Even though sometimes I really wanted those balloons, I thought that Robin and Trent should have them, because they didn’t get birthday parties anymore. We’d stand and watch them float all the way up to heaven.
I asked my mom what heaven was, and if I really had angels, and if those angels were here, how would I know? I desperately wanted to believe I would see Robin and Trent, but the thought was also scary. If I saw them, would they be ghosts? My comforting thoughts were scary thoughts at the very same time.
Like I said, my family never talked about what happened. But my mom seemed eager to help with the balloon rituals and all the bedtime rituals, and she’d try to convince me that Robin and Trent were definitely angels. I wanted to dream about them, but instead my dreams were traumatizing. Even when I asked friends to sleep over at my house, I’d still need my mom to come lie in bed with me sometimes.
How is a kid supposed to figure out their place and their role in life when they believe that the world is unsafe?
Add to that all the bone breaking, and always getting hurt, and the embarrassments that just kept coming when I tried to express myself creatively, and it’s a pretty upsetting story to look back on.
As a fourth grader, how could I even think about doing something big, when clearly that would mean stepping outside of the boxes and lanes I’d been told were “good”?
“Big” didn’t necessarily fit into being a doctor, or a teacher, or a lawyer, but those were the things I’d been told were good and okay to want to be. How could I balance what I was capable of and what everyone expected of me with this “big” feeling that I didn’t even understand?
I worried that being big would be more than I was ready to step into. I didn’t want to fail—I still don’t. I would take risks and then get told I was wrong. And it never stopped. I took the risk and went on The Bachelorette and was shamed for the decisions I made. I took a big risk and got engaged on TV, and got my heart broken.
Again and again I’ve been shown that going with what everyone wants, what’s expected, and then failing at that is the worst feeling of all. It just feels terrible. And yet, jumping into the unknown? Doing something people don’t seem to even recognize? How does someone do that? And how does someone do it well? Do it “perfect”?
Because of the image I projected, I was expected to do good. When I messed up, I never heard, “It’s okay, we all make mistakes.” It was, “Hannah! You know better!” At least, that’s how I heard it—no matter what they said. Whatever it was, the expectation from others, and mostly from myself, was that Hannah Brown was “good.”
When I was late for school, because my mom was late for everything, it killed me. You got in trouble for that. And I didn’t want to get in trouble.
I still think of second grade. There was a dress code at our school, and we were supposed to wear skirts and shorts that were longer than our fingertips when our arms were fully extended, and any kind of shirt or top had to come down below our belly buttons and rest firmly on our shoulders, with straps that were no less than three fingers wide. My mom didn’t care about those rules. “You’re a child,” she told me. “You wear what you want.”