God Bless This Mess(72)



Before this happened, I wasn’t oblivious to the big events or movements around racism, but I certainly didn’t think about myself as part of the problem. I know better now.

The only way for me to be better is to do better. To work to be part of the solution. To raise my voice and to help others learn from the mistake I made, which I own, and for which I am very, very sorry.

I promise to try to do better for the rest of my life.

To be better and do better—that’s progress. It might not be as much as we want or need. But progress is a good thing. Always.





Chapter 22


Day by Day


For the rest of 2020 I was stuck in Alabama, cooped up in my room, trying to sort out so much while the virus was spreading everywhere. Half the world was shut down and wearing masks in public.

I needed to get out. So one day I decided to take a walk.

Whenever I left my parents’ house, I always walked in the same direction; and every time, a dog in one of the neighbors’ yards would run up and bark at me and scare me half to death. It drove me nuts.

On this particular day, I didn’t want to deal with the barking. So I left the house and when I got to the road, I turned and walked in the other direction. I realized I had never walked in that direction in my entire life. I don’t know why. But I walked under the power lines, and down the hill, and I noticed a dirt road, and I took it.

In a matter of minutes, I was standing there looking out at a beautiful lake.

I had known the lake wasn’t all that far away, but we couldn’t reach it by car from our property; we always drove there from another spot in town. So it seemed way farther away than it actually was.

My whole life, I had been within walking distance of this lake, and I never even knew it. I stood there in absolute shock. All I had to do to get to the water, in all this time, was turn left instead of right. I had missed out on that peaceful spot, which could have been a perfect getaway, a place to sit and think when I was growing up, maybe even to take a swim in the summer—and it was right there the whole time.

It was a huge lesson for me; a lesson I wanted to apply to everything in my life. I needed to stop doing things the way I’d always done them. I needed to stop repeating my mistakes. I needed to open my eyes to the beauty that was right there in front of me, and I needed to pay attention to what God was trying to tell me.

That barking dog? Maybe it wasn’t just annoying. Maybe it was trying to tell me I was going the wrong way!

There were a lot of barking dogs in my life. I either ignored them and walked right by, or petted them and tried to love them. Either way, I wasn’t really paying attention to what their barks were trying to tell me.

What if there were a lot of peaceful lakes in my life? Right down the street? And I’d been missing out on them because I kept going the wrong way?

It made me want to reassess every decision I’d ever made. If I wanted to change direction, I needed to look back at my own experiences. I needed to learn from my own life—to learn what worked and what didn’t, and how to do better and feel better by learning from both of those things.

As Taylor Swift sings in “New Romantics”: “Life is just a classroom.”

My life had absolutely been a classroom. And the last two years of it had been like some kind of intensive training program. The only problem was that I got thrown into it so fast. I felt like I’d skipped a grade or two, and there was no teacher at the head of the classroom. I didn’t have a copy of the syllabus. I didn’t know what was expected of me, and I didn’t know what to expect. Now? I felt this overwhelming desire to figure it all out. To do better. To be happier. And I just couldn’t do it on my own.

I had God. He was with me. He was guiding me. He would not let me down. I knew that. But to find what was missing in my life, I had to listen. And during the pandemic, the message I kept getting was “Go get help.” So finally, I listened to my inner voice.

It’s interesting. I was taught early on that if you have God in your life, you don’t need medicine, you don’t need therapy—God will provide all healing. Now, as a full-grown independent-thinking adult, I actually think that’s wrong. I don’t think all of God’s healing happens magically and miraculously in some flash out of the sky. I think He’s capable of that, sure. But most of the time, the gift God gives us is the doctors and therapists that He put on this earth who have the talents and skills to make us better. I benefited from the gift of medicine when it came to my anxiety and depression. I couldn’t have finished college without it. And now, the overwhelming message I received from God was to talk to someone trained to help heal people’s hearts and minds.

At twenty-five years old, I went out and found myself a therapist. I did it all on my own. I didn’t wait for my parents or doctors or anyone else to tell me to how to do it, or to give me permission. So what if my parents didn’t believe in therapy? It’s my life! I took responsibility for my own life, and my own pain, and decided to try to heal it, not ignore it. Not put a Band-Aid on it. Not rub dirt on it and keep going. To actually get to the bottom of it all and heal.

I didn’t have to look very far. I had met a therapist when I was in Florida, the mother of a friend that Tyler grew up with. They didn’t know each other well, and I didn’t know her well, but I liked the fact that she already knew a little bit about me. That gave me a head start, which I felt I needed.

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