God Bless This Mess(73)

The two of us were able to meet remotely by Zoom or FaceTime during the ongoing quarantine. I told her everything. She helped me to see my life from perspectives outside of my own narrow views. She helped me to make sense of the stories you’ve read here, and to allow myself to feel, and to grieve, and to deal with my own emotions, so I could finally move forward instead of staying stuck in the mud.

“Ugh, why has my life been such a mess!” I asked her one day.

“Everyone’s life is messy,” she said. “Nobody has it easy. The only difference is how you process it.”

That was such a revelation to me.

*

For me, having a therapist has made all the difference in the world. For somebody else, a teacher, a life coach, a mentor, a priest might have been what was needed to help them. But for me, a therapist was the right answer.

You know what else helped? Reading. I started reading self-help books, and Christian books, and rereading my Bible and all my old journals—all in an effort to process it all.

I woke up and did a devotional every day. I prayed. I journaled as much as possible. I made a routine that was right for me. And guess what? I started to feel better.

When you feel better, you can see clearer.

When you see clearer, you make better decisions.

Better decisions build confidence.

Confidence creates a new foundation.

And a strong foundation gives you strength to build on.

The self-help books, the Christian books, the therapy—all of it helped.

But do you know where my biggest revelations came from? They came from me.

All I needed to do was get a little help to make sense of the lessons life had been trying to teach me—and which God had been trying to teach me, too.

For example: because of my experiences with men, I had some serious trust issues. That didn’t mean I could never trust again. It meant that I needed to learn. It meant that I needed to recognize that from those experiences, I could learn what to look for in men, and how to better discern who was trustworthy and who was not. That is a huge lesson in life. That is a gift! I was beating myself up for the longest time over picking the wrong men, thinking I was such an idiot. I wasn’t an idiot, but I wasn’t paying attention to the right things. I was supposed to be learning from those experiences, but I kept ignoring the lessons.

Everything was like that. Everything I had done or not done held a lesson.

And the biggest lesson was to realize the peace I could feel not only by going back to God and by spending time in prayer, but by listening to my inner voice. My whole life I had heard this inner voice, nagging at me, screaming at me at times: “Listen to me! Trust me!” But because I spent so much of my life thinking I wasn’t “good enough,” I thought that voice inside of me wasn’t “good enough,” either. So I let other people’s thoughts, opinions, and feelings guide me, rather than following my own instincts.

What I didn’t realize was that my inner voice was bigger than all of that. That voice, that gut instinct, that thing you’re feeling when you sense that something’s wrong, or that maybe some guy isn’t telling you the truth—that’s God. It’s the voice of God trying to help you.

I recognized that voice when I broke up with Brady after church one day. So why didn’t I recognize it all those other times?

For years I let people tell me, “Quit overthinking,” or, “You’re being so dramatic,” and I listened to them—because I didn’t believe in me. I’m not going to do that anymore. I know now that my inner voice matters. If I had listened to it all along, maybe I could have avoided a lot of pain and suffering. And if I listen to it going forward, maybe life will get a little easier.

*

Once I was feeling a little better, and seeing a little clearer, I realized it wasn’t healthy for me to stay in Alabama any longer. Even though the pandemic was still going on, I knew that I wanted to move back to LA. Not to an apartment in the center of everything, but to an apartment by the ocean.

I didn’t have the money for a true oceanfront spot in that crazy-expensive stretch of Southern California, but I was able to find a really nice place just a few blocks back from the shore. I can walk on the sand, take a run on the walkway that stretches up and down the coastline, and dip my toes in the Pacific anytime I want to. Every day I get to enjoy the LA sunshine as it sparkles on the water and waves. And at sunset, when I’m sitting on the sand, watching the sky turn pink, I feel good about making that decision, and for trusting myself to make it.

I am exactly where I want to be, doing the work I want to do. Not necessarily the work that other people want me to do (for once), but the good work that needs doing: I’m trying to figure out who I am, and I’m sharing that process with the world—on my YouTube channel, on Instagram, and now through the pages of this book.

If life is just a classroom, then the mess of my own life was the greatest classroom ever—for me.

My hope in sharing all of this is that it’s serving as a classroom for you, too. Maybe you can learn from my experience and skip over some of the heartbreak. Maybe reading my story will help you to make sense of some of your own life without having to endure what I’ve endured. It definitely doesn’t take years full of pageants and television shows to teach us how to live our lives. Everyone goes through stuff, and everyone can learn from their own experience if they want to. We all just need to learn to embrace our true selves, and maybe to be open and share our experiences with each other—the good, the bad, and the ugly—so we can just do life better.