and it will happen to you, letter seven, preston to hilary

Today, I bring you the continuation of the blog banter Hilary Sherratt and I have doing, in which we write public letters to one another back and forth. Read the letter I’m responding to here. And I’m posting early. Because I can.

Dear Hilary,

And it will happen to you. The details will be different, but it will happen to you.

That’s what I’m here to tell you.

I read those words closer than not to a decade ago when Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking had just been released and I, precocious and viewing myself particularly special and perhaps even enlightened, spent weeks reading the short volume trying to make sense of it all–knowing more in a theoretical sense what she must have meant by tragedy and the mystery of grief than having a tangible, breathed understanding.

But now I think to stand on the other side, the space that hides in the shadow of joy, and I have walked into, it seems, a season that has stuck harder and more resiliently than any other before it. The normal rhythm of my getting over it, beyond it, my ability to read the appointed words of the lectionary, to pray with moderate intentionality, to sleep it off, these methods of rehabilitation have proved no less than completely agitating, let alone failure when it comes to patching my soul.

What do I even mean by all of this? I mean that I do not doubt the orthodox things, but myself. I am not agnostic about the Creator but this, me, creature within cosmos. I am at once sure that this all has to do with the future and in a moment reconciled that it has everything to do with my fear that who I am, breathing and existing upon this terra, is not more than a fraud, a reckless creature of habituated intelligence.

And I don’t know what I need.

I have discovered that I am quite volatile right now.

Sometime in the first part of last week, something important within me moved. I’m not sure what nor am I sure how, but something within me that had held the integrity of my being shifted just enough to distort the rest. All that blessed peace that came with rending to God the very of my very, the being of my being, was pushed or struck, or pulled just enough to make the whole a falsified form.

I fear the foundation. I think that it may not hold.

So while I read your beautiful words–and they are beautiful, that is easy to see, to say, to know–I have to admit to you that I am, at present, unmoved. I am like an animal that has been cut, thrashing against anyone who tries to love me or nurse the wound. And I hate it. I hate who I am in this space and this moment, because the thrashing is a terrible thing and a most unbeautiful way to live. And I think that what I want most in this world is to create and be surrounded by the Beautiful. (It strikes me, incidentally, that unbeautiful is not a word recognized by the dictionary.)

And I don’t know what I need.

I wrote that above. I have repeated it often in the past week, mostly in silence. I have come to realize that I find it a very frustrating thing to be asked. I selfishly and candidly wish that people already knew. I find myself upset that what seems to come by nature for me does not for them, and in this I suffer the double edge of pride that both cuts in that I think myself so much better for knowing and I think myself so much better when I in fact know of them and their needs so little.

We all love imperfectly. We can be terribly nearsighted when it comes to our self-proclaimed exceptional ability to love others well.

Even there I hid in the shadow of pride. I played the first person plural so I wouldn’t have to admit openly, directly, that I love imperfectly, that I think my love so much better when it is, in fact, not.

I’ve tried to love people out of my pain. It normally works. I pour into others and somehow I, in process, feel the perfecting work of grace in the aftermath. But this has not been true this time. And that frightens me.

I have come to hate that my word for the year was trust. I hate that moment when I thought He sat on the couch beside me and said It’s going to be about trust with you.

No, it’s not hate. For I do hate how easily that word has been used to the point of losing meaning. It’s frustration. It’s pain.

I need words. I save the words. I save every good word anyone has ever spoken to me, especially now, especially the written ones, so that weeks from now–months? years? decades?–I can rebuild. I can build myself again by the unlikely grace that people have shown me. I can make myself whole once more. Or, as whole as I have ever been, which is more akin to very broken but somehow caught in a peace about that.

This is a funny way to talk about the Eucharist, to respond to your words, but it’s in the very least honest. It is to suggest that I presently cannot bring myself to talk about it, at least not well.

Except that I need what you said to be true. I need it to be both everything and not at the same time. I need it to be Mystery. I need it to be.

We talked once, not so very long ago, about wondering if people love us well, if they even know how. I wonder about this space, if it is the kind of thing people like us go through and will always go through. I think there’s a time when I would have thought it pride, too, to say something such as people like us, but I have been broken beyond that point.

Goodness, I am so very tired of being me. It’s exhausting. I thought when I found out I had insomnia and they prescribed me the pills so I could sleep that I wouldn’t feel this way anymore. It’s foolish, but I entertained it, I thought for a moment that perhaps all this exhaustion of being myself was wrapped up in not sleeping well.

But I have slept well for days now and I feel more false and broken than I ever have before. What perhaps would God have in this but to press me harder into recognizing His strength in my weakness? Yet this, this too pains me. This too I want to hate.

But I can’t. I can’t hate it, much as I truly do try.

I wonder if that should make much sense to anyone. Ever.

Sometimes I think myself very, very delusional.

I think God shall forgive me this much, if on the other side of the pain, this shadow, I come to see that these words were unfair, perhaps untrue. Not everything True, I am only slowly beginning to learn, needs to be spoken aloud.

And it will happen to you. The details will be different, but it will happen to you.

That’s what I’m here to tell you.

And that’s what I wanted to tell you: that when it happens to you–and I think that it shall happen to you–there is someone who knows, who has been there, and who has felt the deep of the afflicted places too. Even the self-inflicted ones.

Keeping you in whatever this, if it can be called prayed, is right now,

Preston

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