I feel it all, I feel it all

The wings are wide, the wings are wide

Wild card inside, wild card inside…

I know more than I knew before

• 

We bought a house. And I just dropped my kids off at school. You might say things are…settling into place?

You might, and you’d be wrong. Or at least only partially right? Because the thing I’m beginning to understand, after more than four decades on this planet (thank you, Jesus and therapy), is that it’s a bit more complicated than that. And complicated is something that scares the hell out of people.

But not me; not anymore. (At least, not most days. #workingonit)

So to begin again: yes, we bought a house. It was the one that we thought had slipped through our fingers a few weeks ago. Maybe that whole “let a thing go and if it comes back to you, it was meant to be yours” rings true now, or maybe it’s more complicated than that (you know I’ll go with option B; I never met a cliché I didn’t hate). All I know is that the agent came back to us after a week and we ended up striking a deal (by we I mean, of course, The Husband), and we’re moving seven minutes away in four weeks’ time. That, and there are two glorious bathtubs, which means the boys get their piss-filled one and I get my own. God is real, folks.

Second: the kids are back at school one day a week. And what a beautiful procession it was, the one-and-a-half block walk, the greeting of friends from a social distance (I received an illicit hug; oh, the joy!), the running onto the grounds where parents are, wonderfully, not currently allowed. The beauty of it all being in response to rational, scientific thinking instead of quarantine fatigue (feel that side-eye, America?).

So, at this moment, no one is touching me. No one is demanding that I wipe their ass or bring them food. A friend just texted, “this is one of the happiest days of my life.” GIRL, SAME.

And this feeling of all being right in the world? This sense of everything shifting back into its rightful place? This calm of well-being that pervades my soul? It shall last approximately five minutes before anxiety creeps back in and I fret over how the boys are doing and how much we have to pack.

“Know thyself,” goes the Greek maxim, and here’s the thing: I’m starting to. And it’s messy, and scary, and incredible.

There is a fringe contingent of Christianity (and I say fringe not because they’re crazy, but because everyone who doesn’t belong to it is) that is, finally, acknowledging the connection between self-awareness and mental health, between spiritual and mental health, between therapy and grace. And, because I get to police my own mental health if I don’t want it to fly off the rails, I’ve been diving deep into this group’s offerings: these therapists who cosign on such “woo-woo” practices as meditation, as attentiveness and awareness. Because the truth is that there a lot of people walking around with no sense of identity other than a narrative of their own making; living reactively rather than receptively; not knowing who the hell they are. And I know, all too well, what that’s like.

It’s captivity. And this is not how we are meant to live. It’s not how we were made to live.

If I sound a bit all over the place, a bit in the clouds, maybe it’s because I’ve been drinking for an hour (I’m KIDDING). No, maybe it’s because I am all over the place, and in the clouds. Because the freedom that comes with knowing how many terrifying and dark nooks and crannies there are within myself, and knowing at the same time that this is okay because grace is big enough to handle that and has always meant for me to be on a path into and through that? That is true freedom. That is joy. That is resistance to the status quo of “be positive and agreeable and hide/fight the hard stuff.”

Fleming Rutledge writes, “the beginning of resistance is not to explain, but to see. Seeing itself is a form of action.” We seek simple answers–explanations–because they distract us from the truth that much of life is more complicated than we’re comfortable with seeing; there’s more mystery than we want. We want to know that everything is shifting into place and moving back to normal because we can’t face the idea that things may never be truly normal again.

Well, I’ve lived with “not normal” for awhile now, and it’s kind of wonderful. Also, it can suck. There’s room for both here.

Kay Redfield Jamison wrote An Unquiet Mind (girl, mine too!) and in it she says, “I long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms, or a world without dry and killing seasons. Life is too complicated, too constantly changing, to be anything but what it is. And I am, by nature, too mercurial to be anything but deeply wary of the grave unnaturalness involved in any attempt to exert too much control over essentially uncontrollable forces…It is, at the end of the day, the individual moments of restlessness, of bleakness, of strong persuasions and maddened enthusiasms, that inform one’s life, change the nature and direction of one’s work, and give final meaning and colour to one’s love and friendships.”

So, to recap: here, there is room to despair. There is room to feel sad. There is room to be angry. There is room to say “this isn’t right, nor is it okay, Whitney.” There is freedom to look around and mutter, “This sucks,” much like even my five- and eight-year-old boys do (back off, pearl-clutchers; we actually say much worse around our house; remind me to tell you of the Lego Incident of last weekend).

“To see yourself,” writes Sarah Wilson, “to see that you are part of a big magnificent whole–you have to go to the depths…but–oh glory be–by being in our anxiety, by going down to the dark depths, we finally find the connection. Because anxiety, eventually and inevitably, makes us sit in our shit. It takes us there, to the darkness. It forces us to do the journey. And only then can we see what we were looking for. We can see the truth. We see it all as it is.”

As it is. Not as we want it to be, or as we’re trying to make it. Not as we want ourselves to be, or as we’re trying to seem. What we are, as Wilson writes, is what “guides us home.” And that is not a chin-up moment of decision, but a journey.

So if you’d like to be a shit-sitter, come sit by me. I won’t ask you to change, or pretend, but just to look. To see. To gaze boldly around, ahead, and take in the awful magnificence of this world and ourselves: the dark nooks and crannies and the terrifying unpredictability and the wonderful truth that this world–that we–are so much more than one thing. That we are full of the beauty of unexplainable mystery. And so, thank God, is grace.