"You're Mean!"

In case you're just joining me on this journey, I am working to write 24 minutes of the most honest words I can every day of my 24th year of life. I have not and will not do this perfectly. But my goal is to continue anyway, no matter how many times I fail. That is all and that is success. Thank you for hearing my story. I would love to hear yours.

It's funny how clogged my heart gets after only a day of not sitting down to process what's really going on inside myself... 

It's easy to live disconnected from my heart. Disconnected from my emotions. Disconnected from what's really going on inside myself. I know this isn't a problem for everyone, but for me it is. 

I grew up going to church every Sunday and other church events throughout the week as well. And most of the time at these gatherings (at least as far as my terrible memory tells me) I didn't feel safe to be myself. It always felt like there was a "right answer" and a "right way" I was supposed to talk and act and present myself in these settings and so I played the part to a t. 

I've always had a knack for reading people and knowing what they expected of me (at least I've always told myself I do) and because of that, and my natural tendency to want to make people like me and love me, I would transform my chameleon skin to whatever shade and color they wanted me to be at the moment. 

I lived from the outside in, always reading the signs around me and transforming myself into the image of the person that the people around me thought I was or wanted me to be. 

I never paid much mind to my heart and what my own likes and dislikes and desires and feelings really were. If someone asked me what my favorite [fill in the blank here] was I would always struggle to find an answer... I truly didn't know. 

This all probably stemmed partially from the fact that I'm a military brat and moving every 3 years teaches you survival mechanisms that you wouldn't otherwise have if you didn't have to constantly be the "new girl" - always frantically searching for a place to belong and a group of people who would accept me. So I lived like a puppeteer, pulling the strings of my actions and choices without a second thought to what I really needed or wanted deep inside.  

It was suicide to my soul and I am still learning to be very careful how long I go between remembering that I exist as a person and my existence matters... not just as a puppet to please the world around me but as a daughter of God who was born to live fully present, fully alive, and fully authentic. 

That's one main reason this blog is like a life raft for my soul... It forces me to sit down in front of the world and say, "Here I am. This is the real me." Having it online makes me accountable to actually doing it daily (versus a journal which won't know or care if I ever write in it consistently at all) and also to be honest. Because I know you're not dumb and you'll be able to tell when I'm selling you the fake stuff and when I'm actual telling the truth. 

So that's honestly why I do this... Because I need to remember that my heart matters. And I have to remember that daily. 

Otherwise, I'll go right back to autopilot and start changing my chameleon skin all over again - locking my heart up in a sound proof cage and telling her to just be quite already. 

I went to this super charismatic Christian worship school a few years back and one of the breakout session was a woman named Abi Stumvoll (she's AMMAAZZIIINGGG!!! google her. google her now.).

In her breakout session Abi taught us that a lot of times we either have an unhealthy relationship with either our heart or our mind. Some of us live fully from our heart, leaving behind all common sense and logic as we follow it wherever the wind takes us. And others of us (often those who grew up in the church or in a strict environment that dictated our actions for us) live fully from our head, completely ignoring our deepest desires and whims for the sake of conformity and practicality. 

I bet you can guess which category I fell in. (Yep, the heart killing one)

So she said that for those of us who have a hard time connecting to our hearts, we should sit there and actually ask our hearts a questions... "How do you feel about me". 

I honestly thought the exercise was a little hokey and maybe even un-Biblical, but I gave it a try anyway. I sat there and said, "Heart, how do you feel about me."

And in my mind I saw a little girl dressed in pink, about 3 years old, locked up in a dark cage inside me. She was angry and pouting and looked ragged, neglected and abused. She looked up at me from between two prison bars with a hateful look in her eyes and said in an almost temper tantrum tone, "You're mean!"

Welp, I had no idea what to do with that. So I told my friend, laughed about it, and pushed the experience to the corner of my mind to forget about it. 

But even though I didn't fully take the exercise seriously, I couldn't get the image and the "You're mean!" out of my head... It was unsettling to realize that I may have actual been abusing my heart - locking her up in a cage and refusing to let her shine her beautiful sparkle of light into the world because I was afraid of stepping out of line and looking like a fool.

And I'm not saying I have found a grand solution to that yet and that I now have a perfectly amazing relationship with my heart. 

But I did finally admit that my favorite color was pink. And that I like to dress up.

And I'm trying to get on this blog daily to take the time to really connect with my heart. 

So that's got to be at least a start.