"You can either choose to leave here and not graduate, or you can stay and put up with me.
It may not be a choice that you like, but you do have a choice."
When all this madness happened, I was left without a choice… or at least, that is my perspective. It may seem insignificant or even purely symbolic to ask a person's opinion especially if the answer seems completely obvious, but the very action, the physicality of withholding says my decision isn't important, my voice not worth hearing. Decisions may bruise my heart, but not even asking my opinion breaks it.
Today, I made a choice, one of very few that I've been able to make over the last 16 months. Almost everything has been dictated- by people, by circumstance, by finances. This was completely and truly my choice. It's a choice that closed a circle I never wanted to close. My heart and soul flourished in South Africa… I still slip and say 'back home'. A series of what some may call serendipitous, others fate, I call God-ordained events occurred and I found what would become my tribes. Two distinct groupings of people who were destined to become so integral in my heart finding a home I can't separate, even months later, the circumstances, the people, and the places. Two years ago I had just come into a place of leadership, a leadership I'd delayed because of my family, the responsibilities of work, and my own self-doubts. One tribe I had to completely abandon, unable to contribute from such a distance. In the other, I was in the process of completing my leadership training. Today, I clicked on the "SEND" button for the final submission of my application. I've been delaying it, because, for a thousand reasons that won't really make sense to anyone else, as long as my application was outstanding, as long as I hadn't finished "my part," then I was still there, still connected, still a part of something familiar, something I was capable in, something that made me feel even marginally useful. Almost like the baby bird who knows they must leave the nest, but hangs on for one more day, one more feeding, one more warm night beneath mother's feathers. As long as I didn't complete that application, I was still a member, they were still my people, I might still be able to go home. It was my only choice for months and months, and I didn't want to finally cut the last heartstring, so I held out.
I held out through my father's funeral, I held out through a cross-continental move. I held out through a nearly-failed career change and my grandfather's funeral. I held out through my child's spirit and inquisitive nature being beaten up and held ransomed to the American School System with it's Common Core robotic disciplines. I held out through a conference back home I felt I deserve (yes, present tense) to be part of, a sort of completion of a dream I had held in my heart for so long. I held out through my friend's apology, though not needed, because I knew how he felt before he did. I've held out through birthdays and anniversaries because my heart still wants to go back and shout at the top of my lungs, "please, give me a chance to choose… give me a voice."
I have lost so much in the last 16 months. I was listening to a podcast by the person I would consider to be my pastor, although his church doesn't receive any tithe from me, nor am I a member of his congregation. He was preaching out of 1 John and talking about how we can't really get what it was like for the Jews of the first century to be booted from the synagogue. They lost their families, their jobs, their religious community and their cultural identity. I was listening while driving and the sobs racked through me, because I know what that feels like… to have it all yanked away. Walking away is different. To be left without a say, without a VOICE, it makes you doubt in a way I can't explain. And that doubt plagues and haunts not just in the far corners of your soul, but out in the open, in the daylight, in the grit of day-to-day.
Today, when I completed my application, I heard my voice, a faint whisper from a ghostly shadow, but there nonetheless, for the first time in a long time, amidst the grit of daily life. I miss my tribes. I miss my friends and my home and my familiar. I miss my heart and the sound of my own mamma bear roar.
I've been trying to get things back, put things back together, piece my life and my heart into some semblance of 'normal'. But unlike moving house and figuring out where to pack away the dishes, unpacking your life is a bit more difficult. And, in all of it, I've often felt guilt... overwhelming guilt. Guilt about the shoulders of friends back home I was still standing on, guilt that I haven't been doing "better" by them. Guilt that I have been so selfish, so Brittany-centered, so lost and tossed about. Guilt that none of this "should have been..." Should have been so massive, Should have been so traumatic... Should have been prevented. Then I heard this song, sung by artist Regina Spektor and it knit itself into a hole I haven't been able to put words into.
It started out as a feeling
Which then grew into a hope
Which then turned into a quiet thought
Which then turned into a queit word
And then that word grew louder and louder
Until it was a battle cry
I'll come back when you call me
No need to say 'goodbye'
Just because everything's changing
Doesn't mean it's never been this way before
All you can do is try to know who your friends are
As you head off to the war
Pick a star on the dark horizon and follow the light
You'll come back when it's over
No need to say 'goodbye'
Now we're back to the beginning
It's just a feeling and no one knows yet
But just because they can't feel it too
Doesn't mean that you have to forget
Let your memories grow stronger and stronger
'Til they're before your eyes
You'll come back when they call you
No need to say 'goodbye'
I am, once again, an alien in a foreign land. To many, that may sound ludicrous because I am in fact, back on native soil, but my heart belonged somewhere else long before I ever left America. Madeline L'Engle put it best in A Wrinkle in Time when Calvin said to Meg Murray, "I've never even seen your house, and I have the funniest feeling that for the first time in my life I'm going home!" The dream that I had, that I married my future to, that I clung to for dear life as a child, is obliterated, completely gone. The last heartstring was cut this morning, and my soul is saddened by that. I came full-circle. I am now no longer an expat living where my heart thrives, but an American struggling to find my footing. Like the kids in The Chronicles of Narnia who were more alive, more at home in Narnia than England, I too was a better person away from these shores. I got a chance, for five glorious years of life and babies and friends and struggle and laundry and gardening, to be at home in my own skin, in my own heart.
A friend recently visited me. She gave me insight that I will forever be grateful for. She pointed out that I'm really good at being me if given half a chance. That simply inviting people to join life, mine and my family's, IS a gift. Over the last 16 months, I've fought depression, homesickness, grief, mourning, loss and crippling changes. That American adage to "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" has been so far from applicable it's not even remotely funny. Looking back, I see how I could have fared better, should have been more, coped better. But the one thing I held on to, even in all of it, was that invitation. The thing about my tribes that I've missed the most is how grounded and centered I felt in who I was, because I was surrounded by people who repeatedly and honestly pushed me to be just me. To own my own footprints- no more, no less. So many people here, especially in the church-attending communities, have brushed me off... brushed off our struggles as "hiccups" along the bumpy road of life. We've been easily discarded with cliches and maddeningly simplistic sayings. "Whenever God closes a door, He opens a window..." or "You'll never get more than you can handle..." or something equally insane. My tribes proved to me that who I am is so messy. And, the me that I like best is the me that says my mess is okay, not an incumbrance to social interaction or some dirty secret to hide in a dark corner but a venue for friendship. Come into my house, I'll cook a mean Cashew Chicken Curry for you, just push the unfolded laundry aside. Come join me for coffee, I'll try really hard not to complain too much about my kids because I'm up to my eyeballs in trying to steer them through life and I'll listen to you and we'll laugh, promise. Come over, sleep in my beds, I'll make you whole-wheat buttermilk waffles for breakfast and we can hang out in pajamas until 11, no judgements.
Last November I committed to being fully present, not spinning my wheels because it made me feel better to be "doing something" but to wait, deal with each moment as it came. I've honored that. I've chosen to stay in the weeds as long as it took to find the path again. I still wish my path was the yellow brick road I was on, leading me back home. But with every part of who I am, I know I can't go back, no matter how much I want to. My "pastor" is back in my "home" celebrating and honoring dear folks and I'm crushingly sad about it, but I made a choice even in the midst of that reality… a choice to say goodbye, because it's the right thing to do. I don't know what's next, and I know good things will come of all this. But please don't think, in your naiveness of my great and big God, that this was ever a Plan A… He's working things into a "good" but there was a fight, a massive, all-consuming fight for each person to have free-will. It cost Him His Son, and He will always allow people to have the power to weald their wills, even when it means that there's collateral damage. Even as I stand amidst a broken heart that is the definition of collateral damage that could have really, really used close friends, familiar and comforting settings over the losses of this last year, I stand as the psalmist, the songwriter… singing Hallelujah. Because I don't have to say goodbye forever. I can cut the heartstrings, remember the memories, and come when they call... and answering the call to remember friends, places, spiritual awakenings and life-altering moments of truth, just as in the darkest of emotional holes you can fall down into, in ALL of them, there is always the choice to sing "hallelujah."
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