Blogging has been hard for me lately.
I went back to read some old blogs, and some of them just didn't sit well with me. They felt dreadfully inauthentic, like someone else had written using my name or attached puppet strings to my arms and typed on my laptop.
It's no secret that I love to perform and be in the limelight, but lately, though I still do all of those things and no one's probably noticed much of a difference, I just haven't felt like it anymore. I haven't had much to say nor much of a desire to say it.
I just haven't felt like being everything that everyone wants me to be.
I haven't felt like enacting Christianity or doing another fast or praying through another spiritual discipline. I realized that I am so tired of my own behavior, so drained by doing what everyone around me tells me is right, so wearied by the thought of hearing yet another person's opinion on my behavior or the direction my life should go. Christians have more opinions than any other people on earth, I think, and my tolerance has grown thin.
Reading the blogs made me realize my capacity to perform and deceive even myself, and performing Christianity (or anything else) is what's exhausted me. Being in an environment like the World Race incubator makes it that much harder not to be what everyone around me says is "right."
I've struggled for years trying to be perfect at everything I've done because of the weight of years of affirmation and praise holding me to a standard of perfection that was literally suffocating me. Because of this expectation to be perfect and good at everything, I haven't learned how to fail people. Failure has been unacceptable, especially relationally.
the day steve and I killed chickens with a dull kitchen knife
I was taught to be nice to everyone, to do nice things, to be a nice Christian, even to have nice facial expressions at the right times. Here's the thing: I perceived at a young age in church that this kind of person is good and does these things; I learned quickly how to quack like a Christian duck, and I got good at it. Behind all that quacking I was doing, I was stifling all kinds of convictions and inclinations and all kinds of likes and preferences that I naturally had since I knew all the right answers.
I knew how to be what I needed to get what I needed, and no one seemed to be so much concerned with authenticity as long as I did what made them happy. (Or maybe they were and I didn't know how to displease them by admitting that I wasn't what they thought.) Motive didn't hold much weight – did it matter if I was nice because of God's love for me or if I was nice because I was told to be? No. It just seemed to matter that I was nice. Integrity wasn't really important.
I got so good at all this incessant quacking – at learning to be anything to anyone to keep the peace in my life – that I completely lost myself. What's scarier is that the quacks happen without my realizing it. My thought process says that I'm on the World Race and should be writing certain things at certain times, making breakthroughs in certain months and sharing miraculous stories about transformation and ministry, and when it's not happening I feel the weight of expectation and begin making all kinds of avian racket, flapping my wings and stomping my webbed feet and losing feathers hoping you don't notice that I'm more of a goose.
The pressure to be perfect and my learned ability to quack like this Christian duck has combined to form a mask for whoever I might really be and left me with no identity. At my core, I'm dying to know who I am; it's possible that I do know and that I'm dying to let her out, but am sorely afraid because of years of others' opinions about who I am.
God is teaching my about my identity as other former blogs would suggest, but my problem arises when I perceive that you need or want me to be something that I'm not.
In those situations, the quacks start before I can blink. I just don't know how to turn it off.
I don't know how to be "me" because me for so long has been whoever you said I was. I don't know how to search my heart for my deepest desires because I'm entrenched in robotic behaviors that mean nothing to me and have kept me from being anything. I don't know how to be me when it's not what you want or makes you mad.
Somewhere along the way something convinced me that keeping up appearances is better than being true.
the monkey that lives down the road
Someone pointed out that being what I think people want is actually manipulative and it's nicer to just be honest, but the thing is, it feels honest to me to be whatever people want because one thing I actually do want is for everyone around me to be happy. Harmony is at the top of my list.
My favorite memories are of moments of collective harmony – playing games with my family all together laughing, making beautiful music with an awesome worship band, sharing a meal with friends around a table on a Friday night, everyone content and happy for the weekend. What is beautiful to me is harmony (some might say shalom), and I decided it was more important to keep those around me happy than to discover who I am, maybe because I've learned from birth that Christians die to our desires and selves anyway. What was the point in having something you were going to have to give up? It's like I thought I was doing everyone a favor and being a great Christian by never giving myself space or permission to be my own person.
But God's desire for us is not to be nobodies.
If we're actually ducks, he'd love for us to quack away.
If we're not, he'd love for us to be honest about it.
home for the month
God and I discussed the other day how I can't exactly surrender myself or my life to him if I have no idea who Meredith is, what I'm surrendering – it's like trying to give someone a gift but being so eager to give it that you forgot to buy the actual present and showed up with nothing, surprised by your empty hands.
So, I write all of that to say that I'm trying to keep the quacks to a minimum in an effort to be totally true within myself and with others – to feel what I feel, know what I know, not know what I don't know and be convicted by what actually convicts me, to have my own opinions and be whoever I am underneath all these metaphorical feathers. To discover myself. To esteem God's truth about me above what everyone else says I am.
To be myself with you regardless of how you like or approve of it, because that's what loving you and being a duck of integrity and character is.
Part of me is stressed by how simple and headstrong and immature people could tell me this is and I've had to fight deleting it all several times, but to say anything else at this point, I'm afraid, would be nothing more than a quack.
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