I just want to preface this blog by saying that I have never shared publicly what I’m about to share below. I have been plagued with worry about what my loved ones will think when they read this, and I want to apologize for never having the strength or the sight to bring this to you when I was younger. Please understand that I didn’t even understand what was happening at the time. I love you.
It started when I was a very little girl.
I can’t remember how the first thought crept like darkness into my mind. I don’t know exactly how old I was, or where exactly it came from, but it must have been a very long time ago, because I don’t remember life before that first thought came.
You’re not pretty. You’re too loud. Your name sounds strange. Your freckles look weird.
I didn’t understand the thoughts at first, because I was too little to recognize Evil’s distinctly sinister voice. Parts of my childhood were spent in blissful ignorance of these words; they passed in and out of my mind and I didn’t pay much attention to them. What made the voice of an invisible person different from the voices of any other adults I came across throughout the day? I didn’t know and I didn’t care to know. I had other stuff to think about. Things like playing outside and what I wanted for Christmas and sleepovers and how was I supposed to eat vegetables for dinner when the smell of them made me want to gag? The life of a child is surprisingly busy, you know.
Even though I didn’t spend much time dwelling on these thoughts, the mere presence of them had an impact. Comparison, inevitably, crept in as I grew a little older.
My knees don’t look like that. Her teeth are much straighter than mine. How is her waist so small? Do I look pretty in high heels?
Things got worse in high school, as they have a habit of doing. Yes, physical comparison grew to a height it hadn’t when I was younger. I had braces, baby weight, acne, just the same as literally every other human being who’s ever made it to adulthood and the unkindness to myself hit those topics frequently. That wasn’t the worst of it, though. The worst part was how the voice would constantly attack my mind.
Why are you so depressed all of the time? You should try harder to be happy. Why are you trying to be happy? You know that’s impossible for someone like you. You’re so stupid for not being able to get over this. I don’t know why people would ever be worried about you, you’re not worth it. You’re a terrible person for making people upset. I wish you were invisible. You should wish you were invisible.
God, you’re stupid sometimes. How dare you think anything you say really matters? Don’t speak up. Don’t say that. Don’t make eye contact. Nobody wants to look at you anyway. Are you seriously crying right now? You’re so weak.
You better not tell anyone about any of this. They won’t understand. Why should anyone believe you anyway? Everyone knows you’re crazy. Look at yourself. You’re disgusting. People have other problems, why burden them with your own? You don’t want to be a burden, do you? I can’t believe you just said that. You ruin everything. It’s not worth the trouble. You should just swallow the pain.
And so the voice of Evil controlled my mind for a very, very long time. Self-hatred became the only way I knew how to view myself, how to talk to myself, how to motivate myself to be “better.” The worst part of all of this is I kept it a secret for all those years. Evil told me to swallow the struggle, and swallow it I definitely did. It became so secretly ingrained into who I am that I eventually forgot the voice I heard in my brain was never my own to begin with. I started to punish myself with the weight of guilt I would feel should my friends and family discover how I saw myself. You would break your mother’s heart if she could see what you’re really like. You don’t want to hurt other people by how messed up you are, do you?
I learned to continue on with my life around the voice. I learned how to get good grades regardless, because no matter how the voice tried, it couldn’t touch my love of learning. I learned how to hide my affliction from other people, and to navigate around it. I learned how to support and love and admire and encourage other people even though I had no idea how to support, love, admire or encourage myself. I learned how to be bubbly, cheerful, motivated, kind, even though inside I was crippled by my own self-doubt.
I learned how to fake confidence and how to compartmentalize my life into areas of strengths, and areas of hatred. I stopped processing the hatred altogether. I repressed memories. I blocked stuff out. I focused on other people during the day and I cried myself to sleep at night. After enough years, I stopped remembering why I cried and instead, chalked it up to stress and lack of restful sleep.
I developed anxiety from the weight it began to gather after high school. I would get to a place of such overwhelming exhaustion and panic that I would start to feel physically uncomfortable in my own skin. Like merely being alive and having a heart that was beating, encased in a living body was too painful. The impulses to harm myself were there, and they were strong, but I was too afraid to act on them. This just proved as more fodder for the voice to feed on.
Sometimes, we get stuck in pattern of sin for so long that we no longer even recognize that we’re sinning. This is why God gives us best friends.
My best friend Becca has borne with me the weight of my self-image for the majority of our friendship, and I still cannot explain how she figured out my secret. I like to think that God gave her supernatural vision to see what I couldn’t even see about myself. “Why are you beating yourself up so hard?” She would ask me when I didn’t even realize I was doing it. “Why are you being so negative to yourself?”
One day, after many years of telling me to stop being so darn mean to myself, she kindly took my hand and sat me down, “I need you to tell me exactly the kinds of things that you tell yourself, Hannah, because this has got to stop right now.”
I really didn’t want to do it, but she’s a very persuasive person, and sometimes I’m downright afraid of her (in a good way), so I told her. I gave her many examples like the ones above of just how twisted my own brain really was, and I cried many tears. She cried with me. I will never forget the way she said to me, “Don’t you see that’s not even your voice? That’s the voice of Satan.”
For the first time since I was a very little girl, I realized the voice was not my own. I have been carrying around another voice in my brain for my entire life, and it had complete control over my sight and the way I saw myself.
That conversation happened about two years ago. Apart from my mentor, Kari, about a year later, I still had not told a single soul about the voice.
That’s the way it went until about two months ago.
Two months ago, my squad had just arrived in Nepal to kick off month two. We were at a debrief in Kathmandu for a few days before traveling to our individual ministry sites, and our squad mentor Fran had organized a teaching on the second night of debrief. Vulnerability Night, she called it. She should have called it, “The Holy Spirit Is Gonna Prompt You To Confess Your Deepest Sins and Secrets For The First Time Out Loud So Get Ready To Feel Like Dying And Puking All At The Same Time” night, because in all reality, that’s what it felt like.
As I sat and watched my squad-mates lead by example in sharing their struggles with sin, shame, grief and pain, the love in my heart for each one of them expanded in ways I can’t even begin to explain. I was so moved by their transparency, which now we all know was no strength of theirs, it was all the work of the Holy Spirit urging us into deeper intimacy with each other. He was calling us into deeper accountability, deeper community.
I didn’t feel Him moving in me at all for a good hour and a half. (It takes awhile for 60 people to get vulnerable.) I thought, “Maybe I’m not being led to share anything, maybe I’m just here to love my squad family and I’m here to pray in intercession for them.” No sooner were these thoughts out floating freely in my brain than I felt the Holy Spirit start moving.
Immediately the conversation I had with Becca two years prior popped into my mind. Oh man, I fought against that for an agonizing few minutes. Please, God, don’t make me do this. My heart was pounding and my anxiety spiked out of control. I was about to go from only having told 2 people in my entire life, to suddenly spilling my deepest secret to 60 people I still honestly didn’t even know that well. Was this some kind of cruel trick? Before I knew it, the Holy Spirit literally lifted me off my feet, because somehow I stood up without even realizing it. 60 pairs of eyes turned to look at me. I swallowed hard, and then I told them.
I told them that I’ve hated myself for as long as I can remember, and sometimes I feel insanely uncomfortable in my own skin, so much so that sometimes I wish I could peel it off. It causes actual pain, sometimes, the depth of that discomfort. I told them that standing up in front of them and being honest with them scared me so much that I just wanted to run pell-mell straight off the balcony, but God was keeping my feet firmly planted where I stood. I told them that for most of my adult life, I have struggled with the desire to just be invisible. I never wanted anyone to see me, the real me, because I was so afraid they would only see what I see about myself. And then I sat down, head spinning and heart pounding with the realization of what I had just done.
Someone else stood up to share. Just like that, the moment was over, but I was reeling from what had just taken place. As the night came to an end, Fran prayed over us, specifically that we wouldn’t suffer from what she called a “vulnerability hangover,” the next morning: doubts and reservations about sharing and a lot of “I shouldn’t have done that” thoughts and regrets. Of course, that’s exactly where the voice took me. For the next two days I cried nonstop and wished with all my might that I could take everything back and go back to living under a seemingly happy rock with my dark, secret problems. It was so hard for me to look around at all the faces of my friends and know that they suddenly knew everything about me. I’m a very big fan of building walls, I have been my entire life, and the Holy Spirt had just breezed through and knocked all of my walls down. I felt defenseless.
Debrief ended a few days later, and even though I had so many of my sweet squad family come up to me, hug me tightly and say, “I’m so proud of you for sharing. You are so worthy of love. I can’t imagine not knowing you. You are so special to me. I’m thankful you’re not invisible,” etc, I couldn’t be happier to be in the van and on my way to our next ministry. I have always been a runner. I put Vulnerability Night behind me and for the next six weeks, I ran away from what happened there with all the strength I could muster.
But then, halfway through Vietnam, it all came crashing down on me.
(Part 2 to immediately follow.)
