“She knows who she is. She just forgot for a little while.”
It’s only 1,700 miles from Phoenix, Arizona to Williston, North Dakota.
What follows is a collection of excerpts from my journal while on the road.
I’m writing this from Las Vegas, New Mexico. It’s kind of like the Las Vegas of Nevada… except it’s missing the lights, the casinos, the prostitutes, the drunken people on the street –actually its nothing like the real Las Vegas. It’s one of those tiny towns right off the highway that you only stop to get gas and you think, “Gee am I glad I don’t live here.”
I’ve been driving for about 10 hours now and my thoughts have been scattered all down this highway like pages blown away by the wind. I’ve been trying to understand myself, trying to understand the past 3 months, trying to understand why my heart aches like the pulse behind a bruise. I had hoped coming home would erase all the wounds across my memory. As if I could outrun it all. I’ve never liked running –I’m not a runner, but I am good at running away. I can run fast and hard; it becomes my life: to feed the heart on hard drawn breath. But the past never does go away. Time is like a pill that I swallow and it makes me better, but memories are the awful taste it leaves.
Moving forward with your life is easy. Letting go of the past is hard. And it’s not just letting go of a person, it’s letting go of every detail, every mistake, every disappointment, every emotion, it’s letting go of my own shortcomings and weaknesses. And sometimes it’s even letting go of the good times, the things that you made you smile. I know it’s been said, “Take the good, leave the bad.” But sometimes they’re both too closely intertwined, and you can't think about one without thinking about the other.
I can still hear the words of a friend ringing in my ear, “Don’t drink the poison.” We were camping up by the Sea of Galilee a few days before I left. “Don’t let the experience ruin you for anything good that might come along. Too many people drink the poison, and they always go after the wrong thing. They are never able to be satisfied with anything good, normal, healthy.”
I’m deciding not to drink the poison. I’m deciding to let my wounds heal and not scar, to forgive myself and others, to be just as in love with love as I was before. To believe that beauty still exists and I can discover it.
I wish you could see what I’m seeing. I’m surrounded by an endless sea of green rolling fields. There’s so much space here, so much beauty. If only I was a bird in the wind like the ones I’m watching now, I could fly across this green ocean. I wonder if birds ever wish they were humans –probably not. I’m sure they look down and feel bad for us. All they have to do is breathe and fly all day. But for us humans, living isn’t as simple as breathing It’s more complicated than that. But it's beautiful complicated.
I spent the last 24 hours in Denver, Colorado with my old teammate from the World Race, Jo Linda. It was a good 24 hours. I found some old pieces of myself and I was able to add them back into the puzzle. I had a conversation with Jo Linda about how crazy us women can be, and she said that she was so glad that men didn’t know half the things we think when they don’t call us back soon enough. I think she’s right. A lot of what is difficult for me to understand about my summer is how did I get so crazy? I’ve always been confident, I’ve always been secure in who I am, and I’ve always been told that I’m a very rational person. So who was that girl? After witnessing my friends and my sisters, and how irrational they get sometimes in relationships, I swore to myself that that wasn’t going to be me… I have a lot more grace for them now. After thinking about it for a while, I’ve concluded that I operate at my best when I am in high safety situations. I don’t mean physically safe –like in a bomb shelter or anything. I mean emotionally safe. And that safety is established by trust. With a lack of trust and a lack of safety, I felt like all I was doing was trying to grasp the wind. But it always slipped through my fingers, I couldn’t hold on to it. And so, insecurity swelled up inside of me like a vicious storm out in the middle of the ocean and overflowed like a tidal wave of crazy emotions onto my world. But that’s not me. That’s not who I am. And my security doesn’t come from any person. My security comes from Jesus. Somewhere along the way I forgot that valuable piece of information. Driving this lonely stretch of highway across the state of Wyoming, I’m learning to let that insecurity go, and put my trust back in the one who made these thousand beautiful hills that roll forever on.
I’m in Montana now. I’ve never seen a bigger sky before. I’m literally in the middle of nowhere. I haven’t had cell phone signal for 6 hours, and I feel a little bit like I’m back in Africa because I just had to pee in a bush –once a World Racer, always a World Racer. I was thinking somewhere along the last stretch of highway how I’ve never been too interested in building a career. Instead I’ve always been more concerned with living a life well lived. I guess that’s why I crave adventure and new experiences so much. Why nothing really scares me, and how I’ll basically going anywhere in the world –except Guatemala. That is where I draw the line –a very BOLD and DEFINED line. But I’m sure it’s also why experiences can have such an effect on me –good or bad. I’ve never experienced what I experienced these past few months before, and I’m not sure I want to again. I’m still trying to figure all that out. How much of it was real, how much of it wasn’t. It seems like the more I think about it, the less I really do understand it all. Maybe I never will. I’m realizing that all the things I thought I knew, I’m learning again.
On my last day in Phoenix, I was sitting on the floor of Barnes and Noble beside a bookshelf skimming through a stack of books. One page caught my eye:
“If the point of life is the same as the point of a story, the point of life is character transformation. If I got any comfort as I set out on my first story, it was that in nearly every story, the protagonist is transformed. He's a jerk at the beginning and nice at the end, or a coward at the beginning and brave at the end. If the character doesn't change, the story hasn't happened yet. And if story is derived from real life, if story is just condensed version of life then life itself may be designed to change us so that we evolve from one kind of person to another. ” -Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years:What I learned while editing my life.
(He also wrote one of my favorite books –Blue like Jazz (read it))
I’m learning to live a good story. I think I’m in the process of editing my life right now. And I think I’m in a good place to do it –I’m tucked away in my own corner of the earth. Just me, Jesus, and Joe (My journal). I have a lot of time to think here. To process things. To dream again. To live.
