Coming in Hot

The hyping up I do to try to pretend it's all in my head and to try to just out-muscle it, only to be beaten back by my body.

The mornings I get out of bed, determined to conquer the day, and just fall down.

There's only so many days you can just give up and go rest at the beach, right?

The things I do to fight it. The way I tell myself it's important not to admit that I just can't work past it. How I try to "do my part" and push back at it.

I've been coming to accept that maybe I am sick. Maybe my body does control me. Maybe I'm not getting better.

I've had the total body pain and sensitivity since I was a child, the intense knee pain since junior high, the hip and back soreness since college, the eye oozing and constant need to pee since 2010, the wrist/arm/hands weakness and pain and lack of function since 2011, the stomach problems since 2012, the overwhelming fatigue and muscle pain and emotional overload and brain fog since 2013, and the apathy and weakness ever since I came home and gave up the stuff that is "bad for me" but made me feel normal to try to be healthy. Maybe there is something wrong with me, and it's not aches and pains, and it can't be fixed by me being told to "exercise more," and I can't out-will it.

But maybe I can?

I've lived a life of compromise and just getting along for so long with this pain and illness that I'm afraid I'll forget how to live otherwise. I'm sick of being mediocre. This constant need to do only what is necessary, to live within limitations, is a foreign world to me still, and I blame it for my shortcomings.

But then, I was digging through some of my things the other night, and I began to wonder. I wrote hundreds of songs, both words and music. Were any of them any good? Hundreds of poems. Articles. Stories. Novels. A book. Thousands of photographs. Graphic design. Newspaper pages. Magazines. Have I always been mediocre? The way I play sports scares me, because I don't do anything the textbook way — it's all adapted to fit me and my weird pains and body parts. Or I taught myself a different way just because I wanted to, because for some reason I thought I didn't have to do it like everyone else. Is that how I handle everything in life? Am I some diva who's always tried to get by on talent instead of putting in the time to do it right? Is all I have left shells of what could have been, with no hope to resurrect them or continue now that I'm weak, and since I never took the time to build the bases I should have?

I stopped being afraid to really try around the same time I lost the ability to try.

I see it in sports, when the ball is coming at me hot, and I know everything I should do in my brain, and I'm screaming at my body to get down, get down, get the ball, and my body just stays up, not letting me get anywhere near where the ball could hurt me. Is this from day after day of running into walls and coffee tables or getting bruises from someone barely touching me? Has my body decided it can't take anything else that will hurt it and throb for days and days? Has it overridden my will, my fight? The ball is coming in, and I'm a coward. Was I always a coward? I have all these valid health excuses why I might not make the plays as well as others, but I still want to stop the ball. I want to do what I know I can do. I want to help my team. I want to add some value to life. I'm no longer the punk kid making excuses why she can't do things the way everyone is supposed to. I want to do what I'm supposed to, yet now I legitimately can't. Did I bring this upon myself by being that punk? Can a coward never be retrained?

Our identities should not be based on what we can do, but I still wonder. If I can't dribble well anymore, am I still a point guard? I have the talent, locked away, more locks being added against my will. If I can't take grounders, should I still be playing second base? My shortcuts, lacking raw talent, make me unreliable. If all I've ever written are simple songs, why pick up the guitar? I can't put in the time to get better. If I don't write, am I a writer? It's all in my head, waiting, but stuff stuck in people's heads never changed the world. If I can't do anything but eat, sleep, and exercise, why am I alive?

The answers lie in Jesus, and His Father, and the way they value life as life. But I don't understand it. No matter how many times I've rinsed the questions, how many times I've gotten revelations that seem to completely change the picture, this remains a chief question. I have a feeling I'm asking the wrong questions, but that doesn't get me closer to asking the right ones. What does God love so much about broken toys that seem like they'll never be fixed?

I'm not despondent; I have firm beliefs as to why I am still alive and that I shall remain so until God chooses otherwise. But in this place where the body parts fail one by one, healing does not appear to be right around the corner, and no amount of will or positive energy has seemed to make a difference, I am wondering not so much what my new reality is — I have grown used to it in recent months — but rather how I am supposed to approach it. Do you still dream? Do you still run out to second base? Do you still try to play pickup basketball against people you know are going to destroy you? Do you still pull out the guitar? Do you still sing songs in a strange land? If the key to this, as it is with everything, is to draw closer to God and to love Him for just Himself, what then is preferable, the seeker or the white flag? And how are you supposed to find the right questions, or find Him, when your brain is a brick?

The ball is coming in hot. I can see it. My encyclopedia of a mind knows everything about it. What kind of pitch hit what kind of swing, lending itself to what side of the field. I know why Derek Jeter consistently hit to that side, as opposed to the few times Mark Teixeira does (right-handed). I know who plays second base on dozens of major league teams, and who played before them, and before them. I know batting averages and Babe Ruth, home runs and Honus Wagner, left field and Larry Lucchino. But I don't know why my body won't get down and stop that ball. Why I'm mediocre. What being mediocre has to do with anything, including my character and identity. Why things as simple as softball are suddenly referendums on my life and purpose. Whether all that information in my head was a waste of time, or perhaps the cause of my current problems. Why nothing seems to work anymore, and I can't even care enough to check what I've done, to make sure it's clear, to try to get some good out of the rubble.

How to restart the engine. How to understand that an inability to function might be the whole point of the plan. How to fix something that is definitely broken but perhaps is not meant to be fixed.

The ball is coming in hot. Am I just supposed to go to the beach?

On Suffering

I've been dealing with some illness and pain for a while now. I don't generally tell people this or talk about it a lot unless they're good friends who really care, or unless they're annoying people who ask me why I'm not working or what I'm doing with my life. (Honesty!) The extremes, I suppose. It's trickled out enough now that plenty of people know, even if they don't know the extent. The others who don’t know — many of them good friends — would be sympathetic, I’m sure, but there’s just that part of me that hasn’t figured out how to tell them, or why.

I don't know completely why I don't talk about it tons, but I have ideas — I don't want to be a complainer, I don't want it to be the only thing I talk about even if it's the only thing I have to talk about, I don't want it to rule my life, I don't want undue attention when it's really my issue to handle, plenty of other people have (bigger) problems, I'm not sure people will understand, I don't want to be told how I'm supposed to deal with it, I'm easily tired by people asking if I'm better yet or if I've improved (no and no, and you have no idea), I'm afraid people just won't care, etc. I think the biggest reason is because, for a very long time, I thought I just had aches and pains like everyone else, and even when I knew it was more, I thought it would be gone soon enough, or I'd work through it. I don't have a terminal disease; ergo, get some bootstraps, and pull yourself up by them.

It's been going on for some time, though, and the tougher days are when I realize it's becoming my new reality not only in my body but also in my mind. I'm not going to wake up OK tomorrow. The next doctor's visit is not going to have the magic cure. This, and all its limitations and loss, could be my life.

Like any good American, go-getter, overachiever, or modern Christian, I made a plan and attacked the things that were keeping me down. I watched my friends lose weight on Facebook, and I treated sickness the same way, setting goals and coaching myself along. I've been reading Stuart Scott's Every Day I Fight, looking to glean some lessons from him punching cancer in the gut without quit. I've preached to myself about the power of positive thinking, of getting my head screwed on straight and choosing to overcome.

But there's a reason things like this are so hard to deal with — it's because they're hard. If they could be conquered just by some positive thinking or repeating a truth back to yourself, they wouldn't be the kind of things that change people's lives, that leave them in a funk for years or maybe change them forever. Pain, illness, and any form of suffering hurt. They attack, and the reason they hurt so much is because that's what they're geared to do. They control you in a way that makes you befuddled why they’re not gone, and why you couldn't take them down like any other problem. It's called suffering not because of the initial pain, discomfort, or displacement, but because of the prolonged siege it does on your soul. Something that anyone would look at from the outside — that you once looked at from the outside — and judge as a problem (but a problem that could be addressed with something akin to a 30-day weight loss program) has instead climbed deep into your heart and robbed you of things you're afraid you'll never get back. And you don't know what it means.

When I look back through the years I’ve been dealing with different forms of physical pain, it’s never the actual pain or limitations that really get me. The hardest part, by far, has been in the mind and the soul. I was shy for years about saying that I suffered, because I think that term should be reserved for heavy-duty pain. But now I accept it as a word that covers a lot of issues, and I think that we all suffer more than we admit. I think we all follow the path I did in some way — the denial, the attempt to be better, the hiding of our pain and faults, thinking we can get past them.

I unfortunately am not here to tell any sufferers how to get past their pain. But I do want to share some thoughts in the hope that one or two may be a lifeline similar to the ones I have grabbed at different times. This living study of suffering we all do is part of the larger relational aspect of life, and despite my years of waffling and staying silent, I’d be remiss not to share now, knowing that we all indeed do suffer and can go anywhere not by our bootstraps but by lifting each other up.

Waiting on Zion

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.

How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?

— Psalm 137:1-4


The best kind of hope, and waiting, is the kind that comes in so hard you have to catch your breath, because it’s at once exactly what you needed, yet you didn’t know how much you were waiting for it until it was there in a rush.

I’m waiting for that ultimate fulfillment of hope and waiting, and because I’ve seen it before, I won’t settle for less. I’ve experienced it only in small doses — the nights when the puzzle pieces link together to make wisdom in my head, the days when an opportunity drops from the sky, the times a clear path opens before me where only thistles lived before. Or those moments when I remember I’ve been wanting to call a friend, and I have a minute, and I call, and I suddenly remember what it’s like to be talking to someone who understands you completely, who thinks the best of you completely, who laughs with you completely. In it comes, that rush, and you feel silly for all the times you pushed it off, thinking life couldn’t be beautiful.

People want to know why I haven’t been writing, or when I’ll write again. I don’t write for the same reasons the Israelites hung up their harps.

But then there’s hope, and faith. Faith is believing things can be different. Faith is believing that no matter how many times something has turned out one way, you will get up the next morning looking for it to change. Faith is choosing to live even when life seems to have no purpose, praying for rain when the only clouds are the ones in your heart.

I’m not sure I have anything to say, or whether there are words to describe the thoughts I think are worth passing on. But I know the best way to keep hope alive is to share it — to recite the promises you’ve seen come true, to call the friend who reminds you that the God you have loved and love is not far off, to sing the songs through tears in a strange land.

Romans 5:5 says we shouldn't be ashamed to hope because we have God's love.

So I’ll write to remember God’s love, my only hope. Perhaps it will expedite the rush for all others who are marooned, wandering, stuck, broken, or just waiting.

Perhaps it will bring my rain.