I Thought Accepting It Would Make It Easier

This isn't happening. This isn't real. This is not my life.

I said it in the shower. In the car. Lying awake at 3 in the morning doing math that didn't add up to anything.

Just bargaining with a God I wasn't even sure was listening, for a reality that was never going to change.

Nobody tells you how long that part lasts.

When something falls apart, there's a stretch right at the start that goes on so much longer than anyone admits to.

We pretend it's short. Like you get the news, you cry for a night, and then you're "accepting it." (We love that word. Accepting. Like it's one good afternoon and a journal entry.)

Mine was not an afternoon. It went on way longer than I'd ever want to tell you.

I was embarrassed by how long I kept knocking on a door that was already locked.

Then at some point, and I couldn't tell you the exact day, the begging just ran out. Not because I made peace with it.

But because I ran out of gas. There was nothing left to throw at it. And I had to sit down inside my own life and actually say it…Okay. This is real. I don't get out of this one.

Which sounds like the saddest possible place to land.

It wasn't, weirdly.

Because the second I stopped pouring every ounce of myself into getting out, I got back all this energy I didn't know I'd been spending.

And the question changed. It went from how do I escape this to okay, how do I actually do this.

I couldn't change one thing about my circumstances (trust me, I tried) but I could change how I walked through them.

And that one shift is the thing that finally let me breathe.

So that's the reel I shared on instagram. That's the clean version.

Here's the part I left out.

Accepting it didn't make it easier.

I think I secretly believed that once I stopped fighting, the hard part would soften. That being the bigger person would start to feel like less.

I'd read all the stuff about how it's a muscle, how you train it and it gets stronger and the weight gets lighter. So I waited for it to get lighter.

It's been over three years. It does not get lighter.

What happened is I got better at carrying it. Which is not the same thing, and nobody tells you that.

Being the bigger person still costs me something every single time I choose it.

Doing the right thing when everything in me wants to do the other thing is just as expensive on day one thousand as it was on day one.

I just put it down less. The weight is identical. My hands are just stronger.

That's the whole “upgrade”, if you will.

And I find that genuinely disappointing.

I can do the right thing and still be annoyed it's asked of me at all. Turns out those two fit in the same hand more than people let on.

So now I'm holding two things that don't seem like they should go together.

I'm not begging anymore, and there's a real peace in that, the kind I know I didn't manufacture on my own. And also it still sucks, regularly, in ways I don't always have the energy to explain to anybody. It's exhausting in a way my imagination (before this) could have never grasped.

Both of those are true on the same day. All the time. tbh, usually the same hour.

There's a part of the wilderness story that gets me now. The Israelites are out in the desert, years of it, stuck somewhere they never asked to be.

And every morning God sends manna. Provision, enough to survive on, right on time.

And they're still miserable, because surviving on bread you didn't ask for, in a place you never wanted to be, is not the same as being okay.

I used to read that and think they were so ungrateful. Now I just think I get them. The manna is keeping me alive. I also think it tastes awful. Both.

I don't have the bow for this one. I can tell you I've decided to believe what's true about God even on the days my feelings come in louder than my faith, because saying you believe the Bible and actually being held up by it turn out to be two pretty different experiences, and I'm still learning the second one.

I can't tell you it stopped hurting.

Because. It didn't.

So anyways…I'm still in it. I'm just not knocking on the locked door anymore.