Tag Archives: Forgiveness

Authority

16 Sunday Apr 2023

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When I was a Christian it was easy to do things to help others in a way that felt very monumental; after all, I was doing God’s work. Believing yourself to be a direct conduit between God and others is pretty major.

I walked in, what Christians like to call, “authority.” I had the authority of God with me. What I did, what I said, it was greater than myself, it was done with a believed God-given authority.

The belief that I was part of something bigger, that I had a “calling,” and that I was doing “God’s work,” gave me the confidence, or the imagined authority, to get involved in situations and in people’s lives that could seem, and does seem to me now, to be intrusive.

One thing I realized many years ago, when I first became an atheist, was how Christians use the idea of prayer as a free ticket to pry into people’s lives, and make assumptions.

I was taught to “pray with authority,” even though you know that you can’t tell God what to do. Part of being a responsible pray-er was to be as specific as possible. Therefore, it was important to know specific details about people’s lives and struggles, in order to pray for what was needed with more authority.

One thing that has not changed for me since becoming an atheist, is my love and care for people. I still want to do what I can to help those around me live their best lives. I like helping and supporting people. I like being able to celebrate with them, or be there when they need a helping hand. But, this is much harder to do without this sense of “authority” behind me, without a feeling that I’m doing God’s work, and therefore am infallible.

I know better. I know and have witnessed how much harm can be done by those who try to help, but are not professionally equipped or trained to do so. I have experienced how “the power of God” has been an insufficient tool to deal effectively with complicated situations. The truth is, the “authority” under which Christians operate is dangerous because it gives the believer a sense of entitlement as well as a false idea of ones ability.

But, as I was trying to drift off to sleep tonight, I was missing this feeling of authority and wondering how things might be different if I still felt as though I had authority. Could I find somewhere else from which a sense of authority could be plucked? Can the authority to assume I have the answers to someone’s problem, or am a solution to their struggles be found in my humanity? Separated from a celestial being or deity?

As I finish up, I will be drifting off to sleep thinking about this: Can I conjure a similar feeling or level authority from the idea that who I am as a human gives me the authority needed to help who you are as a person, not because some God exists and says so, but because my humanity can reach out to yours and find common ground?

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The Best of Times/The Worst of Times

12 Wednesday Apr 2023

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I frequently have dreams that place me in various times and places of my “previous lives” with people I haven’t seen for years.

There was, what is now, a short period of my life that has had an enormous impact on me. By the amount of emotional and mental baggage it has left, you would think it spanned more than 15 years, when, in reality, it was around 5.

Spanning the years between (roughly) 2001-2007, I lived an incredibly exhilarating and intense life that left me feeling burnt-out, beat-down, and deflated. Though, not right away. Some of this settled-in over the years as I reflected on the life that I have lived, the experiences I had, and how horribly underprepared and unqualified I was for so many moments I found myself living.

I’m going to attempt to unravel this time of my life that has kept me tied in knots for over 15 years now.

This is me just putting it out there and starting the process for myself.

Watch this space.

Confessions of a Facebook “Creeper”

04 Wednesday Jan 2017

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I admit it. I search for people all the time who aren’t my friends on Facebook. Usually, this happens during bouts of nostalgia when I find myself thinking about the people with whom I grew-up and wondering where they are, what they are doing, what they look like and how happy they appear.

I want to compare where I am, what I’m doing, what I look like and how happy I am with my childhood friends. I am always relieved and slightly joyous when I see that there has been weight gain, wrinkles, weariness…good. It’s not just me.

There are many people with whom I wish I had kept more regular contact. People with whom I am no longer “friends” – not even on Facebook. Sometimes I creep these people to see what life is like for them. I did this yesterday and spent a considerable amount of time looking at a few childhood friends and I was genuinely glad to see how happy they appeared. I was pleased that they had experienced adventures, travel, fun, love and beauty.

I considered sending a few friend requests, but got lost in thoughts of how it would be perceived by these people. I suffered from depression for most of my time in high school. This was before depression was really understood, talked about or treated. But, the biggest casualty of my depression was my social life. I withdrew from all of my friends and lost most of those relationships. One of the biggest hangers-on of this time period is embarrassment. I feel embarrassed all the time about how I was and I assume that people remember me in a negative light.

I was moody, judgmental, shy, confused, lonely and lost.

During these years my FB posts would have be the kind that you just get tired of seeing so you block the person so you don’t get the constant drone of negative status updates in your feed.

When I think about these years I am always overwhelmed with sadness for the many memories I have about stupid things I did as a result of my state of mind. I’ve been working on forgiving myself, and giving that girl a chance to heal and find acceptance; strangely, creeping on Facebook kind of helps with this. I’ve managed to ‘rekindle’ a few of these lost relationships and they have been extremely meaningful to me. Every time I send a request to a long, lost, friend and then we message back and forth a bit, and eventually just start to share life through the regular news feed, it helps normalize what feels like an extremely polarizing time for me.

I wish I could sit down with all of my old friends and have an open discussion about those years, explain what was going on in my world, express my regret for how I may have treated them, share my sorrow for all the lost time and then make-up for some of that time and move-forward as friends again.

My mind is full of many happy memories with them. I remember hours and hours of time spent together, laughing, talking about boys, playing stupid games, sleepovers, doing makeup, playing sports, passing notes in school…I see snapshots in my mind of us together on hammocks, acting cool at school dances, playing flag football, flirting and silly things like stuffing our shirts with balloons. The memories are full and rich.

But, then there are years where the memories are filled with pictures of school dances, football games, pep rallies and lunches filled with all these faces growing and enjoying life—but mine is not with them. These memories haunt me like shadows. Life was happening all around me, but I wasn’t in it.

So, I creep on facebook. I try to fill-in some of the gaps. I reach-out. I rekindle. I make progress.

I am so thankful for those friends with whom I’ve managed to reconnect because, the truth is, the folks with whom I grew-up really do mean a lot to me. They were the people that helped shape me into who I am today. They were my original cheerleaders, challengers and role-models. They were my squad, my family, my community. They exist in my memory as a deep and vast resource of life, joy, sorrow, lessons-learned, new experiences, comfort and friendship and I am so thankful for the ability to creep into their lives now and get a little piece of what once was.

Two Hearts

29 Monday Feb 2016

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According to the article “16 Habits of Highly Sensitive People”:

1. They feel more deeply. One of the hallmark characteristics of highly sensitive people is the ability to feel more deeply than their less-sensitive peers. “They like to process things on a deep level,”… “They’re very intuitive, and go very deep inside to try to figure things out.”

I suppose this was always apparent in me.

When I was a kid I used to know, intuitively, that I was supposed to love and care for every person that crossed my path.

When I was 13, I went for a 2-hour walk giving a heated speech (to no one in particular-I lived in the country and there was no one around for miles) about how homosexuals should be welcomed into society freely and without judgement. It was 1993 and I had just seen “And The Band Played On”. It infuriated me-made my blood boil. I couldn’t rest.

As if middle school wasn’t difficult enough, when I entered high school it was as if I had entered a war zone. I was completely lost.

I took every comment, every glance, every shrug, every snide remark, personally-whether, or not, it was even directed towards me.

And, as my teachers were starting to expose us to more world issues and intense literature, I found myself spiraling into a deep, dark place.

My English teacher used to tell me that I needed to learn to have “two hearts”.
He would say: “Heather, you need to learn to have two hearts. One to care for yourself and one to place all the care for the world that is constantly weighing you down.”

For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to do with that advice.

I still don’t know.

me at mike and dans

I have one mind. It is me. For all its greatness and all its weakness. It is what it is.

I feel things deeply. Intensely.

I can’t really explain it. Try this: think of the deepest, most intense, moments of your life: childbirth, marriage, your most intimate sexual experience, a time you felt seething anger, moments of ecstasy, etc. and multiply it by 10.
That’s how I feel about 10-20 things every day.

A memory that rises from the recesses of my brain.
A car that cuts me off as I’m crossing the street.
A careless comment uttered by my husband.
A smile from my baby.
A scene in a tv show.
The feeling of the air as it hits my skin when I step outside.
The smell of toothpaste…

It doesn’t take much to bring me into a deep, introspective, place.

High School is known for being a tough place for everyone. But, it really did almost kill me. And this is one of the reasons why.
I was being exposed to more of life and the world, but given little help in how to process and handle it all.
And so, I have spent every day since I left that hell-hole, trying to come to grips with it all.

I still have a long way to go.

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I’m Sorry. So Sorry.

26 Friday Feb 2016

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Back during one of my previous attempts at blogging, I talked about being a “highly sensitive person”.

I had found this blog on Huffington Post and it resonated with me:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/26/highly-sensitive-people-signs-habits_n_4810794.html

I’ve been thinking about #6 quite a bit lately: An HSP (Highly Sensitive Person) is “more upset if they make a ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’ decision.”

My husband will be able to attest to the fact that I do not say “I’m sorry” very easily. This can often be misunderstood as me not being sorry. But, the truth is exactly the opposite.

The problem, and I try to explain this to him (though, I don’t think he ever believes me), is that I feel so sorry and horrible for what I have done that it’s difficult for me to talk about it.

The Huff Po article says “You know that uncomfortable feeling you get after you realize you’ve made a bad decision? For highly sensitive people, ‘that emotion is amplified because the emotional reactivity is higher’”.

Here’s an example of how this works for us HSP’s from an experience I had just this morning.

When I was changing my son’s diaper I found that he had pooped at some point, most likely, during the night and it had started to squish out of his diaper. When I removed the diaper, I noticed that, because he had been sitting in it for so long, his skin was beat red. Here is what happened in my brain:

He probably did it right after we put him down last night when he was fussing.
Why did I ignore him?
If I had gone in and checked on him this wouldn’t have happened.
It’s my fault his bum is all red and sore.
I tortured my child all night long because I’m lazy.
I’m a horrible person.
I don’t deserve forgiveness.
I don’t deserve to be loved.
With all of that going on in our brains, can you really blame us for struggling to say “I’m sorry”?

The ability to move through these thoughts and say “I’m sorry” is further stymied if the person we have hurt has a strong reaction to what we have done.

For example: I drop a can of peaches on my husband’s foot and he instantly screams in pain and shoots me a dirty look. Here is what happens in my brain:

What’s wrong with me?
I’m a stupid klutz.
Now he hates you (judging by the look he just gave you).
Why are you so dumb?
You can’t do anything right.
I’m a horrible person.
I don’t deserve forgiveness.
I don’t deserve to be loved.

What’s the solution? Should we just be ‘off the hook’ and not have to say “I’m sorry” ever again?

I don’t think so.

I’ve been working on being able to apologize by first of all, trying to explain what is happening in my head at the time so there is an understanding of what I’m facing. I also practice self-talk in my head and try to formulate something to say that, may not be the words “I’m sorry” but mean the same thing, with the hopes that, one day, I will be able to actually just say the words.

Until then, if I’ve hurt you in any way, please accept my apology and know that I’m working on being able to say I’m sorry for the next time I (inevitably) hurt you.

Prom

25 Thursday Feb 2016

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To this day I can’t remember what kind of reasoning or excuse I must have given to my  prom date (who also happened to be my brother) when I drove us to my teacher’s house before heading to the prom.

This action is something that plagued me with intense self-disdain and embarrassment for years.

‘How completely ridiculous am I that I did something like that?’

As an adult I can understand why I did it and I have been telling myself to cut the teenage me a break.

My home life was not stable and could be fairly volatile at times. This teacher was one of the few people in my life that made me feel safe.

I was attending prom despite the fact that I desperately did not want to go. I had never been interested in attending a prom. But, it seemed important to my mother that I attend, and then my brother offered to go with me and I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings or let anyone down (see my “People Pleaser” post).

Because I felt like I had zero control over anything and was about to walk into a world that I believed would chew me up and spit me out like I was yesterday’s gum, I needed to see a friendly face.

I went to his house to get some confidence.

If he said that everything was going to be great and that I looked lovely, then just maybe, I could survive the horror that lay-before me.

When I look-back on photos of my prom I’m always struck by how much I look like the ghost of an old grandma who died on the way to a wedding. Truthfully.

Our prom theme was, perhaps, the most disgusting theme ever used for a prom: “Truly, Madly, Deeply” based on that, ‘oh so amazing’ (makes me want to puke to this day), song by ‘Savage Garden’. We didn’t walk in the grand march, but I think we watched everyone else doing it as that horrible song played over and over and over again.

While at prom I did have some fun, despite myself. My brother and I danced a fair amount. He was incredible and kept saying things like: “Let’s show these assholes how to dance’.

I think I ditched him pretty unceremoniously at the end. I can’t really remember the chain of events, but I don’t think I stuck-around prom for that long. I remember going to a friend’s house afterwards and eating a crap load of junk food while watching a movie or something.

Most of me just wanted to forget that the whole, horrible, night had ever happened.

But, years later, after being able to forgive myself for the stupid things I did when I was a lost teenager, searching desperately for security, acceptance and self, I think back on my prom and the words that come to mind are not that it was lame, torturous, unimportant or stupid.

Now, when I think about that night, these are the words that float to the top: My brother is amazing. He loves me so much that he was willing to do that for me.

And, we really did show those assholes how to dance.

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