To be me, broken and all.

I've been a bit restless these past few weeks, especially last night.  I didn't fall asleep until 3am. I couldn't shut my brain down enough to sleep.  And this is not always the case, but usually is something that comes when something big has happened.

I know many techniques of calming myself down, and sometimes they work and sometimes they don't because I can overpower that if something is really affecting me so much. In some ways, I find this helpful because it helps me to realize that I need to take time to process and can't just get by anymore.

And that's where I'm at. A lot has happened since Thanksgiving, and its fascinating and terrifying and challenging all at once. I finally spoke up about something that has plagued me for years. With it players played just so in a way that I knew I was no longer crazy.  That this needed to be done and I need to break to be changed.  I couldn't keep it together anymore, and that hadn't been happening for a while, I also couldn't be silent anymore. Because the silence was making me feel misunderstood.  Not that I'm ever understood, but anyway. So I wrote a letter saying how things were.

And I felt at peace doing that, but now I feel like I'm waiting and am in this weird place that if I started something I would just be pulled back into the painful disfunction. But now I'm sitting her questioning motives and trying to see where to go next and it just feel big. Like I recently noticed that to be an authority, I feel like I'm being mean every time. And I'm thinking this comes from not being assertive in my life until now. But how do you figure out if you are being mean or assertive when you have only known how to bend over backward not to make someone blow up in your face about something? It makes the whole Christianity bits of being our brother's keepers and watching out for one another be messy things in your mind.  Because enabling isn't helping, or watching out for someone even if it appears that way from the outside. And setting boundaries against hurt isn't blaming someone its taking ownership that this is more than you can handle.

Maybe, though, maybe its not my job to predict someone's reaction. And maybe that's where I'm struggling.  I still want to accommodate someone else's reaction, which I can't do.  I feel very selfish in saying that I need to think of only what I'm trying to communicate, but maybe that's not selfish?  Maybe, its just that I'm skewed in my thinking that I perceive it this way.

One more thing, in a way, I have been thinking that it would be nice to have things work well already. To lament that this is terrible and just be angry, but maybe, I just need to be in this brokenness. That this is where I'm going to see Jesus right now. That this is where I can feel his love, not in the perfect but in the imperfect.  And maybe there will be growth there as well.  One day it would be nice to be able to look back and see this as something that I can be an advocate for that one can get through this, but I'm not there yet, and that's got to be okay too.