I’m at loss about most things as of late,.
the last 5 years have thrown me into a whirlwind that left me fractured in so many ways that i will never fully recover from.
I found my old tumblr and started reading my drafts. i would regularly work out sermons and blog post exploring my faith and the teachings of Jesus I felt important to tell others about.
As i scrolled through these thoughts, like most things from my past, i felt an immense chasm in my chest. a huge gap that was placed there by the loss I have experienced the last 5 years. Mother, Career, Marriage, Light of my Life.
Losing Debbie (my mom) was something I thought could be the worst pain i’d ever imagine. so much so i was encouraged to grieve however long i needed to cope with the pain. I spent November 2015 to November 2016 grieving in the middle of a burnout related to my job at the time.
I found this incredible responsibility to have to perform for my church family. I was practically a pastor and people needed me. they looked to me as an example of faith. So the pressure to be perfect was there, most likely imposed on me by me. This pressure is why we saw a decline or drop off in “Christian” bands sometime around 2010. The world spent a large majority of the 2000s inadvertently deifying prominent faces in the music scene as the representatives of our own faith. As long as someone like Aaron Gillespie was living his faith out and living ‘perfect’ we could project ourselves through people like that and have no need to work on our own faith. If we just listen to their music, support their art, vote for them, whatever…our faith was real, because these figureheads were living the faith we couldn’t…or more so didn’t want to.
so while i’m grieving over my mom, i’m telling my wife at the time “people are going to expect one of us to be Jesus…it won’t be me.”
Imagine me carrying a box filled with all my broken toys, some shards of glass, a bunch of rocks from ‘ebenezers’ i’ve decided to not leave behind but keep for my own memory, and various other trinkets. Now imagine the woman i promised to love, cherish, protect, and support being given a giant backpack. I ask her to put that bag on her shoulders and then i proceed to dump all of that in the bag shoving even the box that carried these things into the bag.
My mom was my world, she was the first person to really validate me as a person. I’m constantly needing validation because i suffer from imposter syndrome and various other anxieties. the first source of validation is gone now. the one who believed in me even when i was a dumb kid who couldn’t do anything really. My mom made me believe she could see the future with how much she made me feel like i could or would accomplish. That clairvoyant caretaker was gone now. and even though i had been living my life with a wife and no longer being cared for by Debbie, i still felt this immense weight that i owed her for so much of who and what i’d become by then.
Like Chewbacca when he lost Solo
she was gone and I had not paid my lifedebt.
I was broken. Fractured legs, i crawled around looking for closure. What i would learn the next 4 years is that Closure isn’t real.
