10 things I could tell you

hope, dermatologists and feeling like a fraud

This format is a mash up of Laura Tremaine’s “10 Things to Tell You” and the “Five Things” essay prompt that

Summer Brennan

used in the first two days of her November Essay camp. I’m reading along with the prompts and may use them as springboards for my weekly posts, but don’t worry, I definitely won’t be posting an essay a day!

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1. I could tell you that healing processes are messy. I would tease out the metaphor of my recent tongue tie surgeries, and explain how much I dread pulling open the wound to stretch it open, but how it hurts just as much when I don’t stretch it - just differently and without the benefit of mobility. I could tell you that it healed too quickly and they took a laser and cut it open again. The wound wasn't as deep the second time, but I still had to stretch it wide open till my eyes watered and I almost couldn’t bear it. It was better than it healing shut the wrong way. Five times a day I made myself visit the whole range of motion, the desire for full function bigger than my fear of pain. I don’t know whether I’m talking about my tongue or something else. How many times do you have to mobilize the scar tissue before it’s finally healed? Does it ever heal? Is the goal just that the scar moves along with the rest of our body? And why does the healing process end up taking longer when you rush it? The same quick healing that makes you so resilient sometimes means you skip a step in the process. Does healing always require laser sharp cuts?

2. I could tell you that the liturgy is a lifeline. I might explain that when I’m angry at the world I can still be held in the rhythms of confession, prayer and communion. I would tell you that I find great solace in being able to separate the man standing in front of the church from God¹. I would tell you that I believe the means of grace are more than theological statements, even if I don't know why or how. That I am grateful. And that the gratefulness exists with frustration and drudgery and all the pains of being in a church with human beings.

3. I could tell you that I thought I might have killed my sourdough starter this week. I pulled the towel off to see a withered and crinkled mass in the bottom of the jar. I worried for a minute, but I was immediately comforted by the knowledge that I have shared that starter with at least ten people and one of them would surely share if mine couldn't be revived. Perhaps holding hope for each other is the equivalent of sharing sourdough starter. I'm feeling pretty withered and crinkly, but perhaps it's not all on me to keep myself going. If I find I can’t be revived, maybe a friend will share my own hope back to me. Maybe that’s why we need each other.

4. I could tell you how, for the last six months I've gotten skin cancer every night at 10 pm. 10:30 pm if I'm brushing my teeth on the later side. And, that while I know I can sometimes get stuck in health related OCD loops, I also decided it would be a prudent kindness to myself to get the spot checked. I visited the dermatologist today and the words “basal cell carcinoma” were thrown around before a mole was shaved off my face. Now I wait for biopsy results and next steps. I could feel foolish for not going sooner, but as someone with a lot of health anxiety, and a complicated history with doctors it’s so hard to know which problems are hypervigilance and which are real. I can tell myself all the things I know - it’s the least concerning kind, it’s a “simple procedure”, there’s usually not complications… and still, there’s a knot in my stomach because the word “cancer” was used in a doctor’s office.²

5. I could tell you that I figured out how to disable the internet browser on my iPhone. ³I would tell you that it’s already stopped me from looking up scary statistics ten times in the few hours since getting home. I am learning again and again how my quest for information is just a way I try to convince myself I’m safe. Sometimes knowing more doesn’t change things. Sometimes the facts still don’t make sense, no matter how you explain them. Life refuses to fall into tidily researched categories and I wonder: will I ever learn to pray first? How long will it take until I get to the end of myself and admit I’m not in control?

6. I could tell you about all the feelings brought up by this post from my friend

   Aimee Guest
   . I might tell you that pain and illness are both a curse and a hiding place and the pressure of being well is almost too much sometimes. That when Jesus asks the man, “What do you want?⁴” I understand why he’s probing. Do we want to be made well? I’ll never know the answer to that question, but I think Aimee’s husband lands on good advice: “You don’t have to do anything else… Just stay curious.”

7. I could tell you I’ve been thinking of the lines from a poem I wrote several years ago.

   Bodies keep score.

   Oh, how I wish mine forgot!

   Let me be in denial,

   I plead. Just this once

   let me go without your reminders.

   There may be wisdom in the remembering

   but I am too angry to listen.

   I might tell you that there are times of year when my body rebels, and I’m in one. That I’m trying to listen patiently, but I’m angry too. That I’m tired of needing to listen, that as much as I’m grateful for my body for being so truthful, I wish I could listen before things got painful. I might tell you that I don’t know how to untangle the “damned if you do and damned if you don’t” from this scenario, and that noticing patterns doesn’t fix them.

8. I could tell you that I noticed I’ve been skipping over quoted scripture in everything I read and I'm not sure why. Am I afraid that I’ll be bludgeoned with words meant to comfort? Or am I avoiding truth I need to hear? Both? I hear the words in church, I read them at home, and in the end I think I’m afraid that people will try to reduce complexity down to black and white thinking. Sometimes I see someone holding a verse and I’m afraid they’re going to throw it at me, or that it’ll be shoved down my throat like a gag order. Then I wonder how often I do this same thing to other people. We want to tie a bow on our problems, but that’s not ever what the Bible does is it? “You have heard it said, but I say to you…” Over and over Jesus disrupts.

9. I could tell you that in the midst of what feels like a messy season of internal renovation, I am so grateful for the gift of laughter. I would tell you that the two year old has me in stitches and the baby thinks she’s going to walk before 9 months, and she might even be right. I might even tell you that my nine year old rewrote the ending to the “Prodigal Son” and the prodigal was Bill and the neighbor was Hank and the older brother was so mad at his “good for nothing brother that he threw down his whip” and the cows didn’t get brought in⁵. I would tell you that my older two boys dressed up like Martin Luther as a joke, and we shaved their heads into Roman tonsures and everyone laughed. And I would tell you that parenting never ceases to surprise me and that same night I had to comfort a partially bald, tearful seven year old who needed to understand that the laughter meant it was a good joke, not that he was being made fun of. Later he told me that he was ready to get the rest of his hair shaved off too, because he “doesn’t play monks very often”.

10. I could tell you that the voice telling me I'm an imposter has been very loud lately. That when I sit down to write I'm afraid the people who read it will think I know things, when all I really know is how much I don't know. I'm afraid that my desire to be seen and successful will override my desire to be faithful. I'm afraid that one day I will wake up and find I didn't know what I was talking about. I'm afraid that perhaps I am not telling the truth, or that I'm not telling all of it, or enough of it, or perhaps I tell too much of it. I'm afraid my children will resent me for sharing too much, or that I will not share enough to be really known. I'm afraid people will see me. I'm more afraid they won't. I'm afraid of being discarded and I'm afraid of being kept. But I keep writing about it because it's the only way I know to keep going, and because when I think about stopping, I write essays in my head about that too. And I keep writing here because sometimes I need to reassure myself that I will not disappear. I wonder if this is a healthy outlet, but in the end perhaps I don't care. Perhaps I'm just writing because it allows me a memory of the future⁶. It allows me to Hope.

the snow has gone, monks in prayer (bedtime prayers that is), the most appropriate bandaid size I could find, she keeps letting go and standing by herself... just needs to keep up.

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Reading: I’ve been working my way through Simply Tuesday by Emily P Freeman and have been grateful for so many of the reminders. This one hit especially hard:

And before I can tease them apart my life becomes one defined by my failure and successes and I’ve forgotten who I really am. “Excellence” just becomes a more respectable word for “control,” which is a fancy version of “manipulation,” which is a physiological word for “sin,” and did I really just align “excellence” with “sin”? Maybe I did. Maybe I meant to.

When I’m performing for my acceptance, burnout is always the result. - p. 73

Listening: My house is very loud right now. I sent a voice message to a friend the other day and she laughingly told me to listen back, at which point I was surprised to hear the radio playing, the baby making pterodactyl noises and the boys shrieking back at her and carrying on their own conversation. It was deafening! All this to say, I have been turning noise off whenever I can. Sometimes even a podcast just feels like another person talking at me. Besides, then I overhear things like the two year old yelling, “Here you doooo! Here is cage! You want dooo in it? I make it! Hey!” (He was trying to lure the baby under his crib - I imagine she was supposed to be the animal in their game).

Wondering: Uh, why is making food so hard? I have no cares left. They all flew out the window sometime this last month and I’ve not been so unenthused about food in a long time. Currently I have two pounds of ground antelope thawing in the sink and sometime between now and about 7 pm I need to turn that into an approximation of dinner. Anyone want to share their favorite easy (gluten free, dairy free) recipes? (This could also have something to do with the fact that certain children ask me for a snack approximately a bajillion times a day and on occasion I want to respond not very kindly because oh my gosh, you've had seven snacks and I haven’t eaten breakfast yet and you are NOT starving, I promise).

Laughing: This post about low stakes burns had me reading the entire comment section. My favorites?

A friend of mine has a great burn whenever someone slightly messes something up or takes a long time. For instance if you fumbled opening a gate he’d wistfully go “ahh I remember my first gate” works in so many situations

and this one

My grandma had a withering look that she used when she said “you know, you could have talked all day and not said that”.

1. Our pastor is a wonderful man, and still, some days I need to pretend he is not here. He is a faithful, “safe enough” shepherd, but when I distrust all men and pastors, and walk into church with a grudge on my shoulder, I can rest in the liturgy itself before I come back to the people who say it with me.

2. It’s been a fall of family medical things that shouldn’t have been complicated but then were, or needed redone, or just ended up being more involved than expected. I’m sure it will be ok, but I’m just tired. And yes, this probably has to do with running in the sun without sunscreen or a hat for way too many years.

3. I would also tell you that I have some FEELINGS about the new Substack layout. Total bait and switch. I’m not surprised, but I’m grumpy. I’m doubling down… so my goal is to keep Substack completely off my phone and restrict it to the iPad that lives in the kitchen as my work/school computer. My goal is to make my phone a useful TOOL - I can still access docs, notes, podcasts and ebooks, which are the things most likely to bring actual goodness to my life if I’m stuck under a nursing baby. Or I can… sit still for a moment? be quiet? I think people used to do that (Though lets not romanticize too much because my grandpa always had the TV on full volume while also reading the newspaper and ignoring everyone in his house every time I saw him…)

4. Mark 10:51

5. We’re using a Classical Academic Press program called Writing & Rhetoric at our co-op and I’ve been pretty happy with it. It’s loosely based on the stages of the Progymnasmata. This exercise was from Narrative I.

6. I first heard this idea of hope as a “memory of the future” in a talk given by Christine Perrin. She quoted this idea from Gabriel Marcel’s “Metaphysics of Hope”.