The stories we tell ourselves are powerful.
It is my desire to make faith stories of the inner struggle with #OCD and #anxiety more accessible, so I start by sharing my own story. This is just part, just one angle, and just the beginning. I am a little nervous to share it. I do not know what you will think. Maybe you will find me a heretic. Maybe you will find me dull. Worse still, maybe no one will read it.
I choose to accept this risk, because I think it just might be worth it.
Stories Help Us Make Meaning of Our Lives
In 2019 I graduated with a master’s degree in Spiritual Formation, and my focus theme was children’s spiritual formation. I have been a Director of Children’s Ministry for nearly six years and struggled with the disconnect between the mechanics of typical children’s ministry curriculum/programming and what children really need in order to grow and develop spiritually. I set myself on a quest to develop or discover a life-breathing path for children. As I began reading about children’s spiritual formation, repeatedly I came across those two words: making meaning.
Making meaning sounds a little strange at first, as if we can create something that is not ours to make. Something either has meaning, or it does not, right? After reading thousands of pages of children’s spiritual formation literature, I came to understand what was meant by the short phrase making meaning.
Telling the Wrong Story
I recently discovered that although I am introspective and constantly in my head, I do not know myself very well. It was studying children’s spiritual formation which began slowly to exchange the lens through which I have come to know myself and understand my life. I came to realize how much I am and always have been a storyteller. Original fiction stories are not my specialty, but I have grown into an expert at telling myself fictional stories about my life. Like all good fiction, my stories have been grounded in enough truth to make them believable, and these stories sculpt the lens out of which I see and experience the world.
In our culture, storytelling is often associated with children, and we fail to recognize the myriad of ways we have and are continually shaped by stories. Stories allow us to process life, and when I stopped to take a good look, I could see the storytelling pattern in my own life – both how I have used story to process events, difficulties, and epiphanies, and how I have told myself countless harmful stories. In this way, it is the stories we hear and tell ourselves again and again that shape our lives, perhaps much more than the facts we learn and encounter.
Facts are perhaps useless until we process them into stories.
My default self-storytelling mode is destructive, and until recently I was unaware I was telling myself fiction and not truth. Drawing quick conclusions without stopping to think about other possibilities has left me spinning my own personal tale into the worst possible version of my life. I assume I know why other people do what they do in relationship to me, and I have even believed I know exactly what they are thinking and feeling – typically drawing upon the worst of myself to ascertain their motivations. I assume the worst and grieve all that I am and all that I am not.
The list of everything bad that I am and everything good that I am not is long, and the stories of my inadequacies have ploughed a well-worn path for my journey. I am so familiar with my flaws, and though I am uncomfortable being put on the spot, I could answer the question “what is wrong with you?” without missing much of a beat. It boils down to one simple truth:
I am not good enough.
A good Christian will tell you no one is good enough; so in my faith community, this is not really much of a harmful life mantra. Perhaps this explains the emptiness we all pretend we do not feel. I have never been very good at finding that sweet spot between relying on my own efforts and resting myself in God’s goodness. I find the teaching that goes “I am not good enough, but God is, and He has covered me, so all is well” to be hallow, empty. I wonder if perhaps God has here been misunderstood.
I used to know for certain that God exists. I believed this faith to be a divine gift from my Father who loved me. I believed this conviction to be unshakeable - the very essence of the marrow in my bones. God exists. He is good. He would do for me what He has done for others if it was not for that flaw within me which makes me fundamentally less than everybody else.
Certain goodness and certain brokenness. One to hold in each hand. Mine to hold forever. Backbreaking weight holds me hunched in the dust. Certainty. My gift.
Beyond Childhood Fears and the Sin of Worry
When I was a child, I was terrified of house fires. I feared armed robbers, the creeping monsters of my nightmares, and hell. My body would go weak and my heart race when I was left alone in a room with just one other person. The unbearable silence of these encounters left me with little doubt of my puny worth. I could feel the palpable pain of the discomfort I caused others who had the misfortune of being alone with me. I quickly came to understand the big favor I did for the world by keeping to myself, looking down, and avoiding eye contact.
As I grew, some of these fears stood true and others were replaced by new fears. I remember wondering how other people found any joy in life when so much pain, sorrow, heartache and tragedy loomed large.
Turns out I struggle with OCD and anxiety. Small enough to go undetected for thirty plus years and big enough to wreak hidden havoc on my life. No one ever told me anxiety was anything other than the sin of worrying. I had no idea some people have a malfunctioning brain that sends fight or flight signals when no real danger is at hand. No one ever told me there was a way out other than prayer and doing a better job of trusting God.
Becoming Less Than Certain
My certainty of God cracked for the first time in college when I was 19 years old. I took a couple philosophy classes which challenged the logic of free will and left me deeply grappling with the goodness of a God who would allow people to suffer in this life and beyond if free will cannot exist. I eventually came to realize I could not penetrate this mystery and accepted the uncertainty of this unsolvable problem. I held tightly to God’s repetitive goodness toward me and to my experiences of Him and made a little space for the unknowable. My certainty perhaps had a little more space, but soon grew back as strong as ever.
At the time, I did not realize there were clinical terms for what I was doing.
The certainty cracked again when I was 30 and pregnant with our second daughter. I remember praying on our bedroom floor on my knees terrified by the possibility that God may not exist. I sat there in agony, believing my life and faith to be crumbling and feeling full out despair. The moment passed, and I believed myself to be in a moment of spiritual warfare.
For the next six years, more moments of doubt came to sit with me. Sometimes they came with agony and other times with emptiness. Sometimes they came as surreal moments where everything I have ever believed felt empty and lifeless.
Through it all, I grasped at the air, hoping to catch a handful of that certainty that once held my heart both secure and thoroughly wrecked.
Soon, the moments of doubt began to settle in as my new home. The moments of certain faith flittering in and out. For several months now just moments before being subdued by sleep, I bolt up in bed with a clenching fear that I have simultaneously failed to stay connected to God and that God does not exist after all.
For much of my life, certainty has been my gift, and it has been my curse. The time has come to face uncertainty head on. Four months ago, I realized I have always struggled with OCD and anxiety, and I began to rewrite my story. Perhaps your story needs rewritten as well. The work is hard and perhaps a little dangerous, but I am finding it a necessary part of finding the light once more.
Until next time, may God hold us close both in darkness and in light,
Jen
The stories and meanings here are my own stories and my own experiences. While I do hope they help you on your own journey, they are not therapy or a replacement for therapy. I am not a therapist, and nothing here should be used as a replacement for professional services.
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