My Story- Part 5

*There is nothing graphic or specific in the following post, but please do not read if you are an abuse survivor and triggered easily*

For anyone just joining in on my story, I start here. If you have been reading along with me for the last few weeks, thank you for being here. I did not know that some of this needed to be written, but as I wrote today’s the tears flowed, because the heaviness of what I have been delivered from was tangible to me. I pray that if you are in the same place, needing a burden lifted, this story gives you hope that Jesus can and will lift it.

Before I get to the emergent church and how that was a part of my journey, before I even tried to figure out if church held any truth for me anymore, there was college…

I will skip over my early college years, because in essence it was just a roller coaster of emotions and emotional decisions. I was good and then I wasn’t. Striving in my own strength to do the right thing and then failing miserably. I was a smoker. And then I quit. Then I would start again. And then I would quit. And well… you get the picture. The world had gotten a hold of me. I could create my own happiness. For a moment.

I went to a small evangelical school in a small town, and I met some lovely people there. But I was searching for my identity. I didn’t know who I was or who I wanted to be for that matter.

I moved back to Georgia, back in with my parents, to try to establish myself. Newly enrolled in a state school, I changed my major to English. I moved home to a church that seemed to be doing well, parents who seemed to be doing better, and I made a commitment that, at 20 years old, I would leave that life of searching behind. It was time I started acting like a Christian. And so all my problems would then be solved….or so I thought. In ways that can only be seen in retrospect, that year got kind of out of control. I did well for a few months, but towards the end of my first semester at my new college I met a boy. We’ll call him X. About this same time I found out about a real life affair of my father’s. I had already “messed up” a few times, but I started regularly drinking and smoking again, literally immediately. I remember calling two girlfriends on that same day and sitting outside on a bar patio. As I barely held it together, I ordered a vodka martini and literally chain smoked (I had just turned 21). Was my life a joke, I wondered? Could I trust anything? Or anyone?

I honestly don’t think this would be a big turning point for me, had I not just met X. I might have just been able to lean on my friends and hear wisdom from one of the few mentors I found. But oh, how my new relationship became a situation. He wasn’t always a villain. He could be kind and fun, he liked taking me new places. We went out for sushi (my first time!) and out on his parents boat. The beginning of our relationship was good. When he wasn’t drinking things were fine, he might make the occasional remark about my weight or my smoking, he might demean me at times or try to embarrass me, but I could deal. However, when he drank, things could become quite dark. I had never been scared of a man before, but by the end I feared him. I knew that he was capable of saying and doing hurtful things when he drank too much. And finally, I knew that if I stayed I would be damaged somehow.

My last night with him I quietly tiptoed down the stairs, so at to not wake him. I had waited for him to pass out, fearfully wondering if I would make it out of the room without a physical scar. I had been drinking, so I laid on the kitchen floor with my face against the cold tile and called a friend to come and get me. Thank God she answered and she came, no questions asked. The next day he didn’t even remember. So, I thought about going back to him, and I listened to him cry, with regret at the thing that he couldn’t remember. I don’t think he was scared of losing me as much as he was just scared of losing anything. But, I gathered every ounce of courage I had and left that relationship with a little dignity still in tact. Much later I almost did go back to him, but I didn’t.

However, I was scarred. And I didn’t know how to cope. The years that ensued were me trying to cope. And I did well at times. But others I very much didn’t. Bad decisions (and another very bad relationship) led the way to a sexual assault when I was 22. I was “hanging out” with a friend of a friend for a second time and I had simply drank too much to fight any harder than saying “no.” It wasn’t my fault, I know that now. But I also know I never would have been in the time and place and mindset for it to happen if I wasn’t “coping” through self-medicating and being in places I knew I should not be.

I walked around for the next few months in a kind of fog. The day I graduated from college was not a happy day. The depression had reached a level where I had to force myself out of bed. Force myself not to cry. I felt like an actor in the play of my life. I remember driving up to my surprise party and realizing what was happening and my heart dropping, I now had to fake it in front of 50-odd people? I already felt at my capacity faking it for my parents, and now I know they too were doing the same, trying to force something to work for their kids. I was hurting and graduating from college made it all the more real. What was I to do now? Where was I to go?

The Lord works everything for the good of those who love Him, though. And so now I am able to say there is hope and there is healing for women who have suffered at the hands of an abusers, for those who have struggled to walk away. I know because I have experienced it. He can make the desolate fields green again. The broken He makes beautiful. But even at the time, as I struggled with depression, to keep myself together on the outside so no one could see that deep down I felt broken, I knew I was missing something, and I would come to discover in time that that something was Jesus.