Living in the Presence of NOW

Sometimes you have to fall in order to learn how to fly. And even though it may appear that your wings are broken there is always potential for strength, determination, faith, discipline and courage to grow. Growing up, I had a love and desire to be engulfed within the pure natural beauty of the outdoors. Often you would find me chasing fireflies in the heat of the summer night, dancing and kicking through the autumn colors of the fall, squishing my naked toes through the mud in the fall of the summer rain, and making snow angels in the cotton cloud glass snow flakes that would kiss and stick to my eye lashes. The ability to be one with the outdoors was my playground and still to this day there is nothing more that makes me feel more at peace with myself.

From a very young age, I had always felt a bit different from my peers. From the time I was able to dress myself, I wore two different colored socks, baggy shorts or tie dyed pants and a T-shirt that was covered in my father’s scent (for I consistently wanted to the comfort of knowing he was always safe and near by) And of course my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle back pack. I was what they called a ‘tom boy’. I would play chicken with the boys at recess, get chased around the play ground, and ride dirt bikes around the power lines with three neighboring boys after school. As I got older, I excelled in sports. Through high school, I traveled all over the country playing competitive AAU basketball and ASA softball, constantly looking to excel for it all came naturally to me. But one thing that was missing was that I didn’t see what everyone else saw in me. The beauty within that God had given me. I never felt beautiful and I used sports at a very young age in order to get outside of my own skin.

When I got to college I got into a division 2 school and was the starting center for their lacrosse team as a freshmen. Despite never picking up a lacrosse stick before in my life, my natural athletic ability took over. I consumed my life around practice, balancing my academics, and trying to fit in socially while still feeling a low sense of self, constantly itching to get out of my own skin of insecurity and self doubt. I was constantly looking to be better internally and externally but my stalky thick body from sports and my social category of ‘tom boy’ didn’t suit me well in college. I became trapped in a verbally and physically abusive relationship, with no sense of self, trapped of insecurity, numbness of built up pain over the years, perfection and the search for love and ‘self identity’. I had absolutely no idea who I was or who I wanted to be.

As time carried on and I grew up walking in my internal mind of self insecurity- it overtook my capacity for seeing ‘self love’ and ‘self identity’. I had failed in having any relationship with Jesus and for much of my pain, I blamed God for and would consistently ask him “why”? Hence, I turned into a downward spiral of self-sabotage. By my junior year in college I had transferred to another college with a concentration in kinesiology, was the starting center for D2 Women’s Lacrosse, All American Division 2 Basketball and Lacrosse Player, competed in Regional’s for Cross Country my junior year, as well as honors academically. My titles may have been viewed as accomplishments, but my body standing, 5’6 weighed in at 95 pounds by my junior year. My body was broken, raw, and frail– yet I continued to push on. Meanwhile, in the mix of it all, alcohol had become a social part of my journey. Drinking occasionally on the weekends felt like it opened a new door of acceptance, but my body could only handle so much. Yet there was a piece in the mix of it all that made me let loose and feel as though I was able to get “outside of my own skin” that I had been itching to get out of for years.

Reality finally sunk in one day when I was out for a run by myself, trying to get in my mileage during lunch break. I was working at an investment firm at the time in their personal fitness department as a trainer while also training myself in preparation to run a half marathon. At about the five-mile mark, I felt pain in my left hip and realized I couldn’t go any further. I thumbed a ride back to work and explained to my boss what had happened as well as the pain that I was enduring. My body was so depleted of energy and weakly malnourished that I had ran myself to physical brokenness. A trip to the ER the following morning by myself ended in my return home in a car with my father. I was groggy and unaware with crutches in hand, and an x-ray of my leg showing they had inserted a pin into the head of my femur to secure it from breaking more.

My body and my mind at that point had been physically crushed to a point of excruciating pain, and I was ordered to stay in bed. If you could only understand my limitations which were unseen to my own eye– I was up and moving two days later, walking two miles (with my crutches) to attend and support a Handicapped Sports Association cookout for the handicapped and disabled. Pain to me was an inevitable feeling of nonexistence. It took a lot for me to feel any sort of pain and as I got older I began to realize that it was more and more my own emotional pain that I was burying away over the years.

Scrolling the film forward a bit, it was in NH where I met my husband. We were both on ski patrol and in 2012 we got married. As my father approved and handed me off, I had opened a new door to the precious beautiful life that I had dreamed of. I was a fifth grade school teacher, a wife, a coach, an adaptive snowboard instructor, a leader in the community, a good friend, a writer… and yet, also a women who unconsciously was still trying to search for her inner self through obsessively stimulating endorphins in her mind to get the rush of feeling outside of herself. I was a woman with an ‘unquiet mind’ in need of silence. Which led me more often then not to the bottle rather then seeking and asking God for help.

Over the years of extensive hiking with my father, he had introduced me to wine as well as one of our favorite delicacies, whiskey. In the winter my father and I would hike with a flask, walk through the quietness of the woods, with white snow crunching beneath our feet and the sounds of our dog Tulla’s bell by our side. The growth of intellectual survival skills, conversations, map reading, compasses, and mountains to climb and descend sent me running.

My drive for success and perfection at every goal I had set in store for myself I wanted to accomplish was strong– family, marriage, knowledge, education, body image, road races, seeking and searching approval from others that I didn’t have the ability to seek within myself. I didn’t know how to love myself- nor did I believe that anyone truly loved me for me. My body felt like a machine with different buttons that were pushed in order to control emotions, physical movement, retain information, what to keep and what to let go of– my body was being fed by a form of self medication to subside the feelings that were killing me and eating away at me from the inside out.

While finally surrendering to the higher power of my understanding at the time, I made a commitment to myself to extend my arms and ask for help. At this point, I believed that there had to be someone up there looking down upon me. I committed to a program in New Jersey and was housed there for four months.

In the mist of it all, my grandfather passed away, I finalized my divorce, I landed a full time job as a landscaper, and I began to push through some of the pain that had been suffocated in my past through an analytically anxious sober life. At this point, I had gradually began to believe that there was a ‘Power Greater Then Myself’ and that there was someone up there looking down upon me. My ability to understand the pure existence of what it was, though, was unknown to me.

After about five months, I decided to relocate completely to New Jersey. During this time  I got a small apartment that was close enough for me to ride my bike to work and to the grocery store for that was my only transportation. We lived in a small apartment with a kitchen, a small dinning room, a mattress, a coffee table with two chairs, a couch, and a TV that I never turned on nor knew how to set up. I had gotten a job at a garden center. I did landscaping there and designed flower arrangements, worked with small walls, fencing, made hand-made wreaths and grave blankets, as well as sold Christmas trees. During this time, I also began to work on a book with a combination of my own journal excerpts and poetry called “Courage Dear Heart”. Many of my pieces had been written in notes on my phone and in my journal, which I kept at work in the back on a small table where I sat next to my boss. At this point in time my boss really had taken me under his wing and put me in a position where I could truly flourish. My job was going great, I was living a lifestyle that was content for me, and although I was happy, I still felt empty inside. Looking back upon it now I can see how Jesus was walking with me the whole time. It was that I hadn’t fully opened my arms, my eyes, and my heart to him.

As winter began to approach in 2014, I knew that I was going to have to find another alternative for my living arrangements as well as my job. The garden center was seasonal and I couldn’t file for unemployment hence I hadn’t been working long enough to collect. My boss started to become more distant from me for he also knew that there was really no way he would be able to help.

I began to fight the devil once again and at the time asking “Dear God, please help!” Meanwhile my Grandmother, in Massachusetts, offered for me to come live with her in the apartment next door to her house where her old office used to be. I made the commitment after the garden center closed to pack up my things once again and relocated.

Although I was in search of a place where I could call home, my addiction to alcohol had already run over me like a tsunami wave rushing its way through the painted waves of Picasso’s canvas that I had planned on laying out for my simplistically, beautiful life. In reality, I had realized God had other plans for me and it was time for me to stop resisting His way and instead, hold my hands up to him with faith and trust.

My grandmother’s home was located just in walking distance from a church, which was the same church where I was baptized as a baby. Growing up, I never really had developed a relationship nor a commitment to attending church on Sundays. It was more of a chore and something I was forced to do rather then pursued on my own. But when I relocated, I knew I needed a place where a community of people could surround me and embrace me exactly where I stood. A place with no judgment or criticism and that could love me for me unconditionally. As I searched among other churches in the area I came across another church. I asked My Grandmother on a Saturday evening if she would drive me to the local campus, which was just down the road. That morning, when I arrived I was welcomed and embraced with open arms, love, acceptance, and encouragement–n unconditional feeling of strength, love and faith. I knew that day that I no longer had to search for a place that I could call ‘home’.

Every experience that we go through in life has a purpose. We may not always recognize the positive things that are to come when we are up to our eyeballs with that feeling as though we are drowning in water of our own loss, guilt, or shame. It’s a matter of pulling and weaving through those times when you’re at your weakest point and reaching your hands up to God with faith and trust. Today, I do believe that my savior Jesus Christ has been walking with me hand-in-hand this whole time and I do believe that there is a true and genuine purpose for every experience that I have encountered, both good and bad. Both of which who have made me into the person that I am today. And today my purpose is to give back, to feel, and to live in the present moment of here and now.

When I was in fifth grade, I read a book called “The Giver” by Lois Lowery. The Giver gave Johan (the main character) emotions. Tears, joy, anger, sadness, excitement, and most importantly a sense of love. All my years of drinking, I was suppressing the pain by myself, medicating and destroying my internal perception of what it truly meant to be alive, to be human. Today I do feel. I know what it’s like to feel your heart ache so badly inside you that you just want it to be covered and blanketed by Band-Aids. I know what it’s like to feel every single emotion, action, presence of humanity, to breathe with every breath I take. I know what its like to hold a loved one’s hand as they take their last breaths. I know what it feels like to be alive today and have the courage in my Heart that God has gifted me with. And I know what it’s like to watch my own life flash right before my eyes.

Today, tomorrow, always- I am living in the presence of NOW. I have accepted Jesus Christ as my savior and I have accepted him as he has given me the keys that I need today to open the pages to the next chapter of my life– what a powerful gift of understanding and knowing that I no longer have to walk alone. That this journey that has been set forth in front of me has a purpose and that even at my weakest points, God knows that I can do it for He would never present me something that He didn’t think I could handle.

Today, I hold the keys to my journey and I carry my back with the most essential tools that I need to carry me along the way. And today I no longer walk alone… one of the greatest gifts that I could have picked up along the way is my Granite United Family. I am so blessed today to have the support and love through GU and the people who have stood by me through thick and thin. Today, it’s my time to pay my words and my story forward while serving God’s plan for me. To write, to share, to live, to inspire, to trust and have faith– to tell my story… let all those hear the glory and live within everlasting love with you.

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