To Create

I love writing. To be more specific, I love the feeling of creating something while writing... I found that I can get the same satisfaction from drawing or painting. I am not flawless in these activities, I've just learned that it's not the finished product that affirms me. It's in every key, every stroke... I allow my heart to take control and my imagination to explore. In my eyes the journey is the best part. With each project, finished or not, I learn something new about myself. The biggest stretch is to take that finished or unfinished project and share it. I mean, REALLY share it. When I first started writing I kept it all to myself. I would let my mom or dad read it, but I just said "glad you liked it" then ran back to my dimly lit room to sit in front of my desk top and "fix" what I wrote. They knew I was sensitive to criticism, so they rarely pried for what inspired me. That is, until I wrote about my spirituality for the first time. There is a popular devotional that has circulated most of my life about a room with filing cabinets and cards. If you don't know which one I'm referring to I can probably find it pretty easily. What I remember most vividly was how he read his sins from these cards that he found in the filing cabinet. But Jesus scratched out his name and replaced it with his own. Jesus took our place. I remember this was so impacting for me. I began writing about heaven... in detail. Reading passages that describe it and giving my own interpretation of it. How It felt to be in that place. I saved it to my computer and moved on to another project when I got a message from my dad. Our house had a shared network and my dad arranged my computer to automatically save all of my files to the network. He messaged me from his laptop down stairs and complemented my latest writing. I was a bit dumb founded. "How did you read that?" He briefly answered my question then wanted to talk some about my thoughts. I was frozen. In my mind, if i wanted to share my thoughts I would have shared them. I still don't know what those boundaries should have looked like, but I did learn something important that day. I am a creator. I have original ideas. I have thoughts and feelings that are unique to just Tab. And it's OK to share. Around January of this year I sat in a room with 75 strangers and realized what kind of standard I had been holding myself to. "I am an Untouchable, Unlovable, Smart-ass little girl who questions her relationship with God." Those words were painfully accurate to be honest. I was afraid of the life I had created, full of loneliness and bitterness. I had always found refuge in writing, but thanks-be-to-God a good friend loved me enough to kick me in the pants. I was avoiding sharing myself with people I loved by writing my thoughts online for the world to see. If my baggage was public knowledge, somehow that made it all less painful. I could numb it. As though I started saving my heart to the network on purpose so my family could read it... and I didn't have to be vulnerable. But how did things get that far out of control? How did I learn to own that title? Who taught me that I was untouchable? Who told me i was unlovable? I don't mean literally... I mean to say, if I felt that way as a small child, where did I get that impression from? How I feel today as an adult is 100% my responsibility. But it doesn't always feel that way, does it? A woman who was abused as a child may grow up accepting that abuse is okay. She is now responsible for her actions, the people she surrounds herself with and the way she interacts with those she surrounds herself with. But where did she learn it was okay? A man goes to prison for burning down a building... but what you don't know, that man's father was also a pyromaniac. He gets all of the responsibility for his actions as he should, but his view of right and wrong was severely clouded by watching his loved ones approve of that behavior. I felt I was untouchable because I was molested as a child. After that happened, all physical touch made my skin crawl. I pushed people away and silently sabotaged relationships because I couldn't stand being touched. Because I shut out physical touch and simultaneously pushed people away, i felt unlovable. Because I felt distant and unlovable, I became bitter and communicated through hateful masks, pushing people even further away... eventually my relationship with God also fell casualty of this downward spiral. But deep down inside it was all linked to an encounter with a man who took advantage of me. But you know what? That man was probably hurting too. Pain begets pain. An apple tree doesn't bear grapes. IF you want to do something different, it helps to trace your habits back to where your pain came from. But if I want to change my habits, I need to leave that pain where it is... in the past. I can't run around saying I feel touchable when I'm focusing on how I was molested. I can't say I feel lovable if I'm still skeptical of everyone's motives and push them away... etc, my point is it does take some work to bear different fruit. It takes some pruning and grafting.