When I felt invisible: part one

THE NOT SO GOOD

I began my journey of self discovery in March 2014. I had spent the entire year before that feeling incapable, forgotten, and, frankly, invisible.   I had absolutely no idea who I was or what I wanted out of life anymore.   I was confused, desperately sad, and I had given up hope that God would or could actually help me.

Honestly, I was shocked that my prayers fell heavily in the silence of an empty room. Wasn't I favored by God? Isn't that what people had told me and what I had believed for so long?  Where, then, was this favor now?  I had prayed in every which way I knew: hours-long conversational prayer; tearful, pleading prayer; angry, exasperated prayer.   I begged for a baby, I begged for an answer, I begged to not feel that deep, painful, I-can't-breathe knot that had grown too large in the pit of my stomach.  Oh, the silence of the Lord is an unpleasant thing. 

Having spent the better part of 2 years getting dragged and bruised by life, I was now on auto-pilot.  I found nothing truly enjoyable. I sobbed multiple times every single day, hiding myself away in bathrooms and closets so that no one would know.  I gained 15 pounds.  I wandered around my house all day, from room to room, in between binge watching television and sleeping far too often. Lonely and alone, isolating myself, I was convinced no one would really even notice if I disappeared. 

But then, quite suddenly, I couldn't do it for a second longer. I couldn't be sad, be invisible, be empty, for one more moment.  I don't know how to describe it except that I felt such an urgency to live, to truly live, that I couldn't sit still.  I shed off everything about myself.  Or, more to the point, it was as though my 'self' was a shattered mess of glass on the floor and I was in charge of going through and picking out the pieces I wanted to keep - putting myself back together in an entirely new shape. 

Without a doubt I made decisions that hurt quite a few people and behaved in ways that are deserving of no ones forgiveness (although they've all given it to me).  I stopped hanging out with most of the people I relied on before, going so far as to avoid my family and to tell K that I didn't want to be a wife anymore.   It was too much to be needed by anyone, especially if what they needed was for me to behave like the woman they knew - the woman I was trying to escape. I felt I was fighting for my life and, somehow, everyone that knew me before became the embodiment of what I was fighting against.

They say that the Lord refines us as though gold placed in fire. I always assumed the process was passive and mild...that He just slowly made me a better person day by day while I merrily went about my life.  I learned quickly that the description of going through fire is, indeed, an apt one.  I spent painfully long days and nights confronted with my own lacking, my own impurities, my own broken and dark heart.

I learned what it is to cry out in the deep of the night asking the empty space of a God you aren't sure of if He is even there, to be huddled in the corner of a bathroom at work cradling yourself through a panic attack, and to sit across from your husband on the couch of a marriage counselor.

Those were very unpleasant times and, to my sorrow, I dragged K through them with me.