Closing Remarks, Part 1

 

Sunrise over Lake Michigan, a spontaneous outing

May 4th, 2021—11 days until graduation

The morning of the first checkout, I snooze my alarm three times. A late night lake jump and an hour of writing afterward has me prioritizing sleep over being on time.

No one is ever on time for their checkout anyway.

Inevitably, I am wrong on this one occasion, and I show up to find my resident seated on her bed, having risen before the sun to complete her tasks. I finish the check, send her off with a hug, and head back to her room to take care of a few last things.

My friends will laugh, but the sacredness of it falls on me like gold dust from heaven. To be alone in the rooms, serving the women before arrivals or after departures, is one of my favorite parts of this job. It is holy and intimate. I take care to do it with my shoes off.

And I will only touch this holy ground a few more times.

I have floated through the last week on a cloud of happy procrastination. Homework has been put off, as well as sleep, prayer, planning ahead—all manner of things, really—in favor of staying up late with the people I will soon say goodbye to. I pretend my life has a pause button.

It doesn’t.

The time crunch squeezes me a bit more, and I feel the stress of deadlines. I scramble to do assignments, spend one good afternoon in the library and then sleep through the next. Too much socialization; not enough rest. Perhaps this is why I welcome the quiet of cleaning the rooms, vacuuming drawers and dusting. It provides a respite, a gentle invitation to ponder and to feel.

As the current storm of my existence quiets with the swish of a rag across a desk, I know it: I need to journal.

I hate this. I have dreaded sitting down with the pages and the pen every day for the last month. And I’m not entirely sure why. Is it just that I can’t sit still, that there’s too much to do and too little time? Am I avoiding my emotions? (That would be unlike me.) Am I ashamed of something?

Whatever the reason for my hesitation, I grudgingly anchor myself to the couch and begin to write, slowly peeling back the layers of my own heart the way I have learned to do with others. I peer in, pay attention to the places where I find resistance. Those are the trails that most often need to be gently followed. And eventually, I find the reason I’ve been avoiding the journal, the reason I haven’t slowed down and felt anything in days.

It’s fear.

My chest hurts, the dull ache of emotional pain that landed me in the immediate care center last semester. I have learned that this signal needs to be attended. It indicates something deep, a festering wound or suffocating anxiety.

This time, I can rightly call it a terror: I am petrified that all the loss that comes with graduation will overtake me, and I will succumb again to the darkness of anxiety and depression that dogged me every summer I went home from Moody.

For a moment, that darkness covers me as I hold the pen, and so I do battle with it the only way I know how:

I write it out.

I write out the lie that it whispers, the hissing question that’s been woven into the synapses of my brain since I was nine years old—or was it younger? Trauma is mostly invisible, until something trips one of the landmines it leaves in the brain.

Loss of connection, of community, trips mine every time.

My lungs constrict a little. My body is fighting this train of thought.

I check the timer. Just a few more minutes and then I can close the book and walk away.

I write down the truths, the tools I have to walk with the darkness. Not to avoid it; resistance only makes it worse. No, this darkness must be faced head on, welcomed in, because truly, it’s the fear of my nine-year-old self, masquerading as a monster. Push the little girl out and she gets more scared; invite her in for tea and she calms, sleeps, grows up.

Self-care is always about teaching the little parts of you to grow up.

The timer goes off and I hurriedly tie the cover of the book shut. Taking a deep breath, I study myself and know there is nothing now to be done but sleep off the adrenaline I’ve just activated. Sometimes, this is how to do battle with the darkness.

I slip into kinder clothes, settle onto the bed, and drift into a deep slumber.

....

May 5th, 2021—10 days until graduation

For some reason, whenever I’m not with a person in this season, I am writing something to be posted on social media. Before you jump to condemnation of our digital age—as I was inclined to moments ago—examine with me what this means.

I am seeking connection.

I know even as I write the journal entry: I need to tell someone. I need someone to be with me in my fears, to come to tea in the dark. And not through a social media comment. I need a real, live person, probing me with good questions and wrapping me up in love as I quake in the presence of brokenness that I can never recover from on my own.

I have to be vulnerable.

In some ways, I’m good at this. People use this word to describe me all the time.* Vulnerability doesn’t activate anxiety in me the way it does in some. I know it first and foremost as a friend, the primary catalyst to healing and growth.

But that doesn’t mean I find it easy.

The confession of sin, or fear, or brokenness, is such an ordeal these days. It is an inconvenience, like the need to eat. It requires asking someone else to take time out of their day and energy out of their emotional and physical reserves to listen to you, and listen keenly. Healthy, active listening is incredibly hard work. It should be tiring, or you’re probably not doing it right. To be listened to is to be given a generous gift.

Not only is this all a large ask in and of itself, but in order to be trustworthy, the person must also be unflinching in their ability to receive whatever you confess, which only happens if they have already processed anything in them that might touch your confession. The idea is not to step on one of their landmines, but if you do, they must be able to diffuse it quickly enough to continue caring for you.

Confession is exhausting, for everyone involved. Which is why we don’t do it, why it doesn’t find a natural place in our daily rhythms.

It’s why I stay up a second night writing instead of sleeping. I am not ready to unleash the torrent of emotion on a living, breathing human just yet.

....

Morning comes, and with it the familiar buzz of stress again. My body is electric with it, like a live wire sparking on the ground. This time, I don’t stop to journal or pray. I just rise and run.

Afternoon brings a meeting with all the other RAs, who are doing and feeling the same things as I am. Our bosses try to walk us through a closing exercise; my friends and I dissolve into antagonizing each other.

It’s too heavy to carry, so we banter instead. The exhaustion leaks out in our laughter.

When it’s over, I flee—from them, from my floor. I have to run one thing down to the storage room and I decide to stop there on my way to escape to the library.

I don’t make it to the library.

Storage is another of those sacred spaces on campus, roach-infested though it is. I am one of only twenty or so people with a key, a privilege I don’t often think of. RAs generally strive to avoid storage as much as possible. It’s a dark room with cages full of boxes, a place of stress for most.

But no one comes here.

I let my bag and keys drop to the floor and sink down against the mesh wire of my floor’s unit, feeling my inner tornado begin to calm. I write, furiously, spinning my chaos into eloquent prose on the page. This is my Imago Dei, the way God’s image spills over in me. I carry the common blessing and curse of an author: my formless and void turns to order through grammar and syntax.

I bleed and heal in words.

And yet, it has been ages since this has happened. When darkness overtook me two years ago, it snuffed out my words, stilled my pen. I stopped writing. The balancing effect of medication furthered this process; I no longer had enough emotion with which to write. If the words are the spilling over, the steadying of my self prevented their appearance.

The cup leveled. I simply lived, didn’t mark down the moments and memories. The journal pages filled, of course, but the artistry left me. Some days, I wondered if it would ever return.

Now here, on the storage room floor, my sandals slipped off as if at the Lord’s command, the words begin again. The fountain is unstopped and my heart is taken up in the current.

I pour myself out, and then, for the umpteenth time, like Samuel in the holy of holies, I return to my bed and lie down to sleep.

...

May 6th, 2021—9 days until graduation

Natalie texts me: “Jessi Bee, please tell me your door will be open tonight.”

I respond that it will, wondering what could be so urgent. “The primary biggest reason,” she tells me, “is because I didn’t see you enough yesterday.”

I wash over with warmth, and try not to flinch. I could cry over this expression of her desire to be near me.

Recently, my counselor told me to practice sitting in connection with others, to allow that need to be filled, without succumbing to shame or fear. This scares me, so deeply that my response is unconscious, visceral, as I unpack it on the teletherapy call. I cry then, and nod slowly that I will do my best to honor the counselor’s suggestion. Here, though, in the moment of connection, lies my ultimate fear: being abandoned. Perhaps this is the reason I've been avoiding the journal. My brain and body have all kinds of tricks to short circuit relationships, to remove myself from bonds before they can be removed from me. My life is a story of unlearning these habits. Sometimes, I think every Christian’s life tells a similar story, or is meant to.

It makes sense, in this season, that this fear is activated. Without choice or volition, everyone is about to leave me, and I them. Graduation means the loss of proximity most of all, and though Natalie herself writes to remind me about the “silent rope, intangible”** that binds us, I still lament the separation.

When she comes to my room, then, my heart grows heavy with the weight of fear and grief and love for her. I put my head on her shoulder and close my eyes to the sound of her breathing. I rest. Again, for a moment, the storm in me stills. I remember peace.

A few nights earlier, another friend wraps me in her arms and I feel the stress fall away. “I forgot!” I exclaim, catching her hand in mine.

“What?” She looks at me quizzically.

“Touch regulates cortisol.” I nestle deeper into her.

“Counseling words, yay!” someone else in the room says, mocking me gently.

I roll my eyes, and translate: “Touching you is taking away my stress.”

Again and again, I am reminded that we are wired for communion. It’s the hard drive of humanity, and the loss of it is the great tragedy of the Fall.

No wonder my heart resists.

Now, for a moment, Natalie shifts in such a way that I can hear her heartbeat. She told me once that I am always checking the pulse of others, reading their vital signs. It’s a comfort to literally hear the evidence of her life beside me, and know that I need not do anything but be present with her.

Later, Natalie wisely decides to sleep, while Julia, Anna, and I take a walk to the parking garage to look at the view. I ache, sagging with heavy emotions. This city, this place—it’s not mine anymore.

Julia spits off the edge and we hear it land.

“I hate that we can hear that,” says Anna.

“This is why I need mountains,” says Julia.

“I know a place with mountains,” I murmur, turning around to sit on the curb. They follow suit. The place I am going to is one I like even more than this city, but right now it represents loss to me.

Julia chats while Anna sits next to me with tears in her eyes. I tug on her sleeve to come closer, begin to rub out the tension in her shoulders, between her ribs. How many times have I loosened the knots in these sinews? How many times has she done the same for me?

“I wish we were related,” I say.

They both nod.

“It would be so much easier,” Julia observes.  “Then we would actually see each other.”

I nod, thinking of the holidays and family reunions we would have to look forward to.

“I would love to have more sisters,” Julia goes on, a significant comment considering she already has three. “I would have you, and Nat, and Anna, and then there would be so many more! I could never have bridesmaids! I would just say, ‘Here’s a flower and be happy.’”

I half-smile, lost in my own thoughts. “That would work.”

“Not being related is so much harder. You have to just—show up.”

I whisper it: “Please show up.” I can’t express to them how much I want to take them with me, or at least welcome them into the new home I’m going to. I want to make their beds up and cook them wholesome meals and take them to the mountains to hear from the Lord.

But no. It isn’t likely and we all know it.

“It’s hard,” Julia says. “It’s a lot of work.”

And we are scattering to the winds, the lot of us: Natalie to the east, me to the west, and Anna and Julia to who knows where after they graduate.

Here is where we are together—this moment, this place. Natalie wrote about this, too, how God “calculates our crossing paths.”*** He does—He has. He calculated all the moments adding up to this one here on the parking garage, and to the impending moment of departure that’s making us all so sad.

He did the math on our love for each other.

Grappling with all of this on a cold Chicago night, though, is next to impossible. So we don’t. Anna’s tears don’t dry. My heart doesn’t lift. We walk back to the dorms anyway, collect ourselves in ways similar to every day of the last two years.

This night, though, when I fall asleep, Julia sleeps on the floor next to me.

_______________

*Which, on one hand, I find hilarious, because vulnerable truly means that one is open to physical or emotional harm and why would you compliment someone that way?

**Revesz, Natalie. “Gravity.” Thin Space: Koinonia, edited by Charles Snyder, Kai Newell, and Wyatt English, Moody Media Lab, 2021, p. 42

***Ibid.