Epilogue

On Friday it will have been three weeks since this whole ordeal started.  Seems longer than that.  It seems like a lifetime ago.  I did all that for about a week before I caved and went back to the way things were.  Saturday I went back to it all, and it started with just a thought.  My Self and Will were having a discussion, Self wanted to listen to music and watch tv.  Again.  It was Saturday, my weekend off, I’d gone out a little with some folks from church, came home and I was majorly bored and wanted to do something fun, like I usually do when I have the day off.  When Will saw that Self wasn’t getting any weaker Will wondered how much longer he could live like this.  Seeing that Will was starting to cave, Self became hopeful and worked harder to break down Will.  My Will felt like it was a checkmate.  No matter where I moved, what I tried to avoid, Self was persistent and strong.  I had to take notice of that, because it wasn’t the way things happen with a fast.  If I’m on a fast for just three days, by the fourth day I’m like a completely different person, and my flesh is silent.  It’s almost like I have to force myself to go back to how it was.  Here I’d been doing this for a week, reading for up to two hours a day, supposedly seeking God, and inside of me was this monster.

As soon as the moment came, the moment that I knew I was going to lose to Self, I began saying to myself “I failed!  I failed!”  I was so angry and I couldn’t believe it.  I couldn’t believe it b/c this wasn’t a gradual process.  If you would’ve asked me 24 hours before if I was thinking of giving in I would’ve said “no.”  If you asked me an hour before.  I was out with my friends from church that morning and they were playing music outside and I felt like it really wasn’t a thing anymore.  I was indifferent to it.  Inside I thought, “I think you’re done.”  But I immediately followed it with, “nice try, Self.  I’m never done.”  And here I was, at the heart of the battle, in my mind, knowing it was over, this brief life I’d been nurturing was about to be a memory.  I must’ve said “I failed!” about fifty times to myself.  All while this was happening, Self was planning all the things it wanted to do and in the order it wanted to do it.

First order of business:  play the Mariah song.  I played it twice.  Simultaneously feeling like a kid in a candy store, and a murderer.  I was embarrassed and sad.  And also a little intrigued.  Because as I went to the kitchen to get my mexican leftovers to eat while watching the two episodes of Project Runway I had missed, to say that it felt “good,” was an understatement.  It felt like my life had gone from black and white to technicolor.  Like I’d been living without my arms for a week and someone graciously put them back on.  I thought, “okay, wow.  That’s a little much.”  I’d never felt that kind of… relief.  And it made me take notice.  I thought, “okay, perhaps I dug a little too deep.”  It’s like if you had a kid that was like, “I’m hot and tired,” and then they get home and they cry and get ill and have a fever and grow up with a phobia of heat, lol.  It’s like, “oh you were seriously messed up, you weren’t being spoiled.”  So I don’t know what that was about, but it was very strange to be both distraught and overjoyed in the same body.  To feel like I was being institutionalized and also in control at the same time.

The next day was Sunday, and I was feeling even worse for another reason.  The week before, I’d forgotten to put the trash on the curb.  The trash that still held my movies and cd’s.  When I realized it would be sitting out there for another week, at first I was upset about it.  Because to me it represented that my life wasn’t really different as long as that stuff was still sitting just outside the door.  But then I took it as a potential mile marker.  Perhaps it was a test to see if I would change my mind.  That I’d have a week before my old life is finally carted away, and I can get that encounter I was looking for.  At that time, I had no doubt that something was going to really be different once all that stuff was out of my driveway.  But I’ll never know that.  Because on Sunday, the day before the trash usually goes out to the curb, I opened the garbage can.

“That stuff’s long gone, you can’t go in the trash and get that stuff out, just forget about it.”  That’s what I’d been saying Saturday night and Sunday morning.  There was no way I was going to rummage through trash.  To me, that was the ultimate plan of the enemy, to make me look like an animal, and the ultimate insult to God, to go back through something I’d sacrificed to him and ask for it back.  Part of me even thought that the trash being out an extra week was God testing me to see if I would actually do this.  But I wasn’t bothered by that because the answer was “yes.”  Once something is in the garbage, it’s in the garbage.  That’s what made the initial act so final.  All that stuff was at the bottom of the heap anyway, since it was more than a week since it’d been out there.  But Sunday morning, Self reminded me of my portable cd case that I’d kept in the car and threw away, case and all.  ”That’s just sticking up on the side,” Self was saying.  My Self had come to terms with most of the music being irretrievable, but she had not lost her buoyancy over it.  But she kept reminding me that the whole collection represented thousands of dollars and that I should keep what I could.  ”Just get the cd case that’s sticking up on the side.”  I’m about to lose the remains of my dignity, I thought.

I went out to the garbage can near tears.  There wasn’t any vague symbolism going on here, I was about to go into the week old garbage and get a part of my life back.  I took the vinyl cd case out and unlatched the velcro on it.  The CD’s were there, intact, protected by the vinyl and cloth interior so there was nothing on them.  It smelled a little.  There was a single maggot crawling up the inside.  I flicked it off.  I turned the thing upside down and left it out on the table in the sun for a few days.  I managed to save a couple hundred songs.  There were also quite a few that were still in other places on my computer.  Apparently computers these days are more and more equipped to help keep you from losing large amounts of data in one fell swoop.  But I still lost every CD I’d ever purchased ever.  I don’t miss it that much.  That could just be chalked up to the fact that we all could probably do with carrying around less than we have.

At any rate, I was feeling like a wretched human being but I also knew that life goes on.  I had this feeling that I needed to be at church early for whatever reason, and I felt particularly obligated to follow whatever inclinations I had now.  I felt like, “I have to obey God without any hesitation now” after this wretched display.  I think what surprised me is that I kept thinking I had a thorough understanding of who I was and what I was capable of, even with brutal honesty, but the truth was I really had no idea.  I knew there was a possibility that I could fail but I just didn’t see it happening at all the way it happened, basically.  I got to church about an hour before service started and I kind of didn’t know what I was doing there.  I walked around and then I found a corner to pray, and then a few people started showing up.  After a half hour I felt like I needed to start a prayer meeting, lol.  There’s a back story to all that that I don’t feel like getting into.  So I started a prayer meeting in the children’s church area.  It was basically just me, and a few people came in and out.  By the time church had started I was still in there snotting and praying, lol.  Not even about myself necessarily, just trying to move on and just be productive.  Because I know God is gracious.  By the end I felt good, and I went back in the sanctuary and caught the tail end of worship.

During the message, I was listening but somehow I wasn’t, because God was answering me about some questions I guess I was asking Him, lol.  You know when you’re in that place where your mind isn’t on anything in particular and then things come to you.  And he was just like, “I just want you to be a little baby.  I just want you to be my little girl.”  I just get emotional writing that, but I was sitting off to the side not really listening to the message anymore, just looking straight ahead and letting my eyes blur with tears.  I got a picture of myself as little kid trying to do grown up things by myself without telling anyone, and then getting frustrated when the whole thing gets messed up because I’m trying to like, mow the lawn but I’m like, five.  And God kind of sees me from the window, going back and forth out to the shed like, “what is this kid doing?”  And then suddenly I’m a heap on the floor, inconsolable about some unintelligible plan I had inside my little kid mind.  And God just wants to get my mind off of it by making me some cookies and putting me down for a nap, and then have the whole thing be forgotten by the time I woke up.  You can’t control the way a child feels if she’s determined to be frustrated, but through the way you react to it, you can show her how little it really matters.

That was the first thing I’d heard from Him since the whole thing began.  The weird thing is that I kinda purposely kept myself from listening to God, like I didn’t trust that voice anymore b/c it brought me to this complacent place.  A couple of days later I remembered that a similar thing had happened to me a year or two ago, where I had this crisis of faith and stopped trying to hear God b/c I felt deceived.  God said, “it’s because you don’t have a revelation of me as Father.”  I’ve had a couple of people tell me this so I knew it was true.  Even the way God was saying to me about being a little girl seemed more motherly to me.  But I was just like, “gah, what do I have to do to get this?”  My parents divorced when I was 12 or 13 but I never felt like I didn’t have a father or anything.  I don’t think it really has anything to do with an earthly father figure.  But I’m just like, “okay, well then give it to me.”  I think He’s wanting me to get this through relationship.  He’s determined to prove that He is a real person in every way despite being unseen.  I do have this thing where I can believe what someone else has said over what I know to be true about me and God.  Because I have this fear that I’m going to be expecting one thing and get another, so I tend to internalize any revelation along those lines.  Certainly I’ve had that happen to me in life many times, and I don’t know how that relates to understanding the Father, but I know that’s the issue.

So long story less long, since then I’ve kind of gone back to the way things were.  I still think what I did and what I went through was valid.  I had a lot of revelation in a short period.  I don’t think entertainment is good for us.  The Holy Spirit was showing me one day how deceptive it is that we get caught up in the lives of made up people and ignore each other, the complexity of whom is far greater, a complexity that entertainment can only try and mimic.  And the closer it gets, the more we love it.  I can feel myself less attached to it than I was in the past, thought that could be due to the fact that a great deal more of it just sucks these days.  I’d still like to see myself free of it, perhaps just not at one time.  I was really looking forward to being the person without the tv, that has all this time in the day.  Now that it’s back to the way things were there’s a strange haze over my brain.  During that week of detox I wrote, I read the Word, I prayed, I called people.  Because I had to do something, you know?  Now, the days go by quickly.  Which I used to love, but now I can’t help but think my time is just being robbed.  I can’t conceive of a single better thing to do some days than to watch some tv show I’ve got recorded.  Turns out the dvr is much like the computers these days– it had no real intentions of stopping my series recordings, a command I specifically remember giving it.  Everything I lost was easily regained.  Except for Oprah.  Don’t know when I’ll be able to catch that ever elusive Oprah.