JulieLeung.com: a life told in tidepools

Lisa Williams put pieces of her insides out on a post. I’ll quote a small excerpt here.

The sources of that feeling of unhappiness are real. My sense of being isolated from other people, even people I love very much; my sense of being alone, the only one of my kind since my father died, of lacking that natural and complete, no-explanation-neccessary understanding of how we thought and how we worked; my realization that I will never achieve my childhood dreams of being a Great Personage, devoted to and excelling at a Great Work; my dinged, dented, and limping religious faith.

She ended her essay with this paragraph

I’m still not sure what to do, how to patch myself up, whether I can be patched and what I would do with myself if I were; but here we are, asleep in the Thinking Chair. Not fixed. But just resting.

I can’t say that I understand Lisa’s life completely or that I know all of her emotions. But I have had some similiar feelings at times. Sorrow has been strong in me through the past year as we have wrestled through some transitions as a family. I too feel that my faith is dinged, dented and limping, an apt description of our aftermath.

We live in a culture that recognizes emotion but at the same time seems to set expectations high. Or at least that is how I feel, on the one hand struggling in the muck I find inside, while trying to be someone and do something on the outside. We are encouraged to dream, but sometimes the dreams die. I’ve had holes in my heart that needed patches, but they’ve taken time to heal. It’s the human mystery: we feel we know how to fix problems and understand science yet we cannot solve ourselves.

What I love about blogging is the transparency, the vulnerable moments of emotion, putting yourself on a page, revealing yourself with intimate words, refusing to censor what you wouldn’t say to a stranger. Like Lisa, I wrestle with isolation. I suspect that many of us bloggers do and that is why we write. Sometimes it takes the last bit of faith we can find to put our insides out for others to see. We place pieces of ourselves into posts, raw and rough, soft and sensitive, and we hope. We wait for the connection to come, to hear someone say “I heard you”, to know from a comment or a link that we are not alone.