Unlearning
A Bold Return to...Me.
You did not wake up one morning and decide to become a fixer of the world.
I didn’t, anyway.
.Me, two weeks post-partum c-section, wearing baby girl, and high heels, to deliver a sermon. Because, if not me, then who? The answer: Literally anyone else.
I just didn’t know how to…not.
It came in slow pieces, like most things that take root deep. It came in the way I learned to read a room before I could read a book. In the way I watched moods shift like weather rolling over the ridge, learned when to speak and when to stay still, learned how to smooth things over before they broke.
People called it backbone. Grit. Dependable.
And it is those things.
But it can also turn into something else.
I met with a counselor the other day. I loved her immediately. And, she picked it up in this first session. Didn’t take her long. I hadn’t even finished explaining myself when she said it plain: you try to fix everything for everyone.
Yeah, I do. and it’s really, really exhausting.
I thought I knew what that meant. I thought co-dependency was my momma not being able to make a decision without my advice. I thought it was other people’s problem.
She handed me a book. Too Much by Terri Cole. I read the introduction and had to put it down.
It was my biography.
Not a metaphor. My actual life, laid out in someone else’s words, on someone else’s pages, in a book I’d never heard of until forty-eight hours ago.
I am tired in a way that doesn’t show. Because I’ve been, well, I don’t really know how to put it in the right words… I’ve just been “there”. For so many people. Like the Dutch boy with his finger in the dam. I also learned a new term: High-functioning co-dependency. Ew. I don’t like labels, and that didn’t feel too good to learn about and see myself right in those words. It doesn’t look like falling apart. It looks like holding everything together so well that nobody thinks to ask what it’s costing me. It looks like being the steady one. The faithful one. The one who shows up, even though it’s not convenient for me.
It looks like me being the mediator of the family at five. Me, co-signing on loans while still trying to wake from post-surgery anesthesia. Me, being a school assistant and staying until 8 p.m. to print out and verify the report cards, because the assistant principal (whose job it was to do), had a church deacon meeting to get to…meanwhile, I hired childcare I couldn’t even afford, so I could prove I was faithful. Me, in active labor, and too worried about the church service I was in charge of to acknowledge I needed to be at the hospital (and almost gave birth in a car).
It looks like me turning my own writing into a workshop for the world’s problems.
I didn’t even realize it until the other day… when I stopped mid-article and thought, what the heck am I doing?
What started as a front porch — a place to sit with my own thoughts and watch the world go by — turned into something else entirely. I have been lining up arguments like fence posts, hammering them in straight and true, hoping someone would finally see what I see. Hoping they’d wake up.
And when I realized that’s what I have been doing, I felt it like a dull ache. And wanted to delete everything. Shut it down.
Somewhere along the way, I had tied my sense of purpose to whether anyone reading my articles got it.
Folks can feel that. They’ll sit with you when you’re telling a story. They’ll lean in when you’re speaking from your own lived ground. But the moment it feels like they’re being talked at, they back up.
Nobody wants to be handled. Least of all me. I’ve got a stubborn streak that’ll make a two year old look as sweet as a slice of lemon pound cake.
I’m not going to stop telling the truth. I’m not trading my backbone for silence.
But I’m laying down the need to carry it for everyone else.
I’m letting my words be an offering instead of a tool. Telling the story as it is, rooted in my own soil, and leaving space for folks to come to it or walk on by.
I’m sitting down on the porch instead of standing at the gate.
Pouring sweet tea.
Speaking plain.
Lord willing and the creek don’t rise, that’s enough.