A book I read this year referred to the “noisy sunshine and showers” of children’s emotional lives – a wonderful, instantly recognisable characterisation! In a year where my own emotional life has felt cloudier and more turbulent, I like the idea of considering it to simply be “noisier”.
Usually I write this post in July, but when I first set out to do so, I found myself stuck, diverted by said “noise”. The defining events of the past twelve months have been leaving and losing my church community and the ending of an important friendship. I couldn’t work out a way to appropriately situate the impact of both within a few hundred words while also giving room to look beyond them, so I ended up taking the time to write specifically about leaving church instead.
Something I love about writing, is that it can be revealing of your own feelings. Struggling to write reveals to me the need to think and process more. In turn, managing to write renders an experience quantifiable. Putting something into words makes it possible to safely leave a feeling knowing that it’s there to come back to.
I have recently marked the ten-year anniversary of this blog (can you believe!), and one of the things I am most glad of, is the space it has given me to process. When change occurs we cannot stay where we have always been, acting as nothing has taken place. This blog allows me to document the shifts in my own life and return to them.
Transformative experiences change us by their nature, and not all change is strengthening. I want to believe that everything can be used for good, and, in an eschatological sense, I still hold that nothing is irredeemable. But events in the here and now can render us in a ‘world of pain‘. Some events reconfigure and reform us; others simply disfigure and de-form.
One of the most moving things I read this year was Jolyon Maugham’s account of finding himself in the eye of a media storm because he had killed a fox. It’s an episode of his adult life he considers transformative in the deforming sense. It was striking to read someone whose professional work is so effective and strident being honest about feeling crushed by the personal toll of public criticism.
If not every transformation makes us stronger, the task becomes learning how to carry what has altered us.
My main learning from this last year is how important it is to integrate loss. An onslaught of pain makes it necessary both to keep forgiving what has happened, and to keep accepting your own reactions to it. Forgiveness means letting go of the hope for a different past. Acceptance means offering yourself a form of inner hospitality towards your own vulnerabilities and failings.
Being able to own what has happened to us – as well as our own response to it – allows us to be moved and changed by events, without needing to be dominated or defined by them. For me, writing is a helpful way to work through this integration, and I’m thankful for the ways it allows me to share with others in ways which wouldn’t otherwise be possible.
I expect that whenever I am thinking about this stretch of time, my mind will turn to the fallout from leaving church and a friendship ending. However, since writing about both, there has been a greater amount of space to also celebrate and enjoy the sunshine of this year. Sunshine pictured throughout this post is increasingly able to reach me.
The sunshine has looked like being able to celebrate a year of shared life with Anna and Joe, who bring the great gifts of daily companionship and a lively sense of fun. There have been milestone 30th birthdays and weddings to enjoy, and remarkable and brilliant friends who have been themselves in new and glorious ways, and held me in the wobblier times. And of course there is the small matter of Matthew, who through this first year of our getting know each other has been a steadfast source of kindness, and my somewhere to return to. Thank you.
thejoyofrachel 