Growing strong in the broken places.

I wish I were as witty as she is.

She like, exudes the essence of cool.

How the hell is she so self-assured?

These are the kinds of thoughts that plague me on a daily basis. In a desperate nighttime conversation with my boyfriend, I was crying and trying to tell him that he had no idea the broken past that I come from, the one that I still attach myself to every day because I know no other way then to live from experience. But where is the separation in living from experience and being shackled to a past filled with regrets and mistakes?

So in this conversation, I kept repeating something. “You don’t know what I’ve done. You just don’t know.” And he, bless him, was desperately trying to understand where all of this emotion and angst was coming from. I don’t buy into the philosophy that a woman is “too much to handle”, (although I struggle with it like most women), however I can openly and freely admit that I am a lot of person stuffed into one body. And perhaps part of the reason I have such a big personality is because it has shielded and defended me at times that the little girl inside my spirit was too timid, frail, or weak to stand up and fight.

I have this horrible fear of not living every moment in my present mind, of not taking in every breath and being consumed by gratitude for it. Paradoxically, this fear paralyzes me and keeps me stuck inside my room and on a computer blogging about my feelings rather than getting out of this house and living the way I desperately want to. It’s an interesting circumstance, isn’t it? How someone who can seem so filled with zest for life, someone who longingly searches for beauty and learning and all this world has to offer can be a slave to her own fear.

I think the best part of those conversations with my already-long-suffering boyfriend is the self-realizations that I come to without being forced. Without anyone sitting me down and saying, “Look, Ash… this is the way it is.” And there’s nothing I love more than discovering something without another person’s help. (I’ve been that way my entire life. It’s not going to change now.)

I realized, through constantly repeating, “You don’t know what I’ve done,” that I was right… he didn’t know what I had done. No one did, apart from God and myself. Isn’t that true for everyone? No one can know the full details of a person’s life. It’s impossible. And so, of course, that got me thinking. What a perfect tool for isolation, right? I’m a big fan of the notion that isolation is the most effective weapon in the War of Worth. If I isolate myself and convince myself that I am alone in my suffering, then no one will ever be able to reach me. And because I’m alone, I’m the weakling of the herd whose easily picked off. Consumed in her own self-guilt.

So maybe they don’t know what you’ve done. (They is like “x” in an equation.) You’re right. They don’t know. But Jesus knows. And guess what? He offered you grace all the same. He reached down and saved you, anyway. Whatever you’ve done, whatever you did, and even whatever you’re doing… none of it nullifies the Cross. Nothing you can do, will do, have done… none of it nullifies the Blood. Nothing cancels out Jesus Christ. No action, no word, no thought. That’s the God I serve, so it’s really time for me to start living like it.