Erin Lucie

Sundays always feel like a blank page, where the ink of routine has not yet been spilled. And like a nervous student in an echoing examination hall I look at it and I stress. What will I write on this day to make it worth it? How can I use this page to prove that there is something more to my life than the revolving door of wake, eat, work, sleep, repeat?

Some Sundays I do manage to make it out the door and into the day, returning triumphant to scrawl my empty activities onto the page. Others, I don’t.

Others I plan my draft and find myself tossing it into the bin to cry over the phone to my sister. To put my laundry in the washing machine and then hang it out underneath bright sunshine. To watch a movie while baking (and burning fingers). And to use the quiet solitude to heal my tired soul from a week that stretched and strained it a little more than usual.

Then I pull that crumpled draft from bin. Smooth out the creases and scratch out the words:

‘Today, I let myself breath.’

I woke up out of sorts. The night had seen me bury into sleep on the couch under the cool breeze of the air-conditioning. Skin uncomfortably warm and brain spilling fear and unanswered questions like black oil. Slippery and dangerous. My uneasy fall into unconsciousness was a grubby handprint on my memory that hadn’t yet been washed.

House empty of food I resolved to walk to the shop. The two kilometre round trip with the simple purpose of nourishment appealed to a mind tangled in thoughts and emotions that were too knotted to yet unravel.

The air was sticky with the promise of summertime rain. Clouds bubbled against blue sky.

I discovered pain in each step as new sneakers and old, ill-fitting orthotics gripped my foot with each strike on the footpath. I was tempted by frustration, until a glimmer of gratitude, brought to my ears by the scratching of my shoe on concrete, reminded me of the beauty in the simple ability to put one foot in front of the other.

Soon I was welcomed by the the cool, dry air released by the automatic doors of the supermarket. I collected items haphazardly into the bright, red shopping basket. At the checkout my bag bulged chaotically and I heaved it onto my shoulder.

As I walked back home, the concrete became polka-dotted by slow, fat raindrops. I raised amused eyes to the sky to observe the clouds collecting together, now a prophetic shade of rain grey.

A slight smile caught the corners of my lips – the first genuine smile of the day – and I revelled in the reality that I would not be able to out-walk the rain. The singular, purposeful drops of water transformed into steady streams, and the houses and bitumen beyond me started to fade into the mist. The water clung to my hair and droplets, obeying the call of gravity, slid down the curves of eyes, cheeks and chin.

As I followed gurgling stormwater drains, a little of my fear flowed away into them. In this moment there was nothing more to my life than the steady, predictable purpose of reaching home and stowing my groceries. Finally, rain-soaked and heart-refreshed, I opened the door. And with each dripping footstep across the grey tiles the day promised to be a little brighter.

It was lightning, cracking and carving the grey sky, that illuminated what I had forgotten. Maybe the parched air and patronising winds of the past few months had leeched it from my memory. Maybe the sepia fields and cracked lips were a timely metaphor for the drought that had dried it up from my life. Regardless of how it was lost, I remembered it again when I watched electricity cut the clouds into fragments.

I remembered my wonder.

In my wonder I was transported to another moment. It was five months earlier and I was sitting in an aeroplane, propelling across an inky landscape, forehead and nose pressed against cool plexiglass. Captivated.

A starry sky was the canvas for a series of lightning storms – nature merely trying to balance two electrically charged fields – but I saw more than that.

I saw a pure sky of stars dripping into a billowing horizon of white giants. The more I watched the more I imagined. I imagined stories for the scene. One, of the stars falling into clouds and blazing briefly before extinguishing. Another, the stars an audience in a night blue stadium watching fellow light dance on a cumulus stage. Yet for all my imagining there still didn’t seem to be enough stories or phrases to capture the brilliance of what I saw.

I won’t soon forget the pure headiness of that flight, the rush of wonder as I wiped away the clouds of my breath that formed on the glass, desperately trying to will the moment into indestructible memory.

It was an awe that travelled with me for many days. I could feel the spark of it in my chest when I told of the moment. The power of it reminded me of the beauty in the broken and the love of the One who designed such magnificence.

Of course, ‘many days’ is only finite and the awe faded. The spark flickered into the dark and the power lost its potency. And I forgot my wonder.

They say that you don’t realise what you had until it’s gone. I think that’s true. But I think it’s equally true that you don’t know what you had until it returns.

The lightning reminded me that I had been living for five months without wonder, and I immediately felt the absence of it throughout those months with that single spray of energy across an overcast sky.

It reminded me that I don’t want to live that long again without it. So my fingers came to the keyboard, to write this note-to-self:

Remember your wonder.

Remember it the mundane, or in the small.

In the way tastebuds hold on to the flavour of the hot chips you last ate in an airport cafe.
Or in the friendly, altruistic smile of a child who ran to give you your pen lid that dropped to the ground unnoticed.

Remember it in the extraordinary.

In wind whipping up white caps on an endless ocean.
In lines and shapes, the geometry of the earth revealed by thousands of feet of elevation.

Search for it. Don’t wait for it to return with thunder and rain.

Remember your wonder.

The bean bag crunches underneath me. The noise seems frivolous and invasive when staring hopelessly at a blank screen. When every word you write is erased because it doesn’t seem true or real.

With not much to my knowledge except my own lived experience, I’ve come to believe that it is part of the human experience to feel like a fraud. To feel like what is showing on the outside doesn’t match what’s on the inside.

We’ve felt it when we’ve woken from a night of bad dreams, listless and tired, dragging ourselves off into our days with the corners of our lips sewed into smiles and voices injected with artificial enthusiasm.

We’ve felt it as we’ve painted over our faces and drawn sleeves down our limbs to cover the tired skin, the dry skin, the hair-covered skin, the picked-at skin, the scarred skin. As though skin could ever be the measure of a soul.

We’ve felt it as we’ve tossed, Good, thanks. And you? to every How are you? thrown kindly but carelessly in our direction, wondering why we persist in asking each other a question to which the appropriate response is so often a lie.

We’ve felt it as we’ve scrolled back through the highlights of our lives – the smiles, the sunshine, the posed, the filtered – remembering what lay beneath and between each carefully curated post.

It’s a black feeling, to feel that what others are seeing might just be different to who you really are. And there’s nothing quite like the claustrophobia you feel when you go to reach out but find yourself grazing your fingers against rough brick wall. The wall you’ve built with each attempt to protect the world from seeing the mess of a broken human being. Or are we really just protecting ourselves?

My brain wanders slowly around the question and I come to this answer: To remove the bricks from the wall is to admit that we are messy. And there’s hardly a more inconvenient truth than that.

Yet I can’t help but think that we respond to the inconvenience by adopting the thinking that was convenient for us as children: Put all the toys under the bed. Shove all the clothes into a drawer. The mess can be ignored if it cannot be seen.

But sooner or later the mess will always be found and it’s then we realise that messy is hard work.

Messy requires patience. And most importantly, messy doesn’t always make sense.

So next time I find myself staring frustratedly at a blank page, or deleting sentences that don’t quite seem to say what I want them to say, I’ll try to remind myself that I’m wading into the mess. And the mess won’t always fit neatly into one sentence – but the mess is where I am. It’s where we all are. And I hope to live my life dragging it out from underneath the bed, sharing, sorting and questioning – for as long as I have breath.

My hip is pressed into a knotty spring mattress. Cheek scooped into a grey pillow. My skin feels slightly flushed. Despite the air starting to sigh with autumn’s cool breath, the room seems to have trapped the stifling summer heat inside. A phone on loudspeaker is held in my hand. My mum’s gentle voice ripples across the radio waves. She’s been reading a book. On another night I’d feel the corners of my eyes crinkle in mutual interest, but tonight my ears hear her words as nothing more than the wash of swell upon sand, and I sink further into silence.

A dark shape lies heavy on my chest. It’s pressing down like my hip into the mattress, scooping a hollow in my heart. I know it’s name, but loathe to name it.
To name it is to call it from it’s shadow and admit it into existence.
To name it is to reveal the purpled skin I’ve allowed it to leave under the clutching of its fingers.
To name it is to expose the crescent-shaped marks chiseled into its own arms, where I’ve returned its grasp, biting in with desperate fingernails.

The name falls out, whispered.

Fear.

Fear and I wrestle for the upper hand.
We circle each other like predator and prey, pacing with padded paws.
We play games like politicians in senate chambers. Bickering, baiting, belittling.
I try to hide behind it. It tries to expose me.
I try to expose it. It tries to hide me.

I’m feeling hidden. I’ve tucked myself under Fear’s arm, buried my face in its chest and it’s held me close. Happy, for now, to conceal me under the weight of its oppressive embrace.

With hip still pressed, heart still hollow, I murmur:

Mum, I’m going to go now.

She answers:

Are you going to write?

And with those words, there is something akin to the feeling of a head raising in response to a curious sound that sparks inside my hollowed heart.

Maybe I will … I think I might.

What will you write about?

The answer comes with unexpected confidence.
Like the stepping out of a darkened room into the full blaze of a blue-skied day.

Fear.

I won’t hide behind it, nor will I be hidden by it.
I sit up. I push the clutching, heavy mass away to arm’s length.
I let it strain against the palm of my hand.
I look straight in its belittling eyes, and dare it with my gaze:

Expose me.

You don’t have time for this, comes the anxious whisper, it’s harsh rasp echoing through your mind. It’s nearly 11pm and you still have work tomorrow. Precious little lives depend on you to be alert, to be compassionate, to be patient. The responsibility feels heavy on your shoulders, in your stomach and in your heart.

You’re not complaining, but you can’t help but clench your teeth tightly against the frustration. The frustration of endlessly scrambling to catch up to each role you wear, each responsibility you own, each task you must complete. You are painfully aware that you can never hold so much and hold it well; things always find a way to leak out.

You feel like a string on a violin. Thrown in and out of the elements. Unravelled and ready to break under tension.

Sometimes you feel alone. The on-a-deserted-island brand of being alone. But you’re not. Not really. You’re surrounded by tired faces wearing slightly shadowed smiles. Their weary voices greet you in meeting rooms and over telephones. You begin to exchange sighs instead of sentences. You read each others’ eyes instead of words.

You wonder: why does it have to be like this?

You answer your own question with silence and scrolling. As if ignoring anything ever made it better.

But at least you returned here. To the keyboard. Even when the whisper insists there’s no time. Because you know that it’s here that things start to make sense again. Here, as 26 letters rearrange themselves over and over again, you remember that you are connected to something bigger, something more than yourself.

You are part of the web of humanity. Together, individually, belonging to the One who breathed first life into this world. And though stained by an innate rebelliousness towards Life itself, He gently and persistently calls you back, because He is Love.

And Love reminds you to find who you are and to Whom you belong with the remarkable imprecision of written language. He reminds you to tell others that they, also, belong to Him, even when the doing so makes your stomach twist with the fear of misunderstanding and rejection. So you find what you need to say. What you need to hear. What you hope others might need to hear too:

He sees you. He sees your anxiety. He sees your exhaustion. He sees your fear and frustration. He sees it and is not silent. He sees it and makes a steadfast promise.

Come to me.
Precious child, who is weary.
Precious child, who carries heavy burdens.
I will give you rest.*

11pm has passed. The harsh whisper in your mind has fallen silent.
The coming day still promises the heavy weight of responsibility.
But now it feels a little lighter to bear.

*paraphrase of Matthew 11:28

The other morning I woke from a dream that was drenched in deception. It was one of those dreams that arrange arbitrary shards of unpleasant memories into an ugly mosaic masquerading as reality. For several long moments, my bleary, half-woken brain knew nothing else but to believe it. I found myself submersed in untruth. Convinced that there was nothing more to me than my selfishness, my fear and my failures.

The thing about a lie, is that it is very rarely pure deceit. It’s most often just truth poisoned.

I trace back through the truth, and try to find the source of the poison.

I am selfish. I’m human. Hardwired to protect myself, to please myself, at the expense of all others.

I am fearful. I’m human. With an innate desperation to avoid pain in all its forms and to cower when it comes.

I fail. I’m human. I can’t have perfect foresight. I make mistakes.

Those things are part of me.

I am human.

Those three words start to echo through my mind. I consider the truth of my humanness. I dip my finger into it, raise it to my lips and instantly taste the poison.

I had believed that my imperfect, broken parts were greater and carried more consequence, than my whole. That somehow my selfish tendencies were greater than any capacity I had for others. That my fear somehow towered over every effort I made to be brave. That my failures accounted for more than my success or my perseverance or my ability to rise up, dust off and start again.

Being human is a hard and complex business. Especially when you feel yourself splintered into pieces that don’t seem to ever make sense together. But there is not one of those fragments of humanity that is more important that the human they are contained within.

And though it hardly seems a cure-all, I find comfort in it. Comfort in realising I’m a human, not just one piece of a human. Comfort in knowing that there are messy, broken parts of me and they clink up against the pieces that long to be better and the parts that are better.

The truth is… we’re human.

Broken humans.
Redeemable humans.
Whole humans.

I’m here. Behind the keyboard again. Where I feel most at home, most comfortable, most alive but also most terrified.

I’m here for one purpose, and one purpose only – to put something on this blank space. To reverse the lies that I’ve told myself for the past six months. The lies that said, You have nothing to write. Your creativity has dried up. You’re too tired. Too busy.

I’m here to coax a voice out of a smothered corner of my mind. The voice that tries to whisper, Just start writing. You love writing. Don’t be afraid of starting something without a goal in mind, without something to say. Write and discover what the words will say. 

So, I’m trying. But this line that you’re reading right now? I’ve typed and deleted it several times. Trying to find an idea to grasp on to. A string of words that settles warmly in the pit of my stomach, like the comfort of home-cooked food.

This was one of my fears. That’d I sit here staring at a screen with half a piece of writing. The other half lost in a forest of my emptiness.

Emptiness.

I let that word sit on the screen for several moments until it starts to morph into something unfamiliar in that strange way words do when you’ve repeated them too often.

Emptiness.

It’s a curse.
But maybe it’s also a key.

A curse when you allow your sense of emptiness to rob you of creating, of pouring out.
A key when you acknowledge your emptiness and start to search earnestly to fill.

I’ll take the key. Not the curse.

I’ve been empty. And there have been times where I’ve been so focused on my sense emptiness that I allowed it to stop me from creating. I allowed it to feed me untruths about who I was, Who I belonged to and what I was capable of. I allowed it to drain me of joy.

I scroll back to the top of the page.
Did I succeed?
Did I find something to stain these white pixels grey?

The evidence that is clear in front of my eyes should give me confidence. Yet I find it less compelling than that of the gentle hum that’s begun to echo through that indefinable place in my chest. That place that is the inexplicable measuring stick of fulfilment.

Emptiness.

Don’t let it be the curse that keeps you in a dry desert.
Let it be the key to set free that which would restore your desert to a meadow.

If I’m being honest, I’ve been pretty up and down the past few months. Between moving, starting a new job, and general other life-y things my stress levels have been high and my health – mental and physical – has been low. I’m discontent.

When I recently had the chance, I ducked away to Newcastle for some R&R. Whilst there had a wonderful, soul-bearing, authentic conversation with an incredible friend which led me to think deeply about contentment.

As we talked I stumbled across a revelation that there was a point in 2017 where I had reached the most content and happiest I had ever been in my life. In that season I began to believe that my contentment was fixed and I had found some sort of key where my contentment was forever unlocked.

Now, I do believe, to an extent, that lasting contentment can be a reality, but at the time it was a naive assumption. Especially looking back to see that my contentment was completely dependent on my circumstances meeting my expectation for a ‘good life’. Which, at the time, they did. I was settled in a great town, a part of a vibrant, close-knit community, felt successful at my job and lived completely independently.

Fast forward to now.

All the familiar things – circumstances, relationships – that I had hung my contentment on are now new or altered. I’ve been adjusting, doubting, grieving.

I’ll pause here to worry that I might be misunderstood for complaining about my current situation. I’m not. If there’s anything that brings me peace it’s the wholehearted belief that God has led me to this place and to this moment and I, of my own volition, chose to follow Him. There are times I don’t understand why, but I’m called to trust. I assure you, I have so much to be thankful for and I truly am filled to the brim with gratitude for the opportunities I have in this season.

Now, if at this point you’re thinking to yourself ‘Why, Erin, you’ve seemed fine to me!’ then I apologise for the facade that you’ve been seeing. I prize authenticity over anything, but I also prize positivity. Strangely, positivity can be a two-edged sword. It can be used to make an environment more bearable, to protect yourself and others from the harm of negativity or to refocus your attention on the important things in life. But I’ve also found myself using it to shield myself from hard conversations, to trick myself into a false sense of contentment or to relieve the guilt I feel for even being discontent in the first place when so many others have it so much worse.

As I flick back through what I’ve just written, I cringe a little. It’s too much. It’s too open. But at the end of the day, it is my sincerest, greatest hope that if we are all a little more open then we will all feel a little less isolated.

I don’t know how you’re feeling right now, you may be feeling perfectly content, and for that I am glad. You may not. What I do know is that we live in a world that would have us programmed to continually chase happiness but never to catch it. That is our curse. It should not be our destiny.

Ultimately, I believe contentment is a choice and a journey. And it is not an easy one. It’s surrendering the things you think will make you happy and looking Up and in for your value. It will be heartbreaking, frustrating and disheartening.

Beyond that, I don’t have any answers or advice, there are plenty of well-researched, happiness gurus in the world for that purpose. The only thing I have for you is the simple reassurance that if you are on that journey, you are not alone.

Sometimes I wonder when I’ll be completely content with my body.

Will it be when I’ve dropped every kilo I want to drop?
Or when my last pimple disappears?
Or when my teeth are the whitest or the straightest they’ve ever been?
Or when every last strand of body hair is removed?
Or when my hair is the perfect colour?
Or when I fall in love with someone who lets me know that I’m beautiful every single day?

Sometimes I wonder when I’ll stop being angry about the way society and the people around me perceive beauty.

Will it be when I stop hearing flippant comments from people about the way so-and-so dressed?
Or when people stop verbalising their disapproval of how what’s-her-name did her make-up?
Or when I see more people who look like me in magazines?
Or when the news is more interested in achievements rather than fashion in awards seasons?
Or when people stop starving their bodies to try and create some impossible image?

Then in those sometimes, I pause, and I hope that one day I’ll be brave enough to stop wondering.

To be brave enough to just exist in the God-given body I’ve been given, treating it the way it deserves to be treated because of the miraculous gift that is the breath inside it. 

To be courageous enough to acknowledge that this life is short and to use every moment to search for and cultivate the only beauty that matters.

To be fearless enough to challenge others to throw away the notions of external beauty and start searching for the beauty that can only be found in the mind, heart and soul of a person.

Then maybe, just maybe, we will all stop wondering, and start believing how valuable we truly are.