Rebuilding: An Invitation to Hope

The worst year of my life was my sophomore year of college. My health was dwindling again, as it had done a couple years prior, and I getting testing done to determine if I would need another brain surgery.

There’s not much I remember about this year of my life. I remember sleeping a majority of the time, and crying almost all of the time I was awake. I remember having to run out of classes and meetings, because I was crying and painfully anxious. I remember being holed up in my dorm room, literally fearful to open the door and exit the space. I thought I had known Rock Bottom from previous years and experiences. But this was it: the lowest I had ever known.

It was determined I didn’t need another brain surgery. I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, a neurological condition known for causing widespread chronic pain and chronic fatigue. I found a doctor who I trusted to help me. Months later, when I was healing and shared with him how encouraged I felt about the progress I was making, he asked me if I had lost hope before I found him, before we made a treatment plan. “Feeling hopeless is the worst thing a human can feel,” he said in that conversation. I cried when I got back into the car after my appointment, because he spoke to how painful it was to feel emptied of hope, and I also cried because I was no longer there. I cried because he said the exact words I needed to hear to know he understood. I cried because I was finally rebuilding hope.

Here’s the thing about Rock Bottom: it can actually be the invitation you’ve spent your whole life waiting for. It’s up to you to accept it.

It took many months, but eventually I wasn’t consumed with being terrified to leave my dorm building. I wasn’t stuck in survival mode, just waiting for something else as crucial as my health to fail me anymore. I finally had room to think about other things. I finally had room to start to rebuild my life.

It felt like rebuilding from the ground up. It felt like starting over. It had been so long since I had the mental capacity to think about anything other than being sick. I had a lot to think about:

What do I even enjoy doing?

Where do I want to spend my free time?

Do I believe in God?

Those were a handful of questions I asked myself on a daily basis.

It felt overwhelming. When a wave of overwhelm hit and it felt like the world was spinning while I stood idly by as I recovered from my sickness and as I unearthed myself again, I asked myself one thing:

What do I know to be true?

My responses would go something like this:

“I know I am a social justice major in college. I know I love my dog. I know I believe in God and I believe God wants good things for me. I know I am good at telling the truth about my experience. I know I enjoy writing.”

Sometimes the things I knew to be true were as simple as my favorite snacks. Sometimes reminding myself of the simple truths of how I experienced life were the things I needed to feel grounded again.

Rebuilding was necessary for me after a health crisis. But I have friends doing their own rebuilding after a breakup, a rejection letter, or a major life transition.

My health is finally stable. I know what I enjoy doing, I have a more clear understanding of who God is in my life, and I feel so content with the life I’ve built for myself.

Rock Bottom offered me an invitation to something better. I’m so glad I said yes. I hope you’ll say yes, too.

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Featured

Why did you move?

A cardstock print sits propped against the lamp on my desk: a taupe watercolor swipe outlining a peakside Saguaro, the sun a tiny ring above. Beneath this minimalist illustration are these words in typeface: “I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.”

I happened upon this notecard-sized print on the way out of a shop last weekend, after already having completed another purchase. It was the last print of its kind in the pile. I had to have it. I returned to the cashier: “This one, too.”

You see, this verse has been a thread weaving through my story, simple words spoken by a prophet long dead, a passage of comfort I’ve returned to again and again since my pilgrimage to the desert four years ago, when I inked a cactus on my wrist.

The Good Old Days

Last week was National Margarita Day.

I did not, however, celebrate the holiday. Truthfully, I’ve yet to find THE Mexican place here in Phoenix. You know the one: gaudy decorations, cheap food, even cheaper margaritas.

But there’s a Mexican restaurant at the corner of Charlotte and Whitebridge in Nashville, TN.

You may have heard of it.

10 Life Lessons This Cross-Country Move is Attempting to Teach Me

There are a few lessons life has attempted to teach me since my move — all things that I haven’t yet spiced up into a full essay, but deserve to be memorialized by my metaphorical pen nonetheless.

So I present a collection of lessons I’ve learned — and am still learning — in the last 3 months.

When The Hardest Thing & The Right Thing Are the Same

“Nuh uh!” I had protested.

The best thing about being 15 years old is that you know absolutely everything there is to know about life.

I certainly did.

I was arguing with my friends over the line in a song from The Fray (#tbt to moody middle school days): “Sometimes the hardest thing and the right thing are the same.”

Doing the right thing should never be hard, I confidently claimed. Anytime you have the choice to do the right thing, the healthy thing, the thing that builds up rather than tears down, it should never, ever be difficult to choose that.

Like I said, I knew everything.

Of course, 13 years later, I know that I don’t actually know much at all. And I also know that the hardest thing and the right thing are just about ALWAYS the same. It’s madness, really.

A Holy Yes to the Real Things: On Setting Social Media Boundaries

Two and a half hours.

That’s how long I had spent on my phone that day. Reading emails, sure. Responding to texts, some. Catching up on news, a bit. But mostly: scrolling through Instagram.

I had spent an hour of my day clicking through clips of someone else’s life. The sad truth? Some days, I’ve spent way more than just one hour lost to Instagram.

This is where the High School Musical cast flash mobs my brain with “we’re all in this together”—because my educated guess is that you can relate to this daily scroll-fest, too.

You Are Worth It: A Journey to Discovering Your Voice & Worth

In November of 2019, two weeks before my wedding, I called it off.

It was the hardest conversation I have ever had, and it created a domino effect of more difficult conversations with practically everyone in my inner circle. And those conversations created a ripple effect of embarrassing moments with acquaintances and co-workers.

The most difficult part of all of it was that no one saw it coming. Not even me.

Who You Are Now: On Outgrowing Earlier Versions of Yourself

In the last few months, I’ve realized, much to my dismay, that I look older. That I am aging. This sounds dramatic coming from an able-bodied twenty-seven-year old, but it’s true. I didn’t know I found so much worth and security in the way that I looked until I started to notice a difference.

As humans, we note the passing of time in the changes around us. The tree that was once green is now orange, now yellow, now brown and bare. The crack on the stoop starts to grow weeds and crumble. The basil plant gets bigger, the dust on the shelf gets thicker, and the water stain on the ceiling expands to look like a dinosaur. We note these changes with surprise, as if they’ve happened all of a sudden instead of one day at a time.

How One Writer is Learning to Navigate Her New Normal

2020: a new year but NOT a normal year. The world really took a turn when it was late winter. The news and social media were giving a lot of updates on the virus that took over the world. At the time, I didn’t know if I should take a break from social media and avoid the news.

Everywhere was closing and shutting down; it felt like 2020 was canceled.

On Navigating Grief During the Isolation of Quarantine

I read about the third suicide that had happened while we were in quarantine via email from my supervisor.

“I apologize for my absence. As some of you may have heard, my brother committed suicide over the weekend, and my family and I have been grieving this loss.”

I wrote back to the mass email individually saying how sorry I was for her loss, and that I, too, had suffered a loss at this time. Within the last month, I had lost my uncle to a surgery that left him paralyzed for weeks in the hospital. Alone. Without family. And that that had filled my heart with grief in a confusing time that didn’t allow people to gather and grieve the loss of a loved one. Let alone, let them say goodbye.

No Man Is An Island: An Ode to Our Neediness

The last few years of my life—so basically my Full Grown Adult Years—have been a reinforced lesson in this one simple yet slightly-jarring fact: we need each other. I mean, need-NEED each other.

“No man is an island,” says Thomas Merton, and my bae C.S. Lewis backs this up further by writing, “We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves.”

We’re meant to be needy, but why is it so hard to acknowledge and accept this?

Say What You Need

Now maybe it wasn’t your family or your upbringing that made you neglect voicing your needs. Maybe it was a toxic relationship or a difficult work environment. Maybe it was someone who told you that your needs were selfish or that the desires of your heart didn’t matter.

Whatever it was, I urge you to identify those people or experiences or situations and start using that knowledge to change.

A Beginner's Guide to the Enneagram

Maybe you, like me, have become curious about the Enneagram because it is popping up everywhere in conversations and on your social media timeline. Maybe you know everything there is to know and have become quite fluent in Ennea-lingo (you even know that there are sub-types!).

Maybe this is the first time you’re ever hearing about this weird test and you’ve spent the last four paragraphs trying to figure out how to even pronounce the word “Enneagram” (In-ee-a-gram, for the record).

No matter where you’re at, we can all use some guidelines when it comes to personality tests, because none of us are immune to over-identifying, self-shaming, and becoming a walking personality-test-fulfilling prophesy. So, without further ado, here are my dos and don’ts of Enneagram-ing.

Health, LifeAlyssa LandrethSeptember 16, 2018FeaturedComment

Rebuilding: An Invitation to Hope

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