Even Here: Words for When You're Wandering

When I was 22 years old, I visited the desert for the first time.

A metaphorical desert, if we’re getting technical.

I was fresh out of college, starry-eyed and eager to begin my post-grad life. I had big ‘ole me-centered dreams: a shiny, brag-worthy PR job in the music industry! An apartment with an exposed brick wall that (somehow) would fit an upright piano! A committed relationship with a kind, goofy man!

I got exactly none of those things.

To summarize an entire year’s worth of emotion: I was devastated.

Maybe that sounds melodramatic.

But when your foundation is poured over paper-thin ideas of success and a wobbly sense of self-worth, the normal disappointments of “we should end this,” of intense loneliness, of cruel self-talk, of being diagnosed with Celiac and IBD, of a meaningless job are enough to crumble any house of cards. And mine went tumbling.

It was in that tumble that the questions, the doubts, cozied up next to me.

What was the point of life, anyways? Did God ACTUALLY care? Or were we created like a Sims character, given a set of commandments, and sent on our way to face the world on our own?

That my disappointments fell under the “average” category — no one in my life was dying of cancer, I wasn’t processing intense trauma, I had an apartment to call home and a cuddly new kitten — threw a load of shame onto the heaviness I already felt. How could I feel anything but happy when life was, on the surface, GOOD? When my basic needs were being met and I was surrounded by a community of good, good people? What right did I have to feel sad?

My very own dark night of the soul, served up with a heaping dollop of self-loathing.

A desert wandering, if you will.

Prior to this season of my life, I hadn’t given much thought to this whole “life is dry” desert imagery. I was a London girl, intent on one day calling that rainy British city my home. But as I wandered wider in my questions and doubts, my metaphor-swooning heart clung to the symbolism inherent in the desert’s stark, lifeless land.

Then, when I was 23 years old, I visited the desert — the real desert — for the first time on a gray December day. And, without my permission WHATSOEVER, this desert place snatched my heart right up.

What I discovered on that first visit was a land not at all like the dry, lifeless land I had envisioned. There was life: cactuses of all kinds, green-trunked trees, the unfamiliar twittering of wrens, sunsets that seemed to stretch across the whole universe, the sky scattering comets over the night.

I was head-over-heels smitten.

Until two months later, when the desert broke my heart. On a red-eye flight headed east, I blacklisted Phoenix from any future travel itinerary. I would never come back — not. a. chance.

I returned to Nashville in shambles. But — and I can write this only in retrospect — the beauty of the shattering is the chance to rebuild better.

In the months that followed, I realized my story — EVERY story! (yours included) — was worth therapy; I said no to a cool music industry job; I took a year-long role working in the refugee resettlement department of a local agency; I saw God move in shockingly and deeply personal ways (ways that I hope to have the right words for one day); I moved into the apartment that would be home-sweet-home for 6.5 beautiful years.

And then, for my 25th birthday, my friends pooled their money together. Written in their card to me: “For your tattoo.”

So with three of my dearest friends, I returned to Phoenix at the start of 2018 — this city I swore I’d never come back to — to ink a cactus on my wrist.

“Periods in the wilderness are not lost time,” writes author Anne Lammott. “You might find life.”

It was there, in the desert both metaphorical and real, that I found life: healing, deeper faith, new things, better things.

And like every good story, there are plot twists.

The pain, the doubt, the shame of those early-twenties years — and the healing that followed — has been a steady, unexpected march toward my right now: typing these words to you in a coffee shop, a Saguaro-studded mountain in my eyeline and a lease with a Phoenix address in my own name.

Life — my very real, non-metaphorical life — even here, even in the desert.

I’m not sure what desert you may be wandering in right now.

Maybe it’s a transition, watching your people flip to a new life chapter while you linger longer in your current one.

Maybe it’s a loneliness that stretches as far as the empty Oklahoma plains, a loneliness that whispers that life will always, always be this way.

Maybe it’s a loss, a gaping trench in your soul that seems impossible to fill.

Maybe it’s a brutish self-talk, one that throws daily darts at your worth.

I don’t know what dark night you might find yourself in, but I can tell you this: this period in the wilderness is not lost time.

With eyes to see, you might find life, even here, even in the desert.

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