Moving Forward is Healing.

No matter how many times I say “I don’t care what people think,” there’s always a sliver of myself that feels like I’m lying. In fact I know I’m lying. Now, I will give myself credit – I’ve come a really long way and I’d say that I don’t care what people think to about 90%. I want to get to 100%. I truly do and I really think that I will. I wonder what will it take for that 10% to kick in? Something I have found that helps when I think about this is asking myself, “what exactly am I so afraid of?” And then actually getting really specific about it because chances are it’s not that big of a deal. At all.

I’m not even 2 minutes into this post today and I legitimately just had the thought, “this is stupid, I’ll write about something else.” Which I quickly realized, that exact thought process is exactly why I need to write this out and post it. I don’t know what’s with me, honestly. I used to be so much more fearless with my words before my heart transplant. I use to be so much more carefree back then…I think about that often. Like I talked about in my last post about having the “life before” a new heart and a “life after.” It feels like two different worlds and this feeling has followed me through. It’s been the one thread that I can pull on in both lives and feel an ache in my heart, it’s like a voice that keeps whispering from my life before, “what happened to us? what happened to the girl who use to use her words so effortlessly and felt excited about it, no matter what?” I guess maybe I’ve been trying to find my way back to her ever since, but I keep coming up short in some way or another. I feel like there’s this part of me now that desperately wants to get back to that part of me before. It was a good part, it was a safe part, it was this exciting part of me that didn’t care if I would bleed. At least it felt like I was alive, even though I was dying. That part doesn’t make sense to me. A new heart should make you feel alive and not to say that I don’t feel alive, I’ve had my moments over the last almost 5 years now. I have overwhelming feelings of being truly alive, but more often than not I catch myself feeling a little less alive and more so just here. Just humming along, pumping myself with medication that is poisoning me but keeping me alive at the same time.

I think there’s definitely something about getting to the place where you’re facing death in your 20’s and all the sudden you really don’t give two cents about what other people think and that’s a good thing. Death wakes you up, but only for so long because once you make it out alive, it’s up to you to stay awake. You’d think after an experience like that I’d be living like there’s no tomorrow and to be honest, in the beginning it was really easy to do that. However, as time passes, life gets back to “normal” and you get further from the trauma, further from your face to face with the end, further from the thing that you had to so heavily revolve your life around because it revolved itself around you. And suddenly, you’re struggling to stay awake because you no longer have anything tangible to fight against.

For me, the further I’ve gotten, the easier it’s been to care about what people think again. Maybe because it’s like “oh shoot, I’m actually not dead, I’m alive and now I have to live here and be here and remain in this place.”

That’s the thing about needing a new heart, when you need it – it frees you up because “you only live once” right? So why not? But what happens when you’re no longer living in the narrative of “only living once?” What happens when you’ve survived over and over again and you end up here for much longer than your illness told you that you would? Suddenly, you have to stay here and stand on what you said. Suddenly, you have to remain consistent and back up what you said.

Maybe not in the way you’re thinking though, maybe it’s more subtle. Maybe it’s more about continuing to be the person you were when death was knocking on your door because for me, that person was so free. Sure she was in so much pain, she was fragile, she was hopeful, she was exhausted, but she was real. She was full of so much faith for whatever was coming next, whether God was taking her home or she was staying on earth for a while longer. She didn’t care what others thought..she changed her mind if she no longer resonated with something she once did and she simply moved forward with peace because thats all she could do. She was always moving forward, even if that meant towards death.(which aren’t we all, ultimately?) Moving forward was healing because no matter how she physically felt, she knew emotionally that forward was the only option and anything in the past didn’t pale into comparison for what was coming (good or bad), but she was excited to find out what it would look like because she knew God was walking with her.

So I don’t know…maybe the way to stop caring so much about what people think is to keep moving forward? At least, that’s the lesson I’m taking from the 2020 version of me. I can’t change the past. I can’t go back. I don’t want to go back. However, I can always learn from the girl I was in my “first” life with my old heart. I can still pull on that thread that connects us and remind myself that I can still use my words and be fearless in this second life I’ve been given.

Ok bye…I love you!!
(But Jesus does even more.)