Faith Unpacking

“You’re too busy in your mind instead of in your own life.” and

“You are writing to save your own life.”

My therapist said both of these things to me in separate sessions over the course of our six years working together. During those years, she’s helped me process self-esteem issues and develop coping skills for anxiety and stress to help me better navigate parenting challenges, communicate with my husband and kids, tackle job changes and career exploration, and examine struggles with my faith.

While she made the comments at different times, I’m sharing them together because they help set the stage for why I’m here.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve maintained a running inner monologue — a “thinking in words all the time” approach to life. JD from Scrubs is a funny example, but a good one because he’s constantly stuck in his head building stories, working through ideas, replaying events, etc. I do those things too, usually in real time, to process information and get a better handle on my thoughts and feelings. And while it does help me gain clarity, it also amps up my anxiety because it’s so easy to get stuck in negative thought patterns — to “replay the tapes” that leave me feeling embarrassed, ashamed and less than.

However, I’m also a writer, and for a long time, that part of me helped to balance out the negatives of living in my head. It’s easy for me to get lost in thought, but writing has always been my anchor; a way to cut through the abstract and turn it into something more refined, concrete and useful. Something I can hold on to and build on.

Over the last several years, though, that changed. As I found myself in uncharted territory as a parent, fumbling through more intense feelings and emotions, it became harder to put them into words. I was already struggling to deal with them in my day-to-day life; I couldn’t bring myself to relive and “re-feel them” through writing. So, more often than not, I didn’t.

But this year especially, it’s become obvious that I’m not saving myself any pain by pushing the writing piece aside. Not only is the pain still there, it’s just as fresh, just as heavy, and always at the surface, so that I never know when it’s going to push through and spill over. It’s time to create a safe space to hold it. It’s time to save my own life.

But of course, it’s not really me doing the saving. It’s God. That’s why this blog is called Faith Unpacking. My main intent is to work through the spiritual and theological issues that leave me anxious, keep me up at night and ultimately hold me back from deepening my relationship with God and becoming the person God wants me to be.

“You are on the cusp of so much growth,” my spiritual director said to me a few months ago. I’ve only been seeing her since the spring, but she’s also encouraged me to put my thoughts, questions and concerns into writing so that I can work through them and maybe even move past them.

It’s not like I haven’t done any writing at all. I’ve kept a gratitude journal for years and a spiritual journal for just as long where I write directly to God (though not always regularly). I also have a personal blog where I’ve talked in-depth about faith before, but my name is attached to it, and I need a private space for this work. This space won’t replace those outlets, but it will help me process what I’m going through with more intention, organize my thoughts, wrestle through “stuck points,” and hopefully soften the intensity of it all.

I’ll also use this space as a faith-based content repository, reflecting on podcasts, articles, blog posts and books about faith and the Bible that I find interesting and sharing thoughts and impressions on passages of Scripture. As an occasional lay preacher for my church, sometimes I’m asked to fill in for a pastor on short notice; it would be great to have an archive of at least partial reflections and ideas to draw from when I get “the call.” Plus, I just love Scripture — reading it, studying it, analyzing it, etc. It’s been harder to focus on the Bible this year, but that’s just one of the practices I’m hoping to reclaim and deepen in 2024.

There’s so much more I could say by way of introduction, and I’m eager to share more soon. Until then, thanks for reading my first post! I’m glad you’re here.