Be Free

Shame

“In your life- over and over again- Jesus will renew- restore- mend- heal- inspire you through the streams of mercy that will never cease. Your life is not going to be about perfection or game plans- but it will be a loving and powerful invitation for those around you to step into the same healing waters you have known and trusted.”

– My friend Meg

I want to tell you the story about the day that my soul was set free. This was the day that I made the choice to stop hiding from my mistakes, and come to terms with what was true. It was the day that I decided I would get off my couch and come face to face with my deepest, darkest fears.

Matt Chandler says that to be 99% known is to be unknown. That’s crazy, right? I’ll put it this way, if someone comes up to you and says, “Hey we need to talk…” and your mind automatically jumps to that one thing you hope it’s not about, are you really free? Well friends, that was me for a year and a half.

Ever since that first morning on the tour bus when I woke up and learned the gut wrenching meaning of shame and self hatred, my life turned into a secret that only I knew about. But it wasn’t just the mistakes I was making that I was trying to hide from the rest of the world; it was who I feared I had become because of them. That’s where the shame was being kept locked away. I was absolutely terrified that people would see what I had done and throw me away. My heart couldn’t take that. There were fears, feelings, emotions, insecurities... a whole list of things that I couldn’t ever let anyone know about. These are all things that throughout this book I hope to go into much more detail about, but for right now I just want to celebrate the day that my lies were put to rest and my soul was truly set free.

This was the day that I was going to finally tell the one person that I was so terrified of finding out the truth, the truth.

On January 4th, 2016 I wrote in my journal:

“I feel like I’m falling apart. I feel like my world is crumbling. Everything from the past is coming to the surface and I don’t know how to control it anymore. I’m hurting people, I’m losing people, and it’s not even over yet. Tomorrow I’m going to have the hardest conversation of my life. There’s no way around it. I can’t live in this fantasy land avoiding the truth anymore. I need to face my demons and come to terms with the choices that I’ve made. This is absolutely anything in the world but easy. I feel numb but I’m breaking at the same time. How did it get this bad?”

I genuinely thought my life was shredding to pieces the day I wrote that. I just couldn’t take it anymore. I remember this like it was yesterday, sitting on my couch alone in my apartment. Normally I would drown out the pain with an episode of Friends and a bowl of cereal, but instead, I just sat there in cold silence. I had been crying for about a week straight at this point, so my eyes were puffy and I could barely see the pages in the journal I was writing on. In fact the smudges of ink from where my tears fell that day are still there, and still as real as they were when they were shed.

Nothing could stop me now. I had to do it. I got in my car, blasted “Oceans” by Hillsong in an attempt to escape my pain for a second, and headed straight to my sister’s house. I didn’t want to wait for another “tomorrow.” I was done waiting. I was done avoiding.

There was not one piece of me that expected a good outcome from this. I planned on telling her the truth about what I had done, driving away, and never being able to speak to her again. I planned on her completely disowning me and never wanting anything to do with me ever again. I planned on losing my big sister.

Hear me out, though. It’s not that I wanted to lose her. That’s the last thing in the world that I wanted to happen. You see, my big sister had pretty much been my hero for the majority of my twenty-one years. Throughout my whole life all I wanted was relationship. All I wanted was to be loved and accepted and close with her. Her approval had always been what I thought I needed to be okay. For as long as I could remember, she was the first person I wanted to think I was great, to celebrate with me when I succeeded, to cry with me when I was hurt. She was who I thought I needed to be like. I chased her around at school when I was little, begging to be a part of her world, just dying to be in her circle and life in anyway possible. Looking at her face when I walked into her house felt like a dagger just flat out pierced my heart. Looking into her eyes made me want to crawl into a corner and never feel anything good about life ever again. I was scum. It’s what I thought I deserved. So why did I get myself into this mess in the first place, you ask? That’s a question that took me a long time to figure out myself.

One of the hardest parts about driving to tell my sister the truth that night was the timing. After years of craving a relationship with her for more reasons than I could count, it wasn’t until a few months ago, at this point, that that bond was seeming like it was going to take place. For the first time, Alex and I were actually getting close, actually getting to know each other’s hearts. It’s not that we didn’t want to share before, I think we just didn’t know what exactly to share. We didn’t know who we were, or at least I didn’t. I felt like the more time I took waiting to tell her the truth, the more I was going to hurt both her and myself with my mistakes. I knew that the closer we became, the harder it was going to be. It was getting to the point where she would ask me to spend time together and, no matter how much I wanted to, I would force myself to tell her no because it just felt like one big lie. I can honestly say that I genuinely hated who I was, and I didn’t want to expose her to that. I thought I was toxic. I wasn’t just on my way to tell her the truth... I was on my way to tell her goodbye.

Crying so hard I could barely even see the road in front of me, all that went through my mind were memories from growing up. When my sister Alex and I were just kids, we used to put on plays in our basement together with our dad’s camcorder. (This isn’t meant to be a plug, but if you look up “The Selfish Queen” on YouTube you might have a reference for what I’m talking about). We would dance around in our pink nightgowns and sing songs from the Annie soundtrack on repeat. She would pick me up and throw me on the ground and I would just smile and hop back up so she could do it again. Then the memories of me getting beat up at softball practice came up. Alex picked me up that day and as soon as I told her what happened, she chased the girl that punched me around the field to get her back. By the way, if the girl who punched me is reading this, I totally forgive you. We’re cool.

That was my big sister. That was my hero and I was on my way to break her heart with my shame story, and say goodbye.

I parked my car a few blocks away and pulled over to try to calm down before I went in. I cried, I prayed, I begged God for a way out. It was loud in my car. Not the noisy kind of loud from the music or my uncontrollable sobbing, but the kind of loud that filled my head with fear. Fear that was louder than God, and fear that was louder than love. I came to terms with the situation, accepted what I was about to do, and tried to prepare myself for my losses.

I took one step into her house, only to then take one look into her eyes, and break down all over again. I stood there hysterical, barely being able to enunciate my words of apologies and how much she was about to hate me, and all she could do was tell me that she loved me and hug me. I wouldn’t let my heart accept that though because she still didn’t know the truth. I spent the last year and a half not letting myself feel loved by her because my shame told me that I didn’t deserve it.

I was just a mess. It took me probably an hour before I was able to get it out. I kept stalling by telling her how scared I was, or running into the other room to cry on her best friend’s shoulder (who had no idea what was going on but was such a good sport about it, by the way). Finally, there they were. There were the words that I was so scared of. There were the words that I thought defined my very being, and claimed me as trash. There were the words that I was fully prepared to hide for the rest of my life.

Okay, let’s back up here for a second. What was this mysterious story that I was hiding from my sister that was so terrifying to tell her, and was it really as big of a deal as I was making it seem? As far as the seriousness of this story goes, I’ll leave that up to you to decide. However, by the convicting truths in my own heart, it honestly did feel like one of the worst things I could have ever had to carry on my shoulders. If anyone reading this book has ever kept a major secret about themselves for a decently long period of time, you might get what I’m talking about. No joke, there were multiple times in church where I would sit there in my chair, watching the hipster LA worship band jump around on stage in their long t-shirts and ripped up skinny jeans and forcing myself to hold back tears because I was so certain that I was going to hell. That fear overwhelmed me, not only in...