The drive home was a blur. Tears filled my eyes faster than thoughts could even form in my mind. What was happening to me? Confusion hit me like a train, as I searched my vocabulary as an attempt to identify what I was feeling. For the first time in my life, I didn’t know.
I fled for safety and found it in the one light that was still on at 2am. My roommate Carmen was awake. I slammed the front door and stormed into her room. Her eyes met mine as if to say, “Come in. You’re okay here.”
So that’s exactly what I did. I sat on the floor of her bedroom and cried. I was angry and hurt over a miscommunication and misunderstanding with someone close to me. Something that happens often to me it seems, and should be expected for anyone attempting to live authentically in a world that would much rather perform or hide. People won’t get you, misinterpret your intentions, and even get hurt by you despite your best efforts.
There will be things you do in this world for good, that others will interpret for evil. You will try to connect with and understand people, and they will perceive your love as trying to fix them or categorize them. At the end of the day, your love can hurt someone. At the end of the day, your love will hurt someone because we are human beings who are complicated and messy and beautiful. And we were not created to be unaffected by each other.
That’s why it only took one comment to wound me. I sat on the floor at 2am and realized that for the first time in perhaps my entire life, I felt vulnerable. I felt wounded. I felt human. In the midst of tears and hurt, I found a reason to celebrate. My walls were gone. The very walls I’ve held up and clung to for so long as a means to distance myself, protect my heart, and keep people out where no longer there. Its why I felt so threatened, because someone actually managed to find there way in.
In the midst of feeling completely open to attack and weak and unprotected, I have never felt more alive. I showed up and let my heart be seen. I was me. And that’s not something that everybody gets or understands. How can it be? And that’s okay. Carmen asked me, “Are you okay with the heart that God has given you, even if nobody ever understands it?” The answer to that, finally, is I am.
I will no longer omit parts of myself to make other people comfortable. I will not hide myself from people to be accepted or affirmed. Because my heart reflects that of Jesus’s. I love without limits and pursue people intensely. I seek to understand and connect. I feel in emotions vast and strong. I’m full of life and passion and fire, and that threatens some people. If anything, it confuse most people.
We live in a world afraid of risk and rejection. Everything we do is designed to make us comfortable and safe. Too many people desire connection without risk, and such a thing does not exist. So show up, and be misunderstood. Get hurt by people close to you and that you trust. At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is that you lived. That you were alive. The only way to be alive, is to be yourself, which is vulnerable and risky and complex. But more than any of those things, it is beautiful.
You are human. There is mess in your beauty and beauty in your mess. So never omit it, hide it, or let it be taken from you. Be you and get wounded and feel alive.
