Is My Writer Seeping Through?

lindseygendke6 Comments

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Since deciding to be a “real” writer, I’ve kept a low profile. Not wanting people to know I’ve embarked on a low-paying (sometimes no-paying) job, I’ve hidden my true profession behind a façade of graduate student and teacher.

I haven’t been a teacher since May 2011, but until last December, I really was a graduate student, putting the finishing touches on my one-hundred-page master’s thesis. Mostly I was done by October, but I still let my classmates offer condolences for “how hard” the writing must be.

It wasn’t hard, really, because my advisor let me write the way I wanted to write: creatively and personally (with a little academic jargon sprinkled in). I guess this “practical” approach worked because the topic was practical: best practices for teaching writing.

When a few of my fellow students heard about my personal [slash] creative [slash] academic project, they seemed intrigued.

“I’d never have thought of that,” some said.

As they scrambled to turn up sources on the databases, scouring search engines and library shelves, giving themselves ulcers looking for an original angle, I just sat back and wrote. I started from the inside—I knew what I wanted to say, and I didn’t much care about citing the scholarly conversation that had come before me, or that would come after.

I know this sounds sort of pompous, and it wouldn’t work in some of the disciplines where original voice is not prized. But thankfully, English departments operate on this truth: If a voice is engaging enough it doesn’t really matter what it’s saying—people will read it for the good writing.

And that’s the truth in the real world, isn’t it?

People who don’t care a lick about golf will watch Tiger Woods because he excels in his sport. Same for most Olympians and Olympic sports. Who watches bobsledding or curling on a regular basis?

But millions watch the Olympics because it’s fun to watch pros do what they do best.

Funny, then, that I feel I’m still hiding in the wings, waiting for permission to “come out” to do what I do best.

Well, not so funny, I guess. I have no doubt that the hiding is due to the overwhelming personal content of my writing. (It’s not really about the money.)

In order for me to write about the things I write about (mental illness, family dysfunction, deepest fears) and be respected, I feel I have to be either a mental health professional or a pastor, or some other authority who can talk on these things at a close, yet safe, distance. That, or I have to make the writing itself attractive. Because the topics just aren’t.

Still, I am convinced that these topics are worth discussion. Worth a master’s thesis, a doctoral dissertation, and many book series. I am convinced that all this painful self-reflection is what more people ought to be doing, but aren’t. But if it’s so worthwhile, why aren’t more people doing it?

Because: Like graduate students fumbling for research topics, we are afraid of ourselves, and we are afraid of what self-examination might reveal. So we look for other voices to latch onto. Let someone else be the guinea pig—or the “straw man,” to use an academic term. Then, if our life thesis fails, we can partially blame the voices on whom we’ve built our own.

Well, I’ll stand behind my own work. To the thesis examiner who said my work got uncomfortably personal at times, I would remind her that everyone else who read it said it was the most memorable thesis they’d ever seen. She was more comfortable in the theoretical realm, and that’s where she encouraged me to return. Toward the end of the defense, we had a more informal discussion about how we felt about publishing—how we felt about others reading our work—and this professor said she felt terrified thinking others would read her academic writing (not to mention any personal stuff).

Just like she couldn’t understand me being so personal in writing, I couldn’t understand her being so guarded (about dry academic prose). Perhaps she is worried that others will smell a rat—that of inauthenticity. And I guess if I were not being true to myself, I might worry about the same thing.

But after denying myself public expression for so long, I think having to live in hiding is far worse than living exposed. After spending time in a theoretically constipated English department, I think living vulnerable is better than living jealous of writers whose real-world topics you only dare poke with a critical stick.

Perhaps my guarded professor would even agree. At the end of the day, she passed my thesis unconditionally. Call my writing what she will, that day she called me a master.

 

 

On Pulling Weeds and Planting Seeds (My Life as a Metaphor)

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My husband planting our garden in 2011 (the same time I was working on photography techniques for the journalism class I taught). Of the family, he’s always been the gardener. But this year I seem to be coming around.

I like writing to my roots, or the metaphor I’ve chosen to guide my blog, because it suggests a narrative that deepens as I go. It means that I don’t have to start with all the deep stuff first, but that I can move more gently to the sources of pain, and the sources of me.

Who says I have to go deep, you may ask? Well, definitely not pop culture or social media, which is oh so surface level.

It’s me (“It is I,” for my fellow English majors) who has chosen to go deep, because I write to heal myself and to help others. I choose to work gradually to my roots of pain and self-protection, because that’s how healing has to happen, and after healing, recovery. Recovery of our dreams, goals, and our true identities. We must take gradual steps.

As we do, we can unmask lies we’ve had about ourselves to finally embrace who we are meant to be. And that’s the point of the blog.

But before I chose Writing to my Roots, I planned to call this endeavor The Before Thirty Project, because that’s how it started. Originally this “project” included two goals in the last months before I turned thirty. Little did I know that these goals would expand as my writing took me deeper, little by little, to my roots—both pleasant and painful. Today I finish a series of three posts on a topic that I used to shun like the unwanted appendage I imagined it to be. Then, back to other topics I’m more comfortable with. I promise.

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When I first vaguely conceived of my project at age twenty-five, I had two goals in mind: earning my master’s degree and publishing a book. It was probably my incessant talking about these grandiose goals, in fact, that had my high school students so frequently asking, “Are you ever going to have kids?”

The junior and senior girls would look at me in disbelief when I shrugged, “Probably not.”

For some of them, having kids was the goal of life.

But when they said things like this, I was the one fighting back disbelief.

Really girls? I thought. What was so glamorous and good about having babies?

Of course, being in a high school environment where numerous girls got pregnant each year, it was easy to disparage their dreamy looks and words. Terrible! We teachers said. Teenage girls getting pregnant! What a waste! What unnecessary hardship!

For a teenage mom, of course, it is an unnecessary hardship. To this day I would never advocate teen girls—or any female who is not married—getting pregnant.

But once a girl finishes high school…once she gets married…

Until recently, I still couldn’t advocate it. Not for myself. And honestly, not for anyone else. As my twenty-something girlfriends got pregnant one by one, it felt as if they were betraying me, one by one. How selfish, I know.

Because I couldn’t have this happiness (rather, couldn’t understand it as happiness), they shouldn’t either. Really, I would be doing us all a favor to save us from the inevitable heartache that must come with kids.

For seven years I told myself I didn’t want kids. Too much risk. Too much time that could be better spent elsewhere. Why risk such a hefty investment when you didn’t know what you were going to get? Never mind potential birth defects. What about angry children who decided to write you off because you screwed up their lives?

Today I can look back at sentiments like these more objectively. They don’t seem normal, or rational, or healthy, like I once stubbornly insisted they were. (My husband would just give me that same look I got from my girl students: You’re messed up.)

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Maybe it was a problem with the kind of kid I had become over the years. Bitter. Angry. Sad. Detached.

I was not bringing any particular blessings to my parents’ lives. I had moved so far away from them that it was not strange to go almost a year between visits. At various points, I had barricaded myself from contact. Didn’t want a lot of contact, because contact hurt. It just all hurt so much—family visits, photo albums, phantom memories—that why would I ever want to perpetuate it?

Through writing and other miracles, God has taken me to a place where I’ve realized none of my self-protections can keep me safe or healthy. More than indicating a kind of logic, all my excuses, denials, and exercises in becoming numb indicate a sad existence. The guardedness (to the degree that I’ve had it) is not laudable; it’s lamentable. Would that we women could be smart about our choices—with healthy boundaries that keep us from getting pregnant when we shouldn’t (right, Kim Kardashian?)—but that allow us to be open to any possibility, should God suggest it to us.

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After eight years of marriage, He has suggested it. And now I’m open. At this point, a baby could definitely be part of the “before thirty project,” if God wants it to be. That is to say, I’ve removed the barriers. I can conceive of getting pregnant. It’s up to God if I really will conceive. But if not, I’m okay with that, too. My being open to the possibility is the real growth—more meaningful than a baby bump could ever be.

Whew. Now that I’ve made some real progress with this root, I’m putting it to rest for awhile. (I’ll let you know if anything develops.)

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Celebrating 8 Years: Roots of a Love Story

lindseygendke2 Comments

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“Do you want to talk again, maybe tomorrow?” he asked from his bachelor pad in balmy Texas.

“Sure, if neither one of us dies before then,” I responded through huffs and puffs of cold Minnesota air.

I was walking briskly up College Street, autumn leaves crunching underfoot.

He thought it strange the way I ended that third phone call. But you have to understand it had been no more than six months since the previous winter when I’d found myself sitting in that mental ward.

I was making a slow recovery from depression, trying my luck at a few random classes in community college after having dropped out of a pricey private institution.

With a BBA, he was in his second year of a new job in the finance industry.

We were both living single and lonely in small apartments. Both dejected from recent life failures, we had recently both shut ourselves away from family and friends.

Apparently he found something intriguing in my dark humor and brooding ways. As well, he’d liked the pictures my bff, and our matchmaker, Samantha, had shown him. It was before the days of Facebook, so I would wait until our first live meeting about a month later to see him. No matter. His voice, smooth and soothing, already gave me goosebumps.

“What are you doing tonight?” he would start our phone conversations, which quickly became daily affairs, usually no less than four hours at a pop.

I couldn’t believe how attentive he was. He actually wanted me to read my journals out loud to him, which I did.

“I’m taking a walk/organizing my closet/doing dishes [pick one—these were all true over the months of phone dating…and all due to that nervous, post-depression energy I suffered in those days]. What are you up to?”

“I’m just lying here, thinking about you.”

Each night on his primitive, 2004-model cell phone, he gave me his full attention, something I was not used to with males. The previous two men in my life I had met at my workplace, a restaurant, and the relationships had always been about what I could do for them. The boy I had loved in high school (a much nicer guy than these two) ended up having precious little time for me after going gay.

I wish I could say that I unreservedly returned Buc’s affection in the beginning. But every true love story must have a complication, mustn’t it?

Sigh. After dropping out of college, I’d struck up a conversation with my most recent ex (he’d since been fired from his dishwashing job at the restaurant). This happened a couple months before I met Buc.

The first contact I’d had in about six months with this dude (who shall remain nameless) started with him telling me he’d love to get together—but I’d have to go to him, because he was under house arrest at the moment.

Instead of running the other way like I should have, guess what I did?

Yep.

I got physically and emotionally involved. Again. Apparently I was attracted to his brooding ways. I identified with his suicidal tendencies, and as lonely as I was, well, any guy was better than none.

Lord forgive me. And Buc forgive me too. How stupid I was.

It should have been an easy choice. Let me put it this way:

  • One had three kids, the other had none.
  • One was unemployed, the other a successful broker.
  • One had a criminal record, and the other? Nary a traffic ticket.
  • One had a history of drug and alcohol use, the other, a history of jalapeno abuse.
  • One was a broken deadbeat who needed me to rescue him, while the other was a broken believer who wanted to rescue me.

Gee. I wonder who I should choose?

You might say I could have chosen neither. I could have accepted the newspaper editor job I’d been offered–but that didn’t pay anything (college newspaper, you see), and I was already out of money—plus, that restaurant where I’d picked up the last two losers had just gone bankrupt.

No, as the months went on that fall of 2004, it became clear that God was propelling me to make a choice. A drastic choice. Doors were closing all around me, and I literally didn’t feel strong enough to go it alone. I knew somewhere in the back of my mind that God was with me—but sometimes we are so low (or so delusional) that we need God’s hands to reach out, take hold of us, and give us a good shake through the hands of another.

“Think about what you’re doing!” Buc would cry in frustration as I lamented to him that I loved both of them. “Why is it even a choice?”

One night he almost gave up on me. I had waffled again, saying I needed to take a break from both to sort myself out. Meanwhile, he prayed for a sign.

“God,” he prayed several days into this separation, “if she calls tonight, then I know you want us together. If she doesn’t, then we’re not meant to be.”

That night when I called, I don’t remember what I said. I know I was not totally convinced one way or the other, but God didn’t need me to be ready just yet.

Buc took this as his sign, and I’m so glad he did. After this, I waffled another time or two, but he didn’t give up on me. He trusted God, even though my utterly stupid behavior baffled and hurt him.

I think I owe our eight years of marriage to my husband’s faith, a faith I have seen again and again over the years when his job was uncertain, or I was uncertain, and he prayed for a sign, received his answer, and made up his mind not to worry because, as he simply and calmly explained, “It’s God’s plan.”

It’s a faith I’m still hoping to develop.

I saw it again just this week, as he faced a job-threatening audit at his branch. Yep, my hubby has become the manager at a top-notch financial branch, and earned plenty of top-performer awards and trips along the way. (Just for kicks, I googled my ex last year and saw his gnarled face and tattoos pop up in a mug shot for a domestic dispute. Gulp! To think I could have married that!)

“I could get fired,” Buc announced coming home a few days ago. “But if I do, I know it’s God’s plan.”

Since I’ve been staying home, I’ve told him many times I wish he could stay home with me. I get so lonely.

“Well, maybe getting fired would be a blessing—we could spend all day together,” I quipped.

Seems all this alone time is not good for the logic—it’s his awesome job that’s currently allowing me to “write to my roots.” But no matter how I’ve spent my time in the past few years, home or not, my desire to be by my hubby’s side continues to grow.

As I awaken to the beauty and possibility around me little by little (because rediscovering family, God, and dreams after deep depression happens gradually), I realize more and more what a jewel I have right beside me. What do I need a wedding ring for? He is my rock, always returning to me at the end of the day.

Today, our phone calls are shorter, because they only last as long as it takes for him to drive the thirty to forty minutes home. (By the way, he’s still employed at that job that is too far away for my liking. “God’s will,” Buc said.) Still, he calls me every day. Kisses me every morning. The calls are a little less exciting than they used to be, more often filled with dinner plans or daily headlines than deep confessions of past sins or heated professions of love. After eight years, there’s not much we don’t know about each other. But though the conversation may have leveled off, the love never has. To the contrary, it has only grown.

Over eight years, as he’s helped “nurse me back” to mental health; talked me down from countless emotional cliffs; and worked day after day to clothe me, feed me, and shelter me, I am starting to “get it.”

His love for me is like God’s love–hoping all things, bearing all things, believing all things. I only hope that I will learn to love other human beings as much someday. Ever since moving to Texas, I’ve had a slow thaw in my heart. But I hope he knows that right now he’s got all the love I’ve got—with these melting icicles creating more room for him every day.

Honey, I thank God that you chose me, and even more, that I chose you! (Oh, how thankful I am that I made the right choice!)

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(Blast from the past)

February 7, 2005, 8:14 a.m. (about a month before we got married)

When I imagine our life together I feel unspeakable joy. Especially today after setting our wedding date.

Last night—remember my tears of joy?—I felt, finally that I have something to hope for (on this earth), for you are my representation of Christ as the husband of humanity.

A place to belong, somewhere to fit—the knowledge that someone thinks I am special enough to invest in for a lifetime…darling, you don’t know what you have given me by asking me to share your life with you.

I am so blessed to have someone who loves and cares for me as a prized possession, yet at the same time respects me as a person. I can’t wait to be your family (even if it means making lunches and suppers and breakfasts sixty more years). To be with you every day will be a privilege and a joy. I hope you feel the same way.

buc and Lindsey

The Question Every Young Couple Must Answer

lindseygendke3 Comments

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“When are you having kids?” my high school students always used to ask. Why they were so interested in this detail of my life I never understood—much like I didn’t understand when family members or anyone else asked. The question used to come frequently when we were first married, and then, as year after year slid by with no child, but only new feats such as a bachelor’s degree, teaching job, and master’s degree, the question all but went away, and with it, my child consciousness.

But when I got to my first semester of grad school in 2010, I had an epiphany. Sitting in class at that time as both student and teacher, I was to finally understand why students and so many others wonder that question.           

It happened one night in literary theory class, when my professor, trying to explain the infant stages of Freudian development admitted, “Well, the research says this [insert windy explanation of anal and oral stages]; but I don’t have kids, so I don’t really know firsthand.” That’s all. One comment. Then he continued his lecture on Freud. But I was stopped.

Before that night, he’d been Mr. Know-It-All.

Now, he was just a man out of touch with reality…who, perhaps, had never changed a diaper.

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(Photo from giftsfordadtobe.com)

What did my professor have? He had his books and his scholarly journals and his research (and with those, late night library visits while bedecked in baseball caps [to blend with students, he’d told us]), but what, beyond that? He didn’t have a wife. Or kids. Or religion. (Lots of grad students and professors end up losing their religion, I was also to find out.) The closest relationships he had seemed to be with us, his students. And he was great with us, very gentle and caring, and genuinely concerned for our welfare.

But in general…in general, I had to ask myself that night: Is this really the life? And more importantly, is this the life I want for myself? Do I want to be like this professor someday, standing before a class of adults (or high school kids, for that matter), in my forties or above, with no life experience to share with them, besides what I had read in books?

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This was a profound moment for me. I journaled at length about it the very next day. And I talked to my husband. Was I missing something here? Was I about to embark on the wrong path, this path to the PhD? What did it mean that I was having all of these questions?

Mind you, I was hardly ready to toss the birth control, quit teaching, and/or withdraw from my graduate classes. Just then I wouldn’t admit that I wanted kids. Because I wasn’t actually sure I wanted them.

But one thing I now understood: If I had kids, I would become a more interesting professor…and a more interesting person. I would become more credible. More human. And that alone was something worth considering.

 

 

A Career Is Not Enough

lindseygendke6 Comments

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A few months ago I sat on a park bench amidst the buzz of a college campus, realizing for the first time in two years that maybe I was out of place. I was twenty-eight years old. I was about to finish a graduate degree. And I was thinking of starting another.

I had also been married for almost eight years to a husband I rarely saw.

As I watched college freshmen skipping past, carelessly slinging their backpacks as if all burdens were so light, I pulled out a notebook and began to write.

It’s a lonely life right now. I am too old to be running around with a pack of friends like these kids—and yet, I don’t really have a family life. Not one that buzzes like this, creating its own nucleus of self-contained activity, a destination and end in itself.

Both still striving for career goals, my husband and I have talked about how these disparate strands will one day converge—we will have enough money to take jobs side by side at a university, or we will have enough money saved to travel together around the country, or we will one day have so satisfied our roles in society that there’s nothing left to do but sit on a park bench like this. We have talked about this meeting of our lives…but we have not yet arrived.

What is it that gives meaning to our lives as a couple? As individuals, we find meaning in work. I find it in writing. But what is the meaning with another person? There has to be common ground. A place where we reap and sow together. Where we both put in time, and dwell together.

Right now we have a house. And technically we both put in time there. He works on the yard (and usually does our laundry), and I work within the walls, doing dishes, cleaning, painting, arranging. Most of our time together we are asleep.

Our house seems oddly empty.

How do two people, young and building separate careers, find common ground, apart from the passing patches at home? Aside from those moments of rushing out the door in the mornings, or flopping down exhausted in the evenings?

Where is that common ground on which we can meet to slowly, deliberately, live life together? Not merely rushing to the next thing or recovering from the last? Is this an ideal that no longer exists in the twenty-first century?

Or is this where kids come in?

The Decade the Music Died

lindseygendke6 Comments

Your parents divorce. Your boyfriend reveals he’s gay. You show up to work one day to find the place has shut down.

Some losses are instant and sock it to you in a single blow. Others take more time to unravel, so much so that you don’t even realize you’ve lost something until, one day, you run smack dab into that old thing—that you suddenly realize you no longer have.

I was browsing the clearance racks of Half Price Books last week when I came upon some old CDs I remembered owning growing up. Mostly Christian tunes from the 90s. A dollar apiece? Sure, why not.

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When I put on the old Ashton, Becker, and Dente CD while doing dishes later that night, felt the music swell and my heart tingle, I realized something: I miss this.

I guess I first became vaguely aware of my loss of music when my bff, Samantha, and I were road-tripping one-thousand miles to Minnesota some years back (we’re both transplants to Texas) and she wanted to sing and I didn’t.

Sam and I had grown up singing together, even comprising two-thirds of a Christian trio in our teens. I remember being sixteen, when we’d just been liberated with driver’s licenses, cruising the Podunk town of W, Minnesota, singing at the top of our lungs just because we could.

But now, when we were twenty-six, cruising Interstate 35, and she suggested, “Hey, let’s sing some of our old songs, want to?” all I could do was shrug.

She looked at me quizzically. “You don’t really like to sing anymore, do you, Linds?”

I had never really thought about it. But it was true.

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For that matter, I’m not fond of playing the piano anymore, either.

Not so for the first half of my life.

I started playing piano at age eight, or during the only year my parents pulled me out of public school to try an experiment. During the 1992-93 school year, our church started a “school” that boasted a whopping enrollment of six. My brother and I made up one-third of all students. My mom was the teacher.

Though I was angry that year for being separated from my public school friends, I found at least one redeeming factor in this arrangement: all the pianos.

Maybe it was because I was in rebellion from doing schoolwork—or maybe it was because God had a plan. But for whatever reason, I found myself drawn to those piano keys all year long. When our school enrollment was slashed to 50 percent at Christmas (one family with three kids moved away), I was only too ready to head back to public school. But by then, I’d heard the music, and for the next decade I would play and sing frequently for church, adding in the trumpet during sixth grade, which I would play in various school bands until graduation.

Of our family of four, I was the only one who played any instruments; but with my dad’s love of classic rock, southern gospel, and his growing collection of Christian tunes, our house was, all told, very musical. And it is my dad’s constant playing of music (on stereos and other sound systems) that brings us back to Ashton, Becker, and Dente, or where this journey started.

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One year not long before the family split, Dad enrolled our family in a music club. You know the kind. Before everything went digital, they used to send out sheets of little CD stickers. You could “Choose 12 for the price of 1!” and you literally cut and pasted your selections onto the order form.

Before, Dad had always chosen the soundtrack of our house. But with this membership, we all had a hand in picking the twelve CDs. Some of the CDs we picked are the same ones I found at Half Price Books: Ashton, Becker, and Dente; Point of Grace; Phillips, Craig, and Dean; Geoff Moore and the Distance; Sierra; and more.

Through that music club I was later introduced to some of the Christian artists I still have in my collection today: Jaci Velasquez, Cheri Keaggy, and Steven Curtis Chapman. Others stayed with Dad after Mom left and Kyle went to college and I followed Mom (later to move to Texas, of course).

And until I stumbled upon these relics at the bookstore, I plumb forgot about them. What’s more, I forgot about the happiness those CDs had brought to our home, because we had all chosen them together—one of our last “family projects.”

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Why did I forget? Why is it that ten years have passed largely without the sound of music in my home?

For years it’s like I’ve just shut out this part of my makeup, flat-out denied it was there.

But rediscovering those CDs was like finding old friends. And more than pain, the memories attached to them brought pleasure. This is what healing must be. Writing. Listening. (Playing?) to my roots.

To face my past I can’t avoid the bad memories that, unfortunately, usually flash out at me first. But as I keep going, God is faithful—He takes me back to where I’m meant to be. And little by little, He restores what was lost.

At the end of a quiet decade, regaining my love of music has started with a few old CDs.

Maybe in my thirties I’ll relearn my love of piano, too.

What Christians and Mental Patients Have in Common

lindseygendke23 Comments

I can never tell, I thought, sitting in a mental ward in Minnesota. I was nineteen.

When I get out I can’t tell friends that I dropped out of college. That I attempted suicide. I can’t tell them how messed up I am. I can’t let them see me like this.

When I got out after forty days, there was only one option (besides suicide, of course). I had to hide.

This year of my life, 2004 to be exact, is the darkest one I can remember. Almost a decade has passed, and there’s hardly anyone I’ve told.

After the mental ward, my social worker set me up in an efficiency apartment that was fully furnished, yet covered in grime. The walls were spotted with grease stains, the floors covered in dirt. Kind of like me.

Only, instead of dirt, I was filthy with lies—and they were rooted deep.

And unlike the dirt that disappeared after one afternoon’s scrubbing, it would take me many, many years to recover from the lies that had saturated my mind for so long.

I can never tell, I thought just today, before finally deciding that maybe someone besides me needed this post.

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It’s funny how those lies stay with us. You see, in 2013 my depression and suicidal tendencies are for the most part gone; but today I almost didn’t post this, for fear of looking “crazy” when friends or family read the opening lines.

The good news is, by this point in my twenty-eight years, I know I’m not alone. After repeatedly opening my heart to the Source that “lays bare our innermost thoughts” (Heb. 4:12-13) through prayer, and after training other women to do the same, I’m starting to feel less territorial about the pain I’ve guarded for so many years.

I can never tell. What about all the women and men who have been sexually abused? In The Hidden Half of the Gospel, the book I’m co-writing, we cite a “1 in 3” statistic about girls who have been sexually abused, which blows me away! (Since starting prayer ministry, I’ve also prayed with two women who have admitted to being sexually abused.)

I can never tell. What about the teenage boys and girls struggling with their sexuality—thinking they may be gay but afraid of rejection if they “come out”? I’m reading a memoir right now about a girl, stuck in a mental hospital for three years by her abusive, incompetent parents, who admitted to lying, stealing, cheating, and who lied about having a drug problem, plus an eating disorder, before she would ever admit she had gender confusion. (Still waiting to see how it ends, but the title, The Last Time I Wore a Dress, gives me a good idea.)

I can never tell. What about all the Christians struggling with pornography, drinking, or other “sins”? (In The Hidden Half, Paul and I share the stories of some such Christians.)

I can never tell. What’s the issue for you?

For me currently, this lie is complicating my various writing projects. Just as I did today, just as I did when I published my first magazine article about a suicide attempt . . .

I still sometimes battle that lie, I can never tell.

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Maybe that’s why I like to read memoirs like Prozac Nation and other riveting romps through mental illness.

My husband thinks reading these kinds of things is unhealthy. Wonders if I am vicariously milking old, bad feelings through reading these books.

I used to wonder that, too. But these days, I don’t think so.

You see, more and more as I’ve dealt with my bad roots through prayer, I’m uncovering a holy rage about how humans (and Christians especially) cover up their bad roots. As if denying them is dealing with them. Who do we think we’re kidding? Certainly we’re not fooling God.

No, I like to read these memoirs not because they inspire my faith (I read the Bible and Stormie Omartian for that!), but because they inspire my honesty. I read them because they take me to a level of intimacy far below what I get with pretty much everyone else in my life.

Now for those Christians who may disagree with my “uninspiring” reading selections, that’s fine. But if you’re going to knock them, then at least tell me where else I can find such honesty. Sadly, I don’t find it in church, or from my family members, or even from most friends.

But as for me and my writing, we will be honest.

Not because I think we all need to be sharing and airing our garbage. If we did, just think what a stinky world it would be. But come to think of it, this world already stinks quite a bit…so maybe we don’t have much to lose. And if Christians would speak up more, maybe more people would join us, as they see that we’re not too out of touch to deal with the ugly realities that blot all human stories.

In any case, I’ve decided to be honest, in the name of not being fake…or distasteful to others because I can’t relate in any human way…or disgusting to myself because I’ve built my perceived flaws so big that I’ll never get over them. But the most important reason to be honest? Well, gosh darn, if so many people are writing the depressing stories, don’t we need someone to write the un-depressing ones? (This is the plan for the memoir I’m writing—to share how I got un-depressed.)

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And so, to conclude my very abridged tale of woe (for today, anyway), at the end of that worst year of my life, I’m happy to tell you, God intervened, introducing me to my husband (in Texas of all places!) and moving me 1,000 miles from that dirty apartment and my broken past. He moved me away physically. Mentally, on the other hand, I had a long way to go! But that’s the subject of many more blogs.

So, though it’s sometimes hard for me to write, and might sometimes be hard for you to read (but I’m sure you can find lots of “fake” blogs to read, if this one makes you uncomfortable), I choose to tell. No matter how often Satan tries to tell me I can’t, with God’s help, I will ever tell.

 

How God Led Me Back to Writing

lindseygendke4 Comments

I think sometimes when a person has a conversion experience, all the old habits become suspect. And if not suspect, they remind you of old times when you lived in darkness. Is it okay to do this? A person wonders. I wondered this about my writing.

Writing—and I mean that personal writing I had done for over a decade with glorious abandon as ink, and often tears, flew across the page—used to bring such relief to me. But sometimes, now, it brought guilt. Maybe I hadn’t realized it before, but I was writing to wallow. Writing in the wrong.

That describes some of my writing history. But not all of it. My reasons were not always wrong, I have to believe. At first, they were just survival reasons, like at age fourteen, when I couldn’t talk to anyone. Or at age nineteen, when the ink substituted for blood. But after that I healed a little. And healed a little more each year, until, in my early twenties, writing was part wallowing, part revenge. By the time I had my conversion in 2010, around age twenty-six, I didn’t know exactly what my writing was. All I knew was that it felt uncomfortable now, didn’t seem to fit the new me, and the thought occurred to me: what if I’m sinning?

For a time I had tried to just forget about it, but early in 2012, I felt the old urge creeping up again. Despite the newly instituted seminar papers and thesis writing for a master’s degree, now it was starting to flow out into magazine articles and opinion pieces for the church newsletter and, of course, as always, my journal. I’m on journal number twenty-five since 1998.

But none of it was enough. None of these outlets was fully satisfying my urge. . . .

Nearing thirty, a realization was starting to sink in: I didn’t have forever to get a PhD, or to have kids, or to finally publish that book I’d always wanted to publish, much less do all three! What was I to make of these conflicting messages, and the confusion in my own heart?

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I was definitely willing to consider that God had planted this recurring dream in me, like a seed that wanted to grow, but I still didn’t know what to do with it. So, God wanted me to write. But what?

As the summer wore on, I desperately wanted to apply to an MFA program [I am choosing not to reveal which one unless I get in!]. But I still felt I needed permission, somehow. I needed some validation that this was what I was supposed to do. I needed to know that writing could be different than it was before, because I was different.

And then, I met Paul Coneff.

To make a long story short, Paul came to my church to facilitate a week of prayer in March, around the time I was feeling desperate [about my career plans]. In five nights, he unfolded a message he calls The Hidden Half of the Gospel, or the message that Christ died not only for our sin—to give us a “happy ever after” in eternity—but that he also died for our suffering—to give us a happy life while on earth. An indispensible part of the message revolves around individuals finding their true, God-intended identities—restoring the identities that Satan strives to pervert, often through traumatic childhood experiences like mine.

Using a plethora of scriptures, Paul unfolded the story of the Suffering Messiah; Jesus had to suffer, die, and rise for our sins to free us. Because he was “tempted in all points like as we are, yet was without sin,” he is able to help us when we are being tempted. Because he has suffered like us—he was mentally, verbally, physically abused, plus he suffered depression and struggled to surrender his will—he can offer us healing for our pain (Heb. 2:17, 18; 4:15, 16). Because he was attacked at the very core of his identity, he is able to restore us to our true identities, replacing lies from Satan, the Father of Lies (John 8:44), with his truth.

When I heard this message, I was being attacked with lies. I was hearing messages like I’m trapped; I will never be able to write; I’m not good enough to write; I don’t deserve to get to follow my dreams. I have to be stuck in a graduate program that I hate for five years, and then it will be too late for me.

But when I heard Paul explain how Jesus had died not only for our sins, but our suffering, to restore us to our God-given identities, to enable us to follow and fulfill our God-given dreams, I began to feel hope.

At the end of the week, Paul announced that he would be holding discipleship and prayer training in our church for three men and three women. This three-month-long training would prepare participants to embrace their God-given identities, enabling them to become disciples who could, through personally testifying to God’s restoration, lead others to Christ.

This sounded hopeful to me. At least, I thought, How could it hurt?

After I began discipleship training with Paul, he mentioned he was writing a book. He said it with a grimace. The writing was coming hard; he was no writer. But he had to get this book done. As a prolific public speaker,[1] he needed a resource to offer listeners.

At hearing this, I felt another glimmer of hope. But I waited, taking this home with me, too. Now it was June, and I was struggling more than ever over my future, my graduate school plans, my teaching plans, my parenthood plans. I couldn’t find peace. Where was there room for the desires of my heart? More importantly, were those desires even valid?

Later in June when I received prayer for the first time—in this ministry, a prerequisite to discipling others is receiving prayer and healing in one’s own life, first—the prayer time revealed that I had not fully surrendered my will. Paul sent me home with a sample prayer and scriptures to pray day after day to further unfold this issue.

And so, in June, July, and August, I prayed. I cried. I read my Bible with fresh eyes. And like Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, I learned to pray “Lord, not my will, but yours.” I didn’t know exactly where all this praying, crying, and reading was leading, but I did know that, slowly, layers of remaining hurt were melting off. And within months, I had not only experienced peace to the point of deciding, conclusively, that I wanted kids, but also that I could trust God to make clear my career path in his good time.

By receiving Jesus’ victory over his carnal will, in July I was able lay my burdens at the cross, trusting God to work on my behalf, while I, meanwhile, composed my master’s thesis. Later that month, I had an article accepted by Insight Magazine—a piece I’d sent in over two years ago and had all but kissed goodbye. Because the article was embarrassingly autobiographical (it was actually a Guideposts reject from high school, chronicling my first suicide attempt), I kept it from most friends and family. But since I had five review copies, and since Paul deals with this type of thing all the time and was, moreover, still grimacing over the writing of his book, I figured, What the heck. I would give him one.

The day after he received the article, he called me, excited, saying, “This was really great; this really flowed. I want my book to flow like this.” Would I consider helping him write his book, which tells the stories of other wounded, yet healing, adolescents-turned-adults like myself?

The rest is history. As you read this, The Hidden Half of the Gospel: How His Suffering Can Heal Yours, should be going to press, to be published sometime in 2013. And it’s not about me.

Well, it is a little bit. Paul actually asked me to share part of my testimony in one of the chapters. I was a bit leery at first, wondering the same old question: Would I be writing this for the wrong reasons? But the more time I spent in prayer, both on my own and with our small group, the more peace I found about my career plans, my family plans, and my writing.

A few months ago I picked up one of those Bible verse cards with my name and my name’s meaning on it. This one says “Lindsey—Peaceful Isle,” and it has Psalm 37:4 printed below: “Delight thyself in the Lord, and He shall give you the desires of your heart.” This verse, among others I’ve studied recently, has led me to believe that the more I surrender my will to God, the more I actually can “listen to my heart.”

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Anyway, after finding the card, I set it on my desk at home, where I was writing my master’s thesis, and then Paul’s book, for most of the summer. As the weeks went by, as I continued to look at that card and ponder its message, I could only marvel at what God had done for me. Several years ago I had not been a “peaceful isle.” I had been a suicidal basket case with control and intimacy issues. But as I continued to delight myself in the Lord, he was slowly giving me the desires of my heart: chief most being the published book that would soon bear my name.

[1] You can find more information about Paul’s ministry at www.straight2theheart.com.

Chasing and Embracing Dreams

lindseygendke2 Comments

Dear Readers:

What gets in the way of you chasing your dreams? Crummy life circumstances? Fear of failure, perhaps? Or maybe failed past attempts? (Feel free to let me know in a comment!)

For me, it used to be all of the above, plus one:

I worried that following my dream was a sin.

You know how I wrote about treating tough subjects (both topics and people) appropriately in writing? Well, that’s because I used to not. See, I have this passive aggressive bone that metastasizes sometimes (see my previous post), and for a lot of years that’s mostly what happened in my writing.

Long story short, a few years ago, I was convicted that my motives for writing were all wrong. And I was confused. I didn’t know what to do. So I just quit.

But the writing dream wouldn’t go away.

My “writer’s bug,” as I called it in my MFA application essay, followed me everywhere—from college to career and back to college again, where I finally threw up my hands last spring and cried, “Lord, what am I supposed to do?” This was the same question I put to a campus counselor whom I sought out of sheer career desperation.

Then, after all my agonizing over the possible sinfulness of my writing, would you believe that counselor looked me straight in the eye and asked, “Why do you think you keep having this desire to write? Who do you think put it there?”

Whoa. Bull’s eye. Since that session in April, I’ve had to ask the same question about that providential counselor whose name I can’t even remember.

So God wanted me to write. But how? I still felt I needed permission somehow. For that matter, I needed some new material! If I was a “new creature,” a born-again Christian, but my writing record was stained with blood, ink, and tears (with a passive aggression that not a few times became active) what was I supposed to write about?

In my next post, using part of my MFA application essay, I’ll tell you about the answer/affirmation I got from God last summer.

Although the writing project He dropped in my lap is not the same one I am documenting on this blog, it is what has led me back to my writing roots—definitively, decisively, and defiantly.

It is also the same project I am struggling to finish up this week and, by extension, is keeping this blog painfully short and colloquial. And so, with that cliff-hanger (or choppy ending?), come back on Thursday for the rest of the story—or to read why I’m finally embracing my dreams.

           

            

What Would Jesus Write? On Writing the Truth with Compassion

lindseygendke1 Comment

 

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Speaking of entanglements, when writing memoir, there’s always that issue of how to talk about your parents. Your ex-boyfriends. Your husband. Or your in-laws. Now your words don’t just affect you and your impersonal readers: family and friends could be hurt or offended. And so, what is a writer, especially a Christian writer, to do?

Two Views on Writing about Real People

When it comes to writing about real people, immediately two options spring to mind.

First, my beloved Professor L used to like quoting an eighteenth-century writer (and I can’t remember whom) as saying something like: People better not tick off writers because they never know what he or she might write later. In other words, writers can and should write whatever they want about whomever they want.

While somewhat humorous to me, this view also seems selfish and inhumane, not to mention utterly unchristian. Even though I may have joked about wielding ammunition in my pen, seriously, this troubles me. “Revenge is mine [not Lindsey’s], says the Lord.” Needless to say, I don’t find much help here.

The second option comes from writer and teacher Peter Brickleback and, although not perfect, seems much more humane. In a nutshell, P.B. says that certain truths and experiences belong to us as writers, and so we should write about them. Those people we’re writing about? They “can write their own” version of the story.

I know this sounds somewhat callous, and even smacks of the other writer I paraphrased. However, here are some caveats P.B. tacks on that begin to win me over (see The Portable MFA, pp. 128-30). In writing “happily” about your “unhappy family [or whoever],” P.B. says the following:

  1. “Do not write as if you are Mr. or Mrs. Perfect.” He’s saying be honest about your flaws, too; don’t write as if you are the only victim in the world (your “oppressor” might be a victim, too).
  2. “Strive for compassion and empathy” in order to “[treat] the subject fairly.”
  3. Writing about difficult, universal experiences “contributes to our mutual benefit, to a wider social, human good.”
  4. Avoiding certain characters or topics can leave a “black hole of an absence” in the story, resulting in a “warped” version. In other words, sometimes we need to address these hard subjects to complete our stories.
  5. Writing using pain and anger as fuel helps us face pain more honestly.
  6. Writing in spite of pain can result in healing for both writer and writee—as in the case of a daughter who wrote a less-than-flattering memoir about her mother. In the end, P.B. reports, the mother and daughter came to have more understanding and compassion for each other: “[T]hey’ve straightened out some things that have gotten twisted through being buried. Also, being part of an attempt to put words to things, they’ve come to appreciate a lot more about the past and each other.”

Now, P.B.’s comments could easily be refuted, especially by Christians who are striving to “do unto others as you’d have them do to you.” Still, I’ve decided that Christians need to be open-minded to consider underlying assumptions and motives behind what might seem to be questionable opinions. In this case, P.B.’s very humane assumption is that writing should not (entirely) be selfish; rather, it should ultimately function for the greater good.

For Christians I think this means writing should, first and foremost, give glory to God—which is to say it must benefit others. But I am also coming to understand that that does not preclude writing about fallen humanity, including ours or others’. What is the Bible but the story of fallen humanity, anyway? That said, a Christian who is going to write on said topic might consider a few more caveats.

Some Christian Caveats for Writing about Other People and/or Pain

[Note: this section is really for me—but you can look, too!]

If I am a born-again Christian writing about a painful past that involves other people, I must be especially careful in how I shape the story. Does it end in redemption? Is there resolution available for all at the cross (even though some may not choose to accept it)? Because if I believe the Bible (and I do), Christ is the solution for all problems: by His stripes, we are healed (see Isaiah 53).

And so, after the happy (or at least hopeful) conclusion is settled, the remaining question for Christian writers might still be how to treat the bad roots, especially as they relate to or involve others. For myself, I’ve decided I want to include only the parts of their stories absolutely necessary to the telling of mine, but I also want to include enough so as to avoid leaving a “gaping hole.” Meanwhile, what I include should never needlessly hurt others.

While it may take awhile to figure out all of the above, I’m heartened by the same advice I’ve both given and gotten in English classrooms: Sometimes you have to write the body and conclusion before you figure out the beginning. Such is my story right now; but one day I’m confident I’ll get down to those roots I’m searching for.

You can view the photo from this post here.