I’ve been dreaming of this since I was five years old…
My very first book, You Are Loved, is slated for release on July 22! I am overwhelmed right now with a lot of happiness, anxiety, and expectation.
Winder Place was established back in 2019 as a vessel for me to express myself and publish the multiple dozen books I would like to write before the end of my life. Up until now, however, I haven’t been able to publish anything, partly due to my tendency to rewrite things after they’re finished, but mostly because of severe mental health struggles that have worsened for me over the last two years. 2020 and 2021 were some of the toughest years of my life, and during that time I was scarcely even able to write.
But this year, my perspectives on how I choose to handle uncertainty, accept my pain, and prioritize caring for my own needs have started to shift my mental well-being in a more positive direction, albeit at a snail’s pace. It hasn’t made me feel “better,” at least not by much, but what it has done is allow me to move forward with the things that matter most to me in life, not because I solved my uncertainty and fear, and not even in spite of my uncertainty and fear, but because of my uncertainty and fear. I realize now that uncertainty is actually the bedrock of faith.
I know that sounds counterintuitive. I used to think faith was about certainty. Earlier today I threw away a stack of gospel tracts I found hidden on one of the shelves in the grocery store where I work; on the front of the cover were the words, “Are you looking for certainty in an uncertain world?” Religious people often talk about their faith as if it were a source of certainty for them, and I think it does actually make them feel more secure, until something comes along to make them uncertain. For many people, that may not be too often, perhaps only the occasional tragic incident or nagging question that casts some doubt on their faith for a little while. But as a person with OCD, I don’t represent most people. My brain is literally wired to remind myself over and over and over again ad nauseam of just how uncertain life really is, all the time, which leads to the compulsive, addictive need to figure things out and restore a (temporary) feeling of certainty again. Nobody likes uncertainty. It makes us uncomfortable and insecure. But some of us are better than others at pretending it doesn’t exist. Which is a good thing most of the time—if I were constantly thinking about the remote possibility of being in a wreck every time I got in a car, something that is statistically unlikely (though of course, still quite possible) might end up having an oversized piece of my mental energy and estimated likelihood, and might even prevent me from living my life in a satisfying way. That is why OCD can be so crippling. The only catch is that when it comes to existential matters (like whether or not there is a God or whether there is an afterlife or whether we are loved on a deep, unchanging level), we don’t have the same kind of statistical measures of probability that we have in place for automobile accidents. And existential issues are precisely what my OCD has latched onto.
And the fact that we don’t have a way, statistically or scientifically, to answer those questions is actually a good thing. Uncertainty makes faith possible.
In 2015 when I left Christian fundamentalism, I believed I was going to hell because I had spent my entire life reading books of fundamentalist propaganda that claimed the scientific and logical evidence for the Bible was irrefutable. So when I realized I didn’t even like the god of the Bible, I thought my only options were either to serve a god I hated or burn in hell. I was certain of this; I had evidence. I couldn’t put my faith in Love because I was certain my faith would be misplaced.
Then in 2021 when I realized the truth of evolution, I believed I was a meaningless mistake and that Love was just chemicals in our brains (and therefore inherently conditional) because most evolutionary apologists tend to also be diehard materialists with oversized ideas about the purpose and scope of science. But once again, I was certain that they must be right; they had evidence. I couldn’t put my faith in Love because I was certain my faith would be misplaced.
Certainty kills faith! So why do we think it is faith? If I believe in something because the evidence says so, that’s not faith. That’s reason.
In my fundamentalist religion, we didn’t practice faith. We practiced bullshit evidence. We had creation science and archaeology and personal testimonies to tell us what we were required to believe. We had no choice. That wasn’t faith.
Faith always has an element of choice. Which actually implies uncertainty.
After spending the last seven years of my life certain of badness, now I get to live my life uncertain of goodness. That’s actually a huge improvement, and it allows me to embrace Love, not because I have proof, but because I have doubt, and therefore get to decide for myself how I choose to live. That’s faith.
And it is this faith that has finally made it possible for me to publish my stories. Not because I’m certain that they’re rooted in reality or that they’re good or helpful, but because I’m uncertain. And rather than doing the thing my OCD begs me to do every day—try once more in vain to eradicate my uncertainty with another dose of trying to figure things out or trying to do “the right thing”—I instead get to hold hands with my pain, my fear, and my uncertainty, and go live out my dreams no matter how loud or quiet these things become. That means a lot of things, but one of the biggest for me is to start writing again and publishing books, even if it makes me scared.
At the start of this June, I decided that waiting the whole way until next year—when I expected to publish my first book—was too long to wait. I needed to demonstrate to myself that it was possible to actually do this, to do it in a reasonable time frame, and to do it imperfectly. Letting go of my own perfectionism has been a challenge, but it is an essential part of my healing, especially right now. I had the idea to take a single poem I had written earlier and publish it as a standalone booklet. Then I decided to put six poems in the booklet; then I decided to go even further.
When I first started talking to H.L., I started writing most of our conversations down because we tended to talk in circles a lot. I would get worked up about something, and he would say something that made me feel better; a few days later I would forget everything he had said and we would have the same conversation over again. So after all these years, I have hundreds of notes representing my best rendition of our conversations, or sometimes small snippets and quotes from the two of us that I thought were important to keep. And H.L. made the preposterous suggestion recently that maybe, in spite of my feeling dismayed that I have spent so much time in the last several years wrestling with my mental health instead of writing, maybe I was actually writing a book this whole time! He invited me to dump some of our most important conversations into the book, completely unedited, which threw me for a loop because I had never dreamed I would show any of my private notes to anyone at all. It was way, way, too personal, and it would make me way, way too uncomfortable.
But since I’m learning to make room for pain, uncertainty, and discomfort, I realized this might actually be the best thing I could do for my own mental well-being right now, as scary as it feels. I am loved, but I am never going to feel loved until I am seen. I need to know that if I bare it all, and put the parts of myself I am most embarrassed about on display, that at least one person will still accept me and treat me in love. The only way we know is to go; if we stay hidden to avoid the experience of rejection, we are also avoiding the experience of acceptance at the same time! Relationship requires vulnerability. And I need relationship. I need it just like I need food and water.
So the goal with this book has been to do something ridiculous, something that scares the crap out of me, something imperfect, raw, and unedited, and something as vulnerable as I can possibly muster. Nearly the entire book consists of material already written—conversations with H.L. that I’ve been writing down for years, poems that were meant for different books or in some cases originally just for myself, thoughts I’ve written down (again, for myself), and excerpts from my unfinished stories, which are very dear to me. The book is almost a scrambled autobiography of sorts, the not-so-chronological story of my emotional arc over the last several years. It covers some of the most painful subjects and events of my life, and some of the most beautiful, precious ones, too. And it is thrown together in a haphazard fashion, but honestly, it feels so lovely to me even that way. And I’m terrified to show it to anyone.
And I’m doing it anyway. You Are Loved releases July 22, 2022.
SHARE THIS WITH OTHERS:
