The hardest worker who hated her life…but what she really hated, was being and feeling alone.
I was 20, working every job I could get my hands on, but not jobs I liked. Purposefully, they were jobs that sucked the soul out of my being. I hated myself for what I had done, what I had left behind, and didn’t think I deserved a better lot in life.
Nurturing jobs. I poured every iota of energy of my being into nurturing the dying, the elderly, the sick, the people that their own family members didn’t want to visit because it hurt too much. And I cried over their misery. But it fit. I felt like I belonged with them.
I broke my body for them. I told myself it was for them. A lot of it was because if I was pouring out on them, I wasn’t alone with my thoughts. Sitting alone was the worst torture. A 3-minute car ride following a friend, tears would start seeping through the cracks.
“You’re bad. You’re bad. You’re evil. You’re bad. You abandoned them. Left them to fend for themselves.”
The words echoed.
Then I would reason with myself.
“But you had to do it. You were going crazy. You were going to lose your mind in that place. How can you help them if you can’t even help yourself? I had to get out to build something for myself and then come back for them. They would survive.”
Loops of the same conversations. Different outcomes.
Back to work.
I worked until I was so tired that I could sleep standing up. The thoughts stopped then. The feverish dreams stopped then.
Rest meant pain.
I would Uber from job to job, catch rides with coworkers that became friends that I will cherish forever: Brooke, Tiffany and Jess. Dear Jess, who I’ve lost contact with and would love to find again. Girls that loved me through the pain and were kind.
I worked 12-hour shifts, 16-hour shifts, 24-hour shifts and 36-hour shifts, too. Taking a nap on the bench in the break room or in a chair, where a nurse would tap me on the shoulder, so kind, and tell me it was time for my rounds.
I’d get up shivering from exhaustion. Nauseous all the time.
But overall, I was grateful. So grateful to be here, to be alive, to be allowed to work. Grateful that even when the people that are supposed to love you most in this world hated you with a passion that made no sense, they were not the only people in this world. Somehow God brought love and nurturing and healing by unconventional methods into my life.
I was so grateful to make my own money. I saved that money like it was an addiction, logging into my bank every morning to see how much I had saved, thinking of ways I could scrimp even more. So grateful for every scrap of goodness that found its way to me.
I hated how I felt whenever I could think. I hated that I felt like a failure, and I hated that I felt I would always be a failure and that it was my lot in life and that there was nothing I could do to change it.
But what I hated most was being alone inside my life. It’s the worst kind of punishment.
But I had also learned, and it’s something I hold to to this day, that being alone inside a relationship is more painful than being alone alone.
But what happens when the coping mechanism that saved your life becomes the way you live your life?
Because as the lovely Jasmine Star says: “What got you here, won’t get you there.”
It means you have to switch it up.
I thought the only life available to me was whatever life I could earn through exhaustion. Somewhere along the way, gradually, I learned that a beautiful life isn’t a prize given to the person who suffers for it most.
But it wasn’t a lesson I chose to learn. My body was going to teach it to me whether I wanted it or not.
I had panic attacks for many years, but because the world felt like it was on my shoulders when I lived at home, they were quiet. They weren’t in the form of uncontrollable shaking or sobbing. They came in what looked like allergies, where my nostrils would stuff up, my eyes would swell up, and my throat would become scratchy and it was hard to breathe. There wasn’t room for me to be a mess on the floor, but my body found other ways to describe how it was feeling. So I would step outside and breathe into a eucalyptus essential oil bottle until it would subside.
Since I had a system for them, I ignored them and worked around them.
Interestingly, when my life had become safer, they got worse and started to show up in the ways you would expect them to, the regular I can’t breathe, don’t touch me sort of way.
I didn’t understand. My life was getting better. I was getting the things I wanted. Why was I not magically better?
But healing takes time and my nervous system didn’t experience calm as safety. Calm meant the thoughts could catch me.
Then the physical labor of taking care of people caught up to me and the nerves in my back became painful enough that I realized I needed to do something else with my life. My body was trying to get my attention to tell me:
“You cannot keep breaking me to prove you are good.”
While I was on that journey of change, I had to ask myself what I really wanted to do and whether I deserved what I wanted.
I found love in this dark season, in a battered and tattered knight who had his own demons he fought. And we fought them together, both his and mine, vowing our kids would never fight these battles if we had any say in it.
He showed up 15 minutes early to pick me up from work, even though my shift wasn’t over for another 15 minutes.
It felt strange to matter enough to someone for them to show up early for you. It gave me such anxiety knowing that he was waiting for me, even though he had chosen to do that, because surely I was inconveniencing him and this was not going to end well.
My mother-in-law and I were in the car, driving from location to location, looking for a long console that I wanted to put in the entry of Ian’s duplex to organize his holsters and magazines. It was the next piece to my vision of that tiny, old, cute, crooked house. I had painted it and scrubbed it.
My husband told me that it was my fault that it sold because I had made it so beautiful inside and out with my garden and paint and decor. But I shrugged because what did he expect me to do? Live in an old, dirty, ugly place?
It’s not possible. While there is breath in my body and caffeine in my veins, I will improve.
Driving between locations, I would be sobbing and crying, pouring out my heart to her. I remember this scene vividly. We were sitting in a parking lot in Jantzen Beach as she told me:
“It’s going to be okay. You’re going to make it. You can do anything you want to do. I promise you. I promise you. You can do whatever you want, and it’s going to be good. Lauren, you’re so capable, you’re so strong, you’re so beautiful. There’s nothing that can stop you in this world. Just do it. Please just do it. You don’t have to be so miserable. Your mother is an idiot. I don’t know why she doesn’t love or want you, but it doesn’t matter because I love you and you can do this. You can do anything you want to do.”
Sitting in my little white Toyota Corolla with the love of a mother-in-law, I had to wrap my mind around the fact that I could be enough to prevail for myself.
The idea that life could actually be good—not tolerable, not safe enough, not better than before, but good and beautiful—came on gradually. It was something my mother-in-law really instilled in me. And Rachel Hollis, in her bestselling book Girl, Wash Your Face.
You can choose what you’re good at.
You can choose what you enjoy.
You can be successful and happy at the same time.
Choose something because you like it.
Make a life that feels good to live inside.
Stop pursuing things you’re capable of doing simply because you’re capable of doing them.
That was new.
So I got my real estate license so that I could work for one of the top realtors—and one of the best businessmen that I knew—in the Washington area as his marketing executive, so I could watch him.
How did he operate day in and day out? How could I help him and what could I learn from him?
Becoming a realtor was the closest way I knew how to do that. The time I spent with James Kimball and his team was invaluable. I always say that he helped me more than I helped him. I wish it was the other way around, but that’s the truth.
The 20-year-old in me still shows up all the time. I take on too much. I get overwhelmed every day. I don’t know how I’m going to do everything I want to do.
I do stupid things like scrub something for an hour that, if I would have just spent five bucks on the Goo Gone, I could have had it off in five minutes.
If 29-year-old me could walk up to 20-year-old me, asleep on that cold, hard bench, and be the one to tap on her shoulder instead of a sweet, compassionate nurse or caregiver, I would tell her that she makes it.
That she makes real friends that last.
That it’s going to be beautiful.
She’s going to make it beautiful. There’s enough beauty in her that she can do it.
It’s going to be hard. Yes, it’s going to be long. There will be more betrayal. It will hurt all over again. But if she can just learn to be okay with the journey and the process, her days will be happier.
It’s not going to look the way she wants. It’s going to be different than what she thinks. But it will work, and it will be good, and it will work.
The man falls harder in love with her. He chooses her even when she’s broken, so be broken in front of him.
You get exactly what you wanted: a boy, then twin girls. And they’re perfect, and you’re going to love every second of it.
Motherhood won’t be hard because the fire you endured has given you perspective that most people will never have the privilege of knowing.
It’s going to be beautiful.
You’re going to make it beautiful.
Xoxox,
Lauren
Next Week — Week 04 of 30
Why I Never Show the Journey While I’m Living It