The Worst of Times and the Best of Times

"It was the best of times. It was the worst of times."

Every attempt I've made trying to describe the last couple of weeks at work winds up sounding like this opening line from Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities. Because, y'all? The last couple of weeks have been difficult and heavy and yet wonderful all at once.

My department is going through a time of weirdness. We've had some departures in uniquely skilled roles. We've had people out because they need to take care of life outside of work (and I'm grateful to have a workplace that supports that concept). Between those two circumstances, we've been without an in-building department supervisor for two weeks and counting. Those of us left? We're just desperately trying to hold everything together with tape and glue. Extending work hours, shifting roles and learning new skills to help fill the gaps, working together to help ensure that the decisions made in this time of weirdness account for everyone's needs as much as possible. Being short-staffed has a way of bringing out everyone's best and worst all at once. There are moments when sacrifices of self for the best of the group get made. And there are times when tensions flare and the grace we try to give each other falls to the wayside. It's that "brutiful" - brutal and beautiful at once - that author Glennon Doyle coined in one of her memoirs.

Our work days have been filled with a whole lot of busy. Sometimes chaos. Sometimes conflict. And all of the stress and exhaustion that come with the above. I've been lucky enough to find myself on the periphery of a lot of the worst tension, especially at times when people have hit their stress breaking points and taken it out on each other, but that still does nothing to help a nervous system that has a tendency to (without my consent, mind you), physically take on the tension that people bring with them the moment they walk into the same room as me, whether or not they utter a word about their distress. And yet, when I headed home from work at the end of the very long year that was last week, I felt at peace as I reflected on the moments of beauty in the midst of the storm my co-workers and I are faring our way through.

Because in the midst of the chaos and the tension and the stress and the busy, there come moments of quiet. Moments of friendships forging deeply in the quickest of fashions. Moments of caring. Moments of holding each other accountable for taking care of ourselves. Moments of sharing wisdom and advisement through the stress. Moments of processing with each other more than the typical at each other that we're prone to do. There are moments of laughter - sometimes hysterical (because the exhaustion has set in). Moments of play. And moments of joy. All of them moments of togetherness and community and friendship.

Still there have been far more moments of separation. Such is the nature of being short-staffed. When there are many gaps to fill, the projects that generally take a full team suddenly get pared down to a workforce of one because there are too many tasks to complete and too few people to take them on. And in that abundance of independent work time? I've prayed. Near-constantly. Which is beyond unusual for me these days. Because for a number of years now my brain has been unable focus long enough to make it past a few sentences before my thoughts have drifted off to something else. Or in the rare times that I can hold my focus long enough, the vulnerability that prayer requires feels so overwhelmingly painful that I stop before I can truly start. It would not be an overstatement to say that my prayer time just at work in the past week outweighs my overall prayer time in the past few years by actual tons.

There have been so many times in the past couple of weeks that I've felt beyond helpless as I've watched some of my favorite people on the planet shoulder a majority of the heaviest burdens of this unusual circumstance. Knowing that I can do absolutely nothing to assist them. At times regretting that day last fall when I turned down the opportunity to learn more skills by shifting into a float role in the department (even though I know full well that if I were in a float role right now, it would have broken me less than a week into this time of weirdness - because when I did get pushed into a float role this winter, I became a dysregulated mess that weighed the department down). Without a more visibly constructive way to pitch in, I've spent a lot of time holding down the fort in my own workspace, trying (and failing more often than I'd like) to avoid resembling anything in even the same zipcode as a squeaky wheel. Offering moral support where I can. All the while watching others stretch themselves thinner and thinner because they have the skills and the wherewithal to take on more than I can. And I just keep praying.

Then suddenly, I began to see how God is working, though my deeply stubborn heart has at times resented the responses I've gotten. (It's always that "Thy will be done" part that's the hardest, isn't it?) Prayers begging for a way to help lift any piece of the load for those carrying the heaviest burdens were met with the opportunity to choose to sacrifice my own work needs for those of others - a sacrifice that I made without hesitation but not without anxiety (and perhaps with a bit more self-centered pride than I'd care to admit). Prayers for the strength to deal with the anxiety of uncertainty on my own to avoid becoming a burden added to others' loads were met with a reminder that we're not meant to do life on our own when a friend noticed what I'd tried to hide - and only then did I find the peace and strength that I'd been seeking. Prayers of gratitude for an unexpectedly extended time of teamwork were met with the reminder that humans cannot be omnipresent - but God is (which led to further prayers of being able to hold down the fort on my own without needlessly falling apart - this time met with the strength that I needed to make it through the rest of the day on my own). Prayers of guilt for potentially adding to the stress load were met with the opportunity to provide calm and caring and a type of wisdom that I didn't know I was capable of sharing (and suddenly I understood a conversation I had with a teacher friend long ago about how she knows the Holy Spirit is active in her teaching when she doesn't know what to say, but the right words flow through her anyway).

And as I've continued to process all of the weirdness this weekend, I've reflected on the change in me. My basic faith beliefs have been a constant dating back to my earliest childhood memories. Sure they've grown and expanded with age and life experience, but the foundation has always remained. My belief in my part in it all had not. Because the last 4.5 years? Most of those times were really rough. One too many Sunday mornings spent anxiously hyperventilating and sobbing on the floor of a church bathroom stall, and I gave up on going at all. And that personal relationship with God thing fell by the wayside when the only way I knew how to protect myself from further wounds brought on by risking vulnerability with humans was to build up walls that not only kept them out but pushed God out as well. And while I continued to fully believe in my gut all that I knew about God, I'd given up on the idea of salvation being a possibility for me personally after the way I'd unashamedly lashed out when the rules and regulations of a shut-down world that were meant to keep people safe were causing me to crumble on every level.

And now? I've begun to rediscover the faith that was once so foundational to who I am. I've found one more piece of me that I'd given up on ever getting back after the brutality of life I've experienced over the last 4.5 years. And I am in awe because I didn't think this was possible.

I began sensing early last week that I'm entering a season of major spiritual growth and refinement. And on the one hand I'm excited because it feels like it's going to end in something big and beautiful on the other side. But mostly? I can already feel my deeply stubborn heart resisting. Because I can tell that it's going to be hard. And painful. And my heart has so hardened in order to protect itself from the pain of living in a fallen and sin-filled world that it doesn't want to risk softening enough to be molded again.  So I keep praying. And in this time of work weirdness, I'm reminded that periods of change are hard and unpredictable and at times unbearable - but also that those periods can still have moments of joy, and of peace, and of community. And even when the moments of good are far outnumbered by the chaos and the hard, those moments of good and beauty outweigh all the bad and the stress. I'm reminded that the worst and best of times are often somehow one in the same. So I'll try to hold to that, and attempt to keep praying as God reveals this next piece of the journey to me.

Something Better

"I hope you get sleep this weekend. In fact, I'm going to pray to that end. You really need some sleep." 

Those were the words my friend left me with on a Friday afternoon at the end of our work day. She was right. I did need sleep. I'd been exhausted for weeks, making it through the work day but upon arriving home falling asleep on the couch as soon as I'd finished eating dinner (or, more and more often, while eating dinner) only to wake a few hours later, drag myself to bed, and then struggle and fail to fall back to sleep as my brain spun through thoughts and feelings that I couldn't put into words, all too much like a car spinning its wheels in a muddy ditch, getting more stuck the more the wheels spun, going nowhere while sinking deeper and deeper into the mud.

Every moment of every day had begun to feel like I was swimming through emotional molasses, unable to process how I felt. Because playing the part of agreeable co-worker was a mask that was becoming too heavy to continue to bear. And because the non-work hours that weren't plagued by post-work fatigue were filled with the necessarily solo process of attempting to un-puzzle my brain as I reflect and re-reflect and analyze my daily experiences given what I've learned about brain wiring over the last couple of years. In short, I was spent.

My friend was right that I needed sleep, but it struck me that day when she said that she would add it to her prayers. Not because the concept was out of character for her; I know that her faith and church involvement are central to her life in a genuine way. It's just not something that we ever really talk about on a personal level. And her words - and the energy around them - seemed to hint at a level of concern, like she had sensed the same shift that I'd felt in myself over the preceding weeks.

My friend was right that I needed sleep, but what had to come first was processing the substance of that emotional molasses that I was swimming through. Verbal processor that I am, I'd usually talk about it at other people until I figured out what was going on in my head, but with therapists untrustworthy (long story) and friends too close to the core issues, I was out of luck - not that I'd been able to find the words anyway. These were the kinds of feelings that I'd once written about, spinning words for hours on end, often creating not much more than nonsense until I'd gotten whatever it was out of my system - but that was a lifetime ago. Before that therapist who'd known me all of 15-20 minutes shut down my mere mention of using journaling as a coping tool, saying that she didn't like her clients to write about things because they'd just make things worse. Before the years of guilt that plagued my every attempt at writing. Before the recent years of attempting to write only to find no words. Before I'd given up on regaining the ability to write the way I once had, the way that had once been so core to my identity.

My friend was right that I needed sleep, but instead that Friday evening I went home, and I started to write. I wrote again on Saturday. And again on Sunday. It didn't lead me to any conclusions. And I still couldn't define any emotions. But the molasses I'd been swimming through began to drain, and I wrote away the feeling of heaviness.

In a busy, stressful stretch at work late last year, a different work friend had shared with me his whole-hearted belief that sometimes when God doesn't answer our prayers the way that we'd hoped, it's because he has something better in store for us. It was just one of the regular, mini conversational sermons that he's shared with me in the time I've known him, but for whatever reason, that one stuck with me differently. And on that Friday in question? A friend had prayed that I'd finally get some sleep, and while that night sleep began to come more quickly and ceased to be plagued by the kinds of stress dreams that made my days blur together, I didn't actually get more sleep. In fact, I definitely got less because writing brain? Total night owl. (Case in point: Draft #1 of this post was written between the hours of 2am and 3am.) She'd prayed that I'd get some sleep, but what I got? What I got was writing - and writing brought me rest. Writing brought me an energy I haven't felt in years. It brought feeling like myself in a way that I haven't in years. So that more sleep thing? That will come eventually. But writing? So much better.