The Challenge of Committing to Others and Making Promises to Yourself

January 26, 2020January 26, 2020 ~ juliemonroe1980 ~ 3 Comments

The other day I was listening to a recent episode of On Being, where Krista Tippett was interviewing the folk singer Joe Henry. They were discussing how important his marriage was to him, how he saw being married to his wife as natural to who he was…it is part of his identity as a person and foundational to his human-ness.

The podcast episode, in general, was fantastic, but it caused me to stop and think for a while about the idea of commitment to others…both in romantic partnerships as well as committing to do life with specific people. I actually sat down immediately and emotional verbiage vomited out an entire blog post, which I promptly lost because it didn’t autosave and I forgot to hit the update button. Honestly, that was probably the universe’s way of telling me that all ya’ll didn’t need to read that messy, unedited Julie-overload. This redo post is still me heavily processing ideas, and could still be a bit on the mental barf spectrum.

For whatever reason, this episode made me suddenly stop and decide to rethink marriage. The truth is, I have been very grumpy about the institution of marriage for a very long time. It took me years to be brave and leave my own marriage, so when people ask me about getting married again sometime in the future it’s almost all I can do to either not smirk or respond with a “Why the hell would I do THAT?!”

Of course, I’m always impressed when I meet couples who have braved the odds or have been married for decades. I’m usually never against other people getting married. But, it left a really bad taste in my own mouth. I’ve said so often in the last few years that I never again want to be legally tied to someone, that I never want my finances to be intermingled with another person’s, that I never want to be dependent on a man again. And until this last week, I thought all of my spouting off came from a place of self-awareness. I have since been questioning this and thinking that maybe my “self-aware” attitude was really just my undealt-with fear attempting to appear enlightened.

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I definitely grew up with some deep-seated notions of what marriage was supposed to be about. (What I’m about to say is what I believed mixed with a healthy dose of sarcasm and generalization, just so you’re warned). What I internalized was that women, thanks to being created second and thanks to Eve’s colossal screwup in the garden, relegated us to second-class citizenship in the eyes of God. We were to submit ourselves to our husbands and help them succeed, being all that God had intended for them. Seriously, I can’t believe I ever believed any of this, and these days the words “helpmeet” or “helpmate” make me throw up a little in my mouth. I used to believe that the man was supposed to be the spiritual leader of the house, and make the final decisions, and a whole lot of other ridiculousness….like how wives should be available for sex pretty much any time the husband wanted. I’m eye-rolling so hard right now.

My rebellion against marriage is not just a pushing back against my own less-than-great 11-year experience, but a HARD push back against the belief system that I grew up with. I have associated marriage with a really icky feeling – suffocation mixed with feeling less than and the perception of not being able to make it through life as a complete and thriving person without a man to steer the ship.

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Byron Katie is one of my favorite spiritual teachers because she teaches me to question everything, and not assume that what I perceive as reality is always true. She is an amazing person who has this uncanny ability to not attach to outcomes, and as a result, she is free from suffering when things don’t turn out the way she would have expected or hoped for.

Katie is married to Stephen Mitchell, a well-known writer and translator of sacred Eastern spiritual texts. She has told a story several times about how her relationship with Stephen works. Basically, when they got married, they did not promise to love each other until one of them died. Instead, she promised to love Stephen until she didn’t love him. And he vowed the same to her.

I have always found this amazing because it implies that both parties have absolute freedom to stay or leave; they are not in the relationship out of manipulation or obligation, but simply because they love the other person and want to stay. Why would anyone want a traditional marriage when they could have this kind of understanding….the kind that says “I love you and want you to stay, but if you want to leave I love you enough that I will help you pack your bags.”

It’s a shocking, scandalous kind of love, isn’t it? I want to be able to love others that way.

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As I was pondering this question of whether or not the idea of marriage could ever not be an icky topic for me, I began to think of the other people I have committed to in my life, and why I’ve committed to them. Some of my best friends live states away from me. A few friends and I have chased each other all over the country in the last couple of decades, but we stick out our friendship even when it’s hard. We make a point to keep talking, to keep connecting, and to travel to see each other because we value this thing we hold between us.

But why? Why do I do this with some people, but not want to do it with others?

As I was thinking about this last week, a friend had a movie going on in the background, that caught my attention with a line one character asked another. Granted, I later found out the movie was Midsommar, a dark and creepy movie whose ending totally weirded me out. But the line stuck with me.

“Does he feel like home to you?”

And, yes! This is why I stick with certain people, even when the logistics don’t make sense, even when there are ridiculous hurdles to keep crossing to maintain a relationship, even when we might go weeks without connecting. I commit to these friends because they feel like home to me. They are the ones who make me feel like I am safe in the world and belong, even if they aren’t physically next to me.

I’m a very “feely’ person. Being an XNFJ on the Myers-Briggs, I do so much of my life based on how it feels. I buy houses based on feel, I choose towns to live in based on feel, I make impulsive decisions based on feel, I, unfortunately, eat too much comfort food based on how it makes me feel, …. and…I choose people to commit to and do life with based on how they make me feel.

I didn’t always do this. For much of my life, I based my relationship commitments on obligation, duty, and, a little selfishly, on those I thought might help make things a little easier, bring me more respect, or ensure me more security. I’m glad I’ve learned to change that because now my relationships seem much more authentic. Nowadays, I want to be in relationship with people who feel like “home” to me, and where I, reciprocally, feel like “home” to them.

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I’ve known people who have intentionally committed to “do life” with other people beyond the scope of marriage or family. This has varied in how it looked; some have lived next to each other on the same property with a communal money pot and shared business endeavors. Others simply promised each other that they would intentionally stay living within certain geographical boundaries so that they could regularly meet with each other, encourage each other in goals, and hold each other accountable to whatever principles and values were important to them.

This kind of commitment seems really cool to me, but it takes some serious sacrifice. It’s about people choosing to accept the personalities and quirks of others in close proximity physically and/or emotionally, in the pursuit of some common goal. It also accepts the fact that there may be struggle involved, and maybe the whole relationship structure will fail at some point. What makes people do things like this? And, what are they getting out of it? Is living in intentional, committed community with people a good thing all the time? Is it always better than being able to freely move about without expectations from others? These are questions I think about alot.

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I should point out that I recognize that the Western world has a unique understanding of marriage, and that it has not always been about falling in love. I get that in history marriage was frequently a way to create allies, and forge bonds between families and people groups to help secure peace. I also know that in so many places arranged marriages were the deal for years, where matchmakers or parents picked who someone was going to marry.

I have adopted parents (C and L) in West Africa who had an arranged marriage. They have been married for decades and I’ve always marveled at how well partnered and suited for each other they seem to be. I asked C once what he thought about his marriage. He told me that when he was young, L had been pointed out to him as a potential mate, and after taking a good look at her, he was good with the deal. (He had a big grin on his face when he told me this). Though the marriage was arranged, they forged a friendship and bond that worked very well, raising great kids, and they have always seemed really happy and content with each other.

The idea of an arranged marriage feels freaking scary to me; I think you REALLY have to trust your parents in that area when the partner picking is happening. And I can see, in situations like that, you need a solid, formal commitment by both parties to be the glue that will hold the relationship together. There has to be some real sense of obligation, I think, to make an arranged marriage successful.

But, we don’t have that kind of society anymore. So, do we really need the formal commitments and legal boundaries of traditional marriage? Getting into formal marriage is some ways, in my opinion, WAY too easy, when it is so freaking hard, stressful, and expensive to get out of those marriages. I kind of think that if the State is going to be involved, then they need to make it harder for people to get married on the front end so maybe we’ll all stop and think a little harder before signing on the dotted line.

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I discussed this topic with a friend of mine after I completely lost the blog post that I had furiously typed out and then lost in a matter of seconds. This person made a couple of good points. When I said that I wasn’t sure I liked the idea of being tied so tightly to someone I was romantically involved with, and didn’t want the mess and stress of limiting myself legally and financially, they reframed it for me, saying “If you’re intentionally leaving yourself all of these strategic exits and backdoor escape routes in a relationship, then how committed are you really to the relationship in the first place? And is that even really a legitimate, authentic relationship?”

That one stung a bit, to be honest. If I want to be loosely tied enough to a person that I can escape when I start getting uncomfortable, is that really much of a relationship worth being in?

This person then made a second point that I think is noteworthy. Why is it that we think the marriage ceremony is where, BAM!, all the commitment happens? Isn’t it better to progress slowly in relationship with someone to the point to where we one day wake up and realize that we that we have worked ourselves into solid commitment with each other, and THEN have the marriage ceremony simply to acknowledge that recognized commitment? It’s a subtle, but I think, important, difference in the way to view marriage.

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This week I had an epiphany while I was driving to work. I was thinking about my own marriage ceremony and the vows that my ex-husband and I made to each other all those years ago. Vows that didn’t keep.

It occurred to me that during that ceremony, I was making vows to another person, but I wasn’t making vows to MYSELF. I was repeating the words that are expected in traditional marriage ceremonies, words that I thought were the magic and glue to make commitment suddenly appear and stick. And then, I realized that making vows to other people will never work…not forever at least….because in making vows only to the other person, you’re forgetting an integral piece of the relationship….YOU.

If we can’t make promises to ourselves….if we can’t commit to ourselves….then how the heck do we think we can commit to some other person for who knows how many years? But don’t we do this all the time in marriage ceremonies?! We promise to love our future spouse until we die, when we don’t really even know how to love ourselves. We promise to stick with them through good times and bad, when we so frequently, we fail ourselves, judge ourselves, limit ourselves. We promise to cherish each other, when so often, we can hardly stand ourselves, much less cherish ourselves.

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I think there are two main reasons I squirm around the idea of marriage these days. The first is because for so long marriage was wrapped up in how God viewed me, and my identity, worth, and status were bound up in this institution. Marriage was very much a place of feeling trapped and controlled for me; it never felt like a place where certain freedoms were set aside for the sake of pursuing something greater. I felt worse about myself when I was married than when I wasn’t. (I should point out this is not an ex-husband bashing post…I’m alluding to the unfortunate dynamics that were present in my marriage, not throwing all the blame on the other person). But I really think now that part of the reason the whole thing was a failure was that I had never made vows to myself – I had never promised to treasure myself, I had never promised to hang tight with myself through whatever life brought me. Instead, I believed that I had to give someone else all the things that I had never yet learned to give myself.

The other reason I squirm about marriage is that I’m not sure we are always, absolutely meant to meet someone and stay with them FOREVER. I think it’s fantastic when this happens, but….what do you do when you and the person you are married to completely outgrow each other? When you suddenly have NOTHING in common, when even your value systems are polar opposite? The stigma of divorce here is so damaging to people who are just trying to be their authentic selves, and we shame them for being true to themselves and pursuing the things that are life-giving to them. I think it’s a really bad idea to try and put one-size fits all templates of marriage on everyone and assume that we all know what is going on behind closed doors, and I really, really think its a horrible idea to bring God into the equation and start telling people that God wants their marriage to look like this or that. I can personally attest to trauma received by people doing that to me in some terribly hurtful ways.

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So, what am I trying to say in all of the rambling of this post?

First, my ego has been knocked down a tad bit because I realized that my repugnance towards marriage again was not enlightenment and amazing self-awareness, but rather, me pretending that I don’t still have hurts and fears to process and work through.

Second, I don’t want to be the person that avoids real, loyal love because I need to keep backdoors open when I start feeling the heat and getting uncomfortable. Isn’t doing so exactly what I blog all the time about trying to avoid? Don’t avoid pain and suffering, I always write! Embrace the hard things! This is where the growth and the real stuff of life is! I’m spoonfeeding my own words back to myself right now.

Third, maybe marriage for me just needs to be completely reframed. It definitely can have some legal and financial perks to it, to be sure. But instead of viewing it as a static moment in time where people suddenly commit to each other, maybe it should be viewed as the culmination of commitment that been building over a long time….maybe it should be more of a celebration of that commitment rather than the sudden shaky start of commitment that hasn’t gotten it’s sea legs yet.

And fourth, what would it look like if we became more serious about making vows to ourselves WAY before we made these crazy, impossible-to-promise vows to another person? What if marriage could be a fluid state where we were entirely committed for that period in time, but then we’re free and blessed to leave if our vows to the other person started causing us to break our vows to ourselves? I know I don’t want to be with anyone who feels like they have to be with me out of obligation. I want someone to be with me because they feel like they can be their best self when they’re with me. And, I want to want to love people so much that they know they can come and go and they will always still be loved. This is super hard to do in practice, but a worthy goal, I think.

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When I began questioning all the theological beliefs I grew up with, I had to undergo a deconstruction. For a couple of years I was MAD at Christianity, MAD at the Church, and MAD at myself for believing things that helped keep trauma firmly embedded within myself and kept me pinned down in a trapped, small life. But over time, the anger faded, I was able to reframe my perspectives about my life and past, and I reconstructed a faith that is still deeply rooted in Christianity, that feels authentic and real to me.

As I’ve written this post, I’m thinking that the same is going to have to happen for me regarding the idea of marriage and long term commitments to anyone. Maybe I needed to be really angry for a while, separate myself completely from the idea of committing hardcore to someone, and allow myself time to reframe my understanding of relationships, while gradually reconstructing a new paradigm for how I want future relationships to look.

Marriage doesn’t have to be BAD or a means of trapping myself or another person into staying. Committing to other people doesn’t mean that I have to lose myself or suddenly become subservient in different aspects of my life.

I’ve said this before in posts regarding spirituality…..as Ken Wilbur and others have talked about, I want to “transcend and include.” I don’t want to throw out things in my life completely just because they were hard or didn’t well. I want to be able to take the good things with me, and use them to construct new ways of thinking and being. I think maybe I’m making small steps in that direction now as I’m finally willing to take another look at long term commitment and relationship with others.

How To Cut Yourself Off From Joy

January 22, 2020January 22, 2020 ~ juliemonroe1980 ~ 3 Comments

As I have grown older, I am recognizing more and more that there is a huge difference between happiness and joy. I’ve heard about this difference since I was little, ’cause joy is discussed alot in churchy environments. However, I never really could make a distinction between the two in a real way until the last five or so years.

But now, I KNOW what joy is, and I totally get what Jesus meant when he talked about the peace that passes all understanding. Happiness is about the things that you enjoy in life, the things that bring you pleasure, the pleasant feeling of satisfaction with whatever is currently coming your way. The Office makes me happy. Key lime pie makes me happy. Stupid Facebook memes make me REALLY happy. Joy, on the other hand, is the deep soul resolve to keep waking up every morning with hope, determined to let life dance you moment after moment even in the midst of shitstorms. Joy is the grit, the resilient knowing, that, as Thomas Merton said, “Everything that is, is holy.” Joy is the choice to love what is, even when that “what is” is paradoxical, painful, and hard because you know that there is a redemptive power coursing through life that is vibrating grace into all things….even the terrible and impossible things.

I’ve been thinking alot about my own joy lately, especially because of conversations that I’ve been having with people about the hard things in their lives, the things that God dammit! refuse to be resolved, the pain that won’t go away, the lingering resentments and fears and loss of big dreams. There is clearly so much in the world that threatens to rob us of joy. It takes daily vigilance and intention to hold onto it, to pursue it with abandon.

I remember when I first moved back to Indiana in the process of getting a divorce. My ex and I had split custody of the boys from the start, and twice a week I would send them to him on his designated days. Up until that time I had hardly spent many nights away from my kids other than to attend an occasional conference or travel to visit family. Now, I was regularly sending them away from me, for up to four nights at a time. The pain of having to put my kids in his car, often when they were crying and begging to stay with me, made me absolutely want to die. During those first few months, I would crawl back into my house, lay on the living room floor, sometimes getting myself plastered drunk, because….how had I gotten to this place? This was not how life was supposed to be, not the kind of parent I was supposed to be, even if I had chosen this path and the end of my marriage. It would take all I had to get into bed in an empty, quiet house each night, and then get up each morning and face another breakfast alone, hating this void of my kids not being with me.

And yet, paradoxically, I did not despair. Because while there was this horrible thing that hurt my heart so terribly, there was the possibility of hope. This hope rising, the hope that had made me brave enough to change my life, to listen to my gut for once, to trust myself…told me that I would get through this “I just want to lay down and die” pain of what I was going through with my kids. Each day, something would happen that would grow this hope, and as time went on I realized that I, in fact, was not going to die from pain, and my kids were not going to die from pain, and that everything was going to be OK. I found that I could take pleasure and solace in things even when my heart ached for my children. I began to explore all the things in life that intrigued me even though I still had fears and hurts and unknowns that I had no clue how to deal with. I could laugh and cry, and I can still laugh and cry, at the very same moment. This is joy.

Rumi said, “When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.” I totally believe this. When you approach life by listening to the voice in your soul, your gut feeling, your instincts… even when hard, difficult things are required of you… you can sense this joy river within, and it begins to carry you, where fear and despair were once the currents that directed your life.

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Too many people are biding their time in life without any joy. Life becomes about checking off the next box, or climbing ladders, or creating external appearances that will garner laud and approval from others whose opinions really don’t matter anyway.

I hate that so much despair exists in the world, even in first world countries like the United States, where we live in relative ease and luxury. How easily we forget that life is freaking magical, and how quickly we forget to be in absolute awe of the amazingness around us! I was talking with a friend the other night about our cell DNA and how I heard a fact about it that made me physically giddy and childishly excited. If you took all of the DNA from al the cells in the average human being and stretched it out end to end in a linear fashion, it could go to the Sun and back 300 times!!! Come on!!! I mean, do you even need to believe in God to not be freaking amazed and overjoyed by the wonder of that?! Doesn’t it dazzle you to imagine how far DNA would stretch if we took all of the genetic material from the 7-something billion people in the world and laid it out end to end?

We lose our joy because of how we frame life, because of the things we choose to focus on, and because we forget to wake up every morning with fresh eyes and open hands, willing to receive whatever life has for us. I am in no way denying that events and people in life can be monstrous, shitty, and, well….evil. But I am so completely soul-convinced that, as the Gospel of John said, the darkness cannot overcome the Light.

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I like practical, and I like lists. So, here are listed, based on my life experience, six things that will absolutely cut yourself off from joy in life. So, if you don’t want joy, revel in these. If you want to cultivate joy and peace, strive to fight against these tendencies, however possible.

1. Believe all of the thoughts in your head. In fact, believe that you ARE your thoughts. There is plenty of scientific research out there that shows our brains have a greater affinity for negative thoughts than positive ones. And somehow, we all seem to grow into the belief that whatever comes down our thought pipeline must automatically be true…AND…those thoughts must be us because they came from our brains, didn’t they? Nope! You are not your thoughts, and just because your brain churns out an idea doesn’t mean that you even have to pay attention to it. There is a REAL YOU that is a witnesser, a watcher, of all the thoughts that come into your brain. It takes time and practice to separate the real you from the personality you, but it can happen. I cannot recommend Eckhart Tolle and Byron Katie highly enough for teaching you how to find the REAL YOU within.

2. Refuse to believe that the obstacles are the path. If you think that the only meaningful life is one that is rosy and blemish-free, then you will absolutely never have any joy. The obstacle IS the path! REAL life, the real experience of being human, is being and accepting where you are and what you have now. There can be no other way.

We learn to love and to grow through things not being easy, by not going our way….because….we learn that we don’t have to have things go our way to have joy, to be content, to love well. The obstacles teach us that it is not the externals that make us or break us….it is how we work with those obstacles and let them refine us.

3. Assume that all you see and perceive with your five senses is really all that exists. On one hand, I am very analytical and data-driven. On the other hand, I’m about as woo-wooey as they come. I am absolutely convinced that the cosmos is enchanted, and any time someone tells me its just a matter of time before science figures everything out, I secretly smile to myself and say, “We’ll see.” To me, God, the Divine, the Universe…is a mystery. And, as Rob Bell has said, “mystery is infinitely knowable.” Which means that the spirit in everything will always be enchanted. Try and convince me otherwise.

There are too many things that are unexplainable by just using our “5” senses. Those senses can’t explain love. They can’t explain how people can dream things that actually happen. They can’t explain the spiritual connections we feel with some people in our lives. And they can’t explain JOY.

But, if you think that the only things that actually exist are what you can hear, taste, touch, smell, and see….well, you might be occasionally happy but you’re going to miss out on some of the real mystery of all things and the deepest meaning of existence.

4. Identify strongly with your roles in life. The other day, in the hospital, I randomly had a patient ask me if I was a runner. I was so pleased because, while I run and enjoy the heck out of it, I don’t exactly have a runner’s body and I’m not terribly fast or nimble. So, to have someone recognize just by my body mannerisms that I am a runner simply please me to no end.

However, this identification as a runner made me think of the other roles in life I identify with. I’m a mother, I’m an intellectual, I’m this or I’m that. And while it’s great to have things that we are passionate about in life, over-identifying with anything can ruin joy for us….because we can get lost when the role we identify with is taken away from us. The key to joy is to recognize that we all wear hats, we are all passionate about certain things….but those things are not who we are at our core. It is this recognition that helps us get up off the floor and keep living life when we are wrecked by devastating events. We are so much more than what is happening to us.

5. Stay in relationship with and in close proximity to people who treat you like crap. Nothing, absolutely nothing, will rob you of joy like negative people that tear you down…or even those who make minimal to no effort to encourage you. This is something I’ve discovered in the last several years: life is TOO short and there are too many amazing people out there in the world for you to continue to do life with people who treat you like shit. FOR REAL.

We don’t have to stay in relationship with people just because they’ve been in our lives forever. We don’t have to be in relationship with people just because they are family. We don’t have to stay in relationship with people just because we feel guilty or codependent or lonely. Necessary Endings by Henry Cloud – go buy this book and read it.

If you want joy in your life, seek out the people who are joyful. Seek out the people who notice your faults and weaknesses, but would much rather talk about and spotlight your strengths. Seek out the people who are literally willing to go in the trenches with you; not the ones who keep telling you why you’re such an idiot that you ended up in the trenches in the first place. Seek out the people that make you a priority, not an option. Follow the people that spread joy in their wake.

6. Avoid pain at all cost. This is one of those, “trust me on this” things. I don’t know why the universe is set up like this. God didn’t ask me for my input when They were making the rules. But, for some reason, pain so very often comes before joy. I’m not a huge fan of pain…but I’m gradually learning not to avoid it because I know that when handled properly, pain is often the gateway to joy. When we choose to avoid pain, emotional and sometimes physical, we may remain safe….we may remain comfortable…but there’s a very great chance that our lives will be much less rich and joyful than they could be if we had faced our pain head-on.

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I would much rather live a life drunk on joy and be thought of as a fool than to plod through life complaining and griping and feeling fatalistic and hopeless while being considered wise by the world.

To quote Rumi again…. “

Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance…

January 13, 2020January 13, 2020 ~ juliemonroe1980 ~ Leave a comment

Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost,

No birth, identity, form—no object of the world.

Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing; Appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere confuse thy brain.

Ample are time and space—ample the fields of Nature.

The body, sluggish, aged, cold—the embers left from earlier fires, The light in the eye grown dim, shall duly flame again;

The sun now low in the west rises for mornings and for noons continual;

To frozen clods ever the spring’s invisible law returns,

With grass and flowers and summer fruits and corn.

-Walt Whitman

I’m almost three and a half years out from my divorce. It kind of amazes me how fast that time flew, and all the big changes and events in my life that have happened between then and now. Something I’ve alluded to in previous posts over those years is that dating after being out of the game for over a decade of marriage is no joke. Alot of this is because I’ve changed so much as a person, and the old dynamics of the way my dating life used to go don’t fit anymore. Furthermore, the kind of people I’m interested in is so vastly different than when I was in my twenties. I’m much less driven by my fears and childhood wounds than I used to be. Also, I ain’t got time or patience for unnecessary drama.

I have a dating policy that I implemented about two and a half years ago. It’s something I take pretty seriously. : my policy states that barring really, really dreadful first dates, I will always go on at least two dates with a person.

Why?

Because so much can be weird and go wrong on the first date that isn’t representative of who the person really is. Nerves play a big role in feeling comfortable, it takes time sometimes to figure out a conversation flow, maybe you or the other person is still hung up on someone else and isn’t completely present. And, if you’ve been texting the person for a while after meeting them online, it takes some time after meeting the “real” them to undo the stories in your head that you’ve created about who they are.

I actually think first dates really shouldn’t count for much unless there is a glaringly obvious red flag or sign that makes you know with a gut feeling certainty it’s not going to work. I’ve only had one date like that in the last few years, but I went on a second date with him anyway because that’s how important I think my policy is.

I hate being judged on how I come across the first time I meet people. Some days I can be incredibly charming and things click right away. But other times, when I meet people, I can be stressed or insecure, and I have this horrible problem of looking ticked off and angry when I’m really just concentrating hard on something.

Once, in college, a girl who later became a close friend, told me that when she first met me in an English composition class that she thought I was one of those super shy people that won’t dare say anything to anyone because God forbid they might answer me back. Too bad for her, she realized soon enough that there are plenty of times where I’m not capable of shutting up.

Another person, more recently, who became my workout buddy, thought after our first very quick conversation, that I must be a bitch. Apparently, in my shyness and insecureness about the new unfamiliar situation I was in, I came across as quite the snark. Fortunately, she soon figured out that I’m actually a pretty decent person and we became good friends. I will admit that I was horrified, as a strong 2 on the Enneagram, that anyone thought me a bitch. If only people could see inside my head and know right away what I was thinking, my good intentions and sincere motivations, how I genuinely like most people, and……this is exactly why romantic interests (and potential friends for that matter) need second date chances….because I clearly cannot read their minds or immediately perceive their motivations either.

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I just started up the latest semester of graduate school. Currently, I’m taking an advanced forensic nursing class. During the introductory video, my professor made what I consider to be a fantastic connection between trauma-informed care and a well-known approach to disease within healthcare.

In healthcare, there is something called “universal precautions.” This makes the assumption that every person we encounter potentially has some sort of pathogen that could be spread via contact or airborne droplets, so gloves, face shields, masks, and gowns are used as safety measures to prevent unnecessary transmission of disease.

A central tenet of forensic nursing is trauma-informed care….that is, when we work with victims of violence or social injustice, we are mindful that they could have been traumatized by their other people or experiences in their life and are carrying around the effects of those traumas in their minds and bodies.

Here’s the connection and point she made…which I love: We should extend the idea of universal precautions to trauma; when we encounter anyone new, we should automatically assume that there is the possibility that they are carrying around unseen traumas that we don’t know about and we should mind how we treat them through that lens. This doesn’t mean that we need to handle every single person we meet with kid gloves, but we should remember that a person’s past influences who they are now, how they communicate, how they interact with others, how they present themselves, etc., and we need to offer them grace for those moments when they aren’t so great or don’t immediately impress us. Our responses likewise need to be gracious, because we don’t know how we can trigger old wounds or dig them into deeper holes of despair through our thoughtless words or callous treatment of them.

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The thing that strikes me funny about people is that Life clearly never gave us a manual, yet we always judge the hell out of each other and point fingers and categorize the people we think are doing life right compared to those we think are completely screwing up. When you stop and think about it, the way we harp on each other all the time is really stupid and never gets anyone anywhere.

I really hate it when parents get all judgy with each other. Moms are so good at doing this; we pit ourselves against each other all the time, comparing working moms versus stay at home moms, this parenting style against that parenting style, “my kid always looks amazingly cute and stylish” versus “thank God my child has pants on today.” We rarely seem to stop and give consideration to the fact that we all grew up in different environments with different degrees of nurture, so clearly, we are going to approach life and parenting differently.

I remember, before I had kids, I could be judgy of moms who didn’t seem to have their shit together in public places, or the ones who seemed to make little effort to discipline their unruly kids, or OMG, the ones who unashamedly fed their kids ice cream for dinner. Nowadays, after having been through the trenches myself with three boys, I ALWAYS try to give those kinds of parents a second chance…..because, well…..I’ve been there too. There have been days I’ve been so tired that I bought them fast food for each meal of an entire day. There have been days when I’ve reached the end of myself and locked myself to nap in my bedroom while my kids sat on their butts in front of the TV while watching grown men doing stupid stuff on YouTube all day. I’ve yelled at my kids in front of people at Target, seethed through my teeth at them at the grocery stores, made ridiculous threats like, “I swear to the living God, if you do “…” one more freaking time, I’m taking away every piece of electronics in the house until you’re 25!!!” at the top of my lungs. There have been days where I thought I might run away if I had to wash one more piece of pee-soaked laundry, or had to rewire one more electrical socket that somehow got poop in it, or had to dig around in the recesses of the minivan to find that one-month-old sippy cup of soured milk that was stenching up everything to high heaven.

Parents really, really need to be offered second chances. Never underestimate the traumas they have experienced in raising children.

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I don’t really give up on people. Sure, there are people I don’t want to be around, people that I don’t trust, people whose hearts I think have really become hardened over time for whatever reasons. There are people that I intentionally refuse to do life with. But I don’t believe anyone is ever lost forever.

And actually, when we reach the point where we completely write off a person as hopeless….I think that might be when we are in our own hell…because we have lost faith in the redemptive creativity of life. When we think anything real or good can ever truly be lost, that’s when love has gone. On the flip side, I think heaven is about realizing that nothing is set in stone forever, that even those who seem the farthest gone can be rescued.

I’ve seen radical changes in people that, for decades, looked like would never, ever happen. I’ve personally experienced shifts in myself that I could have never imagined, out of beliefs and perceptions that I thought at one time were absolute truth and concretely ingrained in me. And, because I no longer believe in a linear progression of life and death where we get this one infinitesimally short shot at life and then go plunk ourselves down to sit for an eternity in heaven or hell….it seems to me there is all the time in the world for hope and love to work their magic.

I can hear some people’s responses here. Julie, people are CHOOSING not to change. It’s through their own fault and their own poor choices that they are where they are right now.

Maybe, maybe not. I think that we actually have far less agency over the trajectory of our lives than we automatically assume. I don’t think everyone consciously makes all the stupid decisions they make, and I think we often unconsciously and unintentionally make really good choices. My overall point here: we can’t cavalierly judge that everyone’s lives turn out the way they do because of their conscious thoughts and choices and that all of the responsibility for that should fall squarely on them.

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To give people second chances, we need to be willing to listen to their stories. I think about this alot working as a nurse in the hospital. I’ve had so many patients who, at the start, came off as completely disagreeable, unpleasant, and unlovable. But to my constant surprise, in almost all of those people, when I took the time to listen to their stories and showed that I cared, I would begin to notice the soft parts in them, the hurts that they carried, their fears and insecurities. And through that simple act of genuine listening, the dynamics between us would change, trust would build, and our interactions from then on would be completely different. We would find commonalities between us, and my perceptions of them would shift. Maybe they’d still drive me nuts with their particular quirks, but I would be able to see them through alot more grace and much less frustration and irritation.

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I mentioned earlier that I don’t tend to give up on people all that easily. This is maybe one of my few good strengths, but it has also gotten me hurt on more than one occasion. Something interesting, and kind of sad, is that frequently some people don’t know what to do with people that won’t give up on them. I’ve had people push me away because they couldn’t believe that they could be cared about by someone who had no ulterior motives, no manipulative agenda in place. I’ve known people who revealed to me they were never really sure if they had ever been loved by anyone before, and felt pretty confident that no one had ever truly “seen” them.

These, I believe, are the people that are most in need of second, and third, and fourth, and fifth chances. Everyone, I fervently believe, deserves to been seen in life. Everyone deserves to know that they have been deeply loved by at least one other person, that their existence matters, that their worth is not based on what they look like, or what career they have, or their social status, or how clever and witty they might be.

In general, I think the people that are most hurtful to other people have never really felt seen or loved. Those who lash out at others, or withdraw from relationships out of fear, or those who are constantly in the comparison game trying to prove they are better than others….these are the ones in greatest need of more grace and second chances. These are the ones with the biggest heart wounds and the greatest disconnection with their true selves. Instead of hate and disdain, they need our compassion.

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In the Gospels, when asked by his disciples how mnay times forgivness toward a person was required, Jesus replied “seventy times seven.” Not literally 490 times, but rather, forgiveness after forgiveness after forgiveness. Grace upon grace upon grace. We ALL need it.

Whether it’s a first date, or a new friendship, or an encounter with a complete stranger…let’s all make the attempt to let go of our stories about people and really see who they are, forgiving them when they don’t meet our expectations or impress us or fail to give us what we think we need from them. Forgive the quirks, forgive the awkwardness, forgive whatever possible, because we’re all just doing the best we can, trying to make it through a world where there are no clear rules but there is alot of hidden trauma.