The Lies We Believe

This topic has been on my mind for a while now, but I only now feel like I can write about it because I have recently become intimately re-familiarized with some of the lies I buy into.

I started a new job three weeks ago. I was told from the beginning that there is a sharp learning curve, that it's incredibly difficult and that after the first few months I might start feeling comfortable there. It was weird, because the first week I exceeded expectations - others' expectations of me and my own of myself. I felt great and was energized at the end of each work day. The second and third week things started getting harder. I had more expectations of myself. I became more aware of my deficiencies. Doing things right was no longer enough unless I was doing everything right and efficiently.

I have a problem.

I have this false belief that I must be unfailingly competent in all that I do. It's not that there's no room for error. I have had many hobbies over the years and have made lots of mistakes and done things imperfectly. Most of my hobbies, though, are done in the private realm and only presented when I have developed a level of competency.

Art pieces are made in the quiet of my own room, without the weight of peering eyes assessing every stroke of the brush or every scratch of the pencil. Crocheting, clay figurines, wood-burnings... All presented in wholeness, their mistakes and flaws long forgotten and resolved, before they are ever seen by another pair of eyes.

Other weird hobbies like unicycling... Most people who see me unicycle now are amazed at my "skills". They never watched me struggling to develop those skills. Guitar - I play on my own because I don't want to open that world to anyone until I have developed a certain level of competency. Any who have seen me play multiple songs are people who I trust to let into my vulnerable little world.

It's difficult for me to be seen as a work in progress. When it comes down to it, I like vulnerability, but only when I choose it. I don't like vulnerability that is forced upon me by having to be exposed unfinished, unperfected, unclothed.

I have no issues with looking like I don't have it all together. My issues come from my assumptions of how people may interpret those things I don't have together. I don't assume that if people see me make a mistake, they are thinking, "Well, she's capable. She just has more to learn." I assume they think the worst. I assume that they think, "Wow, I wonder if she knows how bad she did on ______." I actively throw myself under the bus before they can confront me. I want them to know that I know I could have done better. My entire demeanor changes to this apologetic refrain, "I'm sorry for the ways I'm not perfect." My entire focus shifts to how I can prove to them that I will get better, that I can be good at what I'm doing, that they shouldn't give up on me yet.

It comes out in everything. Work, band practice, dancing (when I have gone a few times), relationships. In the end, somehow a part of me believes that I am only loveable insofar as I am useful to someone and inasmuch as I am efficient and good at something. And the degree to which I am not useful or perfect at something is the degree to which I am a burden/annoyance to another person.

I have no idea where I picked this up. They certainly weren't ideas that my parents conveyed to me in childhood. But somehow these ideas did creep in and they infiltrated my self-perception and my relationship with God and others. I feel really great about myself until I bring God or others into the picture.

I remember journaling at one point that in the years that I didn't actively pursue God I felt better about myself and about my life than I did when I was. For the most part I no longer feel that way, but I do when my lies define how I view and interact with God.

My friend hit the nail on the head when she told me that I saw God as someone who gave me tasks to do, left me alone while I went out and did them, then met back up with me afterward to assess the job I did. Maybe I clung to that idea because I rather liked to serve a God who didn't see me in the struggle. In the end I ended up with a God who had expectations that required me to act within my own power and then judged me on the basis of the end product. I ended up with a God that spoke to me only when He had things for me to do for Him, who didn't really care to know me in any other capacity, who didn't care to see my struggle and who used His Son as a divine measuring stick to show me how I didn't measure up (see my previous blog "Jesus: Mary Poppins?"). His tone was always one of exasperation with me.

In the end, I was a busy bee, who needed no personality to function - in fact who was more efficient without one. I was only useful insomuch as I was efficient and only worth interacting with insofar as I was useful. The very things that made me human were the things that stood in the way of what I saw my purpose to be.

In the past few years, I have become more aware of these subconscious beliefs that I passively inherited. I have become more aware of how to challenge them. This very blog has been a major outlet documenting the ways my mind, heart, faith, and life have been changing as I come to understand who God really is and who I really am. Though many of my conscious beliefs have changed, I still have the same inclinations and fears I have had all along that exhibit themselves from time to time. I am waiting, hoping, and moving towards a place where I trust what I believe with my life, in a way that transforms me, changing the way I interact with God and others on a fundamental level. But for now I am living in the tension of knowing what I believe but not knowing/trusting it enough to embody it yet on the automatic level.

I am forced to be a work-in-process, exposed in the unresolved state to God and to those who are close to me. And I am learning that my God and my community are a lot more full of grace for me than I would have imagined. That is the realization and the place that causes the transformation I yearn for. In the end, love has the power to change me in a way that my fears never could.