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The 1 Year Difference.

  • heatherplastow34
  • Apr 2, 2018
  • 6 min read

Hi folks!

This is NOT a poem. Sorry? No, today I wanted to talk on something I realized today. I was taking pictures for Easter, per usual because Easter’s the best for pictures (Happy Easter if you celebrate it, by the way), and I was thinking back to the pictures I took last year... Here’s a side-by-side for comparison:

Looks pretty much the same, right? The left is last year, and right is today. Yep, everything’s pretty similar. Same color scheme, same smile, same hair color. The only difference is my style has definitely increased... the hair and makeup is definitely better. These are the only visible differences, anyway....

I was thinking back to last year..... last year on Easter was the start of my world crumbling around me. That’s obviously figurative and an exaggeration, but for the next few months after that, my life was miserable. I went into a deep, dark, depressive episode and lost the entirety of my identity. I no longer knew who I was. Everything in my life had lost its meaning because I was no longer an official pastor’s kid. I was still one technically, but because I didn’t have to be seen as a pastor’s kid anymore, I no longer had a reason for my morals. My entire life before that, I always said things like “Oh, I can’t do that, I’m a PK,” and I was afraid to do anything wrong in fear that my dad would be seen as a bad dad and therefore lose his job because of it. Since it happened anyway, it was super hard to know what to do. I no longer knew why I considered some things bad and some things good. I never went out and got crazy or anything, I still was a goody-two-shoes, but I never knew or understood why. I just went straight into a severe depression, hiding from the church because I didn’t want to talk to anyone about what had happened because I knew it would make me feel even worse. I stopped going to church altogether for, I believe, a couple months, and I stopped talking to the closest friends I’ve ever had, including my boyfriend at the time, making things really difficult for all of us. I hid behind my work, putting all my emotions and feelings into my theatre so I could distract myself from all of this. I did all this for a really long time, avoiding having any real emotional vulnerabilities. It was terrible and I was miserable.

This all went on through most of the summer. I didn't really realize it all until the end, because I had forced it all down and didn't allow myself to feel anything. It really hurt some of my relationships with people, and I know that, and I still feel awful about it. It felt like I had been lying to myself for so long, even when I didn't even know what the truth was. It was hard. I realized all this about myself on my church's summer youth camp at the beginning of August 2017, so it was a long long time from beginning to the end, during which I felt like I was mindlessly floating through the air with no purpose whatsoever. When I finally rediscovered my identity, it was like the world changed entirely. For more on that story, go check out my other blog post "Finding Identity." I was finally able to let go of some really toxic people that had been holding me down, making me feel like I was worthless, and I got the opportunity to reclaim my identity. I went from Pastor's Kid to Activist for Christ, and I couldn't have been happier.

The funny thing about life is, though, you just keep growing. You think everything has resolved and fixed itself, but there's always something you can improve on. I thought everything was fine, that I had grown into the person I had been trying so hard to become. I thought I was my own person, and that I could stand on my own two feet, but that really wasn't the case. I had been evolving and developing myself in college after that for a while, and it was working, but really only on a surface level. I was learning a lot of new skills that I appreciated, but it wasn't really doing anything to help the now-visible problem that was at hand.

I still wasn't my own person! Sure, I wasn't a PK anymore, I was an activist, yadda yadda yadda, but it wasn't until late February 2018 that I realized I was still attached to someone. To anyone who didn't know, my boyfriend and I broke up at the end of February, and we're still really great friends and I appreciate him a lot, but I realized something huge after the break-up. I had believed for the longest time that I was a new person, just me and God on my journey to discover myself, but it wasn't until breaking up that I realized that never on that journey did I feel like a complete person/ complete Christian. My boyfriend and I were such opposites and filled in each other's weaknesses so well, especially in how we would work together in ministry, that it never felt like I was doing enough to serve God on my own. It especially was hard, because he was going to college to become a pastor, and I felt inferior to him and how much better of a Christian I thought he was, compared to me. I definitely didn't feel good enough. (That was wrong!! I see that now! Please, reader, don't ever think you're not good enough. You're always enough.) I realized this all came from A: my pastor's kid repressed memories and worries, and B: a really toxic ex-best friend of mine who basically treated me like dirt and walked all over me, brainwashing me to believe that I wasn't working hard enough to be a good enough friend to her, even when I was working my butt off. I realized all of these past experiences had added up to create this jealousy of not being the "perfect Christian," (even when I thought I knew it was okay to not be perfect) and created this huge snowball effect to make me believe that I was only good enough for God when I was with my boyfriend (AGAIN, WRONG, I KNOW.)

That mentality sucked!!! Totally sucked!! I never even realized I had that mentality until everything I had been clutching onto as a security blanket got ripped away from me. The crazy thing about all this was that I needed it. I needed all of these to be ripped away because I finally feel like I can come to God on my own and be worthy of Him, not because of anything I've done, but because of what He did for me. Easter, it's what it's all about right? Jesus came down to die for my sins because God wanted a relationship with me, not me attached to someone else. That's something I'm still working on--in fact it might be something that I just discovered as I was writing it, but I really need to keep that in mind, and it's definitely something I want everyone else to discover on their own. It's worth it, just like you.

Anyway, I just wanted to say this: it's okay to have everything ripped away from you. Sometimes that's the only way to get back to a clean slate. That's definitely something I'm working on right now. Thanks for reading this far, if you did. Let's go back to that picture side-by-side, shall we? On the left, we see a girl fake smiling and hiding her pain because she doesn't know how to expose herself openly and honestly without feeling ashamed. On the right, we see a girl hoping and working to call herself the opposite. Of course, next year, I'll probably be writing a similar blog post, saying I uncovered a new fact about myself that I don't see now, so let's all take this with a grain of salt, at least for now. Until then, i'll just trust in God and let him unwrap my tightly-bound layers. Let's do this, God, together.

I hope writing this blog post helped all of you if you're going through a similar situation as me. Even if it's a totally different situation, I hope you can still pull something from my story. I strongly believe everyone's story is totally valuable and worthy of being shared. Huh, worthy--that's a word I'm going to have to get used to. If you'd like to share your story with me, I'd love to hear it! It'd be totally confidential, of course, but I want you to know that someone wants to know your story and hear what you have to say. You are valid and valuable and worthy. All of us are.

Always believe in the power of God and the power of a year.

Until my next story,

Love,

Noelle


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