My nightmare. I woke up during the confusion of the night, lost in a momentary labyrinth in my heart. A memory, a place, a moment, a person, a dread – things I never want to experience again flood my senses. I look around and nothing registers except for a piece of art on the wall. I look at it, hoping to be in a place with such a beautiful image.
The sun is rising! The darkness is lifting. I realize I am indeed present in the peaceful room with the beautiful art! I made it. I am safe. It was only a few seconds, but it registers as a lifetime. I take a long, deep, and sweet breath of relief and gratitude. So happy!
The source of my horror took place in Pensacola, Florida. When my nightmare was my actual life, I worried that I was literally in hell. I thought that maybe part of the experience of being in hell is nobody telling you that you are there and you just have to figure it out for yourself as things get worse and worse and worse.
Unspeakable things happened in my life in Pensacola that I fail to find some short summary of a description for. I don’t particularly want to find the words either. When you begin to share something uniquely horrifying, sometimes people do not want to encounter such heartache.
I think all of us have a need to just stay in the safety of the current moment, the safety of a casual conversation, the safety of expected responses, and not have to go to difficult places in our hearts and minds on behalf of someone else. We each have enough problems to deal with, are usually functioning at some level of overwhelmed, and do not desire to file away in our minds too many additional ways life can go drastically wrong.
I have since moved many hours away from Pensacola. I have tried to talk about it as little as possible, but the destruction against me still overshadows my life. I apply for a job and employers either immediately pass on me or they want to know why I got terminated in Pensacola and have not bothered to work since then.
“How do you account for your time not working?” I have repeatedly been asked and have repeatedly not given a satisfactory answer. My church family prays for me to get a job, but I am sure they wonder how someone with so many accomplishments can have such difficulty obtaining entry-level work.
The most mainstream answer that I feel is weighing on people’s minds is that I must be at fault in some way for my hardships. Maybe I made some horrible mistake that I am ashamed of and don’t want to talk about. I mean, what other answer is there?
But I am not at fault. I encountered evil people who inflicted many agonies of hopeless moments where I was utterly powerless. I stood anyway.
I did the right thing even when it meant more challenges and more complexities. Thankfully, I also had the strong support and leadership of my family which was so huge and so important to me. I trusted that somehow my God would make things better even though I could see absolutely no way of any good ever coming to my rescue. I felt like I would never have normalcy and truly live again.
Somehow, things did work out. I survived terrible circumstances and now this moment is new. Even when things look absolutely hopeless and you cannot think of any way that they could possibly get better, sometimes a page just turns and your life can begin to unexpectedly get better. The terrible moment you may find yourself in is not forever.
I asked a priest to give me a blessing for my job search. The blessing was incredibly beautiful and profoundly encouraging. He told me my next job would be “a God thing.” How right that statement is! If I am able to continue rebuilding my life after all that has destroyed me, that will indeed be a gift that could only come from God.
When things look ridiculously impossible and blatantly hopeless, I’ve got this! Take heart, your circumstances can change for the better too. Even if there is no indication of any good coming whatsoever, sometimes it just comes! You’ve got this.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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