Armed with Nothing

Birdie Conrad : You are daring to imagine that you could have a different life. Oh, I know it doesn’t feel like that. You feel like a big fat failure now. But you’re not. You are marching into the unknown armed with…[pause] 

Birdie Conrad : Nothing. Have a sandwich.

From You’ve Got Mail, Screenplay by Nora and Delia Ephron

Have you ever made a decision that felt very right, if agonizing, in the moment, only to end up regretting it almost immediately?

I have.

In fact, I made two in May. I chopped off all my hair, and, more significantly, I quit my part-time teaching job of ten years.

What followed was a summer of self-loathing, of feeling, as the Ephron sisters so succinctly put it, “like a big fat failure.”

It’s not that I disagree with the reasoning that led me to either decision. With my teaching job, I had long felt that I either needed a full-time job or no job at all, or at least not one that was five days a week. Going in at noon every day had worked wonderfully when my son was a baby, but for years, my schedule had been a mismatch for my personality, my anxiety, my rhythms. I dreaded the drive through lunchtime traffic. I hated the way I managed to waste every single morning except for the two years (2018-2020) that I attended a graphic design program at a local technical school.

And my teaching partner was retiring.

And I wanted to work on my writing.

And often I was just tired of the smells, the noise, the confinement—not to mention the drama—of working in an elementary school.

And we were close to paying off our house.

My career, like my hair, needed a reset, a chance to fill out, to grow into something new. If not then, when?

I knew it would be hard to reinvent myself, but I didn’t anticipate the grief, or the feeling that I wasted so many years of my life building nothing, or at least nothing that couldn’t be swept away as easily as chunks of my thinning hair from a salon floor.

And doing it for half a paycheck all that time.

I know these thoughts are distortions. In my ten years as a part-time elementary art teacher, I built meaningful relationships with hundreds of kids, inspired their love of art, encouraged and supported and blessed both students and colleagues, and positively contributed to my school in myriad ways. I made an impact.

I hope I made a difference.

But, like so many of us have this summer, I’ve found myself weeping along to Billie Eilish’s song from the Barbie soundtrack, “What Was I Made For?”

As a Christ follower, I know the easy, spiritual-sounding answer to that question, the general answer for all who love Jesus. But I’m looking for specificity. What was Leah Dean Thomas put on earth to do?

Like Kathleen Kelly, I’m “daring to imagine that I could have a different life, marching into the unknown armed with nothing.” In this empty space, I have plenty of time to grieve all the things I’ve been pushing past and pushing through the last few years: my new loss of identity, my disillusionment with so much of Christendom, my dad’s death, my inability to have another child, my seeming lack of professional success at 45, and so on. It’s all balled up into a big bundle of sad, and I don’t have the hugs and high fives and hilarious conversations with four-year-olds from work to buffer me from it.

This season is not fun. But I know it’s not forever, even if this long, hot summer has felt like it.

Think I forgot how to be happy
Something I’m not, but something I can be
Something I wait for
Something I’m made for
Something I’m made for

_Billie Eilish, “What Was I Made For?”

In my 9th grade homeschool poetry journal, I looked for the shortest poems I could find because I had to handwrite it. Consequently, none of the poems were very good, but I’ve come back to that line from inspirational poet John Greenleaf Whittier again and again over the years:

Nothing before, nothing behind;
The steps of faith
Fall on the seeming void, and find
The Rock beneath.

It seems like a void right now. I can’t pretend it’s not scary or sad. “I used to float/now I just fall down,” but I have to believe there’s a solid place to land.