I AM RADIANT, VIBRANT, AND MAGNETIC.
These are the tender, yet bold, and, honestly, very necessary words a beloved friend strategically taped to my desk when I wasn’t looking. I’m in a season where the language I use to talk about who I am, my personality, and my strengths and weaknesses feels like it can move me toward healing or really be detrimental to my own sense of self. My friend’s words serve as a reminder to speak to myself and about myself with honor.
If I’m being honest, honor has not been something I’ve felt familiar with, but rather, I feel more familiar with honor’s slimy counterpart—shame. Shame latches itself like a life vest to my chest. It creeps and crawls over my work—constantly whispering “do better” or leading me to wonder if there is someone more qualified, more energized, more vision oriented, more winsome, more likely to draw in crowds, and just better able to do most of the things I find myself doing. It cripples me in most areas of my life, stopping me in its tracks. So, for me to imagine writing about honor almost feels unexplainable or just out of my grasp.
I feel completely lost for words as I write this final piece for Red Tent Living and seek to honor a space that has provided me a container to capture everything I wish I could fully live out as a healthy and wholly integrated self. How can I wrap words around what this space, this collective of women, these stories have been for me over the past six years? How do I close out something that’s goodness almost seems like a mirage of all the honorable, true, lovely, and commendable things of all of us?
I am going to try, as I take my shoes off and sink my feet into this holy ground one last time.
As much as shame has always been something with which I have wrestled, examined, uncovered, and explored, for this last half of a decade, opening up a blank document to begin writing every other month has afforded me a container to hold what feels like all the delightful and good pieces of myself.
As I approach my 30th birthday in just a few weeks, I pause to reread all of my Red Tent Living pieces, which feel like a synthesis of all the sacred in my life this and past seasons have held. It feels like reading a coming-of-age story of sorts. These stories allow me to relive, through what feels like someone else’s eyes, my own life. The woman who wrote these pieces truly wrote with honor, as if beholding a beloved friend, tenderly whispering compassionate wisdom, and granting permission and grace to remain present to her own wonderful, messy, and vibrant life.
I read back with a host of emotions, but the primary one that rises to the surface is gratitude.
I am not always familiar with a feeling of thankfulness toward myself—shame really can be a beast—but as I read and reflect and mourn and celebrate the stories I chose to tell, I realize that I get to see myself through no one else’s eyes but my own, which feels like a gift.
There is a song by Sleeping at Last called “Three,” which tells the story of an Enneagram 3’s journey toward formation and healing and what it might mean for this type to be whole. There is a line in the song that says:
I finally see myself
through the eyes of no one else.
It’s so exhausting on this silver screen,
where I play the role of anyone but me.
These words feel true to me now. I’ve seen myself and others tell stories that when kept in our own heads may feel messy and overwhelming and shameful. But within this sacred community of other women, we get to nurture those stories and share them with both tenacity and tenderness. I get to see that unfold as I reread my own stories, which progress into deeper vulnerability over time, and I notice a little bit more of what sounds like me. I am thankful.
I am thankful for this community that has brought me home to myself. In one of my previous pieces, I wrote about my female community, “By these relationships, I’m pulled with what feels like all of the gravitational pull in the universe back to myself, back to center, and back to God. They make me laugh and cry all at once. How can that be?”
This is what this community, this space, and my own writing has offered to me. Something that feels like home.
Haley Wiggers is passionate about discovering how the messy, painful, and unexpected gifts that come with being human connect, relate to, and offer understanding of how God relates to and cares for us. She’s been married to her husband and loving partner Tyson for seven years, and together they have a nearly three-year-old, Theo. Haley is learning to notice, lean in, and respond to all the invitations God offers through parenting, pastoring, mentoring, marriage, friendship, and the fullness of life. Haley is a certified Spiritual Director and has found it to truly be a gift to companion with people as they attend to God.
Shame is a heavy burden with no purpose. Try to unload it today.
Haley – Your “yes” to joining as a regular contributor to this sacred space has been a tremendous blessing to us all. I resonated with your words about shame, and about how it feels to go back and read your previous writing. The reality is, in our humanity, we are all both…we are women who know the whispers of shame and we are women who know tastes of the glory planted in us by our Creator. Here we get to share our reality, and know we will be welcomed as we are on any given day. Thank you for your honesty, your vulnerability, your truth telling, thank you for bringing all of yourself to your writing and for trusting us. I am truly so very grateful for who you are in this community of women. (Tracy)