Category: relationships

Returning to Ashes & Falling in Love

Posted on by Brenna Lakeson in relationships, religion

Ever since I realized that Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday were going to fall on the same day this year, I’ve been trying to reconcile the spirit of both of them.  Until this morning, I wasn’t sure at all how to hold them at the same time.  I love Valentine’s Day.  I love celebrating the other couples in my life, my own partner, and the ways in which I love my friends and family members.  I also value the traditions of the liturgical calendar and find meanings in its seasons.  So, how am I supposed to do both at the same time? On one hand, they seem to be opposites.  Ash Wednesday begins the season of Lent, calling us to make sacrifices, remember our own sin and mortality, and look to the suffering and redemption of the cross.  Valentine’s Day on the other is bright red candy hearts, balloons, chocolate covered strawberries, and kisses.  They seem to almost be opposites – one full of mourning while the other is full of celebration.

However, the more I considered what it truly means to love each other, the more the partnering of these two days began to reveal itself.  Loving others is difficult.  Heck, loving myself is difficult.  So, what better to remind us of our own mortality and shortcomings than a day also focused on love?  Love requires sacrifice.  It requires relinquishing our desire to always have our way. It calls us to stop being so selfish all the time.  But, as Ash Wednesday so poignantly reminds us, we are always falling short.  Our ability to love others is stained by the traumas of our past, our family systems, and other times that love has failed us.  Love shows us how truly broken we are.

For the past two years, I’ve been in the healthiest and most rewarding relationship of my life.  Given, many of my previous partners were abusive and manipulative in a variety of ways, but my current partner is a true gem.  As we’ve grown closer, though, we often find ourselves in disagreements because of the baggage that we carry.  Our families taught us to handle conflict differently.  We organize our homes in different ways.  Our personalities are just different: I don’t know how to slow down and rest while he treasures an afternoon doing nothing.  I’m easily distracted during conversations, interrupting to point out dogs or funny signs, while he feels hurt when it seems like I’m not paying attention.  I’m grateful for the ways we’ve learned to navigate these differences and learn about each other.  But it is work to love another well.

Despite the difficulty, though, we are called to love others.  Nothing could be more clear in the Christian scriptures and throughout the sacred texts of other traditions.  Love one another.  Even though we are going to disappoint people that we care about, we are called to love them.  Even though we might get hurt, we are called to offer our hearts.  Even when we don’t agree, we are called to offer love instead of division.  What else is there to do in our brokenness but love?

This Ash Wednesday/Valentine’s Day (VaLENTine’s Day?), let us hold space for both love and imperfection.  How can we offer forgiveness to those who fail to love us perfectly? How can we make the sacrifices we would want others to make for us?  How can we fight to overcome our brokenness to offer love and, in turn, be made more whole?  We are from dust and we will return to dust, but in the meantime, let us honor our fragile condition by handling each other with the care we each deserve.

On the Three Year Anniversary of my Sexual Assault

Posted on by Brenna Lakeson in mental illness, relationships

*TW: assault, abuse, anxiety and panic*

The semester had just begun and I felt like I really had it together.  I was organized, I was going to the gym each morning, I was ahead on my school work.  But things were not as perfect as they seemed.  I was beginning to doubt my long-term relationship with my then-boyfriend, “Ethan”.  I didn’t feel like I could be myself.  In retrospect, I now know that I spent years in an emotionally abusive relationship, consistently being told what I wasn’t allowed to wear, who I could hang out with, and that my opinions were wrong.  After months of built-up doubt, I finally told Ethan that I needed time to think about what I wanted.  He didn’t take it well, which is understandable, but amidst his consistent attempts to control me, his negative reaction pushed me away even further.  I wanted out but I had attached myself to him for so long that I wasn’t sure I could make it on my own.

The next day, I went to work at a restaurant, anticipating celebrating at my friend’s birthday party afterward to blow off some emotional steam.  I hadn’t eaten much that day.  Distraught about the conversation I’d had with Ethan, I didn’t have much of an appetite.  Despite this, I showed up at the party after my restaurant shift and had a few drinks.  I vented to some friends about what was going on in my relationship, and I got some good advice.  After a few hours, though, I lost most memory of much of what happened that night, but I do know how it ended.

As the party winded down, I made what I thought was a responsible decision to stay on my friend’s couch after the party and not drive home.  I knew I had no business driving a car, plus it was extremely late, and I planned to leave in the morning once I had sobered up.  However, I wasn’t the only one who stayed.  A guy I knew from school, “Jacob”, also stayed.  Admittedly, I had developing feelings for him. This was part of the reason I had begun to question my existing relationship with Ethan.  I thought it was important for me to figure out what I was missing in my current relationship that led me to develop feelings for other people. I now know the answers to that question: kindness, communication, freedom to be myself.  But at the time, I just thought I was a bad person for having feelings for someone else, when in fact I was being manipulated and emotionally abused by Ethan.

That night after my friend’s birthday party, I was excited that Jacob had decided to stay.  We were alone together, and I hoped we would talk and get to know each other a little more.  But that’s not what happened.  Because I had not yet sobered up, things happened that night that I did not consent to.  My feelings for Jacob did not make these things okay.  My lowered inhibitions did not make them okay.  What should have happened was this: Jacob, noting I was intoxicated and emotionally vulnerable, put me to bed on the couch and told me to rest up. What did happen was: I stated what I didn’t want, but he insisted that it was okay for him to those things. I don’t know if I said “no” or “stop”, but I do know that Jacob told me what he was going to do to my body instead of asking if it was okay.  I know that I told him there were things I didn’t want to do and that he did them anyway.  But instead of realizing I had been sexually assaulted, I spent months thinking that I had cheated on Ethan.

I woke up the next day in a constant state of panic.  I couldn’t breathe.  My heart was beating out of my chest.  Partly due to what I perceived as my failure to be perfect and partly due to what I did not realize was a violation of my body, I felt unhinged.  This past Sunday, I felt anxious and panicky throughout the whole church service I was attending.  I was confused until I remembered the feeling of showing up the morning after my assault, to my internship at that same church, exactly two years ago.  I had felt dirty, shameful, unworthy.  I thought I had done something terrible that made me a failed pastor and a failed human.  I’m not really sure how I moved forward the rest of that semester, but in many ways I’m still recovering. I hate that I still feel the need to use fake names to protect these men or to protect myself from them.  Moving toward forgiveness for both of these men is a daily struggle.  I still don’t know how to offer forgiveness in a way that doesn’t justify the things that happened to me.  Others often say that forgiveness is actually for me and not for them, but I have trouble framing it that way.

I no longer feel like a failure because I know what happened was a result of abuse and assault, not a result of my own moral failings. I needed to get out of my relationship with Ethan in order to fully be myself. I needed to realize what Jacob had done to me in order to be able to heal from it. I still deal with the anxiety and panic that I hold in my body from these experiences. But on this 2-year anniversary of the most terrible thing, I do have the ability to look back and know how strong I am to have survived this. I can look back and see how far I’ve come in managing my anxiety. I can look forward and know that I am now in a relationship with someone who values me as I am, shows me kindness, and doesn’t try to take control of me. I can also look forward and imagine a future where forgiveness is possible, and I think that’s a good place to start.