Extraordinary Ordinary

I took a class on Vietnam War lit during one of my last semesters of grad school.  It was a special topics class that I don’t believe was offered all that frequently.  It was taught by an incredibly kind man who had spent time enlisted in Vietnam.  I wasn’t sure what to expect when I signed up for the class, but I surely got more out of it than I ever expected.  Actually, I would say out of 6.5 years of higher education, it was the class that changed my view of the world most dramatically.  It reintroduced me to my ideas of right and wrong, good and bad, just and unjust.  It made me questions concepts in new ways.  I still find myself mulling over those questions every time I watch the news or read about world events.

What possibly struck me most was a single phrase often repeated throughout the course, first penned by Tim O’Brien.  “You don’t have to have been in Nam to be in Nam.”

At the time I wasn’t sure what to make of the phrase.  I was young and innocent, and I had spent my entire life in academia surrounded by people who were pretty much just like me.  I wasn’t without my issues, but I had yet to face any of them.  They were still buried deep.  I didn’t quite know they were there.

But that phrase came back to me when I read this article today by Glennon Melton of Momastery.  You probably remember me mentioning her blog about half a million times.  She is who I want to be when I grow up… even though I believe she’s one or two years younger than me.

Melton writes about a lot on her blog — her faith, her children, her struggles, her past history of bulimia and addiction and alcoholism.  She writes about her abortion.

I’ve never been an alcoholic.  I’ve never been a drug addict.  I’ve never had an unwanted pregnancy or had an abortion.  And yet what she writes speaks directly to my heart.  It validates every struggle I find myself wading through day after day.

And it’s all because you don’t have to have been in Nam to be in Nam.

We all have our struggles.  We all have our demons.  We all have the wales that have swallowed us whole, and we are all screaming to get out of them.  Each of us is different.  We have different histories and circumstances and trials, but what unites us is the battle.

Perhaps we all find happiness is different ways.  We relax differently; we celebrate for different reasons; we soldier on for our own private victories.  And yet our pain hurts the same.  Our struggles all confine us in ways that can unite us.

The hardest posts for me to write are the ones where I speak of struggles.  Actually, the writing is easy.  Those words flow out of me because they aren’t art to me — they are just the inner dialogue of my consciousness.  It’s the sharing that’s hard.  It makes me feel self-obsessed and self-centered.  It makes me feel frivolous for sending my struggles out into the world.  It makes me incredibly self-conscious, and I almost nearly always wish I could immediately unpublish them, but I know that would do no good because they have already been sent out into the world.

But almost without exception, I will get emails back from people who share their struggles with me.  Sometimes the struggles will sound the same and sometimes they will sound different, but they always feel the same.  And it’s because it’s our ordinary, our everyday struggles that become extraordinary when we share them with people.  It’s in the sharing of the stories that connection is made.  It’s where holiness resides.

I still keep a lot to myself.  We all do.  Whether it’s from fear of judgment or condemnation.  Or whether it’s that we fear we are making more of our struggles than we should, we all guard parts of ourselves.  It’s human nature.

But it’s when we are willing to share those stories that they can become something so much more.

I don’t write because I’m good at it.  I don’t particularly believe that I’m good at it.  I write because it’s the only way I know how to make sense of my struggles.  I struggle daily with my issues.  The depression waxes and wanes.  The anxiety doesn’t like to wane so much.  The obsessiveness is always right there whispering in my ear.  Those are my demons.  My cross.  And when I sit here fighting them so incredibly hard, and I feel like I’m losing the battle, I ask God, “why?  why me?”  And the only answer I can come up with is because I can share them.  I can reach out into the world and I can say, “This is me.  These are my struggles.  This is my pain.”  And I can hit send.  And then I can pray that someone out there will hear my words and will feel slightly less alone in this big old world of ours.

And it makes me wonder what your stories are.  What is your Nam?  What is the war you are fighting today?  You have every right to keep it locked safe inside your heart.  But amazing things happen when you share it.  It becomes holy.