Michelle DeRusha

Every Day Faith. Faith Every Day.

True You

Enter Into

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Last weekend I read through all my journal entries from the past year (a task that was equal parts cringe-y and illuminating), and I was shocked to see I’d written in mid-May that I was ready to begin my next creative project (though I admitted I didn’t yet know what that “creative project” would be). It had felt, then, like I was on the cusp of something new. I was eager to plan, to begin putting steps in place toward execution. I was ready for the next thing.

It’s clear to me now, six months later: I wasn’t even close to ready.

Although I wrote a whole blog post about “right now being my next thing” – and those words were true – at the same time, the productive, striving and achievement-oriented part of me assumed quitting one thing would inevitably open the way to another creative opportunity. And so, for several months now, I have been impatiently asking, “What’s next, God?”

Last weekend when I read through my journal entries from the past year, I did so with a yellow highlighter in hand. I was looking for hints, trail markers pointing to where the path might be leading. I circled a couple of passages and notes, but in the end, I didn’t find what I was looking for. No clear arrows, no flashing neon signs.

What I saw instead as I read through days and weeks and months of musings was the slow, almost imperceptible work of God. I saw the tiny seeds of transformation that had been planted and tended in the ordinary and quiet. It seems stepping out of book writing has indeed created space for something else, but that something else is not another opportunity to do or create or produce, but rather, to enter into.

“Doing things for God is the opposite of entering into what God does for you.” (Galatians 3:11-12, Msg.).

When I read Paul’s words recently, I realized how much I prefer “doing things for” over “entering into.” Doing things plucks my Type A, productive, achiever strings. I like a plan to execute, steps to tick off and, most importantly, something to show in the end for my efforts.

“Entering into,” on the other hand, while not entirely passive per se, is an act of relinquishment. When we enter into, we surrender control, releasing our desires, our ambitions, ourselves into what God is doing and has been doing all along.

It’s a little bit like the difference between vigorously swimming the crawl stroke upstream and strapping on an orange life vest, lying back with arms extended and toes pointed skyward and letting the current take you where it may.

Swimming the crawl stroke has its place, to be sure. Planning and accomplishing goals is part of healthy living. But I do think Paul is encouraging the Galatians (and us) to be patient with the process – or as philosopher and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin put it: to “trust in the slow work of God.”

“We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient to being on our way to something unknown, something new,” de Chardin acknowledged. “And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability – and that it may take a long time.”

These are hard words. These are words we might not easily accept and embrace. The intermediate stages of anything can be awkward and uncomfortable, and the middle always seems to last forever (remember middle school?). Most days, I am not down with floating in my orange life jacket. Most days, uncertainty is the worst, and instability is for the birds.

But I also know there is so much truth in de Chardin’s words.

It wasn’t obvious to me until I read back through a year’s worth of journal entries, but now I clearly see: this whole past year has been a practice of entering into what God is already doing – not only what he is doing in me, but also what he is doing in my place, in my communities, in the people I know and love and in those around me who are strangers.

I’m not sure when the “next thing” will present itself. Frankly, I’m not at all sure there is a “next thing.” Maybe it’s all one long walk through the intermediate stages. Maybe here, in the middle, is the actual sweet spot and entering into this is what we are called to do.

I Contain Multitudes

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Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
— Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

“I’m not a gym person.”

This is a declaration I have made often, and for the last 15 years or so, I’ve believed it and lived it. For as long as I have been a regular exerciser, I have been a runner who runs outdoors. I relish the bite of winter on my cheeks in January and summer’s humidity pressing heavy against my limbs in June. I love to glimpse what’s blooming as I run past – from the first hardy crocus pushing through the snow in early spring to the last of the goldenrod and purple aster in late fall.

Recently, though, sidelined by a chronic injury, I decided to accompany Brad to the Y to experiment with the elliptical machine. Much to my surprise, I enjoyed it – not so much the elliptical (which is frightfully boring), but rather, the whole gym “experience.” The camaraderie of exercising silently side-by-side with strangers before the sun has risen. The smooth vinyl under my body as I stretch on the blue mat and catch my breath. Watching people of every shape, age and size running, walking, pushing, pulling, lifting and climbing – striving toward whatever goal they’ve set for themselves that morning.

Turns out, I am a gym person after all.

“Those who attempt to work too long with a formula, even their own formula, eventually leach themselves of their creative truths,” writes Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way. Cameron is referring specifically to the writing process, but I think a similar statement can be made about our own selves.

I am a creature of habit who thrives within routine and structure. This explains why I have run the exact same route three to four times a week for the past 18 years. It explains why I have eaten the same mid-morning snack (16 almonds) at the same time (10 a.m.) every day for the past 10 years. I could give you a dozen such examples. Suffice to say, routine is my default mode.

Routines can be healthy and good, to be sure, and the truth is, I feel most safe, secure and confident when I am clicking along within my familiar routines. But I’m also learning that this kind of contained living can, over time, inhibit growth and lead to stagnation. Ultimately, being too wedded to our structures, routines and habits – to our “formula,” as Cameron calls it – will suffocate our soul.

Recently my son Noah and I explored a new-to-us local greenhouse, and while we were there, wending our way between stately candelabra cactus and lush fiddle leaf figs, I felt an inexplicable desire to buy a plant.

I have a handful of houseplants positioned in various sunny spots around my sunroom, but I’ve never considered myself “a plant person.” Suddenly, though, immersed in all that fecund green, breathing in the rich, humid scent of new growth, I knew something new about myself. The realization was like the sharp chime of a church bell reverberating across an Italian piazza: I love plants. Plants make me happy. I want a life with more plants.

So I bought a philodendron and a white pot, transplanted it on the driveway when I got home, and placed it on top of a bookcase near my desk in the sunroom.

“There’s something enlivening about expanding our self-definition,” acknowledges Cameron, “and a risk does exactly that.”

True, going to the gym or buying a philodendron are hardly big risky endeavors, but at the same time, I believe there is something important and telling even in these small steps. Any step outside the boundaries by which we have defined ourselves is a step into newness, and stepping into newness, no matter how seemingly small or inconsequential, is always a risk.

But it’s in these smallest of steps, these smallest of risks, that we begin to recognize and embrace the multitudes contained within us. When we allow ourselves to open to these small moments of knowing, we unclasp something deep within us, which in turn opens the way to living more fully and wholly as our true selves.

Turns out, I’m a gym person. Turns out, I’m a plant person, too. I contain multitudes.

And so do you.

Navigating the New Landscape of You

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A few years ago I dramatically pruned the shrubbery in my backyard. For two days I went at it with the loppers, chopping off clumps of foliage, clipping dead twigs, sculpting and reshaping the remaining branches. When I was done, the landscape was transformed.

Noah, our resident Tree Lover, was not pleased – he disdainfully called me Paul Bunyan for weeks afterward – but I loved it. I could see more of the sky and the neighbor’s house across the street. Light streamed into spots that had previously been dank and dark. Though it was still the same size it had always been, the backyard suddenly felt much more spacious – open, airy and inviting.

Still, for about a week after the dramatic pruning, every time I glanced out the sunroom windows into the backyard, I did a double take. The landscape was so different, so unfamiliar – I hardly recognized it. Even though I loved the openness and was glad I’d pruned the shrubbery, my new backyard took some getting used to; I had to reacquaint myself with it.

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A few weeks ago, my friend Kimberly read my blog post about whitewashing the reality of poverty and Voxed me with an idea. It was a good, strong piece, she said, and she suggested I might want to rework it a bit and pitch it to Christianity Today. It was a timely topic, she noted – something she thought would resonate with a broader audience.

I immediately set to work researching other online articles on global poverty and mission work, reviewing Christianity Today’s submissions guidelines and considering how I would reshape the post into an article that might resonate with CT’s audience.

In the middle of that process, though, I became aware of the slightest bit of a pit in my stomach, which in turn prompted me to ask myself a question: Do I actually want to revise this blog post and pitch it as an article to Christianity Today? Do I want to do this work?

At first, in spite of the stomach pit (note to future self: the pit tells the truth!), the answer was not readily apparent, and so I held out the question – Do I want to do this work? – and examined it further. I turned the question around and around and gave myself the space for my true desire to make itself known. I allowed myself to figure out how I actually felt about pursuing this opportunity.

In the end, I realized I did not want to revise my blog post into an article to pitch to Christianity Today. I realized it was, in fact, the very last thing I wanted to do.

Turns out, striving is still my default mode. After a lifetime of pushing to make progress and striving for measurable results, it’s easy, almost mindless, for me to fall into my old habits and rhythms. Striving is familiar terrain for me (and just to be clear: striving to achieve a goal or make progress is not inherently a bad thing; in fact, it can be a very good, very positive thing. But it’s not the thing I want to do right now). On the other hand, this new place I’m now navigating – this place of writing solely for creative pleasure, of writing toward no particular outcome – is still largely unknown and unfamiliar, which makes it equal parts exhilarating and unnerving.

I am discovering that it takes intentionality to learn to live and thrive in a new landscape. I’m learning to slow down rather than steamroll ahead, to look inward at my own needs and desires rather than capitulate to what I think I should do or what I assume is expected of me. I’m learning to ask myself probing questions and then allow the time and space to listen for and hear the answers that come from my soul.

I’ve done some dramatic pruning in my life over these past several months, and while it’s been a fruitful, space-making, life-giving process, and I generally like the results, it’s also taken some getting used to. I am, in many ways, getting reacquainted with myself. I am still navigating this new landscape of me.

 

Terra Incognita

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A few mornings ago, when he glimpsed me reading my own book on the back patio, my husband yelled out to me from the living room, “That is the height of narcissism!” He was joking, of course (and he was wrong…the height of narcissism is actually taking a selfie of yourself reading your own book). I laughed – albeit a little sheepishly – but the truth is, I need to re-read my own book.

When I wrote True You, I assumed I was writing it from the perspective of a person who had done the hard work of pruning and come out the other side. And while that’s true – I had done some of the hard work of pruning, the fukinaoshi of the soul – what I didn’t know at the time was that I wasn’t anywhere near the other side. What I know now, from the middle, was that back then, I had only just begun.

As I told a friend recently in an email, pruning begets pruning. We make the first large cuts, and when we’ve pulled the dead, unnecessary limbs and branches away and discarded them, we discover we are not finished. Stripping away what’s not needed makes space for us to see what’s underneath. We realize there is, in fact, more pruning to be done.

Breaking my book contract and stepping out of the publishing arena was a very big prune. It took me a long time to weigh the pros and cons of that decision. As gardener Judy Maier advises, I looked at “the tree” from all angles. I asked a lot of questions. I consulted with people I trusted. I walked through all the steps toward change that therapist Lori Gottlieb outlines in her fabulous book: pre-contemplation, contemplation, preparation and action. Over a period of about three months, I went from, “I can’t possibly break my contract” to “maybe I should break my contract?” to “I’m going to break my contract.”

And then I did it. I broke my contract, paid back the advance and withdrew from the publishing arena. I dragged the pruned branches off to the proverbial compost bin, dusted off my hands, and settled in on the back patio with a cold glass of iced tea to rest in my newly pruned life.

Except just as I was getting comfortable I spotted another branch. A smaller branch, but a branch nonetheless. And then I spotted another. And another. And I knew my pruning work was not done.

I’ve been practicing a creative ritual these last few weeks called morning pages. The idea, which comes from Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way, is a simple one: every morning you write three longhand, stream of consciousness journal pages. You can write whatever you want, whatever comes to mind, just as long as you keep your pen moving.

I’ve tried to do morning pages in the past, but I’ve always quit a few days in. This time, though, I’ve stuck with it (though I admit, not every single day), and while there are times the practice feels fruitless and boring and stupid, I am beginning to see the value in it.

What I am learning through the practice of near-daily morning pages, along with working through some of the questions and exercises in The Artist’s Way, is that I don’t know myself. At all. I don’t know what brings me joy or delight. I don’t know what my dreams and desires are. I don’t know what I like to do for fun (except read.) I can’t really remember what I loved to do as a kid (besides read). Most days I don’t know how or what I am feeling under the surface.

I am newly pruned, and I do not recognize myself.

Three years ago I heard a question resonate in the depths of my soul as I sat on a park bench on a November afternoon. Why do you have trouble with intimacy? I tried to answer this question in the pages of True You, but the truth is, I’m not sure I have lived into the answer. I might have answered the question with my head, but I didn’t answer it with my heart.

As I continue to be pruned open, this question about intimacy has resurfaced, and I know it’s not only a question about opening to others and opening to God, but also about opening to my own self.

Right now as I peer under my surface, what I see is blurry. This is progress. Six months ago I was fragmented, disintegrated. Cameron reassures me this blurriness, these questions, this vagueness are a normal part of self-discovery. “Remember that the more you feel yourself to be terra incognita, the more certain you can be that the recovery process is working,” she writes in The Artist’s Way. “You are your own promised land, your own new frontier.”

I Googled terra incognita just to be sure I understood its meaning. It’s Latin for “land unknown” and at one time was a term used by cartographers for regions that had not been mapped or documented.

This feels right to me. I am but a speck on the horizon – a land unknown, uncharted territory, ever so slowly coming into focus.

What I’ve Learned in the Six Months Since I Left Publishing

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A friend recently asked me what I’d wished I’d known before I published my first book. She may have been asking what I’d wished I’d known about the industry or the culture of publishing, but my answer went in a different direction. “I wish I’d known how deep my desire for approval and recognition was,” I told her. “I wish I’d known myself well enough to recognize that a career in publishing wouldn’t be the very best fit for me, for who I am.”

I knew I was Type A. I knew I was an overachiever with a deep desire to be successful. But I didn’t know how deep my desire was to be validated, recognized and known.

Turns out I had to learn that the hard way.

I would have much rather learned about my shadow side from a distance – who wouldn’t, right? But it doesn’t often work that way. We learn who we are not by holding ourselves – our good parts and our flawed parts – at arm’s length, but through real, lived experience, which more often than not includes struggle, pain, tumult, disappointment and failure.

My shadow side was only fully revealed when I was deep into my vocation as a publishing writer. And I was only able to recognize, acknowledge and ultimately confront this part of myself after it had fully emerged – and then only after I realized I couldn’t subdue it or overcome it through my own best efforts.

They say of all the nine Enneagram types, Enneagram Threes know themselves the least well. Apparently this is because we are so busy performing and producing, so busy trying to live up to who we think others think we are, or who we think we should be, we don’t acknowledge or even recognize who, in fact, we really are.

I can’t speak for other Enneagram Threes, but I can say, for myself, this assessment is spot on. When I page through the journal entries I wrote as I was moving toward my decision to step away from publishing, I see the same words repeated again and again. “Fragmented.” “Disintegrated.” “Fractured.”

It’s obvious to me now. Of course I felt fragmented. Of course I felt disintegrated and fractured. I’d spent so many years trying to be someone other than myself, I’d segmented myself into a million disparate pieces.

I realize this all sounds overly dramatic and more than a little psycho-babbly, but here’s the long and short of it; here’s what I have learned that I hope might be relevant for you too:

When we know ourselves, we are able to recognize and move toward the environments in which we thrive. And, at the same time, when we know ourselves, we are able to recognize and move away from the environments in which we fail to thrive.

Some of us – maybe most of us – will become better at knowing ourselves through trial and error. Some of us will learn more quickly than others where and how we thrive and where and how we fail to thrive.

Some of us will be stubborn. We will try to make ourselves fit into a space or a place that is not right. We will try to change ourselves to fit our circumstances. Ultimately we will fail at this. And ultimately, in failing, we will come closer to knowing our true selves.

Turns out, publishing was too big an arena for me. The public nature of the publishing industry fed my voracious shadow side like gasoline feeds a fire. The more I looked to the publishing world for approval and recognition and the more I pushed myself to be successful and admired and known, the more my ego demanded and the more distant I became from my true self, from the person God created me to be.

My shadow side has not vanished simply because I’ve stepped out of the publishing arena. My desires for validation, recognition and success are still there. The difference is, these desires are not being fueled in the same way and to the same degree. I’m still a Type A overachiever, and this is not inherently a flaw. I still strive to be successful in my work as a writer for The Salvation Army, and I still enjoy the validation I receive from my boss or my colleagues for work well-done. But because my work is not public in the same way, and the arena in which I am working is much, much smaller, my ego stays in check.

Over these last six months I’ve come to realize that there’s nothing I could have done that would have better equipped me to succeed as a published author while at the same time keeping my self whole and intact. I didn’t “do it wrong.” Nor is the publishing industry “bad.” Like a couple with irreconcilable differences, we – the publishing world and I – were simply not good together.

Still, I have no regrets. I haven’t for a moment regretted my decision to leave publishing, nor do I regret the fact that I entered in. The fact is, as Parker Palmer so astutely says, “There are no shortcuts to wholeness.” I learned a lot about myself through the ups and downs of that journey. I am closer to knowing who I am. And still I am learning, learning to recognize and embrace the whole of me – shadows and light, flaws and gifts. I am learning where I fit best – where I thrive and where I don’t. I am learning to live as my best self, the person God created me to be.