The Score Keeper
In a world where everyone defines themselves by wins and losses, we have a natural tendency to keep score. In my current role as a real estate broker for new construction, there are metrics that we are measured against to track our performance. Meeting quotas, exceeding sales goals, customer surveys and where you are ranked on leaderboards is what most businesses sensationalize because they believe it motivates our competitive sides to be the winner. That works for many but at what cost?
I am learning that how we keep score and how God keeps score are totally different and sometimes as painful as it is, appearing to allow the other guy to win and as we call it, “taking the L” is in fact a win for Christ. The bible says in Matthew 10:39 ESV Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. From the naked eye, that is very confusing statement, but I have had several experiences over the past few months that have demonstrated the true meaning of this verse.
If you have been a faithful follower of my blog, thank you for your support. I’m sure you’ve noticed it’s been several months since I’ve written. That is because I felt so many things that I was dealing with, even in the victories, I did not feel like it was safe to share it for multiple reasons. However, this morning I watched a podcast by Tim Ross that has transformed the way I see myself and my ability to communicate what is relevant and profound, yet still honoring my privacy and those who play a role in my story.
His podcast episode was a spontaneous yet regulated response to recent news about the sexual abuse of a child by someone that he knew and loved. He started by sharing that it was triggering because he was abused as a child by an older teenaged boy, and he was dedicating that episode to processing it out loud in a way that honors other victims WITHOUT fragilizing viewers and protecting the predators. Those were phrases that I had never heard before. Anyway, this isn’t about that… but as he shared his testimony he said, “make no mistake EVERY trauma that we experience, OUR BODY KEEPS THE SCORE!”
The BODY keeps the score. Those words summarized so many things that I could not find the words to adequately articulate. It’s no secret that I have suffered from neuropathy, severe feet/ankle pain, a herniated disc, and frequent migraines when under extreme stress. However, the biggest thing has been my struggle with obesity, and how all these issues play off each other. There are practical medical reasons for everything listed and I cannot minimize the suffering that comes with each and every condition. I have spent years trying to lose weight. I’ve endured major surgeries to attempt to heal the things that seemed fixable (without success). I’ve taken pills for this and shots for that. I’ve spent months in physical therapy, yet today I still sit here living with all these issues and quite frankly I’m bitter about having to.
We have normalized having and managing pain, but not the process of healing and/or finding freedom from the underlying issues that cause such pain or sickness and that is what I now understand this blog is purposed to do. So, I got the courage to raise the question… God, I can clearly see how my body has kept the score but please show me when it started. It came to me INSTANTLY… “when you published your book back in 2011 and when you stopped dancing”. (Both of these things occurred right around the same time).
Dream in Color Foundation was an organization that I founded to facilitate a performing arts program for children so they could have creative outlets to express themselves without regards to socio-economic status. Dance in particular, was something only privileged kids got to do because it is expensive and very time consuming, especially if you are really good. So as a child who was blessed with a mother who worked multiple jobs to allow me to participate in dance, I was immersed in the divide between the haves and the have nots, generally the only black girl in the class, usually placed in the back of every formation and looking different than all the other girls in my leotard. This came with it’s own whole set of issues but, on the flip side, I also know that dance is what gave my spirit a voice when I didn’t have the words to express how I felt about the painful things I experienced in my life. Our tag line for the Dream in Color Studio was “Why dance… why play… why sing… because your spirit matters!”
All these things are great, and the mission was noble, but in the struggle to bring that dream to fruition, while navigating my ongoing life experiences, I lost sight of what it did for me and shifted all of my focus on making it happen for other people. It is still something that is very near and dear to my heart and I am very proud of what we did accomplish through that project, however it was also a catalyst for my overarching healing process. That part of my journey became the backdrop of the memoire that God intended to use to heal me and others, but I allowed the devil to pervert it in ways that caused me more pain.
How so, you might ask? Well unlike social media where we only post and highlight our greatest hits, filtered photos, and paint a picture of how great our families are, I wrote 200+ pages about the ugly truth and painful details of my experiences and family secrets. Not only was it painful to have to relive it all to put it on paper, then I had to publish it, not knowing how my family, friends and the public would respond and judge me over things that I had not yet fully healed from.
I did it out of obedience, despite my fear and smiled, wanting to be proud of the fact that I wrote and self-published a freaking book, while secretly hoping that certain people wouldn’t read it. So, I moved through that season of my life waiting for a literal bomb to drop by those who may seek retaliation over my level of transparency. This may not be politically correct or racially sensitive to say, but there is an old saying that if you want to hide something from black people to hide it in the pages of a book because many don’t enjoy reading, at least not books over a certain number of pages and/or books that will actually teach you something. Well, although the origin of that statement is rooted in slavery and how it was deemed the best way to keep black people enslaved was by keeping them from learning to read, therefore limiting their intellect and their scope of the world around them, I’m ashamed to say in this case, I had hoped that theory was true. It was such a weird conflict of wanting the success and accolades of a published author, yet being terrified of how people would see me once they read it. So instead of living my fear out loud in a productive way, my body started keeping score when I decided I needed to hide and fade into the background.
There are many sources out there that relate physical conditions to spiritual/emotional issues. Backpain is related to carrying burdens, feet/ankles relate to a fear of moving forward, feeling unstable and I’m sorry to all of my thick brothers and sisters but obesity is related to hiding. You have to decide what you are hiding from but for me, after having been forced to write that book (I’m sure challenged by God is a better term, although it felt forced), I had a desperate need to hide from the anticipated judgement and criticism of having put all of my business out in the streets.
This is unfortunately when the pattern of isolation and sedentary habits took over my life. I sat in an office or hid in a sound booth like the Wizard of Oz, making the magic happen for everyone else. Yet simultaneously, my life at home was falling apart even more. So between keeping the studio afloat and taking care of my family obligations, which included 20+ hours per week in a car driving to practices and sporting events, I drowned my fear and sorrows with toxic busyness. It compounded an already emerging depression and I self-soothed with food and lethargy. Still forced to keep secrets about what was happening in my home, I did my best to dissociate from my feelings and just make it through the next day. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat and the next thing I knew, none of my clothes fit and multiple forms of aches and pains crept in. The more people started telling me I was fat, the more shame I felt about it and the cycle continued. Within two years of that spiral, I had gained at least 50 lbs and after the exposure of the deepest possible betrayal, I became downright mean and abrasive because I was then forced again to keep new trauma a secret after I just poured past secrets out for the world to see. I’d say the rest is history…
Well, thank you to both Penelope Featherington-Bridgerton and Pastor Tim Ross, who both gave me permission to release my pain, my shame and decide to stop hiding in plain sight. He said, “Our triggers either make us furious or curious” and in paraphrasing the rest, he explained that it’s our responsibility to be curious enough to figure out the source of the trigger so we can learn to regulate our physical and emotional responses in ways that do not cause further pain to ourselves or impose pain onto others. In his real time living example, as he discussed the current trigger and how it related to his childhood trauma, he paused and tapped his hand on his chest to say to little Timmy, “you’re okay… we’re safe… you were a good kid”. Then he said, “It is okay to be fully seen, fully heard, fully known, YET FULLY LOVED.” I had never seen that modeled before in such a practical way and it has literally wrecked my life in the most beautiful way.
As for the Bridgerton Season 3 example. Penelope gave a speech about how she became Lady Whistledown, the anonymous gossip columnist. She said, “I know now how common it is to be a young lady to whom no one listens.” Later she said, “It was easy to cause dispersions from the shadows where I could not be found, but I see now how much courage it takes to live a life out in the open. To honor one’s weaknesses publicly for all to see and to know that regardless of the outcome, one always has worth.”
THAT is where I have been stuck. God has been fighting to show me my worth, OUTSIDE OF PERFORMING FOR THE APPROVAL OF OTHERS, while teaching me to publicly honor my weaknesses WITHOUT pressing down my feelings about it in ways that negatively impact my physical health and self-worth.
I had stopped taking photos of myself, especially from the shoulders down and have hidden in the back of group photos because I couldn’t stand to look at who I had become. I take every step with a calculated focus to minimize the physical pain in my feet, as if I were tip toeing through the land mines of my past traumas, afraid that one wrong move will cause an eruption of toxic emotions. I carry the weight of the world on my shoulders and have harbored bitterness and resentment of feeling burdened to take care of the needs and emotional baggage of everyone else, while neglecting my own needs and feelings. I have suffered with debilitating headaches and constant torment in my mind replaying conversations I should have had while swallowing my words, as not to speak up and advocate for myself to avoid making anyone else feel uncomfortable about what they don’t want to have to hear. I even stopped writing both this blog and my screenplay because a recent comment after my last post triggered that feeling of needing to hide after I published my book all those years ago.
The hard truth is that the trauma that I have experienced as a black woman in America (sorry, not sorry to my white friends), as a survivor of sexual trauma, as a survivor of emotional and verbal abuse in many relationships throughout my life (sorry, not sorry to my family members that were involved) are all a part of my story, but they no longer define who I am. I now say I am a survivor because there is a clear difference between being a victim and being a survivor of traumatic experiences and I have finally transformed from victim to survivor. This next chapter of my life will be focusing on the transition from surviving to thriving, but for now, I am happy with the fact that I have survived it all and while it knocked me down it DID NOT BREAK ME.
In the past few months, God has forced me out of the shadows into interactions with several people that I had challenges forgiving to prove to me how much I have healed and grown. He has also challenged me to give to people in ways that would by most standards be counted as losses but have proven or will soon prove to be wins in the ways that matter most because if the person on the other end saw Jesus in me it is a 100% WIN.
You may have seen on social media, the jokes about “girl math” and other funny terms of endearment to say that the “math ain’t mathing” except by the understanding of certain groups because of how they process and rationalize information. Well for me, in terms of keeping score, God’s math has me winning in more ways that I can keep count and has HIM winning every time, because how He sees me now is the only score that matters!
On this Juneteenth, June 19th, 2024 the day that America finally acknowledges and celebrates when ALL of us became free, I am declaring Halleluja I’m Free!
Until next time… much love and I hope you are blessed by this message!
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