Lean Not

Photo by Christine on Unsplash

An Essay By Anna Lynch

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding...” –Proverbs 3:5 NIV

When I was a little girl, I didn’t have any friends. I looked different than the other girls in my class: wild dark hair that tangled in knots more than it curled, a prominent chin with a little crease down the middle, and heavy eyebrows I’d gotten from my dad. They fit his long face, his large frame, his always-laughing storm-blue eyes. But on me? Monstrous. I know, because that’s what the other first graders called me.

Monster. While they ran away from me shrieking. 

Because human kids didn’t want to know me, I made friends in my head, with characters I’d make up who’d act out fun adventures while I swung alone on the swing set during recess. Holiday Cat and his best friend, the golden retriever named Cherry, were some of my first characters. The two of them hung out watching movies, investigated suspicious happenings in their neighborhood, and threw awesome birthday parties for all the other pets they knew. In short, they did all the stuff I couldn’t but wanted to do.

When the worlds I crafted in my head got too big to keep track of, I started to write them down in my notebook. This was fifth grade, and my nonexistent social life led me to submerge myself even further in my daydreams, in the books I loved to read, and especially in my homework assignments.

Being awarded an A and told I was an excellent student, a talented writer, that I’d be someone someday…it made me feel like I was special, had value. None of the other kids could see it, but my teachers could, and they were grown-ups who knew everything.

At 26, writing this personal essay in the midst of a competitive masters program, I see how that seed planted itself in my psyche, watered by continued praise on the quality of my work and the intelligence and maturity I was told I possessed, until it grew so long and rooted so deeply it choked out all other avenues of self-worth. All I was was smart: a good student, a good writer, a hard worker. Without that, I was nothing.

At 17, I started showing the first signs. I couldn’t make a phone call to a business, even to order takeout, without having a panic attack. I couldn’t eat in front of other people. I hated the idea of them watching me chew, I hated that they could hear each bite, hated that they could slowly watch my plate clear.

By the time I got to college and received my very first B, I was in the throes of a disorder. Who was I, if I was slipping like this? Good writers, hard workers, smart people, special people like you’re supposed to be, like you’ve been told you are, do not get Bs. All I could see in my future was darkness. I almost dropped out.

But something…something told me to stay. To keep trying. That there was light at the end of this trial.

I didn’t know it at the time, because I didn’t know Him at the time, but now that I’ve gotten to meet Him, I understand that it wasn’t something but some One.

The Lord made me this way, made me look the way I looked as a child because if I hadn’t been an outcast, I would never have turned inward the way I did, never would have made my own friends up, never would have become the dreamer and writer I am today.

For so long, I cursed that childhood, bemoaned how unfair that ostracization was. But the thing that would have been more unfair? Denying me the opportunity to grow into the strong woman I am, the strong woman who is beginning to realize that she does not know best. If I keep trying to lean on my own understanding, I’ll never be free of the anxiety disorder I’m still battling today. Every night as I lay down in darkness, my mind lies to me that I’m not enough and never will be.

But every morning, when I feel the light of the sun on my skin, and I take a deep breath full of the beauty of the world around me, I feel Him at work. Jesus tends to my mind-garden, planting fresh seeds to combat the weathered and twisted tree of anxiety that has held me in a chokehold for as long as I can remember. He softly begins to pull at the roots, untangling them from the folds of my brain. He weeds the false beliefs I hold about myself, replacing them with sunflowers, tall and strong that always face the light. He adds fresh soil to heal my dry, wounded mind. And He sees the little growths of self-love that are struggling to take root but have been planted in pots much too small to thrive, and gently transplants them into planters so large they take up nearly all the space in my mind-garden. 

He cares for me. He allows me to grow. He provides the holy water without which I would wither and harden and turn brown and fall to the earth to rot.

I’m not perfect and never will be, but that’s okay, because my caretaker, my gardener, my Father, is.

✿ ✿ ✿

Anna Lynch is an MFA student at Cal State Long Beach. She is an aspiring YA novelist and hopes that by telling stories of teenage emotional turmoil, she can help heal other teens as they see their lives reflected in hers. Finding God has allowed Anna to be more confident in herself as a writer and person, and she hopes to give Him glory through her written work.