Buds

The day after I moved, sight unseen, into my house last July, I noticed with delight that there was a rose bush out front. The bed it was planted in was overgrown, sure, and it was choked with vines, but it was still a rose bush, like the one that grew up and around the entrance to the house I grew up in. The rose bush made me feel safe and at home and I determined then and there to do my best to tend it.

And tend it I did. I pulled the weeds from the bed, I disentangled the vine that had been choking it, and I pruned the plant. I checked it almost daily for blooms, even though it wasn’t the season for roses. It was the brightest day of my month when I saw a little red bud, reaching up to the sky from a branch pinned to the wall by the cable cords that run across the length of the house. It was life, undeterred. Life, striving to be. Life, producing beauty in the face of neglect. I felt a little flicker of hope.

Writing in parables and extended metaphors comes naturally to me. Maybe it’s the lifetime in church or maybe I’m too lazy to generate something completely novel when a perfectly good literary structure is sitting right there in front of me, but either way, I’m at home in a parable. I’m not surprised that in the midst of a particularly chaotic time in my life, full of strange newness and despair, I would gravitate toward this rose bush and hitch my star to its wagon.

Seminary was difficult for me. Not the academic content— that was easy enough. But the poking and prodding I had to do into myself, the emotional awareness I felt forced to develop, that was rough for me. I had spent my life building up ever-thicker walls around myself, as those with childhood trauma tend to do, and I didn’t really see the need to tear them down. Generations of pastors before me had had perfectly fine ministries without challenging their toxic masculinity or delving into the depths of their pain. I resented the emotional work that seminary put in front of me. Add into that mix the fallout from the 2016 election and the #MeToo movement, plus facing the bullshit the Purity Movement put me through, and it’s no great wonder that I walked out of seminary with boatloads of anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation.

This, of course, is the perfect mental state to begin pastoral ministry with. Don’t @ me.

And so, in addition to finding a new therapist and going on antidepressants, I clung to the rosebush to help me make sense of my life. My brain screamed words of unworthiness at me every time I approached the pulpit and my knees buckled at least once every service, but I was still alive. I started using a sharpie to slash color onto my wrists when I really wanted to use a knife, but I was still alive. I laid up in bed on days when I said I would have office hours, hoping that, as usual, no one would stop by, but I was still alive. And somehow, ministry got done. Somehow, the job got done. And somehow, through virus and vines, this little neglected bush bloomed.

That is, of course, not the end of the metaphor. Anyone who knows plants can tell you that this bush is doomed and that I should, in all honesty, take it out and plant a new one in the same spot. I might do that. I’m not sure. I rent, so it’s not like it’s my decision alone, but I’m sure the owner wouldn’t mind it if I was paying for it. I inherited this bush and though I’ve tried to tend it, it’s the plants that I’ve put in on my own that have really flourished.

I’m trying to be healthier. I’m working on losing weight and changing my habits. I’m talking myself back from ledges and anchoring myself in the support of others. On good days, I can do something that feels like praying. On bad days, I produce plenty of sighs too deep for words for the Spirit to work with. But growth is a long and complicated process. We each require tending and we are each impacted by the weather and the soil we’re planted in. Flourishing doesn’t happen in a day.

And I know I’m not alone in this struggle. My life is unique, sure, but it shares plenty in common with others who are going through similar things: struggling with mental health, working in ministry, being a female-presenting person in this world, learning to care for my body, and things like that. I know for a fact that there are plenty of other former gifted kids out there who struggle to self-actualize without the approval of others. Hey friends. So I’ve decided to write my way through this struggle, in the hopes that, if nothing else, the solidarity will help us all through it all.

Here’s to growing.