Embracing the Middle

I’m writing this on the heels of finishing Tia Williams’ Seven Days In June.

Spoiler alert: this book broke my [redacted] heart.

Double spoiler: it also gave me so much hope.

In the book’s epilogue, Shane Hall, the story’s—more or less—antagonist shares the following in conversation with the leading character Eva Mercy:

[Eva] “Brownsville? Since when do you play basketball?” 

[Shane] “I don’t; I’m trash. But I came to a realization. I need to mentor kids. I was doing it wrong before, getting way too close. Trying to save them because I couldn’t save my foster family. Or you. It was unhealthy. With this, I just shout motivational shit from the sidelines, build some self-esteem, and go home. I mean…your home.”

As if the book’s ending wasn’t enough to leave me gasping for air and dabbing the corners of my teary eyes, enter this epilogue and very raw exchange between Eva and Shane.

“I was doing it wrong before…”

6 words sufficed to crack me wide open and unleash emotions that have been bottling up on the inside, for what feels like an eternity.

I was doing it wrong before…

I was doing healing wrong before.

Healing is bidirectional. It both pushes and pulls you, often at the same time without gentleness or remorse. 

On one end of the pendulum you’re being pushed to do, to become, to evolve, to release, and to move forward. And on the opposite end you feel pulled to cover up…to hide, to protect, and to shelter yourself from the impact of any further pain. Hanging in the balance between each pendulum swing…is you. 

The present you. The former versions of you. The unrealized selves you’re desperate to realize—the entire process is a grueling, yet beautifully rewarding, and equally exhausting game with real players who hope to have mastered the game’s sequence just right, so that this time they’ll land the optimal outcome.

But outcomes are hardly ever optimal. Yet, we’re forced to reckon with them…however they show up, in whatever shape they take.

Sometimes we push the pendulum too far right and stumble upon a faux healed self that masquerades behinds saving others with branding footnotes of being the “self-actualized” friend who can talk you through any variation of crises, yet knowing deep down you’re just one loose thread from a fully unraveled spool.

And then sometimes we’re pulled too far left buried underneath the restricted, airlessness of pain, grief, heartbreak and suffering, where we’ve either been convinced or convinced ourselves that there’s more safety in living through the motions than doing the work to find the freedom in coming up for air. 

If you’re anything like me, you’ve likely found yourself on both extremes. Going too far to the right, only to regress and pull back too far left.

Culturally, we’ve framed much of the conversation on wholeness around reaching a certain mountaintop within ourselves where the air is lighter, the weather conditions are always favorable and you can see everything, everywhere, all at the same time with clarity. I’ve been guilty of pedaling this framework—it’s ideal, it feels good, it’s a thing to ascertain if only we can just arrive. 

Arrive.

Is there a mountaintop? Perhaps. But all mountains have valleys. And it’s the valley that we underestimate, that comes hurling at us with daunting speed. And when it finally catches us we freeze, caught in an unexpected high beam flash wondering…”more of this? something else to heal from?”

But what if our goal should’ve never been measured in pendulum swings? What if, our goal should’ve been finding balance in the mountaintops and the valleys? The peaks and the lows?

I’ve (unashamedly) spent too much time chasing the summit instead of discovering contentment in the balance. In the middle spaces. In the cushion in-betweens. Because that’s truthfully where life happens, in the messy middle.

And I won’t spend another year avoiding it.

Here’s to embracing the middle.