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Health & Fitness

Perfectly Whole

It has always amazed me how we're the same people our whole lives. The things that bothered us as four- year-olds bother us now, the character defects we had at three are still there at 33.

I can’t really remember a time when I wasn’t flooded with anxiety. From the moment I was able to speak I ransacked my mom with question after question about our agenda for the day. I had to know where we were going and in the exact order we would be arriving at each destination. If she deviated even slightly I’d have a melt down. I just couldn’t handle it. I needed to have a plan, I needed to know what I was up against, and I needed to be prepared.
Honestly since that time not a whole lot has changed. It has always amazed me how we’re the same people our whole lives. The things that bothered us as four- year-olds bother us now, the character defects we had at three are still there at 33. The only difference is we’re just better at hiding them… or if we work on it, toning them down. I’ve heard it said before that the only honest people in this world are little children and drunk people. There’s a lot of truth to that.
When my life doesn’t fall into the plan I’ve created for it I usually just give up and fall apart like a four-year-old. That’s my history and it always repeats itself. There was a point in time when all I wanted was to be a writer. I spent two years glued to my computer screen writing a book that I based my entire future on. When I finally finished it I felt like I had accomplished something great. About a year into the editing and submission process I was checking emails from my dining room table when I stood up from my laptop and forgetting that it was plugged into the wall I tripped over the cord. It pulled my laptop off of the table and before I could catch it, it fell onto the floor. I tried everything. My mom tried everything. We couldn’t even get it to reboot. We managed to save the hard drive but it had been completely wiped clean.
It was gone. 250,000 words… 37 chapters… gone. 
I was done after that. I wasn’t a 21-year-old writer with a future anymore I was a 21-year-old drug addict with nothing. I had put all of my hope, my energy, my time, and my future into that book so now that it was gone…all of those things were gone too. Looking back now though, I’m grateful. That incident became one of many where God did for me what I couldn't do for myself. I wasn’t ready and He knew I wasn’t. I had nothing to offer to anybody except for a broken story and a broken life. I had written an entire book with no real meaning, no real faith, and no real answers to any of the problems I was writing about. 
Don’t get me wrong I’m still broken and all of my pieces are still either mangled or lost. Even if I did manage to find them all they still wouldn’t fit the way they’re supposed to but today they don’t have to. God can create something entirely different from the pieces I still have left and at the end of it all it doesn’t have to be right…or proper…or even presentable for that matter. If I’ve learned anything in the past 23 years it’s that I was never meant to be perfect…I was meant to be whole. We all were.

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