No. 25: Somewhere Only We Know

alternate title: I didn't anticipate a "part two"

When I wrote out last week’s letter on all the things that have been most beautiful and most difficult in the past year-plus off of Instagram, I didn’t anticipate a part two. I guess it was foolish of me to not add a disclaimer attached right at the end, but as I combed through responses in the comments and in my inbox, I saw message after message that stirred something in me. 

“I keep meaning to, but haven’t taken the leap yet”
“I tried but I just can’t stay off”
“I feel so guilty that I’ve only been able to delete the app for a month.”

Stir, stir, stir.

I thought I’d be fine to respond with a quick, “don’t worry! It’s not for everyone” here and a “you’ll know if and when it’s time!” there, but it festered and it pricked and I realized a more important note needed to be made. I pray it’s not soapboxy or sharp. I feel the need to add some humor in because I always want the gold standard to be a cookie rather than a sea urchin to accompany your morning coffee but today, I’m just going to pour out the thought in my heart reverberating around the walls.

We all will have a natural bend towards our besetting sin. I’m not ashamed to be vulnerable here in this space so I’m always more than happy to share some of mine—I know them well. I have a bend towards selfishness, slothfulness, anxiety and envy with a root of discontentment. There are plenty more in there, don’t get me wrong, but that’s a little bit of me in a nutshell. 

My wiring, not my willpower, makes it so that I could be in a room littered with eighty eight bottles of wine, a jar full of joints, a sprinkling of pills and needles galore and be unfazed. In my youth, when I was at a party with a cloud of smoke and a sea of red solo cups, saying “nah—I’m good” wasn’t hard for me. I can count the sips of alcohol I’ve had in my whole life on two hands and decided with no looking back that I’d never drink again when I was 22. The choice was made with zero difficulty. 

If you were to look at me at that same party in my youth and call me “noble” or “good” because I was able to avoid the peer pressure and temptation of drugs and underage binge drinking my classmates couldn’t resist, all you had to do was keep an eye on me for ten more minutes to be proven wrong. Lust and physical temptations overtook me time and time again in my teenage years and “saying no” suddenly was a whole lot more difficult in those circumstances. Why? Because that would mean battling against my natural bend—a battle I often lost.