Over the Top
He cited several instances of
"over the top-ness".
I was curious.
Intrigued.
Over the top of what?
Well, I guess that's better than
being topless?
I was thinking while he kept
talking ...
Who determines the top?
How would I know where the top
is?
And well, I haven't been to the
top of anything much less over the top.
Well there was that one time that
I stood on the very top of the ladder on my tippy toes so I could reach the
apex of the roof while painting. I was on top that day; it was a miracle I
didn't break something.
And there where the times in
college, I would ride my mountain bike to the top of the hills in and around
San Luis Obispo with the guys, yup one time I barfed at the top after pushing
so hard to get there. I literally was chasing a guy up the hill, getting to the
top at that pace pushed me to the edge. Truly, I'm not a barfer, but sometimes
it happens. But still those days were tops.
Well and there’s the time I
jumped off a cliff … tethered to a friend and a hang glider … that would have
been a top of sorts.
But "over the top" ...
what does that even mean?
Does it mean you went over and
now you’re coasting down the hill?
And, it begs the question, is
there really a top?
I mean, the sky is the limit,
right?
Is there a top to the sky?
Can I get over the sky?
Perhaps that’s why I wanted to
become an astronaut, to get over the sky
Can you get over the sky when the
universe is still expanding?
There’s this endless array of
possibilities …
These words … they were a gift …
I felt honored by this moment of candor. You know, a lot of people are afraid
of truth. I loved it, it was like, wow we are getting somewhere here … truth
exposes … truth invites … truth is truth!
In times past I might have looked
further for an understanding of what I could have done differently to navigate
each "over the top" event, but this day, this acknowledgement of my
"over the top-ness" it gave me this sort of part confidence, part
ownership that says okay, so what about that? He said it in a palatable way,
sort of like a fact in evidence that we could agree upon and there was this
sort of unspoken view of what “over the top” meant. And I felt a sort of quiet
confidence about it even though I didn’t understand what exactly was over the
top or how it happened … but I could embrace the concept.
I’m an editor. I’m always
editing. There’s always a way to do it all better. Every day I show up fine tuning
what didn’t work the day before, or maybe it worked, but there’s always a way to
show up better, different. When a communication goes badly, I seek to understand
it so I can edit in advance the next time … but these over the top moments …
these moments had a way of sifting … sort of like coming to an intersection and
you think, which way should I go? These people that experienced Susanne as over
the top, they went another way. Perhaps
that’s good. They choose, they came to the intersection and went down another
path. That was their path …
There was a time when I wanted to
win ALL the business, I mean a lot of days, I still do. I don’t like not being
picked. I do my best, I give sage mortgage advice, why would they possibly pick
someone else? I worked so hard. I did my best. It typically doesn’t make any sense.
You win some; you lose some. But I figure, it’s better to be in the arena than
not at all …
It’s been easier to lose lately.
It’s also been easier to say, “I don’t think I’m the right fit for you.” Yes,
the reality is, I’m not everyone’s cup of tea and well I’m okay with that now …
I've long known about my
proclivity toward intensity.
I was born with it.
I’m not sure how that fleshed out
as a baby or in early childhood. I bet I didn’t like my socks folded in my
shoe. I bet that set me off. It set one of my kids off. It drove me nuts. I
would go to the Gap and buy the super expensive socks just to avoid the
displeasure of the fold in the socks when the shoes went on.
I put the mask on early.
I spent years in hiding or at
least trying to hide “it”.
I was told “it” was bad.
“You’re too sensitive. The way
you experience life is bad, fix it.”
I couldn’t.
I failed at fixing it. So, I went
into hiding, early. I left the home of my youth wearing a proverbial burka. All
of “it” was zipped up as much as possible and I was in hiding. It made me depressed,
physically sick. All the pressure to conform to this standard of a stable
emotional state made me fundamentally not me.
I was born into a world I didn’t
fit into.
I think so many of us feel this
way, perhaps everyone does …
One of my favorite
Shakespeare quotes …
“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.”
In the story of Susanne, Brian showed
up on the stage. He entered with these enduring qualities of goodness, wisdom,
and true love, the kind of love that invites and withholds demand. Over time,
our love became something special. We had gone down the path of risking our own
agendas to go deeper to keep moving toward each other. But early on he invited
me, beckoned me to let the real Susanne show up and in return the same
invitation was given over and over, again. This dance, this journey toward
authenticity, this journey toward extraordinary love was in part about
unveiling our truer selves. I still remember when six months into our marriage
Brian flushed my birth control pills down the toilet. “These are making you crazier,
I like the crazy you without these fake hormones”. Guess what? Nine months later we had a baby.
Pregnancy and motherhood brough an entirely new brand of intensity to the mix.
It was up, it was down, it was incredible love at first sight, it was joy, it
was beauty, it was pain, it was a mixed bag and we were living it and it was
glorious.
Then I tried antidepressants. And
I didn’t like how they made me feel so I went to the Psychiatrist to get help
getting off them. “You may be borderline bi-polar. Try lithium and then take
this other drug too so you don’t gain too much weight.” I went to the wrong
doctor. Hell no, I wasn’t going to do that. So, I stopped, cold turkey. Didn’t
know you weren’t supposed to do that. I cried, ALL day long, on my thirtieth
birthday. Oops.
Every time a practitioner or
friend or whoever would suggest I try antidepressants I would hiss back at them
“I would rather die”. Spoken like a truly depressed person! But truth is, I’ve never
cried ALL DAY LONG since and I’ve never tried another, here’s why: the
antidepressants deadened my emotional responses and with the deadening I
couldn’t recognize the stimuli for whatever was bothering me, so I was depressed
all the time. As a couple we chose the roller coaster. Life was so much more
fun that way anyway. Brian preferred me that way. No, he didn’t love the
intense lows, but he wasn’t afraid of them either and the highs, they were
enormously fun. And we could laugh and cry and love through it all. He invited
me to be me and the more authentic we became as a couple the more we were drawn
deeper into relationship, and I lived before Brian the truest version of me and
he saw me, and he loved me anyway. This kind seeing and loving anyway was the
gateway for me to understand the love of my Heavenly Farther as being truly without
conditions. If Brian in his humanness could love me while seeing all the good,
the bad and the ugly; WOW, there must really be a version of love that is
without conditions, without performance, without pressure to be something other
than what is. It was light tread on old waters. Brian, in his fallenness,
inspired me to go deeper with my Maker, the true Lover of my Soul to be
embraced and loved in the journey, in my fallenness, wherever I am and to know
without a shadow of a doubt that I was created to be who the Creator created me
to be. I am seen. I am loved just as I am, ah such a beautiful realization!
Brian he was an extraordinary
gift.
He sharpened me.
He blessed me.
He blessed our children.
He blessed the world and the
people he passed by while learning to live his life sold out to the one and
only true Lover of his Soul.
There was the Long Kiss Goodnight
…
Ten months from diagnosis to
death …
The war on cancer …
It pressed us both and the kids
to our absolute limit.
We laughed and we loved and we
cried and persevered …
And then one day …
Brian exited the stage …
With all my heart I wanted to
exit the stage too …
I plunged into the dark abyss,
the giant grotto of grief enveloped me, I entered the dark night of the soul
and stayed there for I don’t know how long.
A long time.
I lost track of time. In fact,
what is time? I was trapped in it.
I was stuck on the stage and
performing badly.
I was living in the void, no I
wasn’t living, I was mechanically moving through time
I was pressed to the end of
myself, we had lost the war on cancer
In every respect I felt failure,
I felt void, I felt loss
I was lost in this sea of
nothingness …
It was a giant, enormous, black
hole
It was
“formless and void,
and the darkness was over the
surface of the deep,
and the Spirit of God was
hovering”
And there were these little
lights that Brian left behind, our kids, they were light to me
Brian’s legacy, it was light to
me.
But the One true light is God,
the Creator of the Universe who has never stopped creating, the Spirt of God was
hovering in the void, in the embers of the beautiful days gone by, in the sea
of nothingness …
Then God said …
Susanne, you’re not stuck on the
stage,
You’re not stuck in time,
I put you there.
I placed you there,
By my design you are on the
planet.
I gave you birth, I knit you in
your mother’s womb. Yes, I gave you your parents too.
I gave you, life, I breathed my
Spirit into you,
I gave you Brian for a season, he
was one of the tools I used to point you to Me, to sharpen you
He finished the mission I gave
him.
Your mission isn’t done.
I am God, do you trust me? Do you
believe I AM?
My faith, my belief in the
Creator of the Universe and Lover of my Soul never wavered …
But the choice to live in His
calling has admittedly vacillated, there’s probably a little vacillation in
every moment of every day, it’s like this tension between the already here and
the not quite yet.
My life since the exit of my best
friend and the most enduring graciously loving person I have ever known has
been a giant spiral
Not sure which direction the
spiral is going
Up or down I’m not sure, I may
never get to the top, much less over it
The spiral looks like this …
Yes, I will live my calling
No, I can’t do this
Yes, No Yes No Yes No Why? Why?
Yes, No Why? Why? Why? Why? I won’t do this, I can’t do this, Okay I will, I
will keep going because I can.
You get the drift, around the
horn again and again and again
Susanne, she’s a slow learner and
she’s sort of digs her heals in … a lot
And then occasionally, there’s a
quantum leap, protons, they interact, and the next quantum shift happens, and
creation, it morphs, it changes,
Susanne, she changes, she becomes
…
She’s still becoming
That’s creation
The universe is expanding
We are expanding
New capacity is birthed along
with grit, tenacity, grace, and gratitude
And she is stretched, like
“butter scraped over too much bread”
She’s so thinly stretched she
almost disappears
But God …
Abbreviated version of events goes
like this …
Brian’s exit …
Flurry of activity …
Funeral, let’s sell the house,
no, the house didn’t sell, okay keep the house, it’s ginormous, oh well
Find a job, oh yes, I already
have one, 100% commission, where’s the security in that?
Security is a myth anyway, I’m
good at this job and I need flexibility more than security
The hot guy at the social
security office tells me Brian maxed out his contributions and I can live on a
nice paycheck for a few years while I figure it out.
Why do they have a hot guy
working in the line for widows anyway?
Ah okay, I will sit and do
nothing, that sounds good for a minute
Ah crap the kids, two of them are
adults, nineteen and twenty-one, they are launching their careers
If dad were here, he would be
mentoring them into their careers, ugh I have to do that now too?
Crap, I can’t fail at this, what
would that say to them? That failing at life is an option?
No, I can’t fail at life, a
career is needed, plus I have this boy, he’s twelve, I must finish the job
Shit, why isn’t Brian here? I
can’t finish the parenting job!
Brian was so much better at
parenting, I suck! No, I can’t do this. No, I didn’t sign up for this!
A life insurance check? Sick!
Mathematically it makes no sense! This isn’t enough, there’s no sum that could
even cover the tab or could possibly represent the sum of this enormous gap,
this void, this giant space, this huge hole in my heart. What the crap am I
supposed to do with this? I’m bleeding out, help what do I do?
So yeah, these frantic
ruminations went on and on, day after day, week after week, month after month,
I was an enormous mess. I would scurry and flurry around and fall in bed at the
end of the day. I did not know what to pray, so I borrowed a prayer from the
Bible …
Oh Lord, bless us and keep us,
Make your face to shine upon us
and be gracious to us,
Oh Lord turn your face toward us
and give us peace
Night after night I prayed this
prayer, the tears would flow, and I would recall with the Lord “oh yes you did
already bless us”. And I would think on blessing upon blessing that I had
received, that we had received, I had these fellow sojourners in life, my three
beautiful and brave children, and I was failing them, but I prayed this prayer
over my family, night after night, remembering blessing upon blessing, as I
cried myself to sleep …
Each morning, I would walk up,
grateful for rest, for sleep that transported me to a world of blank thoughts.
And I would stretch out my arm and reach over to the other side of the bed and
this realization would strike “Ugh, I’m still living in this nightmare.” And I
would roll in it, indulge in it, and think “no, I can’t do this today” and
while I was saying “no” I was also saying “okay Lord, what is next?”
I would feel His breath, His whisper, His nudge,
and a next step was born
I would get up and do the next
thing
It was creation unfolding in a
serious of next steps as the cycle repeated itself again and again for days,
weeks, months, now years …
Is it too simple? For some, yes
For me, no, life has become that
simple, a serious of next steps unfolded before my eyes and I kept going while
I didn’t want to. I was being born while fighting it. Yes, I’m a fighter and I
was fighting progress, expansion, life. But creation unfolded anyway and showed
me a new way to live, new roads to travel, new steps to be born to each day.
Work provided a context
It also provided something necessary
… an income
Creating a career out of the dust
and ashes, it saved me
It was a constructive context for
my life as I was working through layer upon layer of grief.
There was a bigger picture in
play but many of the next steps were in my work
Every time I would indulge in my
poor me mantra or put energy toward an exit strategy, I would get a call “Hi,
I’m (fill in the blank)… I was hoping you could help me with a mortgage”
I would think something like …
really, right now? I’m ruminating on my ticket out of here …
But okay … here we go again … and
I’d hear myself say “Thanks for calling, I would love to help you out. Tell me
about you, what are you hoping to accomplish?”
Their story would unfold; I would
engage. My work kept pulling me in like tasks sent from heaven to keep me on
the warpath. And the people God put in
my path to help, the people that He put around me to help me; well they all played
a part in keeping me tethered to time and space. He was employing his army of
people to keep me engaging in this life, these moments that passed me by. This
happened all the time. I would take a day to indulge in my grief, Brian’s death
day, Brian’s birthday, my birthday, our anniversary. I would be at the cemetery
and think “I will just stay here until the elements take me”. But the call
would come like clockwork … “Can you help me with a mortgage”. It kept
happening, it was the call, my calling “snap out of it, girl I have you here.
Just do it.”
The mortgage business is
fascinating … to me …anyway
There is this complexity and
intensity that created a distraction for me. It gave me an arena to function in
and held my attention even though my personal life was shattered. The layers of
destruction with the loss of a spouse and father of your children is a story
for another day, but it’s complex. I was learning to set the malaise of grief
aside to be functional at work, after all, I was a salesperson. How do you sell
something when you are living in a black and white word void of the color that
makes it interesting? I was straining forward, I was leaning in, it was two
steps forward, ten back when the world got me down. Most days I lived outside
of myself and it was a means to becoming highly functional at work.
Life became this incredible
juxtaposition … I was finding success at work then retreating back to the safe
space of my home … only that’s where the lens was on my grief. These diametric
oppositions were pressing me, pressing me, to my absolute limits and in the
pressing some shifts had to take place, it was survival, and I was shifting,
changing. I was learning to embrace change every day. Small changes, and these
small changes let to these occasional and necessary quantum leaps. There were
seven giant shifts …
First, I didn’t want to stay in
time and space, but I had made a promise to Brian to finish what we started.
I’m a person of my word, so as much as I wanted to go back on it, this
commitment was like this ginormous leash keeping me tethered to time and space.
Second, I had watched my husband
be tortured by cancer and cancer treatment. He set his face like flint and
never complained. How could I complain? How could I wimp out in the face of his
incredible perseverance?
Third, I felt judged. I really
can’t explain why people judged me, after all, it’s not like I chose this? But
there were people who thought they had a good idea of the things I should be
doing and they told me so. Because I was pressed to my limits and doing my best
and being judged for it, I stopped caring what people thought. This was such an
incredible gift. This lesson has been invaluable in my life both personally and
professionally. I get to live free from the compulsion that the opinion of
others matters. I love this, it is such, well freedom, to care only about who I
am before the Lord and no other.
Fourth, well what’s the worst
that could happen? Oh yeah, it already did. Risk taking became second nature.
Yes, I still calculate a risk before I take it, but the calculations have become
different. I became a risk taker where I had lived cloistered, tempered before.
Fifth, I had a very rigid brain. But
in order for me to grow and expand in the way that I needed to I needed a
flexible brain. I read a book about Mind Set. I’ve always found it fascinating
that the difference between the amazing athletes and the extraordinary ones was
their mental game which is completely outside of the skill set. Two people could
have a matched skill set, but if they had mastered the mental piece, that was the
game changer toward extraordinary. I knew that if I was going to win in the
mortgage business, I had to have an adaptable mindset. This was huge! This
really was the skill that I needed to go to the next level in my business. It’s
also what I needed personally.
Sixth, this goes back to my
second point. My life’s motto became “because I can”. I had watched my husband
pour his self out during the war on cancer, do whatever he thought necessary to
stay on this side of heaven for us, to be with his family. This recognition
that he wasn’t here in the physical realm moving thru time and space with us
birthed this new freedom to go and do and try all the things because I could.
As I was layering new experiences
on and taking on more challenges personally and professionally, each move gave
me more confidence for the next one. And the “because I can” moves became
larger than the last one. Grit was being thrust upon me. Each next step was
grittier than the one before. Failure was not an option, so I kept taking risks,
kept moving forward, kept straining forward as I honed my skills, learned the
tricks of the trade, digging deeper than ever before, growing, expanding,
keeping on.
The proclivity toward intensity,
that had been hidden long ago, paraded mostly in front of Brian, was still part
of me. It truly is what gave me the courage to take each next step. I tried to
hide it or at least bridle it. But over time and with the freedom I had
discovered in realizing everyone’s opinion did not truly matter I sort of just
bridled it and only let up in certain settings, settings that could handle the
real Susanne.
The biggest quantum shift of all
came this year …in 2020 … the year of the pandemic!
I had created a plan early after
Brian’s exit. I didn’t want to be here, but I was committed to finishing the
job we had started with our family. I wanted to escape but I could not. So, I
concocted a plan. I was going to go on a sabbatical once our youngest became an
adult. 2020 was the year. I withdrew to a quiet place on Brian’s deathiversary
in March. This idea of a sabbatical was fading as impending travel restrictions
were looming. As I sat and pondered all that had happened, all that was, all
the becoming, I wondered if it would be possible to put my fight with God to rest;
to stop wrestling and embrace it all. After all, Jacob wrestled with God and
spent the rest of his life with a painful limp. I had been wrestling for far
too long. So, I asked Him, will you do this for me? Will you help me put this
to rest? I wanted a sabbatical, an escape from the pain, a moment to re-frame
it all. But really what is a sabbath? It is resting from the work. On the
seventh day of creating, God rested, he looked at all that He had created and
said it was good and He rested. He invites us to enter his rest. This was my
seventh year since Brian’s exit. It was the year of the Sabbath. Was there a
place of resting of embracing all that is as from His hand? Of owning it and
living in the dance of life with all the pain and gratitude and joy mixed up
together? Was there a place that I had not come to yet that was deeper, that
lived with it all, that stopped resisting?
I was asking the question …the
events that unfolded are surprising, mind-boggling really and I’m completely
blown away by the magic of it. I asked the question, my Maker responded and
birthed something completely new. The details of what unfolded are a story for
another day, but the summary version of it is what I told my oldest son …
“You know that scene in the movie
Braveheart where they are torturing William Wallace and they tear his guts out,
you know everything inside his body? And while they are tearing his innermost
parts from his body he screams ‘FREEDOM’? Well that’s how I feel right now.” To
which he replied, that’s a really, sad story mom.
No, it’s not a sad story. Of
course, we all wanted William Wallace to live. But he would have lived to die
another day. In this story, his death served a purpose, for the people around
him to choose. He was a muse, an inspiration, that put other people on the
right path.
I screamed my own version of “F R
E E D O M”, it was liberating, all the constructs, all the beliefs that I held
dear, and conformed to, they had been ripped from my insides and exposed for
what they were and I was being born to a new life that lives outside the box,
outside the oppression; I was coloring outside the lines with all the colors.
During the time frame that my
insides were being ripped out, I showed up at the cemetery one day, sort of
without thinking. I had driven there while in some world of subconscious
thought. Somehow, I had parked in the same place we parked the day we buried my
husband. I don’t know how I got there or why I parked there because I never
parked there other than THAT day. I got out of my truck and started walking
toward his grave and heard my thoughts … “Oh my, my husband is dead, my husband
is … D E A D. Wait really? What year is it? It’s 2020, look at the marker, he
died in 2014. How is that possible? How can he not be here?” I caressed the
stone. The epitaph reads “Death leaves a heartache no one can heal; love leaves
a memory no one can steal”. In my early days of survival, my brain attempted to
protect me from the pain; I moved through time and space largely outside of the
heartache because I did not have the capacity to incorporate both. But to live
outside of the heartache is to live outside the memory and the beauty. So, on
that day, a little crack in the door was opened, and eventually I opened it
wide and began to live in all of it. In the dance between heartache and beauty.
The Lord had used this unusual unfolding of events to bring me round to embrace
all of life, the beauty and the horror and to embrace it as from his hand to
bring me to this time and this moment. All of it, all the journey, had been
used to create the me that is in today.
Yes, Susanne, she is intense,
some might call her “over the top”. And she lives between the extremes and she
lives on the edge and she laughs, and she smiles just as often as she possibly
can.
But she’s not wimpy, she’s not
afraid of pain and she’s not afraid to enter a complex world of emotions. Because
in that world, that’s where creation unfolds before your eyes …
So, to be labeled as “over the
top” … well that’s someone else’s label. They get to choose what is over the
top if for them. For the first time, I can embrace all of it. Yes, for some, I
am over the top. I live in this world of complexity and emotional intensity and
this juxtaposition of extremes and the incorporation of all of it as from His
hand. For me, there is no top to get over. My top is my turn at heaven’s gate
with my Maker saying, “well done, my good and faithful daughter”. That’s my
top, there’s no getting over it in time and space. But to be over the top for
someone else in a way that sends them down their path, I am okay with that. In
fact, I embrace it. To learn what “not to do” is critical to learning what “to
do”. This was the incredible gift of truth delivered by a friend on his path to
somewhere else. Ah, so beautiful! I love this, we collided, our paths collided.
I learned something amazing from him. Maybe he learned something from me.
That’s life, you know. We collide, we interact, we move each other, that’s how
creation unfolds, particles colliding, people colliding. People impacting each
other. For good or bad we impact each other, and the impact moves us to where
we are supposed to be. It’s a mystery, it is creation unfolding, the universe
expanding …
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