It’s true—I was actually born on a Wednesday. I wouldn’t describe myself “full of woe,” though. I was an anxious kid for sure, but I also had a sunny streak; I was always full of energy and ideas, quick to laugh. And thanks in large part to a mom who wasn’t an anxious parent, who encouraged me to be bold and give things a shot, the sunny side of my personality mostly won out.
Which doesn’t mean I’m woe-free. I have attachment issues. I’ve experienced abuse, trauma, and loss. I’ve been in therapy off and on my whole life, which is how I learned that “recovery” is actually a very good place to be. As part of my recovery, I’ve written some reflections and devotions that I’m going to start sharing on Wednesdays. Most of these are going to be about my recovery from narcissistic discard and divorce, but not all of them, and all of them will scribble outside the lines of my divorce into other areas of my life where I’m trying to figure out how to be happier and help the people around me be happier. Today, I’m starting with “The Locksmith.
When the person who is supposed to love and cherish you more than anyone on the planet, who in fact swore to do so in front of God and everyone, suddenly rejects you, it’s devastation. When that person also knows you better than anyone on the planet because you’ve been
together so long they’ve seen you at your best and at your worse, it’s pure annihilation. Because the thing that you have feared more than anything since you were a girl trying to get the neighborhood kids to play with you finally happened: you opened up to someone, really opened up, and once they got a good look at what was inside, they made a face, said, “No thanks,” and walked away.
Sure, your friends and family will console you. They will tell you wonderful things about yourself. They will mean every word. And you won’t believe a single one. You won’t believe all of these bright, upright, compassionate, accomplished people because one person—the person “whose blood you elected out of all the earth to cherish” to quote Faulkner—said the opposite.
Is that warped? Absolutely. But I dare anyone who has been through the kind of rejection I’m talking about to say they haven’t played this ridiculously lopsided game, where one shot on your goal somehow cancels out 10 shots on the opponent’s. There’s just something about rejection by your lifemate that trumps reason and honor and love. It gets the last, sneering say on your self-worth.
You can probably see where I’m going with this: it’s ultimately we, the rejected, who give rejection this power over us. But how and why is complicated to figure out at first. And the road back from rejection is a hard one until you realize a few key things.
The first is who’s really rejecting you. Sure, yes, it’s the person you loved and admired more than anyone, the person who chose you above everyone in the first place. They changed their mind, and yes, that’s a problem. But…why did you assume the problem was with you? Short answer: because you are the one who rejected you. And you did it long before they ever entered the scene. At some point growing up, you got the message that you were worth nothing—through trauma, abuse, or neglect. But you kept repeating that lie to yourself after the trauma was over, and it probably led you to do all kinds of things that weren’t great for you. In my case, it led me to chase after emotionally unavailable men because if I could just get them to like me, it would prove I was special; it would prove I was worth something. That’s how I ended up in an 20-year-long abusive relationship….
At any rate, after you’ve taken that first step of recognizing that you’re the one who rejected you, the next step is pretty obvious: to accept yourself. But that’s easier said than done, to rebuild your self-worth (or build it in the first place) in mid-life when all your failings and scars and wrinkles and bulges and mean streaks and missing bits are out there for you and all the world to see. What helped me with this step was the metaphor of a key and its locksmith.
A locksmith (personally, I always picture Randall Duk Kim as the Keymaker from the Matrix, above) makes keys to open specific locks. Those keys don’t have to be beautiful to do their job: as a matter of fact, they must be scarred in very specific patterns in order to open the locks they were meant to—a cut there, a notch here, a gouge there, a groove. We may think, looking at the keys all hanging together on a keyring, that one key seems more beautiful or perfect than another, but that’s just our ignorance talking. Each key was made to open a different door. Each key is equally precious and irreplaceable. If all the keys looked like the shiniest, most beautiful one, we could only ever open one door; the rest, the worlds on the other sides of them, would remain forever closed off to us.
I am a key that God designed to open certain locks in this life: maybe those are padlocks to chains holding people back in life, maybe they are doors to new ideas, or to healing, or to new worlds. It’s not for me, as the key, to say to my Locksmith, “Why this ugly scratch here, this fat bit? Why am I shorter than the other keys?” My losses, my disabilities, my weaknesses, sorrows, sins—under the Locksmith’s hand, these become my strengths. These are the parts of me that were closed off and now are open to fit into and unlock the future He has for me and for those around me. If He never cut into me, I wouldn’t open anything.
I want to be the key the Locksmith designed me to be and not any other. I am still in the process of becoming that key: the Locksmith is still at work cutting away useless parts of me, bringing out my true form. And I won’t fully work the way I’m supposed to until He is finished. There is a great scene in Stephen King’s Dark Tower where one of the characters, Eddie Dean, is carving from wood a key he has seen in a dream, a key that is crucial for opening a door between worlds so the quest for the Tower can continue. Eddie has a lot of anxiety about the carving because he knows that unless the key is exactly perfect, it won’t open the door. It will just be a fancy stick. But he can’t see the shape of the key as long as he stays stuck in his anxiety. He can’t carve the key correctly until he relaxes and gives himself over to his Ka, his destiny, which flows through him and gives him a joyful insight into just how and where he needs to carve.
I’m the same way. God has promised that He will make me into the woman He has designed me to be. He hasn’t let me down so far. My job is simply to relax under His hand, to stay open to the process as He carves what I don’t need out of my life with sure, even strokes. It only hurts if I resist. If I go with the flow, I will see all those nicks and gaps and gouges that I thought were failures in my life turn into steps toward my true life. And I can’t wait to see what lies behind all those doors.
The Rookery 