The Future

There is a lyric from the band Mumford and Sons that speaks rather wonderfully to how I encounter thoughts on the future. "How fickle my heart, and how woozy my mind," they sing. It seems appropriate.

My views are very much dependent upon my circumstances as to whether or not I have good or ill feelings toward the future. My heart is fickle; it can't seem to decide how it feels. And all this mixed-up emotion surrounding the future makes my mind rather woozy. Seasick, almost. My thoughts and emotions are tossed about, and I'm just hanging on for dear life.

Five years ago, about this time of year, I was buying a wedding dress. I had a stunning engagement ring on my left hand, and a dashing fiancé who was proud of me and my accomplishments in my second year of seminary. Life was moving along at an unbelievably positive pace, and when I looked to the future, I could see nothing but marital bliss and happiness alongside my best friend. I was seeing the world through rose-colored lenses. The future was bright and beautiful. I had no inclination of how things would change...

Four and a half years ago, my fiancé became my ex. He called off our wedding, asked for his things to be returned to him, and walked out of my life. I remember that first day like it was yesterday. I drove over to a friend's house and sat in her comfiest chair until another friend could arrive. I numbly explained what had happened. How it was all over. I was in shock. As I spoke in hushed tones, I eventually noticed that there were quiet tears rolling down my cheeks. I didn't sob, not yet, at least. I just let the tears fall in steady streams while I calmly told my friends that the future I had planned, the future I had dreamed of, the future I had worked towards, had gone up in flames.

Kaitlyn Harville | Graphic designed using Adobe Spark | Quote from Sylvia Plath

The future had seemed to pass through my fingers like sand. I thought I had grasped it fully, taken hold of it, and made it mine. But suddenly it was no longer there in my hand. I was left like a sputtering engine running out of fuel, trying to keep on going but not having the ability to do so.

The future I had envisioned for myself was no longer a possibility. Not because I had chosen to give it up. No, never. But because someone else had decided to take it away from me. I had lost the ability to make my own decisions about what my future would look like.

If it had been up to me, I would have put in even more work toward building the future of my dreams. That had been my plan, after all. I had made an appointment to begin individual therapy so that I could "fix" whatever was going on inside me at that was making me miserable. (I now know it was bipolar disorder, which is manageable, but not "fixable.") I was going to premarital counseling with my fiancé so that we could work on issues within our relationship to continue building a strong foundation for our life together. I was maintaining a job in a church and working hard there with hopes of being employed there forever. And I was a full-time student in seminary with the dream of earning a new degree. "The future comes to those who work for it," could have been my motto.

But what are you supposed to do when the future that you worked so hard for slips away despite your best efforts? What happens when, in the midst of hustling after your dreams, you fall? What happens when the people who were supposed to always be a part of your future, suddenly want nothing more than to be a part of your past?

I often think of the quote above from Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar when it comes to the days, weeks, and months that followed the ending of our engagement. I was in shock for a while. I had been convinced that this man, this love of my life, would be the person with whom I would spend the rest of my days. It had never, not once, occurred to me that he might decide to give up on our relationship and walk away. I felt that he must have decided I wasn't worth the effort. Our future together wasn't worth the work it was taking. Our future was disposable. Replaceable. And as I sunk further down into the mud and mire of depression, I felt more fully what Plath describes in The Bell Jar.

The world moved on around me. I watched people I knew live and laugh and love. I stared numbly as the time kept ticking away like always. Calendar days got marked off, but I never really noticed them. The universe kept going. I was continuing to live in an ever-evolving future. It just wasn't the future I had envisioned. It wasn't the future I had planned. It wasn't the future for which I had worked. And so I sat "stewing in my own sour air." I stayed stagnant. I allowed my heart and mind to fixate on the past and my "could-have-been" future and never lived fully in the new present moments that arose.

A little over three years ago, that sour air I was sitting in became too much to bear. And so I decided that if I couldn't have the future I had worked for, then there would be no future for me at all. Thanks to good friends who cared more about my life than my wishes for privacy, I am still here to write this. Thanks to them, I still have a future to be oriented toward.

Three years ago, this time of year, I was living at home with my parents again after having gotten out of in-patient care at the hospital. I remember one night, still in the throes of loss and despair, I sat curled in on my self. I huddled in a ball on my mother's lap like I had when I was a small child. I soaked her shoulder with my tears and shook her body with my own sobs. She held me and stroked soothing circles between my shoulder blades. All I could muster was to whisper the aching admission, "I miss him..." All she could muster was to whisper back, "I know..."

Come December, it will be one year since I set foot on the grounds of the Order of Saint Helena. One year since I saw concretely what a new future could look like. One year since I realized that though there are things I'm still healing from, I can live again.

These days, I'm holding more loosely to my idea of the future. I don't really know what it'll look like anymore. I don't have a plan like I used to have. But somehow, the giving up of my planned future has given me freedom to fully live in the present and to heal from the past. I've begun learning the art of allowing the future to unfold as it will.

These days I look forward to the future with a new perspective. I look ahead of me with an easy kind of hope that looks for the "best of all outcomes" while providing space for the "less than ideal."

In this looking forward, I've learned that I can't turn my back completely on the past. It's a part of me, after all. So I look behind me with grace. I am a being in process, as I have always been in process. I'm learning and growing. It is the best I can do to give my past-self grace and to acknowledge that I was doing the best I could do at the time.

As I hold in tension this looking forward and looking back, I'm learning (ever so slowly) to look right where I am the most. I am learning to pay attention to my surroundings, and to love them. The grass under my feet. The clouds overhead. The coffee I sip. The people I encounter. And yes, even the person I am in the moment I am in. I am learning to love even me. Despite the pain that sometimes rises to the surface. Despite the shifting moods. Despite the past traumas and heartaches. Despite all the things I so easily deem "ugly" about myself.

I've spent too long under the bell jar. I've spent too long in stagnant air, pining after the long-gone dream of my future and reliving the past. It's time to hold past, present, and future in tandem with each other. It's time to live with hope for the future, grace for the past, and love for the present.

I know there will be days when that bell jar descends and I'll sit under it awhile. I know there will be days that aren't perfect. There will be days that aren't even pleasant. Despite that knowledge, however, there is a future left to be lived for me. And I can live, truly live, knowing that my story is not over.