by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
Recently I talked with a group of third- and fifth-graders about how to cultivate creativity in a young life, and one of the first questions they asked me was this one: Who were your biggest influences when you were a kid?
I hadn’t pre-prepared for any of the questions they asked me, even though I should have known they would come. Kids are curious about what (and who) shapes adults to become who they are. And there were so many influences along my journey—but what they all had in common was that they were authors. This is because, even as a child, I was a reader. A writer. A girl who knew what I wanted to be before I ever had a clue what it meant to be grown up.
During a recent year of writing poetry based off the words of famous writers, artists, and influential people, I stumbled across this quote from Francois Mauriac, a French novelist, dramatist, critic, poet, and journalist: “Tell me what you read and I’ll tell you who you are is true enough, but I’d know better if you told me what you re-read.”
These words ring true in my life.
There are so many good things to read. I read mostly middle grade fiction, more young adult fiction recently. I read a poem a day from various poets. I read some adult literature, but not much. I read the classics.
What I re-read is a much smaller list, but it points to who I am. The most re-read book on my shelf is Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, followed closely by Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, Rilke’s collected poetry, Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and Something Wicked This Way Comes, everything Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison have written, and Katherine Applegate’s Home of the Brave and The One and Only Ivan.
Though we rarely recognize it, books shape us into who we are. We spend hours, days, sometimes even weeks with them, and we are always changed by the end of them. And the ones we re-read change us even more.
Books offer us new ideas, tell us who we might be, open us to the lives of other people who are different than we are.
They show us a way forward. They prove that we can overcome, we can do better, we are made to be heroes of whatever story we’re living. They remind us that this—the shadow we’re wrestling with right now—is not the end of the story.
These are all the things I love most about books.
So as we begin a new year, I want to encourage you to find more time to pick up those books stacked on your shelf. Sort through the list you’ve been keeping in the back of your mind. Read one more book a month than you did last year.
And then re-read it. Let it teach you fully what it has to say.
I’ll be doing the same.
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by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
It’s just a tiny thing, oval and white and smaller than the vitamins I swallow every single day, but I leave it on my desk and stare at it.
It’s not the enemy. The panic-lump in my throat is the enemy, and this pill could help. I know this. But still I can’t bring myself to touch it.
More than a week ago, my doctor called in a prescription for some of the symptoms I rattled off with an apologetic laugh—lump in my throat, difficulty breathing through some of my thoughts, constant worry—and assured me I was not alone, not even close, because so many people have to take these medications at one time or another.
Yes, but this is me, I thought.
This is me, and I don’t take medication to make myself feel better, because I have faith and prayer and meditation and mindfulness and hope and joy and gratitude and love and family and Jesus.
So I let it sit on the pharmacy pick-up shelf long enough for them to restock it, like it didn’t belong to anybody in particular, and then I finally drove to the pharmacy to pick it up and a man said he could have it ready in another twenty-four hours because he’d need to fill the prescription all over again. I waited another three days and then sent my husband to pick it up, because I could not face the eyes that would see, notice, judge this woman who needed a pill to feel normal.
Two days it sat on the dresser in my bedroom, waiting, and then, today, when that lump made it hard to breathe, I took one pill out and turned it over in my hands and then let it clink back down to the bottom of an orange bottle.
I can’t do it. I can’t swallow this pill, because I can find my way out of this. I can. There is nothing wrong with me.
And if there were, what would they all think?
///
When I was eight years old, my teacher noticed I was squinting to read the words on the overhead projector, and then I was squinting at my neighbor’s page to copy her notes instead of bothering with the screen at all, and then I was holding multiplication flashcards and books and worksheets too close to my face for comfort. So she told my mom, who talked to the school nurse, who talked to my teacher and arranged an appointment to check my eyes.
It was a tumultuous time in my life then, because I hadn’t seen my father for a year, and those absences explained by an out-of-state job that paid more money than he could possibly make in our little town stretched longer and longer every time he came home and left again. And somehow, in my little-girl mind, my father’s absences had become tangled around my perfection or imperfection. Somehow it all depended on me.
Somehow I had to be perfect, and that would bring him home and keep him there for good.
But now something was wrong with my eyes. I knew it before they told me, and I didn’t want anyone else to know. I especially didn’t want my father to know.
I cried all the way to the nurse’s office, because I knew what this appointment would show. I cried standing in front of an illuminated screen, with a little plastic spatula over my left eye, not even able to read the one big lone letter at the top. I cried all the way back out, because my eyes had failed me.
I would never be perfect, and, to an 8-year-old, that meant my father would never come home.
///
I looked for all the reasons not to take that pill. I called my doctor to ask if it was really safe, because I’m a person drawn almost obsessively to natural remedies, avoidant of all toxins, and I’ve never had this problem before and I don’t like medication and there has to be another way, and why isn’t this anxiety going away on its own when I’m praying and meditating and working out my salvation and doing everything I’m supposed to do?
What is the source of your anxiety? she said.
So much sits like five-ton weights on my neck and chest and head and feet that drag slow steps through the halls of my home and hands that hold too tightly to control whatever I can control.
I name all the things that flash at random. Work. Kids. Home. Chores. Life.
That’s as far as I get, even though I could name money and bills and single-car family and my appearance and my sons, particularly the one struggling with his own depression, and sleep and marriage, too. She interrupts my list and says, Sometimes we just need help.
Right before we hang up, she says, Take care of yourself.
OK, I say, even though what I really mean is, I’ll try, because I don’t know if taking care of myself is popping a pill or letting it sit with the other 59 of them in a bottle that tells me to swallow one twice a day.
It’s another mark of imperfection, this failure of my mind and emotions.
And I don’t want anyone to know.
///
My junior high school was eleven miles from the house I grew up in, so I had to ride a bus for an hour every day to get there and back.
In seventh grade I played volleyball and basketball and ran track and sat first-chair clarinet, and every afternoon one or all of these activities had practices I attended, and at the end of those practices, all of us who lived too far away to walk a highway home packed up into a bus and rode it to a drop-off spot where parents waited for pick-up.
There was an evening when I stepped off the bus at 6:30 p.m., just like I did every other weeknight, and I did not see my mom’s gray Ford Escort.
The drop-off point was an old post office, where, years before, when we’d lived in another house just down the way, we’d been walking our dog to check the mail and a car going too fast hit our dog, named Chance for his good luck thus far, so hard he spun circles in the middle of the road running between our house and the post office that closed every day at 4.
This particular evening, I sat staring at that same highway, thinking of all the things that could have happened to my mom. Seeing my spinning dog in the middle of the highway, replaced by her tail-spinning car.
I tried to shake off the fears, but what if she’d had an accident coming here to pick me up? What if she was dead? What if it was my fault? Who would the three of us, my brother and sister and me, live with, since we hadn’t heard from or seen our dad in three years?
I finally decided I’d walk the eight miles home when my mom pulled into the drive, fifteen-minutes-that-felt-like-fifteen-hours late. The gravel spun under the tires as she came to a stop, and I coughed on the dust, or maybe the emotion, and got in.
I stared out the car window, all the way home, trying not to cry as my leftover fears tripped down the highway behind us.
///
I stare out another car window now, trying not to cry, because I don’t want my husband or my sons to see just how fragile I feel.
We’re on our way to lead worship to a group of teenagers, and I feel like a fraud. We will sing about not being afraid and walking on deep waters with faith ready to be stretched, and here I am sinking in the rip tide of anxiety and fear.
I try to work out some of my feelings with my husband on the way. He tells me I should attempt to put our problems in perspective by considering others’ problems. At least we’re not homeless, he says. At least we have healthy food in our refrigerator. At least none of our children are terminally ill.
The rock of anxiety shifts and grows and hardens. No, I say. That’s not how anxiety works. I feel more anxious now, because what if? What if those things happened? “What if” is the tripwire of an anxious mind. The future is the playground of an anxious mind. Imagining the endless possibilities of what can and might happen are the hazardous snares of an anxious mind. Stop making it worse, I want to say, but of course I don’t.
He tries another tactic. Try spinning things in a positive light, he says, try nipping my negative thoughts in the bud, try practicing positivity, but, no, this is also futile for an anxious mind. Every try and subsequent fail simply makes me feel like more of a failure, because I can’t do it on my own, and God why can’t I? Why can’t I just be happy? Why can’t I let it go? Why do these worries and fears circle round and round in an unstoppable dance of fury and fate?
I have a good life. I have a husband who loves me, kids who mean the world to me, a career I would never, ever trade for another.
Why can’t I just be happy?
What is it, then? my husband says. What specifically is it?
This is the question I can’t answer, so I start crying instead. I can’t talk about this right now, I say, because we’ve pulled into the parking lot and it’s time to unload the kids and go plug in our instruments and do a sound check and then sing like the words and melodies wipe away all our troubles.
And because it’s everything.
It’s everything, all piled and tangled and curled into those weights with barbs and spikes that puncture me every time something else goes wrong or could go wrong or might possibly go wrong in the next twenty or fifty years.
And sure, I can tick off those gratitude lists and I can try to take every thought captive and I can post those one hundred happy days pictures, but what happens when none of it works, when seemingly simple practices can’t and don’t save a mind or a heart?
Sometimes we have walked so far down the dark and winding road of not-fine, not-okay, not in a good place, that we need help crawling back to equilibrium.
///
I grew up in two Southern Baptist churches. They were full of grace and hope and people who knew how to love a fatherless kid, or three of them. Southern Baptist, though, is a religion full of rules.
I’d set rules all my life for myself, a personality quirk that served me mostly well, and here, in the middle of religion, were more rules that held a greater purpose, and, yes, of course, please sign me up, because keeping all these rules would finally, finally, finally make me perfect in one domain, even though my eyes were bad and I’d busted up my knee in high school volleyball and I’d broken a pinkie finger in softball that never healed straight.
I could be spiritually perfect. That would have to do.
I constructed my perfect little life, keeping all those potential friends in my youth group at arms’ length, because if they came too close they would see all the hidden holes in my perfection, and I could not let them see. And then I graduated at the top of my class and rode a full scholarship to university, where, even though all those religion rules had begun weighing me down years ago, I signed up to continue in the Southern Baptist tradition on my own, away from the influence of my mom.
I led worship at the Baptist Student Ministry and attended the Baptist church they told me to attend so I could be a leader, and I sat under all those male preachers who said God was always enough and we had a Healer for all our sickness and that when we know Love we will not know fear.
And I tried to make it true for me.
No one ever told me in those churches that there might be a chance my Healer wouldn’t heal the kind of sickness that stuck in the back of a throat and the corner of a mind and froze around the edges of a heart. They only told me to have faith enough to move mountains.
The problem was: this mountain wouldn’t move.
///
We are back home and the kids are in bed, and once again I’m sitting here staring at a pill they said I shouldn’t need if I believed enough; staring at a piece of science they said proves my faith needs drastic, fundamental improvement; staring at a tiny little thing they said tells a definitive story of my spirituality.
I have learned much in the years that roll between then and now. I have learned that there is a fear that can be known in Love, and it is called anxiety. I have learned that there is a place where joy doesn’t come in the morning, and it is called depression. I have learned that taking every thought captive or praying unceasingly or believing that a mountain can move sometimes isn’t enough.
I have learned that we don’t get to choose our disorders, and no amount of faith or joy lists or gratitude tries can change the hold our disorders keep on us. I have learned that seeking help of any kind for the disorders that rob our lives of joy and hope and peace does not mean our faith or our God or our own hearts and minds have failed us. I have learned that we will not overcome by hiding in a dark room and pretending depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, suicide, do not exist for the religiously pious.
I have learned that courage doesn’t always look like jumping out of a war-plane into enemy territory or rushing into a burning house or opening a heart to fix a vessel block. Sometimes it looks like staring at the precipice of ending things and then facing one more day and then another and then another after that, because this is jumping from a war-plane into enemy territory. Sometimes it looks like braving the truth of our disorder and all the opinions and condemnation and misunderstandings that come with it, because this is rushing into a burning house and living to tell about it. Sometimes it looks like popping a pill and letting it work its magic in our mind, because this is our open-heart surgery.
I have learned that there is no shame in inviting medication into our journey toward healing. The world can make us feel like there is, but the world is not telling the truth. There is no shame here. There is only courage. The Healer sends healing, and sometimes it looks like a miraculous mind makeover, but sometimes it looks like a no-less-miraculous tiny white oval.
So I swallow the pill, and I close my eyes, and I thank God for the help finding my way back to an even road, maybe for the first time in my life.
This is an excerpt from We Count it All Joy, a book of essays. For more of Rachel’s writings, visit her Reader Library page, where you can get a couple of books for free.
(Photo by Riley Briggs on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
We’re coming up on a new year. Every end of the year, I start thinking about all the things I want to do differently in the next year. I’m not alone. There are many who calendar their plans and identify their goals and form a solid map to becoming an improved version of themselves.
Lately I’ve been thinking a whole lot about being wrong. My second son, who is a bit of a perfectionist, has been disappointed with a couple of his grades this semester. He’s got all As, but he wanted higher As. He analyzes every worksheet that comes home, scouring it for the questions he answered incorrectly, beating himself up for what he calls his silly mistakes.
But mistakes, we tell him, are simply opportunities to learn and do better.
I didn’t always believe this, of course. When I was a kid, I had a fear of failure, too. I had a father who’d left, a mom who worked a lot by necessity, and a wide open space to stretch out into perfectionism. Perfect became the main goal of my life. I wanted to be perfect in everything, which left very little room for being wrong.
I used to think that being wrong meant something important—maybe it meant that I didn’t know enough, that I wasn’t smart enough, that I didn’t have anything to contribute to the world after all. Who wanted to listen to someone who was wrong?
In my mind, if I was wrong, it changed everything about me. I was no longer me.
There is still a vivid moment in my past that stands out to me as a defining moment, a change in trajectory. My final year of college I worked as the editor-in-chief of the college newspaper. One of my editorial cartoonists had brought in his cartoon for the next day’s paper. My gut said the cartoon was a little violent. I don’t remember the specific details of this cartoon, but I do remember, or at least I think I remember, that there was a professor in a classroom and a student holding a gun. Maybe the student was pointing the gun at the professor, or maybe it’s gotten worse in my memory, a symptom of guilt and its dangerous counterpart, shame.
I told this editorial cartoonist to draw me another cartoon—I couldn’t use this one. I had no backup plan, so it would simply be a blank space in the newspaper if he couldn’t draw another. Of course he didn’t have the time, or so he said. I called every cartoonist I knew, trying to find someone who had a cartoon I could use instead of this one. No one was home. And because I was on deadline, I gave the go-ahead to the designer; we’d deal with the fallout, if there was any, in the morning. I was probably being too cautious. It was already 1 a.m., we were tired, and I had an 8 a.m. class the next day. Those aren’t excuses, only reality.
The next day the university exploded. Or at least that’s what it felt like to me. I had more emails in my inbox than I’d gotten in four months of working as the editor-in-chief. My voicemail was full. The publisher, a journalism professor at the college, was waiting in my office when I got there.
This story ends somewhat happily. I didn’t lose my job, no one got hurt, and the publisher told me that everyone makes mistakes. I knew better now, and he knew I would make a better decision next time.
I couldn’t believe he hadn’t fired me. I wrote my apology for the next day’s paper, probably shifting the blame a little, even though I should have taken it fully upon myself. But I carried the shame of this failure for a long time. The first time I mistakenly spelled a name wrong in my adult newspaper job, I thought I would die.
I didn’t.
I know more now about failing, making mistakes, and being wrong. I know it doesn’t change who you are or nullify all the good you’ve done in the world. I know it doesn’t end you.
Here’s a handful of things I’ve been wrong about over the course of my life, in no particular order:
1. After three children, adding a child is as simple as pulling up another chair at the table.
2. I can handle my anxiety without medication, because I’m strong enough. And I’m a Christian. And there is no fear in love.
3. Anorexia is not a mental illness.
4. Demanding blind obedience from my children is the best way to raise good humans.
5. Suicide is a choice. And related: Christians do not contemplate or successfully commit suicide. God is enough.
6. Working toward a race-free society does not require reparation for the past. History is history. We should all just move on.
7. History has nothing important to teach me about my current reality.
8. Calling out someone else’s sin is my duty as a Christian.
9. If I’m wrong, it says something about who I am.
My relationship with being wrong has changed. I know something important now: being wrong doesn’t change who I am at all. I am human, and if humanity has any kind of talent at all, it is a talent for being utterly and superbly wrong, at any given moment in time.
I do not, after having lived, loved, and listened (mostly well, I hope, though not always), believe any of those things on the above list anymore. My beliefs and world views are constantly changing, evolving, transforming radically, in some cases. I do not, nor will I ever, know everything. I want to recognize this always, in every conversation. I want to embrace the full measure of humility—enough, especially, to say, at any point in the course of my life, “I was wrong, and I’m sorry.”
And maybe this is how love wins.
Happy holidays and the most wondrous of news years to you.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
Photo by Helen Montoya Henrichs.
My 10-year-old son told me last night that he thinks he’s done with baths. Baths where he soaked while I read him stories. For the last 10 years.
I knew it was coming—he is, after all, 10—but you’re never ready, are you? It’s so hard to watch children grow up.
Over the years we’ve read Judy Blume, Rudyard Kipling, R.L. Stine, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mary Downing Hahn, J.K. Rowling, Charles Dickens, Jonathan Stroud, Jonathan Auxier, L.M. Montgomery, Laura Ingalls Wilder, E.B. White, and so many more. We’ve read about space flight, aliens, the intricacies of caves, the world’s newest inventions, the Civil Rights movement, desegregation, foreign cultures, natural life, environmentalism and preservation, and so much more.
These discussions we’ve had over these books and periodicals and stories, the moments we laughed or got choked up (usually me) or learned something entirely new, the ways we were shaped, together, by what we read, together, are forevermore imprinted on who we are.
We will never lose that. Neither will we lose the memories associated with what we’ve read, even if that sacred reading time has now passed. Digested words, like memories, live in us forever.
My son will still join his brothers for a read-aloud time in our house. Our family gathers around a story every evening. But his bath time, when it was just him and me, has become shower time. He has become an adolescent. I have become an outsider of sorts.
But we will always have the last 10 years of bonding over stories.
Pick up a book. Read to your child. You’ll never be sorry for the small moment in time when you put down your phone or your to-do list or all those dirty dishes and forged unbreakable bonds around a story.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
I promised you last month that this month I’d talk about how difficult it was to keep a trip from kids. Well, let me tell you, it was incredibly difficult. Part of it could be that the place to which we were going was Disney World.
Disney World. This is the place where Ben and I honeymooned. We also returned for our one-year anniversary, when we didn’t have any children, and for our 10-year anniversary, when we had five and left them all with my dad, who lives in Florida. This was the first time we took our kids, and we were almost bursting with the excitement of it. I have no idea how we didn’t spill the news somewhere in the four months between booking the trip and actually taking it.
We woke them up on Saturday morning, ushered them down to the table, and told them where we were going. They thought we were kidding. We told them they had just enough time to pack their bags for the plane (I was pleased to see that they mostly brought books with them), jump in the car, and patiently ride to the San Antonio airport, after which we flew to Dallas (apparently no direct flights exist for San Antonio to Orlando) and then, finally, to Orlando after a two-hour layover. We waited another hour to get our hotel. They were so eager to see Disney World they could hardly stand it. We were, too.
One of the first things we did when we got there, though, was make a family bookshelf.
You might think there’s not a lot of time to read at Disney World, but, actually, you do a lot of waiting for the park transportation. I usually opted to observe people instead of read (because most days I’m holed up in my room; I thought I’d take the opportunity to branch out a little while I had the chance), but my husband and boys read plenty.
We rode together on buses,
observed amazing animals (and amazing shows) at the Animal Kingdom,
and ate way, way, way too much ice cream.
We also sweat a whole lot (because October in Florida is about like October in Texas).
After we’d visited all the parks and wrapped up our amazing trip, the boys were already talking about it again. It was a magical trip, and anyone who’s been to Disney World knows that it gets in your bones and your blood, and before the trip is even over you’re planning your next one. Which, of course, we were doing—though it will be a while. It’s certainly not cheap taking kids to Disney.
There was a tragic ending to that trip, however. While there, I received news that my brother has brain cancer. This was a shocking jolt, news no family member ever wants to hear. I am very close to my brother, and it has been incredibly hard to come to terms with this new reality. I am still weepy when I think of him or see him or get a text from him. Love is a difficult thing sometimes.
On Oct. 31, he had surgery to remove a very large tumor and was given an initial diagnosis, along with a treatment plan that includes radiation and chemotherapy. I will be helping him with a natural approach to healing as well. He is certainly not out of the clear. So if or when you think of me, please also hold space in your heart and mind for my brother. We covet all prayers and thoughts for healing and a long, long, long life.
