For those who do not know, I interviewed to be a FOCUS missionary before I applied to graduate school. It seemed like the perfect gap between undergrad and grad school; I would be meeting up with college students to talk about the Faith. It was something I did naturally at Belmont, and no one questioned my decision to apply, not even my professors.
Clearly I did not become a FOCUS missionary.
I have a few other accounts of what happened instead, but I would like to call attention what happened in my final interview.
“I can sense that your heart is very jaded Felicity,” the interviewer said to me.
This came as a complete shock to me. If you know me, I am filled with love. I care so much about those around me that I often lose sleep, time, and success because I am constantly trying to improve the lives of my friends, my neighbors, strangers even.
I thought that my empathetic nature came across very well in my interviews.
Turns out that I was wrong.
What happened to my heart was something that happens to everyone. Over time, with both positive and negative experiences under our belts, our hearts change. Everything around us is colored in based on what we are told is happening. Suddenly our simple hearts appear to be too weak to handle the world around us. The way we respond to situations, regardless of their nature, is modified in order to perserve our hearts.
In short, we grow up.
We grow up to believe that letting our true selves, our hearts, out to the world is just going to end in ruin.
I did a pretty good job of hiding my heart. Not only that, but I did everything in my power to protect the hearts of all those around me. If something bad happened to me, I did not let my siblings see me so they did not have to hurt. If I noticed someone flirting with a friend of mine, and I knew that this person was a bad influence, I would effectively remove them from the equation.
Pain could not possibly make the world any better.
But it is not just pain and sorrow that we hide from the world. Another issue that many of us face is a fear of sharing our joy. We assume that if we talk about something happy that someone will crush our spirits. We live for the honeymooon phase, and we do our very best to push away the real world.
After all, we are told to grow up.
No way could our joy be sustained. It’s childish to assume so.
The truth is, the only way that we will ever truly experience love is by letting our hearts become open. We have to be our real selves, and we have to be willing to let our true selves in for others to see. The alleged childishness within ourselves should not be hidden from the world, nor should we allow our struggles to dominate our thoughts.
Love has to be let in.
I learned this lesson first from my amazing family.
My advisor asked me if I was ever embarassed by my parents. The truth is, all of the children in our family have been raised to be shameless. If our parents kiss in the line at a restaurant, then we just smile. If my dad headbangs whilst driving down the street in front of my friends, then I join in (and I still do that in the lab).
Family lets you be yourself.
One hundred percent.
For those of my Dear Readers that know me, you’ll know that it has been exceptionally difficult for me without my family here at Notre Dame. I’ve been extremely homesick, and for the longest time I could not figure out how to feel better. Even if people were willing to help me, I did not want to accept their offers for coffee or dinner or anything really.
I just couldn’t open myself up.
The door to my jaded heart was only accessible to my family and a few close friends. I knew that all of the love in my heart would be helped if I just opened up again, like I did when I was younger and playing with my siblings. Maybe then I could understand people, find something in this new space, and maybe even feel at home again.
Thing is…you can’t love unless you are willing to be broken.
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.” ~ C.S. Lewis
So I asked God to break my heart. Here’s the story that started on the fifteenth of September and ended on November fifteenth:
In a lab meeting on September 15th, and there was a lull in conversation. Now the Vaughan Lab is amazing in that we can almost always come up with an odd topic or two. To keep it short, my advisor somehow noticed that I was interested in another graduate student. I had no clue.
My jaded heart originally rejected the idea altogether. For five years, I had been listening to God and not letting myself go anywhere near relationships with people that did not fit my checklist. I was pretty judgmental.
My heart broke at the simple fact that I was not willing to let others in like I claimed I could. Thankfully my little brother told me to be more accepting, and my heart's door remained broken. My heart itself was left open, not broken, but open.
I chose joy even though it scared me.
Man am I grateful for that decision. Not because of the fun times, but because I saw that even though the world tells you that you cannot be happy or can handle life as it is, everything is so much better when you choose joy. I chose not to hide, not to run, not to justify everything away like I did so many times before.
My homesickness seemed to melt away as I played on playgrounds at 2 in the morning and laughing with my friends about the whole ordeal.
But remember, I did not ask God to just open my heart.
I asked Him to break my heart.
He did.
Now what I did not mention was that my heart was wide open to far more than this one kid. See, because of the joy I experienced from letting one person in, I found myself going to more and more people. By accepting others, joy filled my life.
Just as my family taught me to love by being myself, the numerous joyful encounters I had with these new people reminded me that it was ok to be open, to be real, to be joyful.
Day by day, my heart became more open. To the amusement of my advisor’s wife, I would dance around the lab in the mornings. I did not care. Even if the world was going to tell me that I was going to fail, that my child-like joy was a foolish persona, I knew that I was accepted and loved by the people I had let in to my life.
There was no way to close it.
I chose joy that day.
God answered a ten year prayer because of that joy. Through the love of my family, the first love I ever knew, God answered the prayer I had been begging Him to answer. The only reason why I hadn’t heard His explaination was that I had not been open enough to hear Him.
Once that wore off, I was exceptionally homesick. Thus I learned the second lesson of what it truly means to have an open and loving heart.
Had my heart remained what it was, had I not let God break my heart, I may not have had the openness to share my life with those around me.
On a superficial level, my lab found my sadness, and in response, they gave me more mentoring and more teaching and more experiments. It was an odd form of love, but it was because of their love that I am now able to say that the experiment I have been failing at for six months has finally worked.
More importantly, I grew closer to the women I met here.
Normally the girls I meet are the women I support. I rarely share my struggles, nor do I admit that I do not understand what is happening to me. This time my women supported me. These women, because I had already celebrated success and lamented failure alongside them, they opened their arms. They did not judge me for crying for two weeks about missing my mom. They did not care if I made up vindictive hashtags, nor did they care if I acted a little insane.
They just loved me.
On November 15th I turned to my little brother, and I asked him what to do with my remaining sadness.
Basically he told me to stop lying to myself.
So I stopped.
God broke my heart, not to remind me of the hardships of this world, but to show me just how much love can be exchanged if we let our hearts be open.
I was homesick because I missed the love of my family. It had not gone anywhere, and I knew that. Not only that, but I knew that love was present in far more than what I thought before. It was in my undergrads, in my advisors, in my bio girls, in the bio guys, in my beautiful roommate, in the many many people I met every day.
Dear Reader, if you believe that you are too broken, too hurt, too empty for the world to take you in, stop lying to yourself.
You are loved.
Just let yourself be open to the people you encounter each day. Choose joy with them every chance you get. Even if you look stupid from the outside looking in, you will know in your heart that all is well.
Let your heart be broken.
Break it open.
It’s worth it.
“Real isn't how you are made,' said the Skin Horse. 'It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.'
'Does it hurt?' asked the Rabbit.
'Sometimes,' said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. 'When you are Real you don't mind being hurt.'
'Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,' he asked, 'or bit by bit?'
'It doesn't happen all at once,' said the Skin Horse. 'You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.”
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