The Day I Stopped Pretending

I can tell you the exact Sunday.

It was a fall morning, the kind where the air finally turns and you remember you live somewhere with seasons. My hair was done. My coffee was in the car. I pulled out and drove the same route I always did. I pulled into the church parking lot. Found a spot in my usual row. Put the car in park.

And I could not get out.

I sat with my hands on the steering wheel and watched other women walking in. The ones with the kids holding their hands. The ones with the Bibles tucked under their arms. The ones with the friendly waves and the easy smiles and the I’m so glad to see yous that you trade with the same five people every week in the lobby.

I watched them walk in.

And I thought: I cannot do this today.

I cannot walk in there and smile. I cannot walk in there and say I’m good when someone asks how I’m doing. I cannot walk in there and lead the women’s Bible study at 9:30 a.m.,  the one where I was going to teach on trusting God in seasons of waiting when I was actively not trusting God in my own season of waiting.

I sat in that parking lot and I cried. The ugly kind. The kind where you have to pull out the napkins from the glovebox because you forgot tissues. The kind where you ruin the mascara you spent eleven minutes on. The kind where you cannot tell anymore if you are crying about the thing or if you are crying about the fact that you are still crying.

And the worst part, the part that haunted me, was that nobody knew.

Not a soul.

I had been carrying it for so long that the carrying was normal. The carrying was the baseline. The carrying was what I did. And I had become so good at the carrying that even the people closest to me: my best friend, my pastor’s wife, and my mentor would have been shocked to know what was actually inside me on that Sunday morning.

The Thing I Was Hiding

I am not going to tell you the specific thing.

Not because I am hiding it now. I have written about it elsewhere, talked about it in CR rooms, processed it with people who have earned the right to that story. But because the specific thing is not the point.

The point is that almost every woman reading this has her own version of what was in that car with me that morning.

For you it might be:

• A secret you have been keeping for so long it has its own room in your head.

• A health diagnosis you have not told anyone about yet.

• A child who is in the middle of something you do not know how to fix.

• A spiritual flatness that scares you because you are supposed to feel something.

• A relapse. A near-relapse. A pull toward something you know you should not be pulled toward.

• A grief that does not match the shape of the grief everyone else thinks you have.

• An exhaustion so deep it has stopped feeling like exhaustion and started feeling like just who you are.

Whatever it is, you have your version.

And if you are reading this, there is a decent chance you have been carrying it the same way I was carrying mine.

Alone. Smiling. Showing up.

Until one Sunday morning, in a parking lot you have driven into a hundred times, you cannot do it anymore.

What Happened Next

I would love to tell you that I had some dramatic moment in that parking lot. A burning bush. A voice from the clouds. A clear directive about what to do next.

I did not.

What I had was a friend’s phone number.

Her name does not matter for this story. What matters is that she was the one woman in my life I suspected, on some quiet level I had not let myself examine, might be safe.

I had no evidence. She had not done anything specific to earn the suspicion. I just had a sense.

So in that parking lot, with the engine still running, I picked up my phone and I called her.

She answered on the third ring. I said, in a voice I did not recognize as my own, “I think I need to tell you something.”

There was a pause.

And then she said, “Okay. I’m pulling over.”

She was driving when I called. She was, in fact, on her way to the same church we both attended. She did not say “Can we talk after service?” She did not say “Let’s set up a coffee for next week.” She pulled over.

And I sat in a church parking lot, and she sat on the shoulder of the road, and I told her the truth.

The whole truth. Not the cleaned-up version. Not the testimony version. The actual one.

When I was done, there was a long pause.

And then she said two words.

“Me too.”

Two Words

I have written a lot about that phrase. I will probably write a lot more.

But for the woman who is still in her car this morning. The woman who is two minutes away from making the decision I made. I want you to know what me too did to me.

It killed the lie.

For years, I had been carrying around the silent belief that I was the only woman in church who was struggling with what I was struggling with. That everyone else had figured it out. That something was uniquely wrong with me.

In two words, that lie died.

She was carrying her own version. She had been carrying it just as long. We had both been smiling at each other in the church lobby for years. Trading the I’m so glad to see yous. Sitting in the same Bible study. Praying for each other’s prayer requests, which were, of course, mostly about other people, because that is what church-lady prayer requests are.

And the entire time, the entire time, there was a thing in her that mirrored the thing in me.

We had been so good at hiding from each other that we had hidden ourselves into a desperate kind of loneliness in the very room that was supposed to cure it.

That is the cost of pretending.

It is not just that you stay stuck. It is that you stay stuck next to other women who are stuck in exactly the same way, and you both lose the one thing that could have helped you. Each other.

What I Want You To Take With You

If you are reading this and you are still in the parking lot, I want to say three things.

First: You are not the only one. I know it feels like you are. The lie of your specific aloneness is one of the most powerful lies the enemy has. Refuse it. You are not the only one. You have never been the only one. Statistically, the woman in the row in front of you is carrying her own version of what you are carrying.

Second: It does not have to be the right person yet. I did not call my pastor. I did not call I did not call my best friend. I called the woman I suspected might be safe. Sometimes the first person you tell is not the right person, but they are the first person, and the first telling is what breaks the spell. Tell the person who is closest to safe. You can tell the others later.

Third: The lie dies in light. The thing you are hiding is held together almost entirely by the fact that it is hidden. The moment you say it out loud to one other safe person, it begins to lose its grip on you. Not all at once. Not completely. But the loosening starts the second the words leave your mouth.

The day I stopped pretending was the day I started to actually live.

I would not undo what was in that car with me on that Sunday morning.

But I would not trade what happened on the phone, either.

A Blessing For The Woman In The Parking Lot

If you are in the parking lot today, may you find the courage to pick up the phone.

May you find the one person who is closest to safe.

May you stop, even for one conversation, the long and exhausting performance of being fine.

May you hear the two words that change everything.

And may you walk into the rest of your life with one less thing to carry, because someone else now knows the weight of what you have been carrying alone.

I will be here, in my own waiting room, holding hope for you.

Grace and grit,  Kristen