When I was in first grade, I had one of my first life-defining moments. My class was doing an
exercise in a little spiral-bound notebook with dotted lines and places to practice writing sentences across each page. I was struggling quite a bit with whatever it was we were doing on one particular day and became immensely frustrated with my inability to write at the pace and in the way that my teacher wanted. As an act of rebellion, and perhaps mostly an act of giving up, I grabbed my notebook and ripped the whole thing in half. I still remember how much tension I felt in my fingers and how angry I was at myself for ‘not measuring up.’ My mom had to come meet me at school that day and talk to me about my behavior.
As I now reflect back on this story 30 years later, a few things strike me about it. The first is that there were a number of life lessons in that moment that have taken me the better part of half a decade to finally learn. I am just now having the self compassion to say that this is okay and that there is no immense pressure to have it all figured out and have that childhood story all nicely wrapped in a bow. Life lessons take time, and patience and self compassion are both pre-requisites to learning them. The second thing that strikes me is that the way in which ‘performance’ and ‘correctness’ are modeled for us matters so much for how much leniency we will give ourselves for results that fall a little outside the dotted lines. If I allowed myself at that time to believe that a ‘messy page’ was all part of the learning process, I might not have given up so quickly. Thus, my next steps might have shifted dramatically and never resulted in an intervention with mom. The third, and perhaps the most important of all, thing that strikes me is that the places we feel pain or resistance are often the most important ones to pay attention to. I have spent more of my life than I care to admit running from being that girl who cannot cut it in handwriting class. As such, I have not really allowed myself to seriously consider that I might be a writer and that writing might be an outlet through which I can deeply touch others. That’s the funny thing about the parts of our stories we run from: we never outrun them and ironically we allow them to rule over our lives until we decide to face them.
Now as I write this piece I feel fresh and raw and downright vulnerable. I can see that there is an aspect of this story that you crave, that I crave, and that feels quite redemptive in my journey towards becoming a whole person. You see, the messy parts of our lives are not the parts that we are meant to throw away. The messy parts, the squiggly outside-the-page lines, are the bits that have so much to show us, so much to teach us, so much to invite us into. So, as I close this post i’d like to invite YOU into the mess.
What is the mess? It’s what I like to call your sticky bun. Sticky buns are big, typically. They are decadent-and messy, hard to miss when you see them. They don’t fit neatly in your hand, but gosh do they taste ahhhhmazing! These sticky buns require a different way of operating; they are not really grab and go convenience store style fare. Instead, they require both hands for eating, a seated position, and lots of napkins.
Come with me as I further unpack what it means to live a ‘sticky bun’ kind of existence and offer a few examples of ‘sticky buns’ from my own journey and the journeys of others. We’ll reflect on some things that I have finally had the self compassion to take on-things that feel unformed and unsettled in my own heart and mind. We’ll look back at some sticky buns i’ve witnessed in my favorite authors’ and mentors’ lives. Then, accordingly, we’ll look into your life too by asking some powerful questions that invite you to consider where you might be settling for tidy, easy, less than sticky bun. It’s bound to be an adventure-not for the faint of heart-but, then again, it would not be an adventure without some ups and downs, about faces, and re-direction. Stay tuned.