LOST GIRL

"I knew you when you were a girl. I knew you as a young adult. You were smart and kind and funny. You loved life. What happened to you? What happened to the girl you used to be?"

A lifelong friend spoke these words to me several years ago. I was physically exhausted and emotionally and spiritually depressed. I was past desperate...had reached a point of passive numbness. My life was not without an occasional glimmer of joy or light, but, for the most part, life was dark gray. The lively, engaged girl from my childhood had become an automaton.

Why the change? Who knows, but I think several factors contributed to this transformation: extreme physical exhaustion, emotional isolation, financial insecurity. Life was so hard, for so long, and there was absolutely nothing I could do to fix my situation. I tried, repeatedly, and failed, repeatedly, and finally I just gave up.

I lost track of the girl my childhood friend had known. But when my friend asked me that question, and when she described the person she had known all those years ago, something stirred deep in my memory. I began to remember that lost girl, too. I began to ask myself, "What happened to that girl? Where did she go?" The more I thought about that lost girl, the more I wanted to find her.

Fast forward several years...

I am not the same person today that I was when my friend asked those questions. I have found a bit of the lost girl - I hear her thoughts inside my head, and sometimes I hear her voice coming out of my mouth. She is older now, for sure...gray hair, thick waistline, gimpy knees...but she is still curious, still likes to have fun, still a little shy.

Why the change? I don't think I know all the factors that helped resurrect the lost girl, but I do know a few:

I am no longer severely exhausted. I don't think it is possible to overstate the harmful effects of prolonged sleep deprivation, on both physical health and mental health. There's a reason sleep-deprivation is used as a form of torture in places like prison camps. Prolonged exhaustion...a quiet, subtle, slow trauma.

I no longer feel emotionally isolated. Through the magic of the internet, I am able to communicate with friends from my past, and I can stay in conversation with friends who live far away. (Moving frequently, leaving behind friends and having to start over again from scratch in a new location...it often takes years to build emotional intimacy. Having to rebuild so many times, another subtle form of trauma.) I am thankful for my prayer sisters, who pray with me and for me. I am thankful for Global Counseling Network, thankful someone recognized the need for affordable, biblical counseling services in remote places like the hills of Northwest Tennessee.

I don't know that I am any less financially insecure than I was ten years ago, but I'm not the one juggling the numbers. They say ignorance is bliss; it's not, really, but ignorance does involve less stress, or at least a different kind of stress. I have an ATM receipt from a couple years ago taped on my wall: "Ledger balance: $2.44." Groceries for the week ahead, gas for the van (Please, Jesus, don't let the van break down this week!)...how on earth were we going to make it?! I don't know how we survived. But I do know that today, although there may still not be money in the bank, we do have groceries in the pantry and a full tank of gas in the van.

Why am I sharing all of this?

My youngest and I were talking last night, and she was sad because she felt like people she loves misunderstood and misrepresented me, her mom. "They don't know you like I do," she protested.

But here's the deal...

I am not the same person today that I was five years ago, ten years ago, thirty years ago. If you, like my friend at the beginning of this post, had known me as a child and as a young adult, you would say, "Oh, I know Camille. She is like such-&-such." And you would be right. But, if you had known me during the long slow collapse of severe exhaustion, you would say, "Oh, I know Camille. She is like (something very different)." And again, you would be correct.

My youngest is more familiar with Camille-in-the-light, so she does not understand the perspective of those who are better acquainted with Camille-in-the-darkness. But the truth is, their perspective and their experiences are real, too, just as real as hers. The truth is, I am not one or the other, either/or; I am both. Light and darkness, swirled together like ink in sunlit water.

I think one of the deepest longings of the human heart is to be both fully known AND fully loved. People - even those closest to me - are incapable of knowing me fully, completely, because time and place limit their knowledge of me. We relate to one another in still shots, outtakes, film clips. Only God sees and knows and understands the full-length drama of our lives, of who we are.

"They don't know you like I do." No, no, they don't.

But God knows me as I am, all of me, completely, and He loves me! I am content.