Remembering September 11

To my thirteen-year-old self.

You probably can’t imagine twenty years into the future, but here I am, remembering you as if the past two decades were hardly any time at all. And yet, I hardly recognize you.

You were likely up early that day because you were an over-achieving homeschooler who wanted to get her vocabulary homework out of the way before breakfast. And when your parents called you in to watch the news after the first tower was hit, you didn’t understand something so devastating as the violence you witnessed in real time. You thought it was a joke.

I cringe to even write that, but I know now that you were in shock. You were processing that the world wasn’t quite as predictable or safe as you wanted to believe . . .

MemoirCait WestSeptember 13, 20219/11, september 11, spiritual abuse, sunday, grieving, loss, narrative, compassion, toxic religion, complexityComment

On Loss and Leaving

I’ve been thinking about those of you who have lost through leaving.

Maybe you have lost your family, community, sense of safety, belonging, friends, church, or work. Maybe you feel this loss in ways you can’t share with others. Maybe you have lost everything, or what used to be your everything.

Maybe you feel like you’ve lost yourself.

Leaving can mean different things: leaving behind something or someone you care about, leaving a faith, leaving your past self in an effort to grow into who you are becoming. For me, leaving Christian patriarchy meant losing some family relationships, losing the scattered kind of community I grew up in, losing my sense of certainty, my support network.

When I left, I felt like I was losing pieces of myself, only to find that leaving was the only way to healing, to becoming more whole. . . .

In the Hollow

Lay down the wounds like canyons, like caverns in your ocean heart. Cuts in the deep where the water runs coldest. Let the currents of salt fill every crack. Let go of the empty.

You are a world formed in rock and volcano and hurricane. You are the undersea mountains, hidden in the dark. You are the valleys in the hills at the bottom of the earth. . . .