Switchbacks and Scorched Earth
Switchbacks and Scorched Earth
Emily Livingston
My God my bright abyss
into which all my longing will not go
once more I come to the edge of all I know
and believing nothing believe in this.— Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss
I look my dad in the eyes, and have to repeat three times: “I’ll be fine”. I list off reasons— the trail is loaded on my phone, I have plenty of water, I’m not tired. I am 27, and I have traveled around the country and world by myself. Nonetheless, the pandemic has changed things; it has knitted my family together, cut off my independence, left us all craving some semblance of security. I repeat how important it is for me to push myself. My world caved in after my jaw surgery, but pushing outward reminds me that a larger world remains.
My parents and my brother turn back as I finish the 7 mile loop, and the moment they are no longer in sight, I find myself taking stock: how are the blisters on my feet? How much have I eaten? In the silence, I can hear my labored breathing, how the necessity of stay-at-home orders has left me out of shape. When I am surrounded by others, I let my own needs and pace take a backseat. I eat when they eat, I drink when they drink. Without noticing, I stop listening to the breeze, to what my body tries to tell me. Around others, I repeatedly push myself past my own capacity, or slow myself for solidarity. When I am alone, I value discipline, but I also listen to what my body needs from me. I hear the breeze, the birds, the crunch of the ground beneath my feet.
I try to distract myself from the unnerving nature of solitude. I put in one headphone, start a playlist, call a friend, wrestling to keep the kinesthetic application of switchbacks from aligning with the twists and turns of my own thoughts. The silence and the unraveling nature of each step forward hit a crescendo: I unwittingly begin untangling my thoughts surrounding belief.
I know better than to barter with God, but torrents of pain, anger, and confusion have left me wanting for a bar fight, ready to go toe-to-toe. When grief leaves us feeling lost and betrayed, we need someone to blame. Who else than the Almighty? Who else but the only One with the power to protect, to stop the storm of loss from raging? I know how childish the, “I’ve given x, y, z: you owe me” sounds, but it’s all that tumbles out of me.
I let my pain rage until it’s all I can hear; until it envelops me; until it drowns out the theologically problematic outworking; until I bury and hide it even from myself. I couldn’t tell you the bargains I made after jaw surgery, after I felt like my face and my frame were stolen from me. My jaw was wired shut, and my survival instincts came out like a language I never learned to speak—sounds I didn’t know the meaning of, justifications tangled together like a ball of string.
However necessary jaw surgery was, I might have saved myself a lot of pain if I did not berate my body so often, when it was working so hard to survive. I felt so out of control that anger and impatience towards myself were easier than coming to terms with my own helplessness. I had no concept of medical trauma, first sparked in the hospital when I lost my ability to breathe through my nose, my only airway. It felt like fire in my veins, until I lost consciousness and the crash cart was called in. Once I returned home, every two hours, my parents would have to suction out my nose—and every two hours, a knot would form in my stomach, anxiety rising: what if I again lost my ability to breathe?
My jaw wired shut for three weeks, I forced nutrition through the gap behind my teeth with a syringe, only to have it seem to disappear into thin air, leaving my elbow to dig into my ribs, haunting me. I got so used to and frustrated by my body’s inability to maintain weight that by the time I eventually was able to gain it back, it felt foreign to me. Emptiness became so normal that I did not know how to make peace with fullness. When I felt out of control in any other arena of my life, vocationally, relationally—I felt a kind of dysmorphia take over—despite my own rational objections, I would withhold nutrition and goodness from my body until I felt like I had accomplished whatever I needed to, until I had measured up. Just like when I was out on the trail, I continually accommodated the expectations of others instead of listening to and trusting my own gut.
All of this was exacerbated by the reality that every day for a solid 4+ months, I did not recognize the face in the mirror. After surgery, my face was incredibly swollen, bloody, and bruised. While the gore of it lessened pretty quickly, many elements of it lingered. It was corrective, easily simplified like a mathematical equation: top jaw, 5 millimeters forward; bottom jaw, 2 millimeters back. It was temporary, if you looked at it as an objective timespan of recovery: 6 to 12 months of swelling, up to 24 months for nerves to heal. But being able to pragmatically pull apart the recovery process did not make it less painful. Not only did I not recognize my own reflection, but as I went back to work as a barista, countless customers that came into the shop, many of whom I had had many conversations with, didn’t immediately recognize me. My daily existence gutted me.
Blake Cheek
It was as if all these tectonic plates were shifting—within me, outside of me, around me, and to an extent, I could feel myself withdrawing, trying to limit my own existence, which felt chaotic and out of control. I felt angry over heartbreak, anger over all of the careless comments others made, and anger at my own inability to not let grief affect me. I was angry at God, too, but I felt so much guilt and shame that I pushed that down farther than anything else.
How do you come to terms with anger towards a God you can’t see? How do you make peace when you were raised in purity culture: an, at best, underdeveloped, and, at worst, destructive, theology of the body? All I had inherited was a theology of abstaining: that didn’t translate when I desperately needed fullness, gentleness, and care—a theology of abundance. Ironically, although I was taught that my body was a dangerous force of desirability, feeling weak and undesirable left me with no sense of safety—it just left me with nothing. It left me with my own skin and bone poking out of ribs, my own swollen face, my own lonely haunting.
In My Bright Abyss, Christian Wiman asks what the difference is between a cry of pain that is also a cry of praise and a cry of pain that is pure despair: “The cry of faith, even if it is a cry against God, moves toward God, has its meaning in God, as in the cries of Job.” I was angry, but I still felt tethered to my faith. I knew all the right terms—I knew what I was experiencing was existential doubt, not intellectual doubt. But logically identifying doubt does little to curb it.
In the year that it took for swelling to go down and for me to get used to my facial structure, I wrote poems about vulnerability, about how much these shifts in identity cost me—I could untangle those fairly easily. But faith? I didn’t even know where to begin. I felt like the only way to keep what was left of my faith safe was to burrow my doubt deep within me.
We hide the wounds closest to us.
I still don’t know what it means to be both writer and human, both exposing wounds for the sake of others, as Lore Wilbert writes, and making peace with them myself. Even if I maintain, “the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one’s most intimate sensitivity” as sculptor Anne Truitt writes, once a vein opens up, there’s only so long that you can soak up the blood.
Jaw surgery recovery was like an exposed, gaping wound. It affected every hour of every day in some capacity. And even though focusing on physical survival helped me bury the deeper wound of doubt that I wasn’t sure how to untangle, the faith that raised me also came up insufficient. The cultural values of self-sufficiency and restraint overshadowed any semblance of grace. The Christianity that I was raised in, that I had studied, had no working theology of self-compassion, so I expanded my horizons. I read Henri Nouwen and Thomas Merton, Mary Oliver and Kahlil Gibran.
In his book Wholeheartedness, Chuck DeGroat talks about what wholeness means. He says, “we learn wholeness, more often than not, when our boundaries are shattered, when our disciplines fail us, when our theologies stump us, when our supposedly wise choices betray us. We learn by un-learning, by stumbling and falling into the very thing we attempted to gain on our own terms. This, I believe, is the deep wisdom of my Christian tradition.”
I could live in a world where it all ends when we fail; In many ways, I already have. And yet, I’m stopped in my tracks by the life springing up after a scorched earth—we are always surrounded by these cycles of death and rebirth.
I’m still finding my way along the journey, zig zagging through the trail, yet—the words of Jesus find a welcomed echo within me: a holistic Christianity is the only thing that makes sense to me. As I start to make peace with my body, with my face, I start to re-imagine what it looks like to be made in the image of God: to be seen, known, and loved.
There’s this idea of “post-traumatic growth” that has been studied in different outworkings of medical trauma. Pre-trauma, a person starts off with a taken-for-granted body. Pre-surgery, I remember the hikes I took differently. I remember the landscape, the people I was with, or if I hiked solo, but if the elevation gain left me out of breath, it was an inconvenience, not a marker of my worth.
After a body-related traumatic event, there’s a mortality salience, or a feeling that death is imminent. The memory of what felt like fire in my veins was locked in my brain, and it was reinforced when I would come close to losing my airway again. Feeling out of control, I learned to fear my “new body”. When I stared at my face in the mirror, I didn’t recognize myself. As I lost weight, the way my elbows cut into my ribs haunted me. Outwardly, I went back to work, plastered a smile on my face. But inwardly, this dissociation from my face and body took root, and it didn’t budge easily.
Every time that I would hit the trail after surgery, it was as if I was in denial, trying to prove my own worth, my own strength, and there were several times that I almost passed out because I refused to listen to what my body needed from me. I hadn’t yet experienced post-traumatic growth; I hadn’t reconnected to or learned to listen to or care for my body.
As I learned to listen, to value patience and rest, to not push down my tears or my grief: the words of Jesus that I had memorized as a child sprang up to meet me. Instead of only hearing, take up your cross, the soothing my yoke is easy, my burden is light reverberated both within and outside of me. Instead of only hearing the call to die to self, the repeated phrase and Jesus was moved by compassion calmed me.
I needed to make peace with my body before I could once again make peace with God. I needed to know that my whole embodied self—not just my theology—were welcomed, and loved. I needed to feel the sun on my skin, to remember that I came from dust. We separate ourselves from the earth, citing verses about this not being our final home. And yet, didn’t Jesus enter in, God-in-flesh? This world is messy, full of violence and death, full of blood and dust. And yet, it’s also full of great beauty, full of light and hope.
I’m a year and a half post surgery, and the last of the nerves on my face are still waking up. Waking up is so slow. Untangling and re-weaving beliefs, unlearning and relearning—it’s exhausting. It would be easier to hunker down, to not allow change, to remain stagnant. And yet, to remain stagnant means that we have been cut off from a life-source. Change is scary, because at times, it feels like it takes everything from us. Even still, I believe that part of the definition of grace is a capacity to change, again and again, not just once.
I need more moments out on the trail, allowing the reality that in order to walk the path in front of me, I have to feed and take care of my body. I need to write along the edges of my most intimate sensitivity, pitching essays that I don't feel ready to write. I need to not just acknowledge my weakness, my failures, but also my strength, my growth. More than anything, I need to be able to re-imagine hope.
Emily Livingston
Writer
Emily continually unravels and reweaves what it means to follow Jesus. Her heart resides in Texas, where she was born and raised; in the breathtaking Pacific Northwest, where she studied and took weekend road trips to go hiking; and with friends from the Middle East, who taught her what breaking bread and hospitality truly mean.
Photography by Blake Cheek