Lord, Hold My Hand
I was eight the first time I saw someone pinned to the floor, writhing with spirit possession. The choir moans, “Lord, hold my hand, while I run this race.” They stretched Looord like it was trying to pull heaven down. Mama stood, eyes shut, her hands trembling like the Holy Ghost was braiding grief through her fingers. A tambourine shook, someone hollered, and I sat there in my clip-on tie, wondering if God could really hold a life like mine. Turns out, the altar has no room for therapy.
I learned early to perform, to smile in suffering, to “press my way.” So I carried that same performance into manhood. Became an expert at being chosen but never truly seen or kept (by me, first). Every relationship felt like a revival I couldn’t leave until I collapsed. I called it love, but it was just survival, my nervous system rehearsing the only kind of closeness it ever knew: conditional. I chased validation like it was salvation. Needed somebody to tell me I was good, that I was worthy, that I could still be loved after all the pretending. But the truth is, I’d been fasting from myself for so long, I forgot how to taste honesty.
When you find yourself in the quiet work of making amends, untangling the harm born from your survival years, it humbles you. You begin to see how your fear met their peace head-on, how your desperation mistook love for refuge. When you stop justifying the harm you did to those who were intentionally healing, those who matched the character you had to play to survive the hell you'd lived. You watch your ego dissolve, see the shadow it once cast, the loose, chaotic remnants of who you were when you thought survival was the only way to be. And in that unraveling, you begin to understand that healing is not clean. It’s the slow, trembling act of owning the wreckage and still daring to reach for light.
I often share that, "I just wanna' write (& live) a better story than the one I wrote yesterday."
The first time my therapist asked me, “When did you learn you had to earn love?” I laughed. Not because it was funny, but because it was too true. Like she had peeked into every altar call, every “yes, Lord,” every time I smiled through pain so people would say, “He’s such a strong young man.” I told her about the church. About how love there was loud, shouted, sung, performed, but never quiet enough to listen. How my mama’s “hallelujahs” were sometimes covers for heartbreak.
“That’s emotional neglect wrapped in religious language,” she said,
Life is a consistent state of revision; we are both author and editor of our becoming. I've come to learn that this must include more than just forward revision. Sometimes, the tender violence, this act of returning, is about dog-earing painful chapters where commas became walls. And wander through the margins of what we once tried to forget. Revisit the sentences we wrote in haste, verbs too sharp, tone defensive, imagery wounded, those fragmented phrases we left hanging.
I don't know ya'll. Maybe, there's beauty in the broken syntax, meaning in the run-ons, grace in the repetition. Even Shakespeare rewrote ghosts; even Baldwin left room in the paragraph for doubt. Perhaps, life is just a draft that never stops trembling toward sense. Revisiting sentences you left open with fragmented phrases and insufficient punctuation, and sit with those scenes.
I don’t want to run this race in vain, this race in vain.
Everyone is problematic to a cause.
Everyone is a hero to a cause
Ginger, clove tea.
