Persevering Paige

Throughout life, we are always learning about the world and about ourselves. I have found that I am extremely self-aware. What a great thing it is in many ways, but I often feel like I know way too much about myself and then I can spend hours analyzing myself in ways I wish I didn’t. As self-aware as I am, or so I thought, it’s always surprising to find out new things…because I thought I already knew everything about myself.

In all of my grief, I made a commitment to my healing. I’m not sure when this commitment was made but I definitely made it. I have always handled everything that came my way, because I knew if I didn’t it would prevent me from being all that I can be. I have this distinct memory of thinking about my future in high school. I remember sitting in my house at the time and thinking that things didn’t look good for me. With no biological parents at such a young age, I came to the realization that most things were going to be more difficult for me to achieve. At 25, I haven’t let it stop me, but I was right. I remember thinking about the course of my life and the paths I could go down. It would’ve been so easy to choose the path that the statistics showed as most common for kids like me. I didn’t want that though. I wanted to be the rare one: the one that went through insurmountable trials and overcame them on the other side with hope and a future. I chose that, and I’m proud of myself everyday for my commitment to that very choice and my commitment to my healing.

I think we often think of healing as linear. Start to finish. It’s not linear. At all. I have good and bad days but I’m always healing. It’s a lifelong process and I don’t have commitment issues. When a simple conversation over the summer sent waves of grief my way, I think that’s when I truly understood this. I also found out that losing my parents so young created an identity crisis within me that I had no idea I needed to overcome. I don’t wish to go into a whole lot of detail, but basically, I was told that I never attended my childhood church. I was told that there is no record of me ever attending this church. It sent me into a wave of grief that I had not prepared for. Then I started reflecting.

This is what I came up with: When you lose your parents as a child, you lose your foundation. You lose the people that you are literally depending on for survival. You lose a sense of who you are, even if you don’t mean to. It changes you. I am who I am because of this and I love all of who I am. Don’t get it twisted. It is and always will be deeply profound.

The word “childlike dependency” came up in my head a lot, because I feel like that’s what we should have with Christ. We should depend on Him like we depend on our parents. I may have lost my foundation to my hometown, to my childhood, and even my church, apparently. But I will never be able to lose my foundation in being a beloved daughter of Christ. God knows I went to that church. God knows everything I’ve been through and He has loved me all the way and never left me at any point. I may have lost my foundation to my childhood when I lost my parents, but I will never be able to lose me because I am not rooted in this world. I am rooted in Christ. My roots are not here and they never were.

So, take that identity crisis.