inspiredodyssey daily prompt, Inspiration

How What I’ve Been Through Shaped Who I Am

 

 

People love to say that we are not defined by our circumstances, but those circumstances sure as hell help shape us. Lol. I am a product not only of the environment I grew up in, but of everything that environment, and life itself, did to me. I didn’t ask to be bipolar. I didn’t ask to become an alcoholic, go to jail, become homeless, or face every future job application with that one condemning question:

Have you ever been convicted of a felony?

I didn’t ask for the wreckage. But somewhere inside all of it, I found grace, mercy, faith, sobriety, and resurrection.

So are we shaped more by our experiences, or by who we already are?

I think it is both.

Maybe we enter the world with certain raw materials already inside us. I was always loud, determined, rebellious, emotional, funny, impulsive, and completely incapable of doing anything halfway. Then life got hold of those qualities and threw them into every kind of fire imaginable. Some of those fires nearly destroyed me. Others revealed parts of me I never knew were there.

I once heard that a horse must first be broken before it can become a prizewinner. I don’t know if that is actually good horsemanship, it sounds pretty damn cruel when you think about it, but the idea stayed with me. Are we required to be broken before we can become something greater? Do we have to crawl through fire before we can recognize the light?

And what about people who live relatively ordinary lives without enormous trauma? Are their lives better because they were spared the destruction? Or do they sometimes wonder what might have happened if they had taken the risk, left the familiar road, or allowed life to shake them up a little?

I live at the extreme end of that theory.

I went from being a loudmouthed Brooklyn girl with giant hoop earrings to the high school party girl rocking a pink pager and running her own fake-ID business. Yes, I was apparently an entrepreneur before I was even old enough to drink legally. I was always all or nothing. Unfortunately, that same attitude eventually followed me into alcoholism, mania, a destructive marriage, criminal charges, and incarceration.

But that all-or-nothing nature did not disappear when I became sober. It simply changed outfits.

The same kick-ass grit that could probably sell Grandma her own retirement back to her, (morally, I would never do that, shame on anyone coming for Grandma’s pension), now drives nearly everything I do. I gave up alcohol, but I eventually realized I had not given up my habit of becoming completely consumed by something.

Yeah. Do the math on that one.

For the past two years, I buried myself in church work. I was baptized. I joined the Legion of Mary. I became a lector and stood at the podium during Mass, reading Scripture aloud. I became a Eucharistic Minister and brought Communion, Jesus Himself, to people who were sick, elderly, or unable to leave their homes. I attended novenas, volunteered at events, helped with parish projects, and made myself available whenever someone needed something.

Now, let me be clear: I was not trying to buy my way into Heaven with volunteer hours and church casseroles. As a new Catholic, I genuinely believed this was what I was supposed to do. I had been given a second life, so I thought I needed to pour every drop of it back into God.

The work was meaningful. It still is. My faith is real. My service is real. But once again, I had gone all in. And while I was busy building a beautiful life in the Church, I quietly let go of the community that helped me build that life in the first place: my AA home group.

Much to learn, young Skywalker still has.

And then some!

AA was where my shattered life first began becoming whole. Before the church committees, the podium, the Communion visits, and the holy work, there were folding chairs, burnt coffee, terrible cookies, and people who understood exactly what it meant to wake up ashamed and still try again. That room held me when I had almost nothing.

This past month, I spent more time with my parents and began gathering all the old pieces of my recovery story: papers, books, folders, notebooks, letters, jail memories, and rehab materials. It was like opening a time capsule from a woman who did not yet know whether she would survive. When I got out of jail, my parents told me I was absolutely not moving in with them.

BEST PARENTS EVER. 😂

At the time, I probably did not appreciate the brilliance of that decision. I had just come out of jail, my marriage was collapsing, I had nowhere to live, and my parents were essentially saying, “We love you deeply. Now go to the homeless shelter. But they knew me. They knew that if they rescued me too comfortably, I might never learn how to rescue myself. So I went into a shelter and then rehab. I learned how to live sober, follow rules, manage my own life, and begin again without hiding inside my childhood bedroom.

Today, I live independently in a beautiful apartment only about thirty minutes from them. I have peace, privacy, friends, responsibilities, and a life that belongs to me. That independence exists partly because my parents loved me enough not to make my recovery easy. That was not abandonment. That was wisdom.

Sobriety is where my strength lives. I would not be the person I am today if I had not learned how to fight the demon that brought me to my knees for most of my life.

Recently, I walked past my five sobriety chips sitting on my entertainment center. Five years. Five little circles marking thousands of choices no one saw me make. I took a picture and made a post on Reddit. Yes, Reddit, the giant black hole of the internet where you can find emotional support, conspiracy theories, and someone arguing passionately about the correct way to toast bread, all within five minutes.

But the response to that post shook me.

It was not only the seven-year and ten-year sober veterans giving me digital high-fives. There was someone who had relapsed. Someone with five months. Someone just beginning who could not imagine ever reaching five years because five years felt impossible. Every stage of sobriety showed up beneath that post.

And suddenly I realized that while I had been swallowed by church life, I had become blind to another group of people who needed my voice. Not because I have everything figured out, God knows I do not, but because I have walked through something they are still trying to survive.

My story mattered there.

My five chips mattered.

The woman I had become mattered.

And then the revelation came, clear as anything:

Go home, Lynn.

Go home to your home group.

Walk into that room without shame. Walk in quietly. Do not go all Brooklyn, prancing through the door like the prodigal daughter has arrived with her own theme music. Go in humble. Sit down. Listen. Remember who you were when you first found that room.

I had arrived there fresh out of a marriage to a drug addict, a man who had isolated me from my friends and nearly dragged me into another crime while I was still fighting to remain sober. I was frightened, angry, newly independent, and barely holding myself together.

My home group gave me community before I found my church community. It gave me language for what had happened to me. It gave me people who did not flinch when I told the truth. It gave me a place where shame did not have the final word.

Somewhere along the way, I became so involved in being useful that I forgot I was still allowed to be supported. That is one of my oldest patterns. I know how to give. I know how to perform. I know how to throw myself into a mission until there is no room left to hear my own thoughts.

But when I looked at the crucifix on my wall, I felt Jesus smiling at me as if to say:

“You don’t have to give Me or the Church up. We can exist inside your sober life.”

Now, I better slap that revelation onto a recovery lunchbox and get my ass to the noon meeting. Lol.

So, are we shaped more by our experiences or by who we are?

I think who we are determines what we carry into the fire, but our experiences decide what comes out on the other side. I was always fierce. Life taught me where to aim that fierceness. I was always loud. Recovery taught me when to listen, and the Church gave my voice somewhere sacred to carry.I was always all or nothing. Now I am learning that a healthy life cannot be built entirely in extremes. It needs balance. Church and AA. Service and support. Independence and community. Giving and receiving.

What happened to me is not the whole definition of who I am, but it changed me. Jail changed me. Homelessness changed me. Alcoholism changed me. My parents’ difficult love changed me. Sobriety changed me. The Catholic Church changed me. The people sitting in folding chairs at AA changed me.

Grace changed me.

The tragedy of my life did not disappear. It became the beginning of a redemption story. I am not grateful for every terrible thing that happened. Some things were simply terrible. But I am grateful that they did not get the final word.

I did.

God did.

And five years later, I am still here—sober, independent, faithful, deeply imperfect, and finally finding my way home. So yes, I believe what we go through shapes who we become.

I am living proof.

inspiredodyssey daily prompt

“We All Need a Little Chaos Sometimes”

Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York City life was pure chaos on a daily basis. It was hardly the little kind, but honestly, it was exactly what I needed. I learned how to survive, think on my feet, count change without consulting a phone screen, walk through a crowd without getting trampled, and ride the subway without allowing anything, or anyone, to mysteriously “poke” me. Lol.

That fast-paced life prepared me for the one I live today. Absolutely and completely.

Three years ago, I was being sentenced for a crime I maintain I did not commit. But I knew nothing about the justice system. My parents were so scared. I was completely scared. My public defender was so certain I would lose at trial that I accepted the charges rather than risk something worse.

My faith in God, and in justice, was tested beyond anything I could have imagined.

The chaos of that chapter, the life I lived with my ex-husband, was definitely not the kind I needed. That chaos landed me in jail. It tore through my sanity, my safety, my freedom, and nearly everything I had left.

But the life I have built beyond that conviction has its own kind of chaos, and this time, much of it is welcome.

There is the chaos of church work: solving little-old-lady problems, bringing Communion to people who cannot attend Mass, speaking Scripture from the podium, helping at fiestas, novenas, pancake breakfasts, fundraisers, celebrations, and whatever else someone suddenly needs five minutes before an event begins.

There is the chaos of reading on the radio for people who are blind or visually impaired. There is the chaos of chasing a big break in voice acting, figuring out equipment, recording lines, correcting mistakes, and trying again when technology decides it personally hates me.

That kind of chaos means I am participating in my own life. It means I have somewhere to go, something to contribute, and people who count on me.

Life is substantially harder with a criminal record, though. There is a particularly painful kind of chaos in filling out job application after job application and reaching that condemning little box:

Have you ever been convicted of a felony?

God help me, that question burns every single time.

There was no mercy for the alcoholism, the crack use with my ex-husband, or the severely manic state I was in when everything happened. The system reduced an entire human collapse to a charge, a conviction, and a box that will follow me for the rest of my life.

Before all of this, I had never lived a criminal life. I had built a twenty-year career in Human Resources and Finance. I knew payroll, systems, numbers, rules, deadlines, and responsibility. Then suddenly, one terrible period of my life seemed to erase all of it.

It felt like a professional death sentence.

But that is often where God shows Himself, in the places where every ordinary route appears closed.

Far away from New York City, in a small North Carolina town, a modest Catholic church opened its doors to me, baptized me, and changed the entire direction of my life.

I am a woman who has always lived and breathed numbers. I want things to add up. I want the equation to make sense. So, when Jesus came to me on the floor of that jail cell, Muslim-born, broken, terrified, and completely lost, I followed Him the way He asked me to.

And I mean that quite literally.

I followed Him to His Church, the Church I believe He entrusted to His apostles. I chose the Catholic Church because I see it as the apostolic Church, reaching back through history in a direct line to Jesus and the people He first sent out into the world.

That is how I understand it. That is how I live it.

Now my life is filled with the joyful chaos of Catholic community: crowded parish halls, children running around at fiestas, prayers being whispered through novenas, trays of food appearing from every direction, elderly women asking for help, volunteers scrambling to find missing supplies, and somebody inevitably wondering who has the church keys.

That chaos is most welcome.

When I first thought about whether we need chaos, my mind also wandered, somewhat disturbingly, to Norman Bates.

“We all go a little mad sometimes.”

Granted, Norman Bates is not exactly the ideal spokesman for emotional wellness, but the line still has a point. Life can become so still, so repetitive, and so numb that sometimes something has to shake us awake.

I would never call everything that happened to me a blessing. Some chaos is destructive. Some of it leaves scars that do not disappear simply because the story eventually improves. I would never recommend the road I took to get here.

But I also know that if my life had never been shaken apart, I might still be trapped in that room at my parents’ house, surrounded by liquor bottles, buried under a decade of depression and repeated hospitalizations, believing that nothing would ever change.

My ex-husband pulled me out of that room, although the life we created together eventually became another kind of prison. That relationship broke open a life that had already gone numb. What followed was terrible, but it forced everything hidden into the light. There was nowhere left to run, drink, or sleep my life away.

And now?

Now I live independently in a beautiful apartment that belongs to me. I have friends, responsibilities, faith, purpose, and a social life so full that sometimes I need to schedule time just to sit down and breathe.

I have parents who crossed states and rebuilt their own lives to help save mine.

I have a church family that trusts me to stand at the podium, carry Scripture in my voice, and bring the Eucharist to people who need comfort.

And I have the love of a man who is complicated, gorgeous, sexy, bashful, hungry for me, and somehow still shy enough to ask whether I truly believe he is as beautiful as I tell him he is.

“You think so?” he always asks. Yes, sleepy bear. I really do.

So, do we need a little chaos to shake things up?

Absolutely.

Not the kind that destroys us for sport. Not the kind that traps us in addiction, danger, or despair. But the kind that interrupts a life we have stopped living. The kind that pushes us through a door we were too frightened to open. The kind that scatters the old pieces so we can finally see what is worth putting back together.

Chaos may have shattered the life I once knew.

But grace taught me what to build in its place.

And apparently, I needed a little madness to discover just how much life was still waiting for me.