Celebrating: one year on Substack.

Embodied Deconstruction turns 1—here's why I'm more committed to the name than I ever thought I would be.

I thought I’d be approaching July—and one year on Substack—with a rebrand. Instead, I’m leaning further into the name I chose from the beginning: Embodied Deconstruction. For me, as a chronically ill/disabled person, what I named it last year has taken on a whole new meaning this year.

What started as a project of writing solely on deconstruction as a concept or on redefining theologies and practices I grew up with, has become writing about how it lives and moves and breathes within my body, which itself is deconstructing, too.¹

This very embodied deconstruction is coming to a very unexpected crescendo this month with a surgery I did not see coming².

It’s a literal deconstruction—a structure within my body being excised, removed, cauterized—to make space for pain to no longer pervade my everyday existence (that’s the hope).

These two ideas are woven together though, right?

Suffering & deconstruction feel like a liminal, braided tightrope beneath my feet.

And my feet—with my very dexterous (hypermobile) toes, let me tell you—that is, my body, is the thing walking it.

Photo by Sandip Karangiya on Unsplash

This year has proven that my body often reveals my old beliefs, especially about suffering and pain —beliefs like:

There is always purpose in suffering. We suffer so God can teach us something.

I must hope in God’s will only—not my own desires to get better or experience relief.

Or, seeking answers is the opposite of faith.

I no longer believe those things. I’ve deconstructed those beliefs. I’ve found that at the core of my experience, at its foundation, these ideas can be believed instead:

Finding purpose in suffering is not necessary; it’s grief avoidance.

And not only am I allowed to grieve, I believe that God grieves with me. God (or whatever name you have for him/her/they³) doesn’t want us to suffer. She doesn’t hide some higher purpose within it that we have to dig up as if we are treasure hunters; who has time or energy to do that while suffering anyway?! Sure, we might learn something along the way, about ourselves or even about God; lessons aren’t ever absent no matter what we are going through, but that’s not the reason why we suffer.

Some sort of goal or purpose in our suffering should never push aside our grief. Because we need grief to process & integrate what is happening.

Only then can we see the gifts of our grief and our pain—gifts that are far more beautiful than anything we can dig up ourselves.

Hope is not and does not need to be limited to “godly” or spiritual things.

Hope can be holy as a wholly human experience, as a fully embodied experience, not only as something or someone we pin ourselves to—like God’s will, which I believe is not a rigid, unchanging thing, not something we can say as if it is an X on the treasure map that we might find, if we do all the right things—like hoping in it only. I now believe that God’s will is more like grace than something predetermined—a gift we don’t have to figure out or follow a map towards. Grace includes us, too. It includes our hopes and fears, our desires and doubts.

So if you want to say you hope in God’s will, that’s okay, just know that it includes your hopes, too, because hope is within us, a part of us, and can be tangible and touchable, too. Hope can be held; I think it becomes more real to us when it is.

I am allowed to hope in both God (something/one higher than yourself) AND in the outcome I really, really want to see happen.

To that point, answers aren’t the opposite of faith. Why else would we pray or hope for certain things?

I’ve been told before that I should stop asking God for answers; that I should just wait upon his will. Get really still. But all that did was silence me, and I don’t think that God wants that. And, it made not getting answers so much harder, because then what did that mean? That I didn’t pray for them? Or that God didn’t want to help me? Suddenly, my faith was diminished. All because someone said wanting answers was the problem.

Sometimes there aren’t answers, but that doesn’t mean our faith or hopes were wrong or misplaced; it means, I think, that there’s more ahead of us than answers. There’s more journey to go on. That might mean there’s answer, after answer, after not-an-answer, after no-answers, after answer… on and on the journey inevitably goes, because this is the way of life. A collection of answers as stepping stones—and wet feet as we wait for the next one.

Photo by Mr Catographer on Unsplash

Those wet feet prove it: faith is a mystery. It’s trust, often in things we can’t see, water we can’t control. But we can also have faith in things we can see, the answers we need—and most of all, the people we have around us.

When we put faith in people, I think it’s precisely because we see that mystery—or Divinity—in them.

This is the mystery of faith I’m most seeing in my life, in these weeks leading up to surgery especially:

In friends who show up for you.

In my friends (and my husband), I have faith that I’m not alone. Even when it feels like I am. I learn that I don’t need to avoid my grief; I need to let others in on it.

In a surgeon who speaks words of kindness and care to you, who doesn’t hide his humanity from you.

In a surgeon, I see my hope for answers isn’t unfounded. His care for me agrees with me: answers are worth taking risks for.

In grief that offers gifts you didn’t see coming.

In grief, I have faith that the end is not ever truly the end. Unanswered hopes wet my feet with a current that whispers, “Look to the horizon; there is more ahead.”

In writing all these things, I find purpose that transcends suffering—without denying it.

In writing this year (especially these days/weeks), I’ve broken over a decade’s worth of silence around my body and all its pain. Writing has been my purpose all along, but it’s never asked me to push through my pain to fulfill it or to avoid grief in its name. It’s asked me to keep coming back to it, to process and integrate and grieve and cry—all while writing. Because purpose doesn’t have to be outwardly focused; it can simply be what you need to keep surviving.

When I see the mystery of faith in these ways, I find deconstruction in all of it.

No longer is anything black or white, though I will have to fight that ingrained pull the rest of my life; all is foggy grey—like how the misty clouds seem to grip both heaven and earth at sunrise.

Heaven and earth. Body and soul. Stepping stones and wet feet. We’ll always hold it all.

And I’ll keep writing about it here.

Happy one year anniversary to this space!

Thank you for being here. Because I am having surgery on July 22, know that new posts will be sparse for the coming weeks, but I’ll try and check in when I can. I will also be out of work for a few weeks at least. Which means a lot of lost income, to be completely honest with you.

If you’d like to support me and my family during this time, one of the ways you can do that is to upgrade to a paid subscription. This will get you some older posts in the archive, access to all paid posts, which you can go back and read during the time I won’t be writing, and more, depending on the level you subscribe at. You can choose a one-time payment for the year or a monthly one.

You can also choose to do a one-time donation outside of Substack via Venmo.

This would be such a big help to me during this time. Thanks again for being here.

A question to end with: How has deconstruction been both body and soul for you? In other words: How has it been embodied?

PS: Did you notice my subtle nod to my history with India in the photos I chose for this post? That’s because July is when I moved back to the States nine years ago, after living in India for two years. So, just reminiscing over that place I loved, but it was also a fluke (or not) finding both pictures for tightrope & feet in water that are from India. Love!

1. I must credit a friend for this one, who said the name of my Substack jumped out at her recently, and it led to this realization that it’s exactly what’s happening to us literally, to our bodies.

2. Read to the end of this post to know how you can support me during this time.

3. In case you didn’t know, I’m pretty fluid with my pronouns for God and always want to be inclusive with want name/designation you might use, including the Universe, Fate, etc.