I do not understand grace. Performance based love & acceptance has been my norm for so long, that even when I thought I was eradicated from that way of thinking (I mean, hey, I even got a tattoo about that so you’d totally think I was cured by my intrepidity, right?), nope. There it is again, showing up in that little corner or random belief. It’s like the Where’s Waldo of specious philosophies.

For example: I was 100% wrong about the Donald Miller “life’s a story” theory. My contumacious mind took that idea and warped it to mean “Life is a story you want to tell so make sure you’re always perfect and there are no plot holes because there’s an audience you have to please or they’ll want their money back! You must have the best life story ever or else nobody will care (let alone turn it into an Emmy winning HBO miniseries.”

SO yeah. I don’t recommend living like that. My Myers-Brigg personality type, ENTJ, explains this as having “impossibly high standards you force on yourself and others” and while I think it’s kind of puerile to based your personhood on a personality test, I totally agree with it there.

For a while, I could keep up with my performance based ideology & standards. I mean, it wasn’t the easiest, but it was like a monastic vow of my own making. I was religiously devoted to performance and control.

And then my stupid foot broke and with that one tiny bone, the dam holding back all those impossible standards shattered with it.

These past three and a half months have been utterly abasing– I have no friends here, no independence, no audience to perform to. I now live in a city which is rather rustic & austere. I went through a terrible depression–mostly due to the fact that I was disappointing myself. I could not match my high standards. I felt like I was failing myself. (I imagined much greater things for myself than what I was living.) Ironically, I always thought “I don’t know how she does it” would be the best praise ever–and now I hear that from people because they don’t know how I stand having zero independence.

All this to say, God didn’t forget about me. Ever since I returned from my semester abroad last year, I’ve been living one giant lesson on grace–this chapter just so happens to be on how to give grace to myself. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was my performance mentality. Sometimes there’s still a bit of a struggle between my pre-injury, super harsh mentality & my current “not living for an audience” mindset, but the old layer is just molting.

I’m ready to be more sportive towards life and less calculated. I’m ready to just be free from performance based acceptance. If you struggle with that too, you’re totally not alone. One way we can work together in all this is to stop criticizing others (see how hypocritical that can be?)–let’s just agree to give everyone a lot more grace, truly the best way to start giving ourselves more grace too (minus breaking your foot and giving up everything, but that’s definitely the Jonah moment–save yourself the struggle.)