Life is a game of Hide and Seek that never ends. We hide the things that might be perceived as disadvantage, disability, or dysfunction and seek what we perceive to be perfection in someone else’s life. We are afraid because recovery comes swaddled in blankets of stigma and it isn’t trendy to be mentally ill, differently-abled, or in pain.
So we hide.
And although our friends are not counting to ten, they are still keeping score. We all think we are winning the game. We all think that no one knows where we hide our souls, but darkness has a way of s p r e a d i n g i t s e l f a r o u n d until we don’t know what to hide and what to seek anymore. Then it’s “ready or not, here I come” and the hunt is on.
So we hide.
And we pray that we won’t be found. But, if we are honest, we are just crossing our fingers and not really praying; because we are just as frightened by the possibility that God will find us as we are of our friends and neighbors seeing our vulnerability uncovered and completely true.
So we hide.
We hide from introspection and self-awareness. We deny the skeletons in our closet because we think that our healing isn’t as valuable as our reputation. We distract ourselves to the point of exhaustion because we are terrified. If we look in the closet now, we might find that those skeletons that we abandoned long ago have grown flesh and rotted.
So we close our eyes, and count to ten
We hide and we lie and we hide some more. Denial does nothing but add fuel to a fire that will eventually kill you. If you want to put it out, you have to face it. Excuses are like great whiskey. They taste good in your mouth; but when the sweetness is gone, they really begin to burn. We have to stop caring what dishonesty tastes like in our mouths and start caring about what it does to us once it goes down. If we want to stay alive, we have to develop a taste for the truth.
So we close our eyes, and count to ten.
What if we reverse the role of the struggles in our lives and make them our strengths, the stepping stones to becoming whole? What if we could stop letting our abilities and disabilities, our past and present misfortunes, and our addictions and illnesses define the amount of love and happiness that we believe we are allowed to have. We have to stop hiding. We have to truly begin asking God for the courage to face ourselves. We must begin to cut the darkness away, one secret at a time. Turn an eye inward and be brave. Quit the game now, or you might never find yourself.
Ready or not, here I come!
