Leap Into Truth
On Instagram I shared the quote below from the first draft of my book. The quote comes from the chapter in which I come out to my parents. When I was searching for the words to describe what it felt like to come out, I thought of bungee jumping. Not just the idea of a leap of faith. But actually a feeling I hadn’t expected when I went to jump. The feeling of leaning out over the edge, right after you lean out but before you start to fall – a single moment of instant regret and then instant surrender. Here is the full quote from the book:
There is a point when you can’t come back. You’ve leaned out so far from the edge that there is no clutching again to the frame you were standing in just a breath ago. There is no way to turn around and put your feet on solid ground. You are leaning so far out now that you cannot will yourself back. In that moment, there is an incredible feeling that you’ve made a huge mistake.
I could die because of this, you think. And I was fine. I was just fine. A breath ago.
And then, with one more breath there is a a sudden pivot, a negotiation you make with your own soul. A letting go.
Because you can only fall. You can only feel the air rushing over your face and neck and arms and belly, between your legs, over your back, tossing your hair wildly. You can only see impressions of the ground, the walls of cliffside around you, the water below, perhaps the sky above. And you do consider the horrible truth that you might have been wrong all along, that, despite what you wished for, you might smash into smithereens.
I remember, even now, the rush of air and color. I remember, even now, the bright happiness that filled my body, the total release of myself. My cells lit up like stars.
A photo of me bungee jumping near Lake Taupo, New Zealand in 2004
Coming out to my parents was excruciatingly difficult. It was a decision I thought about since childhood. It was a decision I came to after a million other decisions to live in truth, to follow hope and to commit to love.
You, I hope, will read the story of that night in the book that you’ll eventually hold in your hands. Here’s what you won’t read in my book, a few things I’ve been thinking about since I dug up those pictures of the day I went bungee jumping in New Zealand.
My internship in New Zealand was the beginning of me breaking away. Entering college at 18, I was a zealous Christian. I felt committed to Christianity, but unsure of how to find solid ground amid so many concepts that seemed incongruent, like a puzzle without all the pieces. Outside of my homestay, most of the Christians I met during my church internship in New Zealand were either cold and unwelcoming or downright unkind to me. I left impressed by the beauty of the place, but questioning the idea that carrying the label ‘Christian’ guaranteed any kind of welcome or belonging, which didn’t make sense to me at 19.
The trip to New Zealand was the beginning of a path that led me to Peace Corps. I’d been inspired to travel by my love of reading. I’d turned to ministry and foreign missions after a high school religious experience set me on a path of purpose - to find the truth of what it meant to be alive and to try to share that truth. There were many, many people in my church who loved me which I felt deeply, But my religion, it turned out, did not provide a space of unconditional, abundant love. As I got older and travelled more, I found that Christian communities were indiscernible to me from any other kind of community. They had just as much good and just as much bad. But I held onto the idea that I had something to give to the world. I also fell in love with crossing thresholds across cultural divides, and through a college mentor and advice from a friend, I channelled that love into Peace Corps.
I watched my parents let go. I do not know all of what it was like for my parents to see me slowly leave home. First it was this summer internship in New Zealand. My mom would later tell me that she thought my trip to New Zealand was a blip and that afterward I’d settle into a more Texas-bound future. I did not. Instead travelled to more than a dozen countries over the next three years, staying in three of them for more than two months. My parents never wavered when I asked them to take me to the airport. They never said, “No.” They never tried to stop me. Instead, my mom snuck notes into my bags, wrote them in my blank journals, all of which told me how much she missed me and how proud of me she was. My dad got up early, sometimes driving me the three hours to DFW before the sun even rose, then turning around to drive home while I flew through the clouds. Now, as a parent myself, I cannot imagine how they were able to let go of their baby in a time before cell phones, before international texting, when a summer in New Zealand meant they wouldn’t hear my voice until I landed back at home. How did they do that? I’ll have to ask them.
I’m excited for you to read the my book that includes a reflection of this moment in New Zealand, braided with the night I came out to my parents six years later. Until then, cheers to leaps of faith leaps into truth.
