The years are not lost

On the illusion of perfection, the wreckage that breaks it, and what we have come to believe about the years it cost us.

There is a way of being in the world that most of us learn early and almost no one names.

We learn that there are versions of ourselves it is safer to show — tidier, more capable, more faithful, less weary, less afraid — and that the way to belong is to show those versions. We bring them to church. We bring them to family gatherings. We bring them, eventually, into our own marriages. We may not know we are doing it. We may call it being good.

We have come to call it the Illusion of Perfection. It is the work — exhausting, mostly invisible, almost universal — of maintaining an image of ourselves that we hope others will love, because we are not yet sure they would love who we actually are. We acknowledge with our mouths that no one but the Savior is perfect. Then we proceed to do everything in our power to look like we might be the exception.

The room of actors

What makes the illusion so hard to see, and so hard to drop, is that everyone is doing it at once.

We look around, and the people in the next pew, the next row of folding chairs, the next house, all appear to be holding it together. So we conclude that we are the only one who isn’t, and we work harder to look like we are. What we don’t realize is that they are looking at us and concluding the same thing. We are all in a room of actors who have each decided that everyone else is the audience. No one is being themselves. No one believes anyone else is being themselves. And yet the performance continues, because to stop is to be the only one who stopped.

You are who this is for

Most of you reading this are not yet on the other side of that performance. We know. We were there for years. We want to say something to you directly, before this post goes any further, because the rest of what we are going to say might otherwise sound like it is for someone else.

It is not for someone else. It is for you.

What we are going to describe is not a destination you have to reach before your life starts mattering. The years you are in right now — the hardest ones — are not waste. They are not subtracted from your life. They are the work. The person you will be on the far side of this is being made in this, right now, in the part that feels like nothing is happening. Lehi told his son Jacob, who was born in the wilderness during the family’s exile from Jerusalem, that God shall consecrate thine afflictions for thy gain. That is not a sentence about what happens after the wilderness. It is a sentence about the wilderness itself. The afflictions are not removed from the account at the end. They are sanctified into the gain. They become part of who you are, and part of what you can give.

We did not understand this for many years. We are still learning it. But we have come far enough to say to you: where you are right now is sacred ground, even when it does not feel like it. Especially when it does not feel like it.

What it costs and how it breaks

The illusion costs more than most of us realize while we are inside it. It is what makes neighborhood relationships shallower than they want to be. It is what makes family gatherings tiring in ways that have nothing to do with the people. It is what teaches our children, without our meaning to, that the way to be loved is to perform. And it cuts us off from the very people who would love us, fully, if they knew us.

For most of us, the illusion does not break gently. It breaks in some kind of wreckage. A divorce. An addiction surfacing. A child whose path the friends did not expect. A diagnosis. A death. Something that makes the carefully managed image impossible to keep maintaining, because too many people now know things. And in the days and weeks after, in among the grief and the shame, you may notice something else, something almost embarrassing in its smallness: relief. The thing you spent so much energy protecting was costing you more than you knew.

What grew

What we want to describe now is not a practice. It is what life feels like when the illusion has, slowly, fallen away — not because we are advanced in some way, but because the wreckage cleared the ground for something else to grow.

What grew, for us, was the ability to be in a room with another person and not be performing. To say a true thing in passing — this season has been heavier than I have let on — without rehearsing it first. To be tired in front of someone without having to explain it away. To let our children see us be wrong, and apologize, and try again, instead of pretending we had not been wrong. To stop reaching, a hundred times a day, for the practiced answer.

What surprised us is that being real with people is not always met with relief, at least not at first. For people who are not used to being around real people, the first reaction is often discomfort. It is as if a taboo subject has just been broached. The unspoken rules of the conversation we were supposed to be having have been broken, and they don’t quite know what to do with that. The temptation, when you see that on someone’s face, is to put the mask back on. To laugh and walk it back. To make them comfortable again.

We have learned not to. What happens, almost every time, if you stay real long enough, is that they realize you are not running a different kind of game on them. Something shifts. The discomfort softens. And then, almost like they are whispering to share a secret, they begin to open up too. It is amazing to witness. It is liberating to be part of. And it is full of light.

The years are not lost

What has surprised us most about all of this is something we did not expect to be able to say.

We have come to believe that we could not have arrived at the marriage we have now without the years that came before. Each of us, separately, in our first marriages, was learning things we did not know we were learning. The patience. The capacity to sit with another person’s pain. The willingness to be wrong. The understanding of what love costs and what it does not cost. We would not be the people we are now without those years. We would not have known how to love each other the way we love each other now. The fire taught us things we could not have learned any other way.

We sometimes say to each other, I wish we had met thirty years ago. And then we walk it back, because it is not actually true. Thirty years ago we were not the people who could have built what we have built. The years did the work. Not all suffering teaches, but suffering met with humility, and met with honesty, and met with whatever capacity for love we could muster on a given day — that suffering is not waste. It is the becoming.

Weak things become strong

There is a verse in Ether we did not understand for years. The Lord says,

I give unto men weakness that they may be humble; and my grace is sufficient for all men that humble themselves before me; for if they will humble themselves before me, and have faith in me, then will I make weak things become strong unto them.

We used to read this as a promise that God would replace our weaknesses with strengths. We now read it differently. The verse says weak things become strong. Not that weakness gets removed and strength gets installed. The weakness itself, owned and offered up, is what becomes the strength. You do not become someone who never struggled. You become someone whose struggle has been consecrated. And that turns out to be a different kind of strength than the kind we used to want.

This is what we mean when we use the word becoming. Not the gradual perfecting of an image. The gradual letting-go of one. Not arriving anywhere impressive. Slowly, gently, becoming a person you can actually live with — and a person other people can rest near.

If you are still in the wreckage, or still in the part where you are barely holding yourself together for one more Sunday — we want you to know what we wish someone had told us when we were where you are.

You are not behind. You are not failing. The life that is being made in you right now is not less real because it is hard. The Lord is not waiting for you to become impressive before He starts loving you. He is loving you in this — especially in this — and He is at work in you right now, in the part you cannot see.

It is hard. We will not pretend otherwise. But what is being made in you is real. And the years are not lost.

They are you becoming.

The years are not lost. They are you becoming. Wherever you are in them, you are on sacred ground.