finding room to just breathe...

It's been a rough few weeks…months. Or maybe it's been years. All this time, however long it's been, life has waved at me like I'm some old, almost-forgotten friend who missed the bus or the train or the carpool that takes people to places where they can really live instead of just exist.

I don't know when exactly it happened, but I lost myself somewhere in the middle of all that time.

It might have started back in college, when I balanced three jobs (editor-in-chief of the student newspaper, substitute teacher and freelance writer for the San Antonio Express-News) to pay my bills, a full semester of writing-intensive classes and an out-of-control pressure to maintain my 4.0 GPA.

Or maybe it was back in high school, when I turned 16 and realized my parents couldn't afford to pay for my insurance and the gas to drive the school, back when I landed my first job. Working wouldn't have been such a big deal, except that I played volleyball and tennis and ran track and was a drum major for the high school band and an all-state clarinet player and in the running for valedictorian.

Maybe this balancing act began way back then.

I used to think, naively, that God had gifted me with some crazily awesome time-management skills (how else could I get so much done in so little time?). But last week, while Ben and I were in the studio recording the songs for Progeny's second album, I discovered something about all those accomplishments.

Every one of them had pocketed a little piece of me, and I just sat back and watched them do it.

So when the MakeShift Records guys told me they needed me to add a little "personality" to my solo songs, my first thought was that I didn't know how to do it or what it would sound like or how my personality, as uninteresting as I am, could make any difference at all.

They stopped me halfway through my song, called me back into the main studio room. I remember how the room spun as I walked toward the black leather couch, how dry my mouth was and how my nose burned with tears that I couldn't let them see (but ended up doing anyway).

They said they needed something more from me, something that showed them I believed in the song, that I wasn't "singing karaoke" behind a studio mic. I told them I didn't know how to give them more, that Ben was the creative genius behind our song melodies, the one with the "big" voice.

But they sent me back into that little vocal room, told me I was just as talented as Ben is, that I didn't need a "big" voice to sing a great song. I just needed to show who I was.

I thought about that in the short distance between the studio room and the vocal room. I thought about how I had left myself behind all those years ago when time and all its demands first started smudging my face and my heart with this gigantic eraser. I thought about who I believed I was now and how different that was from who God says I am.

I let God speak. He told me he has gifted me with the voice he needed me to have, to reach the most people. He told me to have courage in it and to embrace it and to really believe in it so it can reach out the way he intended it to. He told me I am beautiful and wonderful and precious.

And then I sang. The song happens to be amazing.

One night last week, Jadon and I drove to my parents' house after I covered an event for the newspaper. It was late. The two-lane highway that stretches its arms from Beeville, where the event was, to Victoria, where my parents live, was unfamiliar to me.

As I drove out of town, a thick fog made me blink my eyes to make sure my contacts had not shifted to the wrong part of my eyes. It was so hard to see anything except the orange construction cones that passed my bumper every few feet. I drove slowly and carefully and shaking with fear.

I realized after our studio time that that's how I'd been living. Slowly and carefully and shaking with fear. But I'm tired of the fog. I want to see clearly…and take risks…and really, really live. I want to find the parts of me that I traded for another plaque on the wall, no matter how long that takes. I want to learn how to breathe again.

And along the way, I'd like to sing…and maybe bust a few moves here and there, too.

Thank you, God, for the fogs that always lift, no matter how thick they've become, and for the brilliant, eye-stinging clarity that comes once they do.