I want to tell you that 2010 was the year that leveled me and flattened me good.

That would be a lie though.

If I properly retrace my memory down to the bones of it then 2010 was the year I acquired baggage. Lots and lots of baggage. Except I didn’t really know how to call it that at the time.

Looking back, I see what I didn’t see when I was graduating from college and moving to New York City: I heaved around suitcases of heartbreak as if I were the inventor of suitcases, myself, and I handed out sleeping bags to every “not good enough” comment rattling in my head. I gave all the baggage room to sleep. And the longer you let baggage sleep in your mind, the harder it is to clear that baggage out and call it all lies.

I know this all happened in 2010 because at the cusp of 2011, in the middle of a party with hats and cheesy bread, I felt like I didn’t even know who I was anymore. I was just a girl with lots of baggage. I could trace the faces of my friends and I wondered if they looked at me and thought to themselves, “Where’d ya go?”

And I didn’t know how to let go. I mean, how do you even start to let go and just give yourself permission to be free?

It was 2011 that leveled and flattened me out.

I know it now for sure. I don’t know if there are any real defining moments you’d pick out from the crowd but I remember the pieces that made me feel like dust: I was a full-time volunteer. For an entire year, I’d made a commitment to make no money and serve in the Bronx, New York. New York City had been sucked dry of all her romance as I struggled with the unworthiness of trying to be something “chic” with a $25 a week stipend.

I was riddled with an eating disorder. My eating disorder was a quiet whisperer throughout the day. She controlled every step and action, every crumb that did or did not reach my mouth. She watched me until I went to sleep. She sang me stingy lullabies as she sat stiff in an armchair I never did learn how to like.

It was the parts of me that were hungry that would come out of hiding after.

After she took her eyes off of me.

After my roommates went to sleep.

After the lights flickered down the hallways.

After I could crawl from my sheets and tiptoe down the long hallway and sit atop our kitchen table with a bowl full of food and finally admit to the the ceiling and mice hiding in the walls, “I am hungry. I am so hungry. To love. To be enough. To stop being so fearful. I am so hungry to not hate myself so furiously.”

The nights were never silent back then. No, they were never were so silent.

That year was full heartbreak for me.

I look back and think I was young, and maybe naive, but I knew how to decode heartbreak and the breakdown was still pretty titanical to a girl who was 22 and trying to put her life together. And it was hard to write a whole book on that year because I struggled daily with wanting to call my editor up and just say into the phone, “I don’t know how to focus on anything but heartbreak. How do I change the story? How do I find the good in what I long-convinced myself would always be bad?”

That’s the hardest hurdle you’ll ever get over, writer or no writer at all: Deciding that you’re going to love the mud that once transformed you. Deciding you are going to finally pass a buck of grace to yourself for not holding the world together all the time.

I just remember this one time, at the start of 2011, where we went on a weekend retreat to Atlantic City for the volunteer program. It was before the boardwalk got obliterated by Sandy (that little tyrant). I remember how cold it was outside and how I tried to breathe hot air onto my fingers as I forced myself to run that boardwalk. Up and down. Up and down. Because sometimes running makes you believe in new beginnings again. And the sweet Lord knows, I needed to believe in something good and optimistic in 2011.

But more than anything, I remember getting to the cottage. And my roommates and I found our separate rooms. And I nearly cried because there was a full length mirror hanging on the wall. As if God was giving me a present, there was a full length mirror waiting for me.

I took that mirror off the wall immediately.  And I cradled it in my hands before propping it up on the floor in the closet. I got down on my knees and crawled into the closet. It was such a compact space, whoever once lived there never needed much room for clothes.

I sat Indian-style, facing the mirror. I closed the door to shut me in. And I wondered how long I could just sit there. How long it would take to reconcile the pieces of this broken girl.

Call it dramatic. You know what, I will call it dramatic before you do but that’s all I really knew how to do during that time in my life when I wasn’t crying: sit in the mirror and look at myself and wonder what I was doing. I did it often. On several occasions. In bathrooms. And fitting rooms. And the quietest places I could find in New York City.

I wanted to know why I was my own wrecking ball. I still want to know that: why we decide to become our own wrecking balls when life is just a miracle we’re asked to hold.

I guess I am afraid to find out that I am holding paper chains. Maybe that is my biggest fear, just like the one Marianne Williamson put out there: “”Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.”

I want to raise up my hands. I want to tell her and tell everyone that I don’t know how to be something apart from inadequate. So no, that quote doesn’t fit me so well because I don’t want to be anything other than the girl who messes up the bigger story. That’s silly to even admit— God is far too big and far too wide for you to ever worry about messing up his bigger story.

But inadequate is a sweater I’ve always worn, even if I don’t like the feel of the material or the itchiness of the collar. And who am I without it? I mean, who am I when I choose to say “enough” and just walk away from the smaller anthems that tell me I will never reach the point of Enoughness. As if it were a destination, I need to reach the land of Enoughness.

Enoughness is not a word but maybe it should be. Maybe it should be a program of studies at NYU. The Studies of Enoughness. Because we worship that word long and hard enough to make a science out of it.

We carry it like a suitcase— like baggage— into relationships. Into careers. Into family matters. Into all the places where we should have never been riddled with those sorts of questions: Who do you think you are? And why do you think that you matter? And will you, oh, will you ever add up?

Like I said earlier, I am afraid to find out that I am holding paper chains. I am gripping them so tightly. And it would just be a matter of ripping them— one by one— to be able to say to the paper and the staples that held the loops intact: you are finished. You are done. No more. No more.

I wish I could go back sometimes.

With all the strength and might that sits inside of me, I wish I could go back and wedge myself into the closet to sit beside the girl— the 2011 girl— who is trying to find her worth in a mirror. I wish I could wedge my way in and find a way to tell her the truth.

“Hey you,” I’d probably whisper. It sounds like a friendly enough introduction. “ Hey you, I am sorry all of this is happening. I am sorry that you are still in the muds of it. But you’ll be thankful one day. I just need you know that: one day the darkness will clear and you’ll crawl out of this tiny space and you’ll be thankful.”

Because only in the darkness do we know light. Only, and only, if ever there was a word called “darkness” would there be a reason to create another word to counter that word called “light.” And maybe that’s just life: patches of darkness and patches of light. Sometimes we see it all so clearly. Sometimes we don’t know the way. Sometimes we grab the hands of others too tightly and they’re just thankful— just so thankful— that you’re finally grabbing on and needing to be held.

It’s dark. And we weren’t called to walk the road alone. And you could always look up. Don’t you know that? You could always just look up if you need something to catch you. 

And maybe that’s why the stars are so pure and so golden. Maybe that’s why it is important to stop and breathe and bundle up and climb out on the roof to look at the stars at night.

The stars are beautiful. And reliable. And they ask no questions. They sort-of just let you be. They let you sit there and feel so small and ready in the still of silent nights and hopeful that the morning is going to come.

I don’t know about you but I believe someone made those stars. Every big, batch of heat and light was crafted and ready to serve a purpose. And it wasn’t an accident. Just like me, those stars were not an accident. They were not a mistake. They were just big balls of light that would one day make a girl like me so hopeful when I watched them stand there in the night sky. Not moving. Not budging. Not going anywhere.

That’s all I want to believe on any given Friday or Monday or Thursday: that if the stars that guide me home are enough to be adored, then I could be too.

I could be too.

No questions asked.