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Drop the Drapes

What’s past is prologue.

—William Shakespeare, The Tempest

I recently came across an old journal. You know how intriguing that can be, to look back at your thoughts from years ago. Especially because it’s easy to move on, to forget, to disconnect from who we were back then. Or, at least, it is for me.

The entry is a letter written from me, to me.

The letter is marked October 8, 2008. On that day, I was thirty-two years old. I was not yet a mother. I was significantly pregnant with two babies who would be born nine weeks later.

I wrote the letter to myself in ten years, which meant the thirty-two-year-old Leeana was sending her deepest thoughts on the wind to the forty-two-year-old Leeana.

I was on the precipice of life change, though I had no idea how to even anticipate, let alone prepare for, what was about to happen. Additionally, I was very much in the awful middle of my first book, which despite rewrites upon rewrites, would not come together for me. I was slightly paralyzed with anxiety, not quite sure how to reconcile who I was and who I was becoming.

The letter is dear and sentimental and I’m so grateful to have come across it. It’s amazing to see what I wrote to myself about the babies, not sure what they’d look like, what their names would be.

What’s most intriguing to me about this letter is the way it ends. The final paragraph reads: “I have inklings of you—parts of you I feel like I know and parts I’m sure I will discover.” And then the very last line: I hope you have felt the freedom to become.

This is truly unreal, because I found this journal while I’m in the middle of writing a book about being brazen, about becoming, about growing into our voices and living into our longings.

It’s the very thing I want for my children: that they will feel the freedom and support to become who they are meant to become, who they were created to be in their center. It’s what I’ve always wanted for myself—one of my deepest and most enduring longings—probably because I have become in so many essential ways, but my becoming has also been thwarted in certain seasons. By anxiety. By my desire to be easily liked more than wildly loved. By my insecurities. By my intoxication with image instead of my quiet nurturing of identity.

I was writing that letter to the forty-two-year-old Leeana. I’m not there quite yet, but I am closer to her than I am to the thirty-two-year-old Leeana who wrote the letter, and I can say definitively that I’m ready to live into—as intentionally as I possibly can—the freedom to become.

I want that for you too. I see too many of us becoming more and more invisible because it suits those around us or because we’re afraid of what standing up and standing out might cost us. We are afraid to become and live from our beautiful and bold Created Center.

Or, as Ann Kidd Taylor put it, “I learned how easy it is to give up and become draperies while everyone else is dancing.”1

Doesn’t that just nail it?!

Perhaps becoming draperies has served us. It’s what we’ve chosen for ourselves. It’s what other people in our lives have expected us to be. Or becoming draperies was how we kept everyone happy. But somewhere along the way we got lost. We got lost behind depression or our empty nest or our abuse or our need to be perceived as nice or even our piles of laundry. We got lost behind responsibility or fatigue or misunderstanding. We got lost behind fear or our inability to fight for ourselves. We got lost behind the weight of our responsibilities.

Are we ready for a new way? Are we ready to consider what it might be like to drop the drapes and get on the dance floor? Are we ready to become?

Become is a great word. Its etymology is “to come to a place, come to be or do something, receive.” The definition is “to begin to be, to undergo change or development.” It’s kind of a contradiction within itself to both “be” and “come”—a state and an action all in the same word. I like to think of becoming as both waiting and receiving, which is really the essence of the dance.

We are both onward and waiting. We are both being and coming. We are both pursuing and receiving. We are holding the tension of a state of being and an action at the same time. In this tension is where we learn the dance. We learn the movements of returning—to God, to the whispers and nudges of our Created Center, to the garden of our own soul where we are given freedom to roam. In this way, the movement is back to something inexplicably familiar, like home, and yet mysteriously unexplored.

The dance, then, is not some boisterously obnoxious display. It’s not about attention seeking. The dance is about allowing God to show us around what he already knows, who we already are, and—like the hummingbird who migrates thousands of miles and then returns to the same garden on the same day, year after year—our home.

As we drop the drapes and step into the dance, we get glimpses of our Created Center that God is inviting us to investigate. And, somewhere down deep, we know that true freedom is not chasing after the forbidden but, instead, embracing the already.

I want to make good on what that thirty-two-year-old me wrote to the forty-two-year-old me. I want to honor her by showing her that, yes, in fact, I am becoming. Slowly and surely, I am becoming.

I’m unwilling to let my Created Center be muted. And so I begin again. I return to the Creator, the ultimate artist. Some days the dance steps feel awkward and unpracticed. And then there are the days when I realize I’m learning a rhythm I always, already knew.

Reflection & Expression

Write a letter to who you will be in ten years. What do you want to say to that older version of yourself?

In what ways are you drapery?

What does dancing represent to you?

For Your Brazen Board

Add a picture of someone dancing.