36
Break at Least One Rule

The mind I love must have wild places.

—Katherine Mansfield

Bear Bryant, the legendary coach of the University of Alabama Crimson Tide, allegedly once told the media that there are two kinds of football players who are no good: “The ones who never do anything you tell them, and the ones who always do everything you tell them.”

My dad told me that story last summer. I’m still thinking about it.

So many of us have lived our lives by a series of rules, the kind of rules that others told us would make us good, successful, loved. The kind of rules that would keep everyone comfortable. We were shown these rules in a thousand different ways, reinforced by a thousand different experiences of embarrassment, praise, discomfort, acceptance. The rules were taught and they were caught.

If we wake up one day and realize we don’t really know what we want or what we think about things, doesn’t that mean—perhaps—the rules didn’t serve us?

Breaking rules for the sake of breaking rules is adolescent. But is there an outside chance you’re following rules that are contributing to your hiding?

Is that possible?

Here are six rules you may be following (without even knowing it, in some cases) that will not serve you. I only tell you this because I’ve learned the hard way.

Rule #1: You must tame your husband.

I’m probably going to get into some hot water here, but I have witnessed time and time again this pervasive cancer of we women wanting to emasculate our husbands and then getting diabolically contemptuous when they become passive and detached.

My husband does and says a lot of stuff that makes me uncomfortable. Some of which we’re working through and some of which I need to just let go of. I need to let him nurture his own wild so I can honor and enjoy the very best parts of him. This is tricky, messy, totally uncharted, and therapy-worthy. The Soul Bullies want to give us a list of rules we must abide by and our loved ones must abide by too, no matter their interests, personalities, or preferences. This is because the Soul Bullies are all about control. Would I rather control my husband or know him? (Depends on the day, to be honest.)

For many years of our marriage, I believed all of Steve’s behavior reflected back on me, which made me take way too much responsibility for him. The experts call this enmeshment, I think. Or is it codependence? Either way, I’ve had to learn to back away, get my grubby little hands off of his life, and let him sink or swim on his own. Great practice for raising kids too. Ugghhh.

Steve is going to hunt animals and cook them and eat them. Steve is going to cuss. Steve is going to talk about politics a little too aggressively. Steve is going to do a whole host of things I would prefer to edit and domesticate. But here is the down-and-dirty truth: I have never gained anything by trying to get Steve to be the version of himself that would make me most comfortable. Period.

To tell you the truth, the thing I am drawn to most in Steve is this wild. I often wonder if so much of what I’m attracted to in him are the things I long to be. So much of who Steve is are the very things that are locked way down in my soul, nudging for release. He’s not really all that worried about trying to win people over. He loves the people he loves fiercely. He doesn’t need your approval. I think people are drawn to these things in him. I know I am.

I want Steve to be the version of himself that celebrates his soul. (Even if I have to turn around and walk away and breathe deeply.) And I want him to do the same for me.

Rule #2: You must avoid pleasure.

Pleasure is one of those words with a lot of baggage, an idea we’ve gotten really wrong. I don’t have it the least bit figured out. Most of us either indulge or deprive, and we do not know how to experience pleasure in a way that is God-designed. We’re either chasing the forbidden or we’re flatlined.

I want a greater capacity to experience pleasure and to do so appropriately. I want to enjoy food without overindulging. I want to enjoy alcohol moderately. I want to love clothes and home décor without becoming a hoarder. I want to experience sex more intimately and profoundly. I want to see beauty in the beige and the back alley, and let that beauty sink into my soul in a way that brings me endless pleasure. Like the pomegranates. I want to believe I was made for pleasure instead of being wary of experiencing gratification.

I don’t want to binge on pleasure, which is actually about numbing instead of feeling. I don’t want to repress or demonize pleasure, either, which is also about numbing instead of feeling.

I want to give myself permission to savor the garden of experiences God’s given us. Long meals. Deep breaths. Slow sips. Soft skin. And in the places where I am blocked and bruised and binging, I want the courage to seek out help and healing.

Rule #3: You must put yourself last.

I believe in the value of servanthood. I believe in self-sacrificing love. I believe in putting my own needs aside to take care of those I have vowed, before God, to take care of. However, I do not like any sentiment that constantly reinforces the idea that my needs are less important than my husband’s and my children’s and my home’s and my pet’s and my boss’s. I don’t think this line of thinking helps anyone.

For example, how many times a day do you need to pee and you don’t? You simply don’t go because you don’t have time, don’t consider your body’s basic functions a priority.

I spoke at a women’s event at Christmas and I gave them a whole list of helpful suggestions, if I do say so myself. I talked about creating breathing room during the busy holiday bustle and happened to mention that one of the ways they could honor themselves this season was by listening to their bodies a bit more intuitively—sleep when they need to sleep, eat when they need to eat, pee when they need to pee, and so on.

I had a line of women waiting to talk to me after. Do you know what they all wanted to discuss (THROUGH TEARS)? They all wanted to tell me how they constantly dance around their lives—one more load of laundry, one more lunch packed, one more email, one more meeting—because they have to pee. And it’s making them frantic.

Do you know what my husband does when he has to pee? He walks down the hall to the bathroom and he pees. Do you know what I do and so many of my friends do when we have to pee? We hold it. Until we’re in pain and panicked. We are crazy people. Even animals don’t do this.

Step One: Go Pee.

Rule #4: You must be available to everyone all the time.

I don’t have voice mail set up on my phone. I haven’t for the last two years. When we lived overseas, voice mail was not an option, and Steve and I got used to communicating by call or text and not having to leave messages on people’s phones.

When we returned from living overseas the first time in 2004, I did set up voice mail on my phone, and I found myself drowning in the various communication streams I needed to check. I couldn’t keep up. Within a couple of days, my voice mail space would fill up and I’d have twenty or so messages to listen to and calls to return and then people would call or text or email to tell me that my voice mail was full and they couldn’t leave a message. I thought I was going to hurt someone.

I never really considered the fact that I could just shut it down. No one was forcing me to be available to everyone all the time through every means possible.

I am not saying it is sinful to have voice mail. Seriously, I’m not. I’m simply telling you that I currently don’t have the capacity for any more contact.

So when we returned from living overseas the second time, Steve and I both decided there’d be nothing wrong with never setting up our voice mail. Sure, I think it likely annoys the heck out of my mom and mother-in-law. Caller ID tells me I missed a call from a doctor’s office and I have to return the call. But overall, it’s so nice to have one less thing I need to check.

Most of all, no voice mail is one small YES to my mental health even if it means people are going to say things like, “Did you know you don’t have your voice mail set up? I can show you how to do that if you need some help. It’s really simple. And that way people can get in touch with you whenever they need to.”

Got it. Thanks.

Rule #5: You must listen to the experts.

I love the show Project Runway. I love it mainly because I am so intrigued by people’s creative process, especially their intuition as it relates to their individual voice. These designers get huge challenges with tiny time frames and they are asked to pull off a miracle, episode after episode. Season after season, the successful designers say much the same thing: “There isn’t time to second-guess yourself. You have to trust your gut, trust your aesthetic, and go for it.”

In a recent season the designer’s mentor, Tim Gunn, kept giving a designer named Char pointed advice about her design concepts, often trying to convince her to go in a different direction with her work. She would always politely listen to him, and then she’d stick with her original plan, one time saying, “Tim, sometimes you gotta leave a little room for the magic.”

I didn’t always love what Char made, but I’ve never forgotten that line. The “experts” will always have ideas, conventional wisdom, and advice for us. Usually this input is given with the best intentions. But sometimes we need to trust our own gut, our own voice, that nudge in our spirit, and we need to leave a little room for the magic (the magic that, just maybe, only we can see).

How many times have you been told, “Just listen to the people who know best”? Others’ experiences have merits, sure. But so do our own attempts, false starts, intuitions, visions. We need to start believing we are a reliable source in the world. Everyone else does not always know better. Your observations are valid.

Bear Bryant had it right: we can’t always do everything we’re told, and we better not be the kind of people who never do anything we’re told.

In other words: Don’t be a punk. And don’t be a pleaser. Learn, instead, to be a poet.

Rule #6: You must consider your body a liability.

So many of us were told—and this is still being preached—that if girls wouldn’t act and dress in certain ways, then boys wouldn’t have to be so naughty. We were responsible for their choices, their thoughts, their addictions, even. This is so significantly crappy.

Many of the young women receiving this message, internalizing this message, realized they needed to shut off some essential things about themselves if they were going to survive in a culture of “keeping the boys clean.”

What’s so very sad about all this is that we heard the message OVER and OVER again that the boys’ sobriety was far more important and to be protected than the girls’ sexuality.

We have women who have been told their entire lives that being a woman is a liability. And what follows, then, is women who now believe their bodies are liabilities too.

How do women who have internalized these messages have an exciting, free sex life? How in the world could these women ever in a million years make amends with their bodies? I recently attended a half-day event all on the topic of sex. I was reminded what a treacherous subject this is, how deeply so many are wounded, and how carefully we must tread when it comes to talking about sex, bodies, pornography, sexual abuse, marital disharmony, and marital satisfaction. We are in the midst of untold brokenness. Ours and everyone else’s.

One of the women at this event told her story: She and her husband were the model of Christian marriage. And then seven years into their marriage, he admitted his sex addiction and their lives came crashing down.

Now, over twenty years since his confession, you can see that this couple has been through hell and back and they’ve fought for what they have. She told us about the shame she felt, how viscerally shameful she felt for years, and the one thing that helped:

She gave each of us a blank 3x5 card and had us paraphrase Psalm 34:5 on it with our name substituted. It read: Leeana who looks to the Lord is radiant; Leeana’s face is never covered with shame.

But she didn’t stop there. She told us to put our fingers in our ears and to repeat, out loud so that we could hear only our own voice in our head, the sentences. She had us do this over and over again, repeating that we were radiant and without shame. Reading the words with our fingers stuck in our ears. Louder and louder and louder.

She told us she would yell these words twenty or thirty times a day when she was in the marital valley of the shadow of death, believing the toxic lie that her husband would have never looked at other women’s bodies if hers had only been enough.

In a recent twenty minutes of soul time, God said to me, “Leeana, now is the time to take exceptional care of your body.” And do you know what? I’ve started realizing how easy it is for me to fall into rhythms of taking hideous care of my body. Do we know how to really feed ourselves nourishing food? Do we know what it means to be hungry and full? Do we know how to take care of our skin? Do we know how to exercise in a way that is strengthening and not bullying? Do we wash our hair? Do we shave our legs? Do we invest time and energy in the proper care and feeding of this one body we’ve been given?

Perhaps it is time for you, too, to begin taking exceptional care of your body: nourishing it, moving it, feeding it, honoring it.

These are just six rules I think you should consider breaking. I’m sure you’ve lived by and been burned by many more. Crap like, “You must never let them see you cry,” “You must be perfect or you are a failure,” and “You must gauge your success in life by the effectiveness of your home décor.”

Breaking rules for the sake of breaking rules won’t help you feel alive. Many boundaries in life contribute to our freedom, not threaten it. But I also fear for this entire culture of women who can recite the rules but cannot recognize themselves.

Reflection & Expression

What is one rule you need to break?

When was a time you didn’t listen and it ended up being a good decision?

For Your Brazen Board

Add an image or symbol of someone breaking the rules for the right reasons.