Onsite

I’VE BEEN IN LOVE with two men in the course of my life, but this guy wasn’t one of them. What had started simple and sweet and possible had turned, rather on a dime, to distant and silent and confusing.

Physical distance helped when he went silent. He lives in a completely different region than I do. But the internet is limitless and no number of miles could stop someone from tagging him in a post, thus landing him in my Instagram feed on a fairly regular basis. And honestly, I didn’t want to stop seeing his face or reading his words, because I didn’t think we were finished. I knew something was very wrong, but I didn’t think we were done. I just thought he was being quiet toward me while figuring out what he felt. I thought he was wondering and wrestling and pinning down how we would become us.

I recorded an episode of Mike Foster’s Fun Therapy podcast the week after the silence started. Mike and I sat together in a recording booth on the south side of town and talked. He knew about this guy, and before we started, I asked him kindly but firmly not to bring up the relationship as it was in a bit of a strange place. I told him that after a few days together in Nashville, the guy had left with no words, and a week later, still no words. And with no real understanding of what was happening or had happened, I didn’t want to talk about it.

Mike honored my request, sort of. He indirectly found my wound and pressed on it. Not because he’s vicious or manipulative or mean. I think he legitimately did it to show me that there was an injury to be dealt with. Maybe it had to do a bit with my current situation, but it was certainly an older and deeper cut than a man I’d known for such a short time could inflict.

When we finished recording I was a mess of emotions and gripped in pain and tension. The work we had done in that booth was good and right, but it also wrung me out in some deep ways. In a way only a man as kind and loving as Mike Foster could, he leaned forward on the table between us and asked, “Annie, have you ever thought about Onsite? I think you should go.”

Many of my friends had been to Onsite. I had heard of it plenty of times, but I had zero desire to go there myself. Onsite is a an emotional-health retreat center that hosts workshops and counseling intensives meant to help you do good hard work on some of the deepest pains in life, the parts of your story you may not have picked but have shaped you and shaped your decision making. That did NOT sound fun to me at all. But I had made myself a promise many years before, when people had first started the conversations about Onsite: if anyone ever SAID I should go, I would. Previously, when people asked if I had been to Onsite before, I would cringe and say nope, expecting the next sentence to be a suggestion that I go. But every time—literally EVERY time before this moment across the table from Mike—the person just moved the conversation forward. So when Mike made the suggestion, I blinked, my heart jumped, and I knew it was time.

I MADE SOME CALLS the next day—to friends who had been to the Living Centered Program (LCP) at Onsite before, to a friend who had recently begun working there, to my business manager to see how we could afford for me to do this. It was November. And by the end of the phone calls, the first week of January was set aside in my budget and my calendar, if not quite yet in my mind and heart. I was going to Onsite.

You gotta know this about me: historically, I do not like pain. I do not like digging too deep into my past because I’m afraid of revealing things that I’ve forgotten that are painful and better left there—in the past. I worry that there is something that has hurt me but I don’t know what it is. So why pick a scab when I don’t have to? I recognize this is incredibly backward thinking, but it is how I learned to cope long ago—look away and it will go away. But that’s not true. The best course of action is not to ignore; instead, I’ve learned to always get the sickness out, always sweep the corners, always check the balance in my bank account, always start the hard conversation. But on that day, in that particular time in my life, the idea of sitting in pain and talking about it for a full week (which was my understanding of Onsite) sounded and felt absolutely terrible.

But I also had a feeling.

You know when you KNOW? I’m not speaking of cognitively knowing something; I’m speaking of a deeper knowing. One that may not have words or a proper space in your mind but you know it in the center of you in such a way that it almost feels like too much. I bet not every person experiences knowing quite like this. I think of my podcast episode with author and musician Chris Rice (episode 154) and how differently he experiences the presence of God than I do. But for me, I often know that the Holy Spirit, the very presence of God, is encouraging me or inviting me to something based on this sense I have in the center of me. It also helps that once I have a sense of something God is asking of me, I invite others into it. I do this often, so I did it with Onsite. I went to two mentors and a counselor and two recent Onsite graduate friends and asked for their advice on the opportunity before me. I laid it all in front of each of them. When there was a resounding yes, and my checkbook and calendar were compatible with it all, I had all the confirmation I needed that, yes indeed, the invitation had been from God and was going to work itself all the way through my life.

If I could bring myself to actually go.

I WAS TERRIFIED, for all the reasons listed above. The few early days of the year before my Living Centered Program began, I would burst into tears at the thought of it. I didn’t want to be without my phone for a week (lame, but true). I didn’t want to leave my friends. I didn’t want to sleep anywhere but my own bed. I didn’t want to do the work I was afraid was ahead of me. All the silence from the guy, which had become months at that point, had pretty solidly convinced me there was something incredibly wrong with me and I was scared I would finally see the thing, the gruesome truth, whatever it had always been that was keeping me single and causing men (this man, at least) to run away from me without even a handshake and a goodbye.

The day I was supposed to go to Onsite, I packed my things but could not make myself put my RAV4 into drive. Then Heather showed up.

Heather is one of my most faithful friends. She is the one who sees movies with me in the middle of a sad day, and she is the one who will come, do, be when no one else will. She sees without being asked to look and listens far more than she talks, which always makes me feel that she is getting the raw end of this deal (and I am fairly confident it’s true).

When she showed up at my house, she handed me a baggie of envelopes. She’d written me a letter for each day I was going to be gone. Then she offered to drive me there. I cried. I was grateful but said no need. I knew what I had to do; I just had to make myself do it. (And to be fully honest, I wanted to have a car at Onsite in case I decided to leave during the week. Having the ability to escape really mattered to me. Hmmmm, sensing a pattern?) So Heather stayed in the driveway with me until I pulled out and pointed my car west. I headed an hour or so outside of the city beside long curves of farmland and sporadic houses and one little hard-to-see sign pointing to Onsite.

I don’t want to tell you what happens at Onsite any more than I want to walk you moment by moment through one of my counseling appointments. I’m fine with you knowing the roots of both those needs in my life, but to be fair and loving to myself, what happens behind those closed doors is probably just for me. (And I don’t want to ruin your experience if you ever decide to go to Onsite. There are some special moments I want you to have without knowing they are coming.)

My small group leader, Jim Cress, was incredibly insightful, and as we sat around our group room, about ten of us strangers became friends. We shared our stories and worked through some history and by the end of the week, I believed Jim. I believed him when he said I was doing the work to be healthy, and I believed him when he said I was free of the old pains that still tried to tie themselves to me, and I believed him when he said I should be loved well.

He says it to me a lot, actually. Jim and I still keep up on a fairly regular basis, and he still reminds me: “You are so worthy of being chosen by a good, healthy man.” He’ll say it over lunch or in a text message, and I believe him.

I LEFT ONSITE on a Thursday night after the closing event with all the participants from the program. After a week that had felt far too scary at the beginning, there I was at the end feeling strong and clearheaded. We had barely even talked about the guy who ghosted me—it was never about him, really—but we had walked toward my pain in a new and healing way.

The entire time I was at Onsite, I wore a name tag that read “Annie D” and I carried the key to my room with me wherever I went. That version of myself, Annie D, participated all week, but as we were preparing to leave, I wanted to make some decisions and some promises to myself as just Annie. Always Annie. So I took my name tag off and handed it and my room key to one of my friends. And then, even though it was a very cold evening in January and the sun was already setting, I walked outside.

Through the field along the path at Onsite is a labyrinth created by stones. We had been there once before during the week, but I wanted to visit again alone because I wanted to make some promises to myself. I thought deeply as I wove through the stone path.

Labyrinths are so interesting to me—they weave around the same space, sending you back and forth and back and forth, and you cover four times the amount of ground you should because just going from the start to the finish in a straight line would be so much faster than tracing the maze built for your feet. But it also slows you down, it makes you trust the path and, as they say at Onsite, trust the process.

Once I got to the very center, I looked out over the fields, down the hill, and to the other side of some valley I couldn’t see because it was too deep between a few rolling hills. And I said two things out loud, there at the beginning of January:

“God, I want to buy a house by July. And if it would be okay with You, I want to try again.”

I really wanted to try again. I wanted a new man to come into my life and with the health that I now had, or at least the health I was going after, I wanted to try again. I never wanted to talk to the guy who ghosted me again; I was strong enough to stop thinking he was better than his behavior. But I wasn’t giving up on men or love or big feelings. Because that’s how God made me: Always Annie, the girl who loves to love and who wears her heart on her sleeve.

THERE IS REAL POWER to falling in love. I didn’t fall in love with that guy, but I can tell you this. My experience with him taught me how to view myself, how to care for myself, how to let those big love feelings grow right here, right inside of me, and direct me in my behavior toward me.

And those two things I said at the center of the labyrinth that last night of Onsite? I did them.