I'm tired, fam. Tired. There was a time that I questioned my right to say such a thing, since my grandparents were tobacco farmers and my mom worked her legs into a varicose mess as a factory nurse, but I'm learning to unlearn self-erasure.
Part of the problematic relationship that developed with the priest involved erasing myself to become a sounding board for him. I spent so many meetings with him discussing the questions I was facing as I pondered the priesthood, and asking for his prayers, that when he started to share about his own family and his own problems I felt like I owed him that much.
Nobody owes anyone anything in a healthy, equal relationship. And in a relationship between an authority figure and a mentee, nothing is owed beyond respect...and boundaries.
By casting boundaries out of the way, this priest kicked off a kind of wild-west relationship where anything went. I was always a step behind the playbook, because catching up to him meant ignoring the red flags that kept snagging in my own internal sense of order. I felt a little bit icky, or questionable, or confused about every step forward into unhealthiness. When he started texting me. When he invited me out on outings with his family. When he set up activities for me and his wife and encouraged our friendship (perhaps so there was a "more appropriate" reason for him to be around me outside of church). When he found me in the church pantry grabbing supplies for soup kitchen-- a galley pantry, where I was backed in-- and blocked the exit to compliment my appearance and tell me "playfully" how much he loved me.
What makes remembering all of this so hard for me is that I'm not only revisiting it from my own mind. I keep trying to get inside his head, and assign him motives-- reasons he was doing these things so that it made sense. He saw me not as a parishioner, maybe, but as a colleague friend-- and everyone overshares with colleague friends. He was needy and felt unloved, because he'd had a difficult childhood, and he was looking to me for admiration and acceptance.
And that is a rabbit hole with infinite corridors: the unending maze of why he made the choices he did. I can't know. I shouldn't know. He was giving me things to hold that weren't mine to carry, but I keep picking them up, almost ten years later.
The work of this fall is laying that shit down. Putting it away. Turning back to myself and what's mine: these children I love, this new work path I'm carving out for myself with a new master's degree, the grief I carry from the loss of my dad and the joy of a new church where I can feel safe and respected.
It's not easy, though. I want to turn the corner back towards understanding the "why" behind his choices almost as badly as I'm trying to figure out mine.
And it's making me tired.
Image credit: "The Myth of Sisyphus" by vintagedept is licensed under CC BY 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/?ref=openverse.
Image description: A clay sculpture of a nude man curled over a rock, as if in exhaustion or grief. It's Sisyphus, from Greek mythology, and we see him in profile. In the story, Zeus condemns Sisyphus to an eternity of pushing a rock up a hill, only for the rock to fall back down again. While I've felt this way many times trying to work towards healing, I like this image because it looks as if Sisyphus could just stand up, stretch, and say "Fuck this shit" and walk away from it all.
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