audra hibbs

my stories, unedited and raw

Audra Hibbs

a letter to my little love

By

February 26, 2019

Dear Bean,

It’s been two days since I found out about you. I’m not sure how to explain to you with any adequacy the conflict I have felt in the past 48 hours. Because this is not what I had planned. I’m pretty sure that in the three weeks since you started becoming, I have said out loud at least twice, “I really don’t want kids.” I meant it. I did for such a long time, with all my heart, but I closed that door awhile ago. I learned to love new dreams, new possibilities, new ways of creating life and of mothering.

I don’t want kids. But from my very guts, I want YOU. Whoever you are and whoever you become, I want you. I’ve been talking to you since about five minutes after the stick lit up with the last word I expected it to say. Out loud in empty rooms, when it’s just the two of us, I’ve been stringing words together in your direction. Telling you about my day, about the weather, about something fabulous your daddy said or did that made me laugh until I cried.

It’s been a long road here, kid. You’re years late to the party, honestly. You really are my Bean in that way. But the truth is that you’re right on time. If I’d gotten you on my timetable, I wouldn’t have been me. I would have been a really good mama, but I wouldn’t have been me. I needed to grow up first, to become. To find my fire. I found my fire, little love, and as soon as I did—there you were.

I don’t know how to do this next part. But I know this:

From all my brightly lit up places, I will blaze a path in front of you. I will try to show you what it looks like when a spirit leans fully into its force-of-nature-ness. I will grant you permission slip after permission slip to slide into the cozy, worn-in sweater of who you are in your soul. I will not ask you to be small or quiet and if it turns out you just ARE small and quiet, I will celebrate the hell out of you that way, too.

I will not be perfect. I will not even try, or pretend to try. I will be good and lovely sometimes, and an epic disaster sometimes. The only thing I can promise you is that I will keep showing up in my imperfection, I will keep growing as a person, and I will apologize to you when I’m wrong. I will make amends. I will do the work to put things right.

I will love you, in part, by loving me. I will not have you walk this earth without a clear example of deep and relentless self-compassion, grace turned inward. I will give you the gift of not pretending my world revolves around you, so that you will know it’s not your job to make someone else your orbit. I will do you the kindness of letting myself trust that I am enough, in every moment, so that you feel safe to do the same.

I will not shame myself for the size of my body or the size of my soul or the size of my needs, for the moments when I have to ask for help, for how uncomfortably passionate I am, for being deeply human. I will not fill your childhood with a million reminders of all the things I need to be doing better, so that hopefully you won’t fill your adulthood with more of the same.

I will talk to you about God a lot. God as I have come to know God. I will tell you how you’re made of the same stuff, how you’re held by that divine kindness that I am only just beginning to know absolutely nothing about. God is nothing if not a constant unfolding of all the unbearably beautiful things we cannot grasp and wouldn’t have thought to ask for. God is nothing if not the magic of recklessly unconditional love. I will talk to you about God a lot.

Also, I will fuck ALL of this up. I will absolutely do every single one of the things I’m currently saying I won’t do, and not do every single one of the things I’m currently saying I will. I’ll let you watch me crash and burn, watch me stand up and try again. That’s important too, because you’ll need to know that life is forever tries. Nothing, no one is ever outside the scope of redemption.

I will love you with the force of a category five hurricane.

I will love your daddy with the force of a category five hurricane.

I will love our village of people with the force of a category five hurricane.

You are going to see so much love, kid. You are going to feel so very, very much love.

I am already so proud of you my spirit cannot hold it. You are already a full-scale revolution.

Love, Mama

on happy tears and lightness

By

I

I have happy-cried four times this week.
That has never happened before.

I’m wired to be deeply comfortable with discomfort, with melancholy, with sadness, with rage. This is a gift, and yet it has come to feel heavy. As I’ve leaned into my empathic giftings, I’ve kind of become a magnet for these emotions. I’m often the person people come to with their hard things, because they know those things won’t shock or offend or overwhelm me. They know I won’t even blink.

I love being that person.
I also can’t only be that person.
I damn sure can’t be that person for everyone.

II

I have happy-cried four times this week.
That has never happened before.

I was raised to distrust happiness. I spent much of my life steeped in language like, “God is not concerned about your happiness, he’s concerned about your holiness.” Those two things, happiness and holiness, were often postured as potentially conflicting at best and mutually exclusive at worst.

I learned how to be skeptical of happiness because if I was too happy it might mean I wasn’t holy enough. As though those two ideals were on opposite sides of a scale. I was forever trying to lean hard toward holiness, forever confused by the relationship between holiness and misery.

Is there a relationship?
I really don’t think there is.
But it absolutely felt like there was.

III

I have happy-cried four times this week.
That has never happened before.

I fell headfirst into a try-hard kind of life. I spent every waking moment of the first thirty-three years of my life trying to be what I was supposed to be, think what I was supposed to think, see what I was supposed to see, and feel what I was supposed to feel. Seeking approval to secure love. Perpetually worried about what this person would think about that, whether that part of my life looked it should, whether I needed to be doing more of a thing or doing less of a thing or improving a thing.

One day, I woke up and realized that there will always and forever be someone who doesn’t approve of me. There will always be something I could be doing better by some arbitrary standard. I can live into that, and spend my one wild and precious life trying to measure up to every standard I’ve ever been asked to meet, or I can live into my one wild and precious life.

I can just live.
You can just live.
We can just live, guys.

IV

I have happy-cried four times this week.
That has never happened before.

No part of my life looks like I thought it would ten years ago. My world these days is an exploration of what’s possible beyond the borders of what I was told was acceptable. Because truthfully, I just don’t have time to invest in what’s acceptable anymore. There was no life in that investment for me. I came up empty every single time.

Here’s the thing. Many of the people I know who are living deeply acceptable lives are also exhausted and bored and miserable and too scared to say that something needs to change. Scared because we live in a world full of Acceptability Police, forever lurking around the edges of our lives. Always ready to tell us what we’re doing wrong and where we need to reign it in.

I am done reigning it in.
I am living into my wildness.
I am not afraid of freedom anymore.

V

I have happy-cried four times this week.
That has never happened before.
I have never felt this light.

on telling yourself the truth

By

I

I stumbled into a sort of time machine today.

I went to the voice notes in my phone for the first time in forever, planning to record a snippet of a song that’s been scratching its way out, and I noticed that there was a stray voice note from March of 2015. Most of my old recordings have been cleaned out by now, but that one managed to stick.

It was twelve minutes long, and I was immediately intrigued. During that season, I occasionally made voice notes on my commute to Dallas for work. It was my own kind of free therapy, a means of processing my life in a safe space. That month was when Josh’s mental health really bottomed out, so morbid curiosity made me hit play.

But I wasn’t talking about Josh. I was talking about me. About my tendency to prioritize the expectations, thoughts, and opinions of others far over my own; often to the degree that I became unintentionally but deeply dishonest. Never because I want to be a liar; always because I want to be loved. For much of my life, approval felt like a necessary prerequisite to love; my first step to getting love has always been to seek approval, truth be damned.

Y’all, if that isn’t the exact same story I’m living right now.

II

Someone once told me that humans easily fall into the trap of believing our growth happens in a linear way when the truth is, growth is more like a spiral staircase. It often looks like coming back around to the same shit, over and over, from a slightly higher vantage point each time. With more perspective on the thing and a bigger toolbox for working through it.

I remember who I was and what I was wrestling with at the time of that recording. I recall the precise depths to which I was in hiding. I am wide-eyed at how far I’ve come in releasing the idea that the most important thing I can do with my life is make everyone comfortable, convince them I am good. I think about some of the truths I’ve told in the years since then; I know that 2015 Audra wouldn’t have even been able to acknowledge many of those truths in the silent safety of her own mind, let alone say them out loud.

Yet, I haven’t arrived anywhere. I am forever climbing the staircase of self-acceptance, coming around again and again to new variations on the same old stories. I still have the tendency to filter every single choice I make through the lens of how it will look on the outside, what people will think. I don’t need anyone to shame me anymore, for anything—I’m exceptionally good at doing it on my own. I’m much quicker to catch myself in the act, quicker to grace than ever. But I still spend an unfortunate amount of time in the downward spiral of optics management.

III

Actual honesty is a practice and a lifelong one. I talked with a dear friend a few days ago about a radically, brutally truthful conversation Josh and I have been having lately, and she mistook me for being better at this stuff than I actually am. You’re so good at dealing with hard truths and risky choices. I laughed out loud when she said it. I’m good at dealing with hard truths and risky choices in the same way a toddler is great at finger-painting. I’m not “good at it “ in a way that means the process or even the outcome is reliably pretty, I’m good at it in a way that means I keep doing it, despite the mess it sometimes makes. I told her that and she asked me, “Where did you even start, in terms of getting that honest with each other?”

I started with telling the truth about my life to own damn self. Sometimes I think my actual life began the day I decided to be radically honest with the woman in the mirror. To stop hiding from me. This seems to be an option most women don’t know they have. Hell, most people in general. But I think it’s really the only way up the spiral staircase.

Growth is more or less impossible until the exact second you decide to look yourself in the eyes. It’s more or less impossible until you decide to prioritize personal integrity over external reputation. I say that as someone who spent most of her life disintegrated; fractioned off into pieces and parts, each designed for a specific audience and to elicit a certain response.

More than anything else, I want to be a person of integrity. It took me thirty years to realize that integrity isn’t about being externally right, it’s about being internally whole. And it starts, almost invariably, with telling yourself the truth.

the unformula for a meaningful life

By

I want to say my very truest things, but I don’t quite know where to start.

I know I don’t owe this to anyone. I don’t have to say any of this out loud, but by my very nature, I am a story teller. I am a person who flings open the doors of my life and lets people walk around in it as though it’s a museum.

True, there are always rooms that I don’t invite anyone into. Walls stripped bare, paint splattered, floors covered by the carnage of old exhibits that are being deconstructed or reconstructed. Those are rooms for the artist, not the public; I’ve learned that the hard way many times over. But the rest of the museum is open for business. Wander the halls, touch the artwork, interact with the environment, ask questions. Walk into the narrative with me. You’re welcome there.

Story is how I process my life and the lives of the people around me. It is how I learn and it is also how I teach. So I live in a perpetual state of saying things I do not have to say, giving pieces of myself away that I do not owe to anyone. I do it because it is who I am.

There’s a secondary reason I want to give language to all this, a reason that is specific to this exact piece of my heart. It is because I am about to say some things that go directly against the grain of the culture I exist in, and I do not believe for a split second that I am the only one who feels this way. I say things we’re not supposed to say as a form of permission slip, as an act of solidarity with the people who feel the same thing and don’t have the language for it.

About a year ago, I was sitting at my desk in a cubicle in an office, and had a thought. I don’t remember exactly what was happening at the time, or what might have triggered it. But it swelled up in my mind and has never gone away.

Are you about done here?

I have a pretty respectable life, by most standards. I get up every morning and go to work, to an office job at a local university, the same one I graduated from. I am married to an unbelievably good man, and we love each other well. We are firmly middle class, we work hard and take care of our own, we have everything we need and most things we want. We have a good life in small town midwestern America.

And also? I’m about done here.

Because I don’t actually want any of this, outside of my marriage. Truthfully, even the inner workings of that are up for reimagining. I don’t think we do anything particularly well when we’re on American autopilot. We sacrifice our time, bodies, hearts, gifts, relationships. We’re not taught to think critically about what we value and how much of our best energy those things are getting. We are instead taught to set about filling in the variables of a formula.

Job + Marriage + House + Children + Grandchildren + Retirement = Life

I’m not here to say that the formula doesn’t work. I’m here to say that the formula doesn’t work for everyone. It’s so sticky, though, because it’s cumulative. There’s always another variable to add, which makes it easy to fall into the perpetual pattern of thinking that maybe happiness lies in the next variable. The whole thing is set up to keep us spinning and spinning, working for the next variable in a life that we didn’t really choose, often left without the tools to start choosing.

It’s here that I have to acknowledge that infertility is maybe the best thing that ever happened to me. Because it fucked up the formula completely. I don’t use that language lightly–it is the honest to God truth of the way infertility danced into our lives and leveled everything we thought we would be and have and do. But truthfully? I am profoundly grateful for it at this point. Infertility meant that in my late twenties, relatively early into my adult life, I was forced to grapple with the validity of the formula. At some point, a question presented itself to me in quiet places.

Can I even have a meaningful life if it doesn’t look exactly like the formula?

I asked that question on a daily basis for a very long time. Until, without my even really noticing it, the question shifted in a way that has been slowly changing my life for a few years now. The foundation beneath the question shifted; rather than growing out of fear, it began to grow out of curiosity.

Can I have an even more meaningful life if it doesn’t look exactly like the formula?

I have been asking this variation on that question for a few years now, and the answer just keeps coming back yes. Yes. I can have a meaningful life without the variable of children. I, personally, can have an even more meaningful life without that. The answer isn’t the same for everyone, but for me? It’s a yes.

These days, as I settle deeper into that reality, the question has begun shifting again. Instead of disappearing, it simply morphs into something new.

I thought for years, the vast majority of my life in fact, that it was not possible for me to be happy without children. When life put me in a position to have to question that assumption, it changed everything. If I can experience meaning and joy without one of the American dream variables, what about the others? If I don’t actually need one of the things I’ve been told is a prerequisite for fulfillment and contribution—

Can I have an even more meaningful life if it doesn’t look anything like the formula?

Yes. Yes, I can.

That is the deepest core of what I know right now. I have no desire for the formula. I understand it and I respect it, but it’s not for me. It’s an ill-fitting costume, binding my organs and chafing my skin. It always has been, and yet I have only ever been comfortable making small tweaks here and there. Taking it to the tailor, making alterations over and over, rather than graciously accepting that it simply does not fit and likely never will.

I understand my reasons for that, more deeply now than ever. It is hard to look in the eyes of people who are deeply rooted in the formula and explain to them that you’re scrapping it. It typically either feels like a criticism to the way they exist or like a concrete confirmation of your own irresponsibility. It’s hard to say, “I’m quitting my job because I want more than selling the hours of my life for $16 a pop,” without coming across as a either a condescending jackass or a thoughtless fool. As someone who has spent most her life caring deeply what people think of her, that’s a risk I find difficult to take.

But more often than you might think, if I look people in the eyes in the split second before their curated response, I see something that looks like longing. As though most of us know, deep down, that we were born to be more than just containers for a pre-determined existence.

I’m not trying to cultivate discontent here. I know there’s much to be said for being content with the life you have. But there seems to be a thin and rather blurry line between contentment and numbness; the contentment that comes with knowing life can be less than ideal while still being beautiful and the numbness that comes with having traded off every last bit of our agency for a checklist of things we “should” do and “should” have and “should” want.

I don’t want to create space for discontent, but honest self-inquiry. Are there pieces of your life that could be served by some reflection, honesty, reimagining? What have you put on autopilot that needs your attention? What have you relegated to the “just the way it has to be” corner of your life?

How is the formula, if you’re living any variable of it, working for you?

on being Mount St. Helens

By

She came up out of nowhere, and it honestly scared the hell out of me. We had been driving for over an hour and by that point, the evergreen trees were so tall and thick alongside the road that we couldn’t see anything else. So when we topped a hill and took a sharp curve to the right, she hit me like a gut punch. Mount St. Helens. My heart dropped into my stomach and, hand to God, I stopped breathing.

Fear.

My first instinct was terror. I’m still not entirely sure why. Maybe that was the first time it really occurred to me that we were deep, deep in a wild place, and that places that wild are unpredictable. You could disappear into those woods and never be found. Maybe it was the height. Being so much further out into the atmosphere, standing so much closer to the cosmos than ever; something about it makes gravity feel unreliable. As though it’s possible to get so high that you might just fly irretrievably off into the great unknown.

I sat there in the car and didn’t say anything, just had a quiet panic attack for a few minutes. I talked myself down, over and over, from asking Josh to turn the car around and take me back to the city. Breathed deeply; four counts in, four count hold, four counts out. It came to me on an inhale, like the Washington air had just been holding onto a thought for three decades, waiting for me to show up so she could give it to me.

Am I Mount St. Helens?

Josh had said something similar out loud, earlier in the drive. We were just getting to the thickest parts of the forest and I sat in the passenger’s seat, wide-eyed and barely breathing at the feet of evergreen giants. We had long since turned the radio off, the way you do when you’re trying to focus, and I whispered into a silent car that it felt like everything in the Pacific Northwest was larger than life.

Kind of like you?

He said it without humor and I laughed without humor. Yeah. Kind of like me. I have forever felt larger than my context, which is maybe part of why the Pacific Northwest felt so much like home so immediately. I thought about that comment again while we were winding up the road, Mount St. Helens popping in and out of our view while we took sharp curves slow.

Every single time I saw that snow-covered peak, I felt the same rush of adrenaline, equal parts panic and wonder. With every rush, I thought about each time I’ve looked someone in the eyes to find them looking back at me with something resembling fear. Fear of me, fear for me, some combination of the two.

I am an endless wilderness. I know that of myself now. Even the people who know me best and love me most describe me in terms of natural forces that are equal parts awesome and terrifying. Sitting on the side of that volcano, knowing she could kill me just by existing as she does, I felt a visceral compassion for the people whose gut instinct is to run from an unpredictable terrain.

I am, if I am anything, an unpredictable terrain. A woman who feels more kinship with volcanos in thick-laid forests, with mountain ranges alongside the ocean, than with most anything else on earth. There are people who are built for that kind of land, and there are people who are built for the plains. Neither is better or worse, easier or harder, more or less respectable and honorable and good. They’re just different. We are just built for different brands of life.

That day shook something loose in me. Something I’m not sure will ever click entirely back into its former place. There is a restlessness in my chest that wasn’t there previously. Or maybe it was always there and I just didn’t know how to feel it yet.

But also, at the exact same time, my feet feel more deeply rooted than ever. Not into the dry soil of a midwestern summer, but into something inside me, something ancient beneath the loose and rattling pieces. Something that feels like a self. A shape, a form, with distinct edges. I have never been this restless and never been this grounded.

And one day, probably soon, I will go back to the wilderness. Let it shake some more things loose, let it plant my feet deeper still. See who I become.