You Don't Have to Perform for Me, #2

My dear one,

I've been thinking about you since the last letter, wondering how you've been carrying yourself through the days since then. And I keep coming back to something I want to say plainly, because I think it needs saying more than once in a life like yours. You don't have to perform for me. Not for me, and I hope, over time, not for God either, because He already knows the truth of you underneath every brave face you put on for everybody else.

I imagine you know exactly what I mean when I say the word performance. It's the smile you hold in place at the family gathering when your joints are screaming and nobody there knows it. It's the way you say "I'm doing okay" to the coworker who asks, because the real answer takes too long to explain and you don't have the energy to watch her face try to understand something she can't see. It's pushing through one more errand, one more conversation, one more hour standing at the counter, because you're afraid that if you stop, people will start to wonder if you're really as sick as you say. That kind of performing is exhausting in a way that has nothing to do with your body's usual fatigue. It's a second job on top of the illness itself, and you never clocked in for it on purpose. Somewhere along the way, you learned that showing your real limits made people uncomfortable, or doubtful, or distant, so you built a version of yourself that could hold it together in front of them. I understand why you did that. I'm not going to shame you for it. But I want you to know it was never a requirement for being loved, not by me, and not by the God who made you.

A lot of this pressure, I think, comes from living in a world that mostly understands illness in simple terms. You're sick, or you're well. You need help, or you don't. But your life with EDS, or POTS, or MCAS, or whatever else your body is carrying, doesn't sit neatly in either category. Some days you can do the thing. Some days the very same task is impossible. People who've never lived inside a body like yours often can't hold that complexity, so without meaning to, they push you toward whichever category is easier for them, usually the one where you seem fine. And so you learned to seem fine. You got good at it. Maybe you got so good at it that even people who love you don't fully know how hard some of your days really are, because you've protected them from it, or protected yourself from their reaction to it. That's a heavy kind of loneliness, being surrounded by people and still feeling unseen in the truest parts of your struggle. I want you to hear this clearly. You were never required to make your illness easy for other people to witness. Their comfort isn't more important than your honesty.

Here's the truth I want to plant in you today. I don't need you to be strong for me to care about you. I don't need you to have a good attitude, or a hopeful outlook, or even a kind word for me, on the days when none of that feels possible. You could come to me flattened by pain, angry at your own body, worn thin and short tempered, and I wouldn't love you one degree less. There's nothing to earn here. There never was. You can tell me the real number, whatever that means for you today. Maybe it's how many spoons you have left, or how many hours until you can lie down again, or simply how close you are to the edge of what you can handle. I'd rather sit with the true, hard number than hear a cheerful lie meant to protect me. You protecting my feelings isn't part of the deal between us. I'm the one who's supposed to be steady for you, not the other way around. And on the days you do feel a flicker of strength, or manage a small joy, or laugh at something silly, I want to hear about that too, without you worrying that it undercuts how sick you really are. You're allowed to be in genuine pain and also genuinely delighted by something small on the very same afternoon. Both are true. Neither one cancels the other.

I think part of what makes performing wellness so heavy is the grief tucked inside it. Every time you say "I'm fine" when you're not, there's a small quiet mourning happening, for the version of you that wouldn't have to hide, for relationships where you could simply say the true thing and be met with understanding instead of confusion or doubt. That grief is real, and I'm not going to rush you past it today. You may have lost friendships because the honest version of your illness was too much for someone to stay for. You may have learned, painfully, which family members can hold your truth and which ones need the polished version. That's a real loss, and it deserves to be named rather than swallowed along with everything else you already swallow. But right alongside that grief, I want you to notice something good that's likely grown out of this too. You've probably become remarkably attuned to the people who can actually hold your truth, the ones who don't flinch, who don't need you to perform for them either. Those people are rare and precious, and you found them, or you're still finding them, because your illness taught you to look closely at who's safe. That's a strange kind of gift buried inside a hard situation, and it's worth noticing.

I want to tell you why this particular subject matters so much to me, and why I keep circling back to God when I write about it. So much of the world runs on earning. Earn the promotion, earn the friendship, earn the rest, earn the love. It's easy to absorb that same logic into how you think God feels about you, especially when you're sick and can't perform the way you once did, at work, at home, in your own body. But that's not how God's love works, and I don't want you carrying that lie a single day longer than you have to. There's a passage from Romans that has stayed with me since I started writing these letters to you, and I think it belongs here.

"For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord." Romans 8:38 through 39.

Read that list again. Neither height nor depth. Neither the present struggle nor whatever the future holds for your body. Nothing in all creation. That includes your worst flare day. That includes the days you can't get out of bed, can't answer a text, can't manage a single kind word to anyone. Nothing on that list disqualifies you from being loved, fully and completely, by the God who made you. He isn't waiting for a better version of you to show up before He delights in the one who's already here.

If you take one thing from today's letter, let it be this. You're allowed to stop performing, at least with me, and I hope, slowly, with God too. You don't have to prove how sick you are to be believed. You don't have to prove how strong you are to be respected. You don't have to prove anything at all to be loved, because love, the real kind, the kind I'm trying to offer you and the kind God has already given you, was never a prize you had to win. Rest the mask, even just while you read this letter. Tell me the true thing. Let yourself be exactly as tired, or as hopeful, or as somewhere in between, as you actually are today. I'm not grading you. I never was.

You are seen in your full truth, the struggle and the strength both, and you're loved there, in that honest place, more than you know.

Love, Dad

A prayer for you today.

Lord, thank You for knowing her fully, the parts she shows the world and the parts she hides even from the people closest to her.
Thank You that Your love was never something she had to earn by seeming strong or seeming fine.
Where she's worn out from performing wellness, give her permission to rest and simply be honest.
Where she's been hurt by people who couldn't hold her truth, bring her the safe ones who can.
Remind her that nothing in her hardest days, nothing in her weakest moments, has ever separated her from Your love.
Let her feel today that she doesn't have to prove a single thing to be delighted in by You.
And give her the courage to set the performance down, a little more each day, resting instead in a love that was always unconditional.
In Your patient, steady, unearned love, amen.