My therapist told me I was walking around in wet socks.
I had been telling him about the heavy things. The calls I wasn’t making. The paperwork I wasn’t opening. Problems I knew how to solve and kept carrying anyway. He listened for a while and said it sounded like I had been walking around in wet socks so long I had forgotten my feet were supposed to be dry.
I felt them immediately.
Cold in the heels. Fabric gone heavy back there, dragging half an inch behind my foot, so I’m always walking slightly inside my own shoes. That s**t keeps squishing. F**k, I hate that sound.
After a while, I start changing how I walk so I don’t have to hear it.
That was the part he understood before I did.
I had reorganized my whole walk around staying uncomfortable.
I got dry socks. Good ones too. I wear a fifteen, so when I find socks that actually fit, I buy them on purpose.
Relief ain’t unavailable.
It’s in the same apartment.
In the morning, the wet is loud. Every step got something to say. I’m walking around carrying my own damn feet. By noon, it quiet down some. By four, I ain’t noticing no more. I’m just in a mood I can’t explain to nobody. Short with people. Tired in a way that don’t match what I did all day.
That’s the part that f**k with me.
It don’t stop.
It just go under.
And you’d think sitting down would help. It don’t. At least walking give me something else to think about. Sit down, feet up, try to actually rest, and now it’s just cold and quiet and mine.
I couldn’t tell you the last day my feet was dry.
Might be weeks.
Might be longer than that.
Getting used to it is worse than the cold ever was.
Here’s what I know about being uncomfortable.
I know how to not say nothing about it.
I was twelve when they started putting me in front of people. Youth group. Bible memorization competitions. Adults telling me I’d run the youth group one day.
The thing about getting picked that young is you learn real quick it’s a job.
You don’t get tired out loud.
Somebody handed you something, and the fact that they handed it to you is the proof you can hold it. If it’s hurting, that’s between you and God, and it probably means it’s working.
They taught us about Paul and his thorn.
Whatever it was, nobody could name it for me. That made it useful. Anything could be your thorn if somebody needed you to keep carrying it.
Paul asked God to take it.
Asked three times.
God told him no.
My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness.
And we read that like it was good news.
Like that was the win.
The lesson I heard wasn’t that God fixed it. The lesson was that Paul asked, got told no, and stopped asking.
Stopping was the growth.
So what I learned at twelve years old is you can have a thing in you that hurts every day for the rest of your life, and the mature response, the spiritual response, is to quit bringing it up.
But we talked about pain.
That’s what people don’t understand.
We talked about our pain all the time.
Just backwards.
Past tense.
I went through a season, but God.
You get up there after. You get up there with the ending already on it. With the lesson. With the bow.
Ain’t nobody ever stood up on a Sunday and said, I’m in it right now. Today. And it’s stupid and small and I don’t know why I can’t fix it.
There’s no place to put that.
There’s no song for it.
So you hold it until it becomes a testimony.
And some things never become a testimony.
They just stay a thing you’re holding, and you get real good at holding.
I didn’t tell nobody.
Not directly.
That’s how I tell it. I wait until I can make it sound like a status report. I leave just enough hurt in my voice for somebody to notice, then close the door before they can come through it.
I told the story that way again this week.
Then I went back and read the messages.
February 18th.
I sent my mother a screenshot of the problem and typed, Smh.
She told me to call the bank. See if they would do a partial release.
I told her they wouldn’t. Told her I had already asked for an extension and hadn’t heard anything.
She wrote:
How much is it. Idk if I have it.
I wrote:
1565 I wouldn’t ask you to cover that tho.
Then, before she could answer:
Interview went really well.
I answered her question and revoked the answer in the same sentence.
Then I gave her better news.
Something lighter to hold.
Something that let both of us leave the number sitting there by itself.
Nobody told me to do that.
Five years out and I do it my damn self now.
They built it.
They left.
I kept it.
At this point, it ain’t even religion.
It’s just how I walk.
It ain’t that the thing is hard.
If it was hard, I’d have something respectable to say about it.
I could explain the obstacles. Make a story out of why I ain’t done it yet.
But taking off a wet sock ain’t hard.
Sit down.
Use two hands.
Peel.
The first move takes fifteen seconds.
I know that.
The whole time I been walking around like this, I have known exactly what to do.
But the knowing and the starting don’t live in the same part of me.
There’s the chair. There’s the dry pair. There’s somewhere to put the wet ones.
Every step is easy enough to insult me.
And I still can’t get through the first one.
That’s how everything is right now.
One thing waiting on another thing. A repossessed car in a state I don’t live in no more waiting on a document. That document sitting inside a folder I won’t open.
It ain’t four problems.
It’s one line, and I’m standing at the front of it.
That’s a good explanation.
I been using it a while.
February don’t support it.
In February, I called a woman at the bank and said the number out loud.
Five thousand five hundred dollars.
Cashing out the whole retirement account so the lights stayed on.
She walked me through it in about ten minutes, like it wasn’t nothing. Then the money landed in my account and the bank held it anyway because it came from someplace new, so I still couldn’t touch my own rent.
I sat for a job interview and sold somebody on what I could do.
I did every step.
The job went quiet.
But that ain’t the point.
The point is I started.
Those things had somebody on the other end.
Somebody asking.
Somebody waiting to see what I would do.
I know how to move when somebody needs something from me. When there’s a chance to be useful, competent, impressive, necessary.
The folder don’t have nobody on the other end but me.
Nobody’s waiting for me to open it.
There’s no applause in private relief.
Just me, taking care of something because it hurts me.
I know the other answer too.
ADHD.
Executive dysfunction.
That gap between knowing and starting has a name. It ain’t laziness, and I know that well enough to teach it.
Some days, somebody says it back to me plain and I believe it for about a day.
Then I’m standing in front of the folder and the old math runs anyway.
The diagnosis explains the friction.
It does not erase what I was taught to believe the friction means.
The name lives up in the part of me that reads.
The shame lives lower than that.
And it was there first.
So I don’t just fail to start.
I watch myself fail to start and turn it into proof.
Then, when I finally sit down and do the thing, I feel so good it makes me sick.
The relief is too big.
It don’t match.
That’s it?
That’s what I been carrying?
Then I have to sit there with the fact that the first move was fifteen seconds all along.
And that shame is exactly what makes the next pair harder.
That’s how you end up not knowing what day your feet was last dry.
There’s a folder.
Mostly digital, but that ain’t really what I mean.
I know what’s in it the way you know what’s behind a door you decided not to open.
Not from looking.
From the weight of not looking.
Everything inside it is administrative.
Numbers. Disclosures. Forms. Signatures. Dates.
Sit down with somebody who does this for a living. Tell them the truth. Sign where they tell you to sign.
Forty-five minutes, maybe.
The first move still fifteen seconds.
But it don’t feel administrative.
It feels like a verdict.
Somewhere under the man who walked away from the church five years ago, there’s still a boy who thinks a verdict like that says something about him.
Not his math.
His soul.
Be faithful in the small things.
Sow and you’ll reap.
A good steward multiplies what he’s given.
If the numbers are bad, then somewhere in me the conclusion is already written.
Irresponsible.
Undisciplined.
Failed.
I was raised to believe you don’t get to just handle something like that.
You repent.
You believe harder.
You wait on a season.
Wasn’t never a sermon where the answer was: this is paperwork.
Ain’t no altar call for gathering statements.
No testimony in letting a number be a number.
So the folder sits there not being opened, and I carry it the same way I carry the wet.
Feeling it at the edge of everything.
Letting it change my mood.
Letting it shorten my patience.
Letting it make rest feel like something I haven’t earned yet.
I know what the folder is called.
I just keep using every other word for it.
Financial.
Administrative.
The situation.
The paperwork.
Anything but the word that makes the verdict feel like it belongs to me.
But it ain’t a spiritual problem.
It ain’t a verdict.
It’s a Tuesday.
It’s forty-five minutes to open the thing and tell the truth.
It’s quiet in here right now.
I got my feet up.
You ask for the thing to be taken, and the answer is that you learn how to carry it. Grace being sufficient just means you keep it.
Five years I been out here learning there ain’t no permission coming, and I still sit here like I’m waiting on the word.
I keep waiting for relief to volunteer.
Nobody’s watching.
So.
Two hands.
Sit forward.
Start at the heel.
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