Courage, Dear Heart

 “ To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one . Lock it up safe in a casket or coffin…but in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will begin to change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable ” (C.S. Lewis).  I hate that quote. C.S. Lewis is my favorite author, because his words are so powerful; unfortunately, I don’t often take them to heart. Instead, they are pretty words on a page that should  mean something to me, but don’t.  “To love is to be vulnerable.” Seriously, I hate  that. It wasn’t until I learned what it meant to be an 8 (the “Challenger”) on the Enneagram that I fully understood why this bothered me so much; I honestly thought I was broken, and I was really embarrassed by how I viewed vulnerability. My husband, Ethan, is a 9 (the “Peacemaker”), and he has a really difficult time having “tough”

 “I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But He said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient  for you, for My power is made perfect  in weakness.’  Therefore, I will boast  all the more gladly  about my weaknesses… for when I am weak,  then I am strong ” (2 Cor. 12:7b-10b, NIV). I didn’t really understand these Scriptures until today. I’m an 8 on the enneagram, and if you know anything about 8s, you know that weakness…well, it’s not really our jam. As a matter of fact, the 8 that is writing this will do everything in her power to avoid weakness, to avoid vulnerability, and to avoid anything that could force me to lose control over myself.  You may be thinking, “But Taylor, what about this blog?” Yeah, sometimes I can be vulnerable on here - but it’s a hell of a lot easier behind a screen than face to face, especially when it’s with someone I trust. In my 8ness, I’ve convinced myself that vulnerability =

“Thanks for the good time, babe.”  Those were the last words I heard my sexual assaulter speak. Though he wasn’t the last of them, he was the first. In my heart, I believe that this horrible day set the cycle into motion.  I was only 17 at the time, and a police officer actually interrupted the interaction. “Not in public, guys,” he said to us, somehow thinking it was mutual. I was terrified, and I wanted to scream,  “Please, help me! Get him away from me!”  But I was a 5’5 120lb female, and he was a 6’1 180lb+ male. I was so scared, I was shaking. Before he left me, he said those awful words. “Thanks for the good time, babe.”   I went home and curled up in bed, shaking and crying into my pillow. I didn’t understand what had just happened - in fact, because of those words, I convinced myself it was consensual. I blocked out the parts of the assault when I was hitting him as hard as possible, screaming at him to stop. I blocked out the parts when I felt terrified for my life, thinking,