A NOTE TO THE READER:
In this winter season, the Anselm Society is considering the opportunity that limitations bring. Constriction — of time, space, ability, and everything we do with these gifts — gives us a chance to work within it. Christina Brown recounts unwanted limitations that abruptly shifted her life as a writer. Read her story below and listen to her engage these ideas more broadly on the Imagination Redeemed Podcast episode, Always Winter.
Through years of suffering, Christina Brown learned a hard truth all artists must live by.
By Christina Brown
Once upon a time, I thought it could. Art, that is. Come first. Or at least, in practice I thought it should. But I was wrong.
I was young and enthusiastic, with a hungry mind and vivid imagination. In my teens, I wrote short stories, plays, and poems, and surprised my dad by writing an original piano quartet composition for my siblings and me to perform on his birthday. I even wrote a novel. (Was it good? Of course not. But I was happy. I just knew I was called to be a writer.) I pursued my love of creating into college with a liberal arts degree, getting straight As and loving every second.
Until I got sick.
My grades slowly declined, and I became too exhausted to keep up with the reading. Mental fog and depression wrapped me in a gray mist, obscuring the beauty I had always found in the world around me.
I fought my way to the finish line of my second semester of my sophomore year, then I went home. After three long years of doctor visits, mysterious symptoms, and multiple diagnoses, the doctor finally flagged the underlying cause: long-term lyme disease.
The next few years were dark. I wasn’t sure I’d ever fully recover. I was too ill to return to college, and though I was functioning physically, my brain was handicapped, and I could barely manage a retail job, let alone read a book or carry any kind of creative conversation on art, intellect, or theology. I was too depressed to pick up the paintbrush or the violin, and my writing abilities evaporated. I became that dark lump in the corner during parties; half brooding, half weeping inside as I struggled to even follow the conversation – terrified that someone would look at me, yet simultaneously hoping they would. I was desperate to contribute to the conversation as I used to. But I couldn’t. My insecurities tormented me.
Why did I ever think God was calling me to write? I was wrong. I am a broken waste of space.
Even now, I cannot think of those days without shuddering at the hopelessness I felt. I thought the silence of God was an invalidation of my calling as a writer.
But it wasn’t. It took me years to understand, but I know now: My art was never supposed to come first.
John Steinbeck was partially right when he said, “The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.” People like Anne Lamott and Madeleine L’Engle have written similar things, and such statements can be helpful in guiding our efforts and ordering our endeavors.
Though at one point I might have resonated with Steinbeck, I think now I’d rephrase his idea this way:
The writer must believe that the most important thing in the world is to glorify God, and he must hold this priority close in every effort of his life and craft, even when he is tempted to believe it is not true.
I longed to be that writer – the one who had the freedom to dedicate my life to my craft. But that choice was no longer mine to make. I had to learn to work around my limitations. Though my journals were still chock-full of entries of lament, and my pillowcases were often damp with salty tears, I turned my attention to what I could do.
I began checking in with old college and high school friends, setting up phone calls or coffee dates to see how they were doing. I learned how to make elaborate scrapbooks, and in doing so found I could make beautiful hand-made cards. They became messengers of love (literally) as I used them in care packages to family and friends, or sent them as unexpected notes of cheer to an unwitting recipient. I learned to pay attention to the struggles of others. I listened. Gradually, my heart began turning outward, and learning the art of loving others became a passion point of my life.
Slowly, through a long decade of treatments and tears, a gentle healing gradually occurred.
During those first years, I looked at the world with an acute longing I felt but couldn’t describe. Only later did I recognize it for the gift that it was; my inability to harness the words to describe that longing singed my soul with an indelible scar that has transformed each and every piece of writing I do today. (And on occasion, I’ve even picked up my paintbrush and my violin.)
I can’t say exactly what butterfly effect any given moment or habit might have had on my life or the lives of others, but over time, as an apprentice, I’ve slowly learned to quiet my vainglory and serve the Master first — and the work second. He is the same Great Craftsman who worked as a carpenter, getting splinters from the very same wood whose molecules His hands once formed. And as I’ve learned to respond to His invitation, I’ve seen my own work revivified within His.
It took me many years of long, hard suffering and slow healing to realize that, in the spiritual mystery that is God’s strange providence, those were some of the best years of my life. For in learning to let go of my own desires and dreams for my art, I found Him. Only now, nearing 20 years after the first inklings of my illness, do I find that a slow mastery of my craft is beginning. But I would never have found it if God hadn’t taken all I thought I loved and given me His strength through my weakness, for “from Him and to Him and for Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever! Amen” (Romans 11:36 NIV).
Christina Brown and her husband, Brian, are the founders of the Anselm Society, whose mission and calling is a renaissance of the Christian imagination. She serves as the director of the Anselm Society Arts Guild, and is the garden columnist for Cultivating magazine. Her creative work can be found at LiveBeautiful.today and on Instagram.