mama3girls-phnig

The Eternal Now
There is a peculiar kind of loneliness that comes from trying to describe an experience that does not fit neatly inside ordinary language.
Before I tell this story, something important needs to be said.
I have lived for years inside a body carrying profound stress.
Clinically, two separate psychiatric evaluations have ruled out psychosis, mania, and primary thought disorder. What remains is a diagnosis that makes far more sense of my lived experience: complex post-traumatic stress disorder.
Complex trauma.
That diagnosis matters, but perhaps not in the way people assume.
It means my nervous system has spent long stretches of life behaving as though danger is near, even when danger is no longer visible.
It means my body can register threat with startling intensity.
It means my brain and body do not always tell the same story.
One physician cried while reviewing my brain scans.
She told me my brain showed profound depression and anxiety, and yet my cognition remained remarkably intact.
She said they do not usually expect to see cognition functioning at this level in a brain carrying this much depression and anxiety.
I asked her the question I suspect many trauma survivors eventually ask.
“Am I dying?”
She said no. I think the silent tears she shed were confusing. I hope they would be confusing for anybody.
Then she said something I have never forgotten.
“No—but your body feels like it is. This is how complex post-traumatic stress disorder is showing up in your body.”
The string theory of two thoughts woven together with the use of language to understand the model my body is simulating—
those sentences changed me.
Because they gave language to something I had been living but could not explain.
My body has been behaving as though it is fighting for survival.
And when a body lives near survival for long enough, strange things happen.
Perception sharpens.
Meaning intensifies.
Time bends.
Or at least, it can feel that way sometimes—usually between the hours of 1–4 a.m.
My husband and I do not always understand these experiences the same way.
And I want to say something clearly and gently here.
I have never been unsettled by the concept. I have always been curious and fascinated by it. It unsettled my husband.
I do not think he is trying to harm me.
I think he is sincerely confused.
And that is okay.
Because so am I.
There is something else that complicates this, and I want to hold it carefully.
My husband has told me, in private, about moments in his own life that do not fit neatly inside ordinary explanation either.
He has described seeing something in the sky he could not account for.
He has described an encounter that felt, to him, like a presence—something he would not easily dismiss as imagination.
He did not tell those stories loudly.
He did not offer them as proof of anything.
He shared them quietly, almost reluctantly, as experiences that unsettled him.
And I believed him.
Not because I needed to categorize what he saw.
But because I could hear the sincerity in how he spoke about it.
When he told me those stories, I did not challenge him. I did not dismiss him or try to force his experience into something smaller or more explainable. I affirmed him. I remember saying, “That makes sense to me. It seems highly possible if you consider the language of the Bible. If that happened to me, I would have been terrified.”
I told him I didn’t know exactly what it meant, that it depended on the framework you were looking at it from. If you’re looking at a light hovering in the far distance, something that feels unfamiliar or even extraterrestrial, I have never called that aliens. I have always approached it through a Christian theological lens—something that could have been a warning, something spiritual, something we don’t fully understand. I never said it wasn’t possible. I always held space for mystery. I always used language that affirmed him, that allowed him to feel seen without being reduced or corrected. That has been something he has received from me, consistently. And it is something I have not always received in return.
What has been difficult for me is noticing the difference between how those kinds of experiences are handled depending on who is speaking.
Publicly, when something unusual is discussed, the response tends to move quickly toward explanation and attunement for the other person’s perspective. Yet when it is held in private, regarding my own lived experience, my husband’s frame becomes more skeptical or dismissive.
This is confusing to me.
There is a kind of social reflex that says: we need to make this make sense.
We need to contain it.
We need to decide what it is.
People enjoy movies and shows that are wrapped up with a pretty bow. And while I love a good pretty bow, life is not that clean. I don’t love reading books that don’t get wrapped up with a pretty bow because I’m trying to escape real life. I even told my husband in the same conversation that this is why I love reading—I can escape reality. I also told him I’m reading friends online who are writers and have allowed me to escape reality. I asked him if that was okay. He encouraged it.
Data.
My husband can be extremely attuned to me when I’m asking for something that I think I need. Sometimes I question if he has it backwards. Meaning, I need him to tune in to me regarding my lived experience in our home, and sometimes I need him to give me words that say, “No, don’t read those authors.” Again, I am very confused.
Privately, with me, my husband has sometimes responded differently.
There have been moments of curiosity.
Moments where he has listened.
Moments where he has acknowledged that not everything fits cleanly into categories we already understand.
And there have also been moments where fear or uncertainty shifts that response into something more guarded.
More corrective.
More urgent.
I do not think that shift makes him a villain.
I think it makes him human.
I think it reflects the tension many people feel when something brushes up against the edges of what they can comfortably hold.
Especially when it is happening to someone they love.
Especially when they feel responsible for keeping that person safe.
I am not writing this as someone with answers.
I am writing as someone who has lived in confusion for so long that we are now looking at a house where I may live alone for a season.
Not as punishment.
Not as revenge.
Not even as surrender.
But as an act of mercy.
Toward both of us.
Toward a nervous system that no longer seems able to heal inside constant friction.
What I need right now is astonishingly simple.
Less conflict.
More quiet.
More purpose.
Enough calm for my body to relearn safety.
Enough stillness to see whether healing is possible.
Except here’s the thing: my body hasn’t gotten the memo when I say I’m used to it. My body is screaming, “No, we’re not used to this anymore, and you’re going to fix this.” Doctors have essentially given me permission to make a practical change—to find a place closer to the school I’ll be attending in the fall—so I don’t have to drive two hours a day, three nights a week, after ten o’clock at night. It isn’t just about convenience. It’s about survival in a quieter, more sustainable way.
And in the same evening where my experience is challenged, our realtor called, and then came the May story.
And now a question enters my frame: if my body is allowed to be at a calmer state and its nervous system settles, will the veil thicken?
“The veil is very thin for me right now, Phil, and it’s not always fun. Can you please just make sure that nothing violent happened in that house?”
He said, “I will, Jen. I promise. I don’t think we’re going to have to worry about it because the house is already under contract, and that may be answer enough. But I will put a backup contract on it.”
This is where my body starts to buzz every single time—when my husband doesn’t believe me, but my realtor does.
Not metaphorically.
Physically.
My chest tightens.
My nervous system lights up.
Something inside me prepares for impact.
Because I do not want to be pathologized.
I do not want my experience used against me.
I do not want the most tender, terrifying, mysterious parts of my life turned into evidence that I cannot be trusted.
So I have become very quiet around this topic.
People may call that maturity.
Or restraint.
Or choosing peace.
But I know the more honest name.
It is a fawn response.
It is what happens when a person learns that speaking too fully may cost them safety.
I have been thinking about time lately.
Not clock time.
Not the kind measured by calendars and deadlines and mortgage rates and school start dates.
I mean eternity.
God names Himself in a way that has always unsettled me.
I AM.
Not I was.
Not I will be.
I AM.
My husband once said something that lodged in me.
He said he thinks eternity might simply be now.
No beginning.
No end.
Just now.
When he said it, I gave language to what I thought he meant.
“Do you mean,” I asked him, “that God is the eternal now?”
Yes.
That tracked.
Then yesterday, while visiting a friend in Houston, I heard something similar.
She said:
“God is I AM. He is only now.”
Only now.
That should have satisfied me.
It didn’t.
Because my mind kept catching on another phrase of scripture.
He who was and is and is to come.
Why preserve those words?
Why not only I AM?
Why name past, present, and future at all?
I challenged her.
What if He was
and is
and is to come?
She looked at me and said:
“What do you mean?”
Not dismissively.
Genuinely.
What do you mean?
And in that moment I realized something.
She had likely never considered the possibility that God exists outside time in a way that rearranges the architecture of reality.
So I stopped.
I never answered.
I said two words silently inside my own head.
Never mind.
I have said those words more times in my life than I can count.
Never mind.
Not because the thought no longer matters.
Because suddenly I can feel the cost of translation.
How much scaffolding will this require?
How many concepts must I build before another person can even see the question I am asking?
Sometimes the distance feels too great.
So I retreat.
Never mind.
Two small words.
The burial ground of unfinished thoughts.
A few nights ago, I tried to explain something to my husband that I rarely tell anyone.
I woke in prayer.
Not groggy.
Not dreaming.
Awake.
And as I prayed, something shifted.
Suddenly I was not merely praying for someone.
I was with someone.
A woman.
In a car.
Rain everywhere.
Floodwater.
Fear.
I felt her terror in my body with such force that language still fails me.
I prayed for peace.
I prayed for mercy.
I prayed for release.
Then came something I still struggle to describe.
An ascension.
A span of seconds—five, maybe ten—where I knew she was leaving.
And then she was in the presence of her Savior.
I know how this sounds.
Believe me.
I know.
I have never experienced God in this way until depression.
That matters.
Because I do not know where neuroscience ends and God begins.
I am not sure the line is as clean as we pretend.
Maybe what we call pathology is sometimes the body’s evidence of unbearable stress.
Maybe what we call spiritual sensitivity is sometimes what happens when suffering strips away ordinary defenses.
Maybe it is both.
That is the part I need held with care.
Not inflated.
Not dismissed.
Held.
I am beginning to suspect that healing may require something I have not had in a very long time.
Not certainty.
Not agreement.
Just enough safety to remain curious.
Enough quiet to stop saying never mind.
Enough peace for my body to decide it no longer has to live like it is dying.
Maybe that is what I am really searching for.
Not answers.
Not proof.
Just enough stillness to hear what remains when conflict leaves the room.
Maybe eternity is not endless time.
Maybe eternity is the place where nothing true has to defend its existence.
Maybe eternity is where reality no longer needs permission to be real.
And maybe healing begins there.
In the now.
In the I AM.
In the space where unfinished thoughts no longer need to apologize for existing.