Validation

Last night in my Writing Workshop class I read aloud the first part of an essay that I wrote about my experience as a missionary kid. I read a section that dealt with the first two years as an MK, when my parents were deciding to become missionaries and we were moving all the time to raise support and get the necessary training. I have really been processing that time in my life a lot this past year. I was 11 when my parents decided to join Wycliffe and 13 when we left the U.S. to move to France. Those years typically represent a disempowerment experience for girls, but for me that was combined with the confusion of constantly moving and having all kinds of major identity crises at once. The outcome of this confusion and turmoil was that I became a fundamentalist teenager. Then moving overseas made me reconsider some of my rock solid certainties.
But anyhow, what I wanted to say is that reading the essay to my writing class last night made me feel so amazing. I've sent the essay to a bunch of friends, and I've gotten positive feedback, but some part of me felt like maybe they were just being nice because they were my friends. But this group of relative strangers (it is a safe environment and an encouraging one, but I don't know these people, and they don't know me) really responded to my writing. They were moved, and felt such compassion for the narrator in the essay. It helped me to really stand up and own the fact that I lived through something unusual and difficult. And it helped me to listen to their compassion for that young-self that I've been trying to understand and forgive and honor this past year.