Cannibalized Gift

I did something bold.

I cannibalized something an old friend had given me.

Did you ever see those super goofy sacks you can wear? You know, the ones that look like a human-sized pillowcase, but instead of the hole being at one end, there’s individual holes for your head, arms, and legs?

No? Okay, well, I’m just really weird. And so are my friends, apparently, because my friend made me one out of this super soft fleece material (with an adorable donut print, I might add). It was so comfy and so warm, which was great for our house in the winter because we have baseboard heaters and they’re awful.

The Backstory 

She and I used to be good buddies. We’d stay up talking some nights so late that my husband would have to come out and tell me to kick her out. She even came up with a code word so we wouldn’t feel bad telling her to leave (it was “pineapples”).

We had our ups and downs, like any friendship. In the spring of 2024, we had a particularly rough patch. She felt I wasn’t pulling my weight in the relationship and when I did try to open up, she acted like I was the problem instead of sitting with me in my pain. We didn’t speak to each other for several months. That summer, she was in the process of raising money to move to Africa as a missionary. Just before she finished her fundraising, she asked if we could try again, patch things up one last time.

We did, for a time. My husband tried to warn me away, but I wanted to be a good Christian, you know, “…as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone” (Romans 12:8)? She’d apologized for how things went and asked for forgiveness. After she moved, we messaged on What’s App and chatted off and on about her move and how things were going in the States, shared things we found in the Bible that spoke to us. The relationship was going fairly well, or so I thought.

Fallout 

But just a couple months after she moved to Africa, we left our church. We’d been attending there for over 8 years. That church had seen us through so much hardship, but also so much joy. In the fall of 2024, we felt that God was telling us to leave that church. Not that anyone had hurt us or was teaching anything unbiblical, but we felt that God was pointing us away and that our ministry was elsewhere.

The leadership didn’t see it that way. They told us we were being unbiblical, accused us of leaving the Church altogether, and said that we were like sheep, letting ourselves out of the fold for the wolves to devour us. We didn’t defend ourselves; we simply restated what God told us and said, “We’re leaving before Thanksgiving.” We wrote a letter to the church and sent it through the church email, letting everyone know why we were leaving and that they were welcome to reach out with any questions or concerns.

A few days later, my friend in Africa messaged me. I knew it wasn’t going to be a pleasant conversation. She accused us of abandoning community. She asked questions that could only go around and around in debates and nastiness until one of us broke and accepted their place as the problem (me). So I handed (well, slammed) my phone off to my husband and said, “I can’t respond to her; I’m too angry.”

Thank God I had. He didn’t stoop to her level and answer her questions. He came back with questions and statements of his own that swatted away her accusations. She backed down, apologized, and asked if I would forgive her. I did, but forgiveness doesn’t always mean you let that person continue to have access to you. I blocked her on all social media after that and deleted the messaging app.

Recovery 

The blanket she’d given me sat in a dark corner of my closet for months. Our cat claimed it as his little hidey-hole and I let him cover it in cat hair because I couldn’t stand to look at it.

 Recently, my therapist has been doing EMDR with me because I’ve been finding multiple situations where I just can’t cope and can’t process things well. Depression kept sneaking its way into my soul and I’ve been shutting down for weeks at a time.

A recent session covered all the pain of leaving that church. The pain of leaving a community that should have loved me and my family well, even as we left. The pain of being accused of shutting myself away when all I needed was acceptance and grace. The pain of being “too much” in a church that celebrated the people who could be neatly packaged.

And I walked out of that session so much lighter. Parts of that community had harmed me, but they don’t get any say in how I live now. They don’t get to decide how “much” I am. They don’t get access to me. I can be fully myself, fully alive, and their ghosts don’t get to whisper horrible things in my ear anymore.

I don’t have to chase after those relationships anymore. I don’t have to dwell on their opinions of me. If they couldn’t accept and love all of Di, then they didn’t deserve all of Di.

The day after therapy, I told my boys we were going to repurpose the blanket/sack/thing. My youngest helped me cut up and sew the fabric into a little cushion for our cat. My oldest son helped me engineer a tent over a little basket with the remaining fabric, some sticks from our yard, and some wire. And now our cat has a beddy-bye basket (if you get that reference, we were meant to be friends), repurposed from old friendships and built with new memories.

Our cat, Jack, enjoying the cannibalized gift.

If there are people in your life, past or present, who will only accept you when you fit in a tiny box of their design, you can cut up that blanket. Make it into something new and enjoyable. Because you don’t need to hold onto that anymore. They don’t have to have power over you and your emotional wellbeing.

You are worthy of love.

You are so much more than they can handle and that’s a good thing.

Be fully you. Be fully alive. And be unapologetic about it.