Member-only story
This Is Us
My Lifelong Battle Against Intrusive Thoughts
Confrontations with God, a tollbooth, and the Devil
I used to pray a strange prayer:
“Dear God, prune the roots.”
I saw my mind as a magical tree, but I feared it wasn’t mighty enough. What if it’s only a bonsai? I wanted God to go underground, down to the roots and trim them, snip off their tapered decisions to stop reaching, encourage them to dig deeper into the earth.
“But bonsais are so beautiful,” you say.
You’re not wrong. And I love you.
God’s pruning would make the root system vast. Imagine oceans of water sent up and up into the bonsai. It would have a choice to make. Either expand like a balloon, becoming a water bomb the size of EPCOT, and explode — or grow to the height of a sequoia, a redwood, and freakishly beyond, a tree so gigantic that the moon nests in its branches.
Why did I pray this? To be noticed, of course. I knew by instinct that it’s difficult to ignore a brain so big it swallows the moon.
