I’m listening to Joyce Meyer talking about making peace with yourself. My eternal struggle. I think I do well on it and then I realize that I’ve been in a pattern of self doubt for weeks…or longer. To God’s credit, I’m no longer wallowing in self-loathing. But, oh my gosh, do I doubt myself. All the time.
I’m a nerd. Geek. Whatever. But not in a way that I can actually use. I can’t create something super cool, like a web page or video or some sort of graphic that I could like, prove to someone that I can make decent use of my time. I just love knowledge. I love to Google things out of nowhere just to learn about them. I talk on here about loving story. I get caught up in stories of real life people or characters on TV or in books and I love when they’re in situations completely unfamiliar to me. I love to imagine what I would be like in those situations. I’ve been watching the first season of Dexter…and last night I dreamed about solving an extremely complicated crime. Have I ever really done anything useful with my nerd stuff? Nope. I’ve written a couple things that are sitting in Scrivener and have about 20,000 words so far. Each. For me, that’s HUGE. But not nearly enough to be published, and considering that they’re my first real efforts it’s unlikely that they would be published at all even if they were completed.
So I spend time in my on-screen or on-page worlds, treating these characters as people. Thinking about what makes them tick. Thinking about the people in my real life and what makes them the way that they are. Thinking about my story, my setting, and how I could change things but also thinking about how no one would ever listen to me. When I think about my church, I think about how I could change EVERYTHING there and make it so much better. When I worked for Amazon, I saw how everything was so blasted inefficient and it drove me bonkers. When I look at the city of Huntington, I see how stunted it is and how we NEED something better- but no one is doing anything about it. Yet no one listens to me and I barely to go church anymore because I can’t stand it, I quit my job and I’m moving away.
I wish I didn’t run away. I wish I didn’t live in denial. I met a new boy recently, and I warned him- I’m a nerd. He’s super country. We’re like, total opposites. But I said that I’d try to take it easy on him. I hid it away and tried to find common interests for us to discuss. I didn’t want to scare him away. And then, oh gosh. One day, it happened. We were looking stuff up online and I stumbled over some nerdy things and totally. freaking. fangirled. It was one of the most embarrassing displays of excitement I’ve ever exhibited. After a few minutes, I looked up to see him smirking at me. I stopped mid sentence and played it off with a joke. He wasn’t phased. I was.
Thinking about it takes me back to high school, when I was treated with derision because of things like that. When I tried to hang out with the “cool” people at church and told that fiction was stupid and that watching TV meant that I was not a good steward of my time.
I’m so tired of being made to feel like a loser over what makes me unique.
Hearing Joyce talk about this gives me hope, though. She said that she was always embarrassed by her voice. It’s rough, deep, and loud. She’s not one of those sweet, mousy, quiet women that the church likes so much. She is brash. Has presence. In my opinion, she’s a great speaker and I love her manner. But she used to hate her voice, and felt that it was what would stop her from becoming a success.
Look at her now. She has preached the gospel to millions and is doing absolutely amazing missions work all over the world. God has used her tremendously, especially in my life, and I believe that He caused me to find her podcast at the right time to keep me from committing suicide.
To this day, when she talks to people on the phone they think she’s a man.
I hope, so much, that one day my obsession with story will help people and be used for good. But in the meantime, my biggest obstacle is being okay with being me.
Stick with it, never give up. I think oftentimes our skills are used for “good” that we don’t even see immediately.