Feet On the Ground

I’m moving to Lexington in 2 days. I have orientation on Friday and classes start next Tuesday.

Nearing freak out mode here.

And…we’ve arrived.

Tags: change, discomfort, law school, risk, uncertainty

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.

Tags: discomfort, peace, trying

Just gave up on sleep. The lack of shut eye will make me super grouchy tomorrow when I’m working, but I hate my job so much that it won’t really make a difference. I’ll just grouch in a gravelly, tired voice.

I envision some scenes of my life as how they’d appear on film. I’d love for my life to be a dramedy full of excitement and witty banter, like Psych, but the truth is that my life is mostly full of sitcom moments with dashes of horror thrown in (horror being something  involving the upstairs neighbors who play Wii at all hours of the night and a sawed off shotgun- eh, that’s just a fantasy). The sad part is…I don’t even like sitcoms! WAIL. Okay, so Modern Family is HILAR – but that’s just cause, well, it just is.

Anyway.

Like, recently, I met a friend at Starbucks and had an extremely awkward moment before I even got through the door. My car is a tiny two seater, low to the ground and compact in every way – which, incidentally, is useful in preventing your stepdad from driving it. I took my laptop housed in a BookBook, which can be a bit cumbersome but is probably one of the coolest things I own. As I was getting out of my car, I stuck my arm through my purse straps and grabbed the BookBook, which became wedged between my stomach and the steering wheel. I couldn’t lean back, nor could I reach the lever to scoot the seat back. I finally dislodged it and thought I was in the clear. No one saw that awkward moment. Success.

Except that I was wearing jean shorts that are probably a ~smidge~ too small as they’re from, like, high school, but I’ve since been too broke around summer to buy new shorts. I was excited about the warm temperatures and the fact that I COULD wear shorts, so I went with it. When I extracted myself from the car, the shorts rode up and while I didn’t want to be adjusting them on the street, I also didn’t want to be accused of trying to start a new trend while simultaneously giving a new meaning to the term “booty shorts.” So I decided I was going to smoothly pull them down as I turned to shut the car door. Yeah, I’m completely sure I didn’t pull that off…

…because then I noticed the high school aged boys staring at me from beside the bus stop across the street.

Great.

I’m a college graduate preparing to go to law school getting creeped on by kids who can’t grow facial hair. (Which is no better than getting creeped on by men who have lost all of their hair. It all gives me the willies.)

So, I’m trying to look both ways and cross the street without getting smushed by a pickup truck while simultaneously unwinding my purse straps from around the dang BookBook. I already look awkward enough, and I was hanging onto both of them for dear life in a sort of hug. I thought I could let go of one of the purse straps because I had ahold of it with the other hand, but I couldn’t really see what was going on and I also have a bad habit of NOT zipping my purse…so I didn’t want to accidentally turn it upside down and dump everything into the street.

As I’m stumbling and fumbling, one of the aforementioned boys said something like, “Hey hot stuff” (really?) as another random dude driving by on my left slowed down, honked, and whistled through his open passenger window while perfecting his leering, creepy grin.

I wish I could have given them an icy glare or pulled out a tranq gun or thrown down some witty insults. Instead, I gulped, walked faster, and tried to hide behind my hair. My bravado failed me and my snark disappeared.

I want to be refined and clever. I want to demand respect. I want to be the type of person that walks with enough confidence that people know not to mess with her. In real life, I stumble, fumble, run away, and hide.

But once in a while, the script in my head insists that I’m the star of the show- and that I’m totally fabulous.

I really wish I had the power to make that script a reality.

Tags: awkward, discomfort

She sat at the table and recounted a story that is the closer to hell than anything I’ve ever experienced. Her straight posture and matter-of-fact manner didn’t welcome pity for her pain that she hid well behind a mask of cynicism and wit and bluntness. Yet as we sat there, my heart broke for her. It was too late for me to do anything about her pain, but I knew it was tangible and wondered if I could have done anything beforehand to help her through it. I even realized that such thoughts were useless, but it all felt so real in that moment that I could barely hold myself together.

And then when we were alone, she had the audacity to apologize for possibly offending me with her tale.

It was an issue that countless people have underwent, even in the church, and it’s something that usually results in immediate condemnation. Yet condemnation was the farthest thing from my mind. I haven’t known her for very long, but I can honestly say that I love her. And in that love there was no judgment. Only deep regret that I hadn’t been there to support her.  That she had to endure it alone.

The thought that she could have kept her story to herself out of fear of offending me made me feel a whole host of negative emotions toward myself and the religious community in general. Yet it felt so powerful because she chose to tell me and my first response was grace.

This isn’t a post to talk about how fabulous I am. The desire to extend grace was the most humbling thing I have ever felt in my life. I realized that grace means you’re aligning yourself with someone. It’s not showing that you’re condoning their actions but rather that you see them as they were made to be and are willing to help them close the gap from there to where they currently are. Extending grace means that you might receive condemnation simply from associating with them. It doesn’t mean that you’ll receive grace in return and almost certainly guarantees that enemies will rise up immediately to punish you for daring to give them a free pass.

I would never presume that I’ve made any impact on her life at all. If you could write a life story that was exactly the opposite of mine, hers would be it. But I’ve learned so much from her. Even if we never spoke again, I will forever remember her as striking. Her appearance, her wit, her ability to cut through all of the crap in a situation or a person and call them out on it. Her tenacity is unparalleled and the way she can rebound from a bad situation and push through everything life throws at her is remarkable. She warns and even apologizes for her brashness but refuses to curb herself to fit a mold. She’s the type of person that everyone wants to tame but she’s exactly what we need to make us realize that molds are completely useless.

She’s changed my life.

We’d be offended by her story, and that’s exactly why we need it.

Tags: appreciation, discomfort, grace, learning, nightmare, pain, risk

When you apply to law school, you have to write a personal statement. It’s the one part of the application where I have the most control. It will allow the committee to have a peek inside of my life and see what’s motivating me to go to school. You’d think this would be the thing I’d nail, considering that all of my blogs are about my favorite topic- me.

Instead, I’m finding it incredibly challenging. When I write here, I try to include more than a hint of self-deprecation because I know how ridiculous I am most of the time, even in my earnestness. Yet when I’m writing this statement, my earnestness is completely sincere. It’s kind of terrifying. I haven’t cared about something this much since…well, we all know how that turned out.

These feelings are so weird. I don’t know how to process them seriously right now. I don’t know when I began downplaying my passions but now it’s like I’ve become the person I scorned. Someone who didn’t care enough about anything to really pursue it.

I miss writing, I miss God, I miss reading, I miss spending time by myself just being in complete silence and completely content with that. I could be doing any of those things seriously right now, but I’m laying here with a headache, a slightly sore throat, tense muscles knotted in my neck and not enough energy to think about anything beyond, “Ow.”

And, of course, this intense desire for something more that I can’t seem to put into words…but I have to.

Tags: change, discomfort, law school, learning, risk

I’ve been kind of numb the past few weeks. I think it’s a combination of dealing with the most epic heartbreak of my life, being lonely and getting thrust into a new, draining, full-time job out of nowhere. I’ve read little and written less. I haven’t talked to my best friends much because there’s nothing to say. I can’t even really get involved in my TV shows as much as usual. I can’t connect. I can’t feel.

Part of it is welcome. I can’t feel anything bad, and when I do I just shove it aside and return to the numbness. But that also means that I can’t feel anything good either. I usually love Christmas, but it feels dead to me. It’s a celebration of life and I feel none of it. I miss God’s presence and the anointing flowing in my life. Whenever I listen to a Bill Johnson sermon, I no longer feel like all he discusses is attainable. It’s foreign and I wonder how the heck I’m supposed to get there. I don’t feel the passion and the power of God in my life anymore. I miss it. I miss Him. I want it back.

I struggled for a long time with thoughts of suicide. Up until a couple months ago, I was having an onslaught of random thoughts and dreams about killing myself. It was so weird because I knew I had no real intentions of doing that, and I would never follow through on those ideas. Yet they flowed into my mind with frightening regularity, and it was a painful struggle. A direct reflection of how much I did not love life.

Somehow, though, I could handle it. I could press into that anointing and feel God’s love and know that I would have to struggle with it forever. And when it fell away after a very emotional week, I rejoiced. I thought it was over for good. Then little by little everything else started falling away too, until now I stand here feeling empty and forlorn. Then last night, I had thoughts of cutting, which is something that I’ve never really had the interest in pursuing seriously (cause like, it hurts…). This is why it doesn’t make sense to me- I don’t do it, I won’t do it, and any attempts in the past (very few) have been half-hearted indeed. Even now, my rational thought process is so much more stable than it used to be. I’m not going to do it. But there’s something that wants me destroyed and it doesn’t really care if it’s in one fell swoop or proceeds gradually.

I used to be equipped to fight against it, but I don’t feel that way anymore. It’s probably the most terrifying part of this whole mess. Maybe, though, this is what I needed to get back to the right place. It’s certainly motivating, but I’m not sure how to do it anymore.

Tags: discomfort, fail, pain, silence

So I wrote that post on hope and then tried to go to sleep. I was almost there, and out of nowhere, both my heart and my thoughts started racing. It makes no sense, and yet it does. As soon as I felt the hope, I also felt the need to capitalize on it and make it all work. I’m really bad at that, if you haven’t noticed.

That’s not the point of hope. Hope is the response to God whispering, “I have something for you.” Hope births anticipation and expectancy and excitement.

Not panic.

I always try. That’s something that Mom and I both use on each other: I try so hard. I’m not saying that we’re supposed to be lazy, but I think it’s kind of a theme in my family, and in women in general. We try and strive and when it doesn’t work, we internalize it and blame ourselves. Then when it comes around again, we try even harder because if it didn’t work the first time, it’s obviously because of something we didn’t do.

So here I am, someone who hears all the time about how smart and beautiful and talented and so many other adjectives that don’t really matter she is, and although that sounds conceited, I’ve grown to see how much those things don’t matter. Oh sure, I’d be extremely distraught if I woke up and all of those qualities were suddenly taken away- I’m honest about my shallowness. But when someone says something like that, it generally makes me want to bust into frustrated tears. I want to start wailing, “SO WHAT?!” All of those compliments imply that I just need to learn how to use those things to my advantage, and I’ll get ahead.

It doesn’t work like that. It isn’t working. It hasn’t, and it won’t.

At least, that’s how I feel.

I think I would be more comforted if someone just said, “You are loved and will be blessed because you simply exist. You’re here, and you’re worth more than can be measured and you don’t even have to try.”

That’s what God did when He sent Gabriel to speak to Mary. She was a poor, uneducated girl who had barely hit puberty and who was a nobody from the middle of nowhere, but she was seen and chosen. She existed. She loved God the best she could. And that was enough.

So why do I keep thinking that more education and more striving is going to fix my situation? If God leads me to law school, it will be because that path is the best one for me…not because it will give me value.

Speaking of which: if the LSAC doesn’t approve me for a fee waiver before next Tuesday, I can’t take the LSAT in December and I’ll have to wait another year to apply for law schools. So…pray for me. That the right thing will happen and I will have peace with whatever happens…and that I won’t try to “fix” it.

Tags: discomfort, learning, trying

Facebook has become almost as annoying as Myspace was before I stopped logging into Myspace. There are ads and apps and bogus friend requests and emo song lyric statuses. But what annoys me the most are the hyper-religious statuses talking about Jesus and God and Christianity and how great their lives are because of God. I will be hugely judged for this statement, and I am totally beyond caring.

The thing is, I love Jesus with all of my heart and I am in no way ashamed to admit that. I become very territorial when He is reduced to a simple line on Facebook that someone writes in passing. I know that they’re probably well-meaning, but in my opinion they come across the same way as someone does in church when I ask how they’re doing and they smile fakely and say something ridiculous like, “Blessed and highly favored, praise the Lord!”

I DON’T CARE.

If God has performed a huge miracle in your life, like healing you from cancer, I will hallelujah dance right with you because that totally takes faith, prayer, and perseverance and you probably have something that I need to learn. But if you are just saying something about how great Jesus is just to say it, to show how good you are or perhaps just to gain some favor with God, you are doing it for the wrong reasons.

I expect my pastors to put stuff like this in their tweets and statuses, but I’m more pleased when they update about things that are really going on in their lives. If something good happens and they actually say what it is, I’ll smile. If they’re open and honest about something bad that happened, I’ll pray for them and grieve with them. It’s the same for anyone else. But if you’re just throwing random Pollyanna Jesus statements up there, it makes me roll my eyes.

“Moreover, when you fast, do not be like the hypocrites, with a sad countenance. For they disfigure their faces that they may appear to men to be fasting. Assuredly, I say to you, they have their reward.” – Matthew 6:16

The reward is only that people think they’re a little more holy than the next person. God isn’t pleased with it, and this so-called sacrifice will glean no reward from Him. One of the most eye-opening comments I’ve ever heard from someone that I respect but doesn’t believe in God was when he mentioned that he thinks I’m wise because I understand so much about something he understands nothing about. I just kind of sat there with my mouth hanging open because it was so honest, and so humble, and it made me realize that if I only ramble on about my relationship with God, people who don’t know Him really won’t understand me. It’s something so basic, that God even tells us in the Bible- that people who don’t know Him will not see Him and will not understand His Word. The only way that people will come to God is if they feel a longing for something more, something greater in their life…and they won’t get it if you just walk around saying how wonderful Jesus is. You have to live it, and show why He is so wonderful.

It’s a literary technique- showing vs. telling. If you tell everything that happens, every detail about a person or situation, the story is dull. Some things have to be told because they’re either too complex or too unimportant to show. But the power of most scenes lies in the showing of how the character is the way she is, or how he figures out that he loves her, or how the single mother breaks out of poverty.

I know that Jesus is great. I don’t need to be reminded on my news feed that you know it too. Neither does anyone else, because if all I know about you is that you love Jesus you’re really just like half of the other people on my friends list but one of the more annoying ones. I have absolutely no proof that your faith is real and substantiated, or that you’re anything more than a church-going robot.

Your Facebook statuses won’t get you through the pearly gates.

Tags: change, discomfort, fail, risk

The other day I was thinking about stories, and how the stories that I love are the ones where the main character trips all over herself and falls flat on her face and gets kicked around and still comes out on top because she strives for it. And then I thought about my life and how it looks nothing like that. And that my life is my story, and that I want my story to be like the ones that I love, but I don’t have enough courage to make it happen like that.

I don’t like to be uncomfortable.

So my story simply looks like someone who is trying to get to the point where she’s comfortable and shielded from attacks and perhaps doesn’t do a whole lot with her life except write a bunch of run-on sentences and watch really good TV. It’s a boring story. A boring life. I never cared about having an interesting life until I had a boring one and realized that comfort wasn’t what I wanted.

Being comfortable means that you’re not really making any progress. So while I’ve been comfortable, I’ve totally been stagnating. Which…makes me uncomfortable. When comfort brings discomfort, there’s a problem.

It just clicked with me at some point over the past few days that I have overrated comfort. And that discomfort in certain areas can offer comfort in others…and the tradeoff might just be worth it. I don’t like to feel unsettled, but life has a way of doing that at the most unusual moments. If you get used to it, it’s really not that bad. It keeps things interesting.

I don’t want a boring story.

There is a huge amount of risk in making that statement, and it will probably come up to bite me soon. But I’ve sat around for long enough to know that I’d rather leave behind a story that people want to remember than to sit around being another average person. There are way too many average people in the world. To make my story be something interesting, I have to face conflict. I’m not a confrontational person. I don’t like people being mad at me. I get upset when people dislike me.

Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure God doesn’t care if people like me or not. It might not make sense at first, but honestly, He never cares if we’re popular or comfortable. Just if we’re doing the right thing for Him. Jesus challenged people. His disciples challenged people. They were accepted by some, hated by many, and killed for what they believed. It didn’t matter if they were liked, but it mattered that they were making a difference in the lives of people by speaking the truth.

Pretty sure God is going to challenge me soon, and I have to be ready to meet it.

Tags: discomfort