becoming

I can’t go in thinking it’ll be my next great novel. And by next I mean first. The stories in my mind are haphazard, fleeting, then gone. It reminds me of the creative spark certain professions require where the best time to create something perfect is when you haven’t planned it at all. I picture everyone sitting and waiting for me to say something great, quotable, memorable. I find my fingers frozen over the keyboard with this internal, self-inflicted pressure to CREATE. Do it. Now. If you don’t start writing at this very moment, it will be gone.

But then you do it, and it is never as impressive as you wanted it to be. So...at this point do you save it as a draft and start over, or delete all of it entirely and wait for the next moment of inspiration? And who’s to say it is “that” anyway? “That” being inspiring, magical, provoking, everything you yourself expect a book to be when you open it to invest your precious time in its contents. Oh the horror of leaving an unimpressive mark!

The familiar question of my childhood was “what if they hate it?” What? Anything. Anything I produce as an expression of myself. It can so easily be rejected. “No, they’ll love it,” I hear the kinder part of myself say. Who are you people kidding? That only works in really sappy movies or to really pretty people. I prefer the Sundance award-winner worthy movies that make everyone want to crawl under a rock and die. Too often you hear the words you fear most, “This is good, but not quite ‘it’”; “I like it. I mean, it’s not too bad.” And although I hate producing bad work, I think I would still rather the Great Oz come down on my performance with fiery disdain than hear a lukewarm response. Clearly, hating something is much better than not caring about something, because one of these invokes some sort of feeling, while the other conjures zero concern or care at all. So at least hate my work, get mad over it, think about it tomorrow, let it make you smile and relate, or be inspired. I just want someone to care, to feel something as a result of, to remember the next day.

I don’t just write for me. I don’t always know why I write, except for some innate need, literal NEED, inside of me to create. That need is different for everyone, but mine is focused on the art written work. I think everyone really wants to save the world in one way or another. Many people want to save the world through beauty, and some of them are doing a fantastic job. The best writers, singers, song-writers, artists I know are the ones who can touch the part of my soul that longs for beauty. There is nothing more powerful than passion at work. And nothing more beautiful than witnessing that passion.

I write to tell stories, to find commiseration with other flailing humans, to be honest, to find peace, to identify with my heroes of the same art, to glorify my Lord, to challenge my mind and its amazing ability to convince me I am incapable, and to summon the deepest thoughts of my heart to the surface.

I think this is maybe meta-writing...but as I grapple with the significance of my own abilities and uncover this hole where I tend to bury my talent, I have to write about writing to confirm that I can even do it.

election day in the year of our Lord 2012

It's a funny place, this new world I live in. I think England may have felt more familiar than working for the government; at least they spoke English there. It's not nearly as scary as I presumed it would be, but it is new and different, and I am still walking on shaky legs. Shaky, but proud - tentative and slow, but moving forward. The last few weeks have opened my eyes to the adult world, to [more of] what goes on behind the professional facade, to the humanity of my coworkers and supervisors, as well as to their wisdom. It is surprisingly less intimidating, and I realize it is because I am really getting acquainted with myself. When I went to Europe I had no idea what was to become of me; I knew that my independence would be tested, and that I would either gain confidence or come home and stay tucked away in Tennessee for the rest of my life. Thankfully I grew - to love Europe, to love travel, to love challenge, to embrace "hard", "scary", "new". Which has further spurred me on in the other terrifying encounters I have in this fast world where the crosswalk character and ensuing cars wait for no man, old or young, and the outdoors are only experienced and enjoyed by a select few professionals who find the time. I find joy in the silliest idiosyncrasies of this working life...the way my heels tap on the tile floor walking up to my office; that this sound does not depend on how perky or motivated I feel - it sounds important no matter what, though more important the quicker the pace....How the receptionist differentiates between the two Stephanies in the office by calling me Lily on a regular basis. At this point, I don't think she knows my real name anymore....The way the frozen yogurt store downstairs plays a movie every day that reaches into my long-term, dusty memory and pulls out a smile. Today's was Big. Yesterday was the old Charlie and the Chocolate Factory....How the man at the top of the metro escalator announces all the biggest news stories while he passes out his papers...How the milk steamer hisses as I pass Starbucks, and the coffee scents follow me down the hall...How my chair is comfy enough to sit curled up on my feet all day long...

As a side note before I get back to work, let me just say that even though I voted today, and I like who I voted for, the sweetest part of the whole experience was standing with my husband at 7 in the morning, jacketed arm in jacketed arm, chatting before we went our separate ways for the day. I think voting is mostly a great excuse to stand in line for inordinate amounts of time with someone you care about and less about the names you circle on your ballot. Suffice all that to say, we're going to be ok, Mitt or Barack, and in 4 years, this all happens again. The only thing I'll do differently when I vote in 2016 is bring coffee.

october!

Just yesterday I think I spoke of the approach of summer and how all the vegetables were raring to go, and all I could think about was shorts and sunshine. Funny that as I write this it is hot probably like the day I awaited summer, and a fan is blowing in face, and every few minutes I sneeze as it picks up the dust in the room. Now I anticipate fall. Not that I look forward to greeting the outdoors with misery - walking everywhere has it glory until it's cold - but I am looking forward to the first few days of cold cheeks and wind tears.

I can vouch for DC from last November that fall here is gorgeous. I'm really excited to experience it. Last night we went to our first small group meeting, and we had chili and seasonal sierra nevadas and pumpkin cream cheese bread. And it was everything that it is every year; except that there is really nothing like the first pumpkin ale, the first changed japanese maple, the first frost of the season...

I start a new job in two Mondays. There is a lot of excitement and anxiety I'm experiencing, because it's the first big jump I've ever taken into adultness. Honestly, my hope is that I can still be young. At the end of the day I am 23. Except at the end of November 10th. But in reality, as much as I try to be grown up and responsible and essential in the work place...I still want to be my age. Something I've felt since moving up here is that I can't be silly anymore. Silly is one of the greatest expressions of candor out there, and, when expressed in small doses, it brings the sweetest fragrance of youth to even the oldest someones.

In other news I'm knitting a sweater. This is important to know, because you are now my accountability partners as I struggle to finish it. It is necessary to finish before it gets cold or else I don't know what I'm doing. Also...to friends two sizes smaller than me and a few sizes larger, you may be getting a surprise Christmas gift if this sweater does not go as planned...

a couple weeks ago

collar!

the goal

most recently...

you know it's cool if it's worth blogging about

Yard Sales. They are so intriguing. There is a whirlwind of emotions I feel when I have them. On the one hand I so hope to sell everything no matter how cheap I have to make everything and no matter how much money I don't make. On the other hand, I feel so indescribably sorry for the people buying my knick knacks because I KNOW how worthless they are. Someone bought my vanilla-smelling, half empty package of tea candles, and I felt bad that they were spending a whole 50 cents on something that had sat in my drawer for the last 5 years. And yet really that's a positive thing--that my trash is someone else's treasure. It's just that when I see the old men buying 10 cent coozies that aren't cool and the unopened package of unsharpened #2 pencils and the tiny UT foam football that I proudly boasted on my bookshelf as a student, I immediately imagine how these items will all end up in this old man's stack of hoarded crap. I don't guess feeling sorry for him will change any of the circumstances, except that I will continue to get richer off of the persons like him who love worthless preowneds.

I was in DC the other day and as I pranced around pretending to be a Washingtonian, I felt one with those other working women because I had on a dress and cardigan for an interview. Suddenly, as I was comforted about my non touristic appearance, I realized there were slowly forming blisters on my heels and pinky toes, and I was struck knowing that I would never be one with the women because my feet hurt so badly. And I was wearing flats. But then I stood on the escalator, and in front of me was a woman climbing up quickly (on the left side...that's important apparently), and just as I was about to look away--ah ha! her heels slid off her feet just enough on each step for me to see the two band-aids on each heel...Soon thereafter I went to CVS and bought CVS brand bandages, and I felt like I could pretend to be a city gal again.

A humbling experience indeed is an overnight bus trip. If you were super human before, you are completely and unfortunately just a tired tired person after a trip like that. I have now taken several of these--one to Boston, two to Knoxville, and two to DC. The next morning all I can think about is espresso and fluffy pillows and the sighs you heave just before falling asleep in your own bed. On this last trip, I got the coveted spot on the Megabus to sleep--the back row on the upper level with 5 seats that if you stretch out on early enough and the bus is empty enough, you can sleep there the whole time. When a big boy, without asking, sits in the very middle seat of this row, it makes the sleeping process a bit more difficult, the arthritis in the knees more inevitable, and the respect for humanity just...not...there. I struggled all night long to find a place where I could fall asleep for more than 20 minutes and not be bitter toward this person taking one of MY five seats. It really never occurred to me until afterward that his sleep was just as important as my sleep. I think I am much more comfortable thinking of other humans as THERE instead of as CREATED. It doesn't change the fact that I was exhausted the next day because of his space in that seat, but it does make me consider that the space in that seat was taken by someone as important as me.

reality

when I was little, I used to think that someday we'd use up all the variations you can possibly make out of music notes, and there would be no more new songs. It depressed me to think about because I loved music so much. In a quirky way, I think this fear helped me enjoy all my favorite songs from the point of first-listen fascination and subsequent goose bumps to the complete memorization of every lyric, background harmony, instrumental solo, and key change...


On that note (pun intended), random as this tie in may seem, there is a lot I can say similarly about people. There are a world of combinations that happen in chromosomes between two people when they are making a new person...and those two people were separately created by two people with a bunch of combinations of chromosomes, and so it goes back and back and back. Anyway, that makes me consider the fact that with all these mash-ups we call people, they're beautiful and memorizable, and the person who created them thinks they are It. Then I further continue to think about people I meet who, by the world's standards, are completely messed up and will never be "anything". One of them being myself, the other people usually don't have a home, have drug issues, probably have been in prison a few times, mumble so I can barely hear them, don't realize that nobody over age 17 wears Hollister or Abercrombie shirts (especially not from heaven-forbid a thrift store), and may use 12 packets of sugar in their coffee. And to that person, Jesus says the same thing he says to me and to Obama and to my grandmother and to Ryan Adams, "You are not what you did." I was listening to this pastor (Scott Sauls) today, and his big thing was that we as humans look at people for what they have done in their past, completely dismissing the fact that messy people may actually have a story...that there is a narrative behind whatever horrible that-which-we-don't-speak-of's they did. I really don't need Jesus to look at me for the very worst I've done or thought...


Then that pastor talked about how Jesus comes into places in our hearts that we don't want our parents to see and makes redemption happen. He told a story about a man, Bill, who had been sober for about a month and somehow ended up in his church even though Bill didn't smell like Old Spice, had kids who misbehaved, and had a wife who wasn't in a better place than himself. This guy became a big part of the church, despite his issues. His family kept coming. The point of his story wasn't that Bill made it to the finish line as an associate pastor of that church or started a recovery program for addicts (not that this wouldn't be beautiful)...but that he came to a place in his life where he wanted to be permeated by the Gospel. The thing is, people don't always end up in brown paper packages tied up with strings. If we are going to love people, we can't expect our results. You know those great stories? The ones where drug addicts finally give it up and have a family and start to make money and go to church and then they get their big break in Chicken Soup for the Soul? Unfortunately as great as it is, it doesn't happen that way all the time or even most of the time. The homeless people may always be homeless, the dads who left their families may not come back, the stephanie gilman's who try to have all their ducks in a row may constantly fall on their faces. But when our cities can come around those fellow strugglers and point them to Jesus and ACTUALLY love them, the story is beautiful. It just may not look exactly like the suburban culture would have it look.


So...I'm convinced that Jesus made an infinitesimal amount of music notes, words, and chromosomes, and more and more beautiful combinations are constantly being made. Certainly they all need revision, but what imperfect things don't?

The Giver

"I like the feeling of love," [Jonas] confessed. "I wish we still had that," he whispered. "Of course," he added quickly, "I do understand that it wouldn't work very well. And that it's much better to be organized the way we are now. I can see that it was a dangerous way to live..."

The community of Sameness in The Giver is one that I can identify with, and I'm realizing I've lived most of my life longing for Sameness. This isn't to say I don't enjoy change. If I didn't enjoy change, I wouldn't have gone away to college, studied abroad, or gotten married. But I draw from this inner repertoire of fear...and I think I decide to test out the waters of Change, using my fear as the guinea pig to make sure it's going to be safe. It is an exhausting way to live, I assure you.

One of the ways I see this is through babysitting. When I babysit, I am so concerned with how happy I can make the kids and feel completely inadequate when I can't do it. As a kid, I was afraid of babysitters because sometimes I could tell they didn't like me. I would beg my mom not to call this or that person to babysit, and it occurs to me now that maybe I am that person to other kids. I know they aren't always supposed to be cooing and happy, but when they aren't, I don't know what to do. Something I've realized as I've gone over and over in my mind wondering where in the hell my maternal chromosome went is that a close relative to my general fears is my fear of failure. A baby starts crying, I've failed. Their crying feels like a boss yelling in my ear that I am not good enough and I might as well give up. I look at upset babies like I did pre-algebra. No matter how many times I tried to figure out the problem, it was NEVER EVER the same answer the book wanted. Now perhaps this was due to the fact that I was home schooled and didn't have an actual algebra teacher. The thing is, I DO have good teachers for how to deal with babies. I have two sisters who adore their kids, and their kids adore them. My mom and dad were crazy about me and assured of that on the reg. I'm pretty sure Jesus loves me because the Bible tells me so...so now why can't I pour all of that out on little people without fear of rejection...?

I could go on and on about the ways this fear of change manifests itself in my life...ahem, all my friends leaving me, and me about to leave all my friends for D.C....but the big one right now is my job.

Here's the real issue. I am not a Giver by nature. I'm a Receiver. And the big changes in my life all require that I be a Giver. It's super uncomfortable and is breaking me into pieces, and I'm not adjusting well. I don't know how to love people, and I rely too much on my feelings. If I feel frustrated, I assume it's in my nature to be an angry person and that I'm not supposed to feel angry, which makes me more angry. Me, me, me, me, me, me. That Toby Keith song comes to mind, but I dare not sing it.

I'm really just going to have to let somebody else take care of it just like the rest of my issues, because this is too heavy. And I do and will keep failing if it's up to me. Which, most of the time, I make it up to me because I don't exactly know how to give it all up. I mean, with loving being so dangerous, this definitely feels the safest way to live my life in fear fear fear fear.

But I don't think it's healthiest.

let's call it a "squash"

Summer is upon us. Actually, spring is upon us, but that means warm bike rides and fresh produce. Imagine how delighted all the tomatoes and summer squashes and zucchinis (are those the same thing) are going to be to have a balmy breeze where they can be lazy and grow plump and succulent. The only way to describe a good tomato is succulent. You know the difference between good fruit and bad fruit and good vegetables and bad vegetables? Some taste the way they are supposed to taste, and others taste like they were beget of a broken world. I think when you taste a piece of heaven, you know it immediately; it is in its purest form a gift for broken people.

I had a thought the other day while nannying for my tuesday/thursday two-year-old. She's two on other days, but I only see her on tuesdays and thursdays. She's special in an eye-opening sort of way. We get to enjoy frustrating moments where we're both tired and want nothing more than a nap and maybe some chocolate milk. But we also get to go to places like the park or the animal shelter or Kroger to not only make the time pass, but to introduce Caroline to what the rest of the world is doing on her day off. We went to park on Tuesday (it was a perfect day), and lots of kindergartners were out and about, running after one another and gloriously shedding their coats as the day warmed. We sat to eat lunch in the sun, and Caroline stared warily at the rambunctious children, deciding whether or not this was a safe place to play. I wiped the peanut butter/banana concoction off her tiny mouth, and she said, "Ok, let's go play with them." Caroline frolicked, and two 5-year-olds begged me to let them take her down the slide. That's when it hit me: these kids were BORN when I was starting college. I don't know if it feels that long ago that I began college, or if I realized that my own 5-year-oldness seems not so distant from my 23-year-oldness...but it was a shocking moment. Maybe it's because I will vividly remember the feelings I had as I pondered my way through primary school. Either way, that thought encourages me to think for a second that I may be older, but I am definitely not more important, and despite my frustrations at the totally different mentality they use when doing anything, I was in that same spot not so long ago...

Philip and Mina and I went hiking last week, so I thought I'd record some of our adventure.

we had to get mina ready to go.



she is a great sport.








More musings later...

A few more years alive is a good teacher.

Some things of which recently I am certain or aware:

-just as sure as my southern accent and my constant craving for chocolate is everyone's desire to be important
-I love to write.
-I am probably more inspired by Carrie Bradshaw and Anne Lamott and my husband than I should be.
-It is a always a good idea to not where pants at home.
-Accumulated dog hair is among the top most frustrating predicaments in my life. Along with impatience, cellulite, washing dishes, being blunt,and mushrooms.
-Contrarily, my dog and all of her isms are among the top sweetest joys in my life.
-My mom should write a book because I think she has more to say than she says. If she did write one, it would likely sell millions, but even if it sold only a few, at least a few more anointed people would value from her thoughts.
-I openly admit that I legitimately and regularly think a glass of wine makes me more intelligent. It doesn't.
-Many of the people I most admire have turned out to be on some type of medication.
-I express myself in complicated ways. I've noticed if I pause too long, people stop listening.
-I am not limited by what my degree is in or not in.
-I will always have best friends who don't live in the same city as me.
-I'm not 12. or 16. or even 21. I'm old.
-I'm a sensitive soul...though I seem thick-skinned.
-I just added that last part for fun.