Don't look in the mirror.

I am struggling--have been struggling--don't expect to stop struggling any time soon.

I think the Christian way to say this is that "God is refining me". But I do not often think in the Christian way and all I feel is disgust and dread and a little bit of fatalism. I am learning about myself...the trap doors and movable walls and booby traps. Here we go. They were made for someone else; but, once made aware of such things inside of me and how they affect those around me, I begin to fall into one after the other in rapid succession. I am not allowed out. The hallways are long. There are stairs missing. I have already made mention of the moving walls and alluded to the sharp things that find you in the dark.

But worst of all is the feeling that I am responsible for this even though I have no immediate knowledge or secrets that could ever help me to safety. It is, after all, the inner workings of my emotions and intellect and that damned tongue that keep this fun house dangerous and make a haunt out of what should be a home.

I think the Christian solution is to pray more. But I rather feel like hermitting in the woods. Besides, I am certain that improvement will be slow, dangerous, and always a little too late to save those whom I would spare the razors and mazes if I could.

blindness

Tonight, I watched a movie called Volviendo and I listened to a woman share about her life before, during, and after being trafficked. She now works to help other survivors reclaim their humanity, their self-worth, and especially their health. I had this question burnt into me as I watched and listened: how do you stare into the darkness for so long and still see?

Me? I am torn. I do not want to look away and neglect the darkness. But I am small. If I stare at it too long, I am sure it will creep inside of me, take up residence, flood me, spill out, and not even notice me struggling to breathe. The darkness is...dark. And I? I do not possess any light of my own. Most days, I forget about the light I have been given and I trade it. I let go of the joy of the Lord for busyness. I let go of my self-dignity for productivity and survival and getting to wherever someone else told me I should be going.

I am fragile. And the world is heavy and sharp and full of broken things that want to make me like them. It is hard to even figure out where to stand much less how to stick both of my hands into those dark places and keep trying to pull them that would come out. The dark is full and everywhere and deep.

I know God is big. I know He uses small things, weak things. But I am certain that I will break if tried.

But I cannot look away. I want to some days. I want to move to suburbia and construct a beautiful life that is so safe and so far away from all of these things. I want to reduce injustice to stories and brokenness to the part just before the fairy tale gets good. But I cannot. I love true things, even when they are ugly. Ugly truth is still more trustworthy than the most beautiful of lies. And healing, healing makes the broken places worthwhile. I have never met someone who has been down that very, very long road who has been disappointed with the result.

But I am so unqualified to help the people around me to find healing. I have tried in good ways and bad. And both of failed much more often than they have succeeded to any degree. Of this I am certain, I am no good at healing. I am afraid that I am very bad at loving people, especially the closer they are to me. I have some very good intentions sometimes, but I am a clumsy healer in the least poetic sense. But this is not really about me. This is about that overwhelming darkness and how much respect I have for people who have the strength to stare into it without going blind.

I met a woman a few days ago. She asked for a cigarette and money to feed her children. My boyfriend gave her $5 and I asked her name. Charlotte. Whatever her life had brought her, it wasn't what she dreamed of when she was 6 years old. Whether she told us the truth or not is not really important. I see her and so many other people walking about under a weight that has left them feeling less than human. And I want to teach them their worth. I want to heal them. But I cannot. The darkness is there. And I do not yet know how to penetrate it. I can only peek into it for now and hope to learn something which may yet equip me to be one who stares into it making the most of every opportunity and never goes blind. I want to see what is there as it truly is, but I do not yet know how.

October Leaving

I kept a pretty thorough log of 'doing one thing everyday that scares me'. A lot of days were pretty uneventful and I really had to examine myself, but I succeeded everyday except for October 11th. Most of the things I was scared of had to do with hurting other people even if I needed to do what I should (like tell the truth or just say 'no I can't do that') or with not feeling equipped to handle a situation and being afraid that it was going to end very, very badly. I was just going to post the list, but things repeated a lot and I have decided I do not like the list format. It kind of divorces the fears from their context and I'm not so much a fan of that.

A few of the highlight events that revealed these things were my oral and practical exams for my mechanic's certification (I have never tried so hard to do something I didn't want to do!), dealing with some family/financial drama, trying very hard not to pick a fight with my landlady, and trying to learn how to cope with life without shutting down my emotions (apparently that means I stay home from school if I have a migraine, say what?). Oh and I bought a dress and danced with my boyfriend *in front of people*.

All in all, I am very glad October is over...not so that I can stop doing scary things, but because it was a very full month. My prayer for November is that it shows a little mercy. However, the mercy I receive may or may not be related to the mercy I allow myself to take in. October was confronting fear, maybe November can be about receiving mercy and grace. October, unrelated to the confronting fear, taught me a lot about my shortcomings, faults, failures, and the way in which I hurt people. I am very acquainted with all the things which make me ugly. I could use a healing balm. I expect anything that could bring healing to initially be terrifying, but I may just be ready.




Oh, also, I am an A&P mechanic! That was one of the gifts October left me with.

Skin to marrow to unexplored soul.

How do I explain this?

Fall makes me... restless. In a good way.

It makes me seek changes I have long been putting off. But fall in the city feels off beat. Fashion changes first. Then Halloween paraphernalia comes out. Then change grabs a few leaves or the air temperature. It feels funny. And I ... get stuck. Like a lizard trying to shed old skin, but not allowed out.

I'm not sure if that was a helpful metaphor.

But I am itchy. Skin to marrow to unexplored soul. There is no salve I know for this. Only the need to lie still out somewhere where I can count the space between passing cars in minutes, in breaths taken and released.

Yes that is what I need... a forest full of release.

There is nothing which *mandates* that my most itchy days be lonely days. It is just... that I become picky about my company. And the company which I would choose is typically unavailable on these days. Or they do not understand the importance of them. Either one. Justified or unjustified. I am at a point in my life where I do not wait for people because the longer I wait for people who are very likely going to misunderstand... the itchier I get. I can come very near to manic if I wait too long.

I do not know why.

There is pressure pushing me from an unknown direction. It is not meant to be lonely or to make me antisocial... It just is and it does.

I would bring people if they would come, but schedules are treacherous things. You need to be good at them, but not too good. Or else the itchy days will get you and gnaw on you until you blow off the really important things. In view of the week I have planned, I should not go. I have homework and preparation to do. In view of the week I have planned, it has to be today.

So South it is. Lunch is packed. Camera is charged. Notebooks still have space. Books are yet unread.

Grab the keys. It's time to go.

knots tied in between anger, boredom, and anxiety

Task (1): Meet the world each day somewhere between whatever terms it gives me and whatever terms I give it.

Task (2): Remain stress free.

Task (3): Try not to laugh/cry/scream at the combination of 1 and 2.

I have been mulling over how much of stress is a choice and how much of it just is. --As immovable, unalterable fact. It would seem that my body, and human bodies in general, were not made for stressing. They were not made for worry. They were not made for life to be so... hard. We are such fragile creatures for all of our bluffing and hoping and straining.

But how much of life being hard comes from our making it harder than it has to be?

I had a history teacher once who said that the purpose of history was to remind us that just because this is the way things are, does not mean that this is the way things should be or always have been. And ever since those words left his lips, they have followed me. He continued to explain that we need history to tell us that sometimes we need to fight and sometimes fighting is ugly. More than that, sometimes the way things are is, quite simply, wrong; and when it is wrong, we are not powerless. We are not restrained to a passive watching of the world, our world.

Those words have made me bold on more than one account in the years since. Lately, however, I have been really good at refusing to apply this idea. I am not so much the humanist that I can believe that a man's or woman's destiny is in their own hands entirely; but I do believe that the many of us spend too much time reacting to a life that appears to just happen. We are not as powerless as we often feel. We can take responsibility for more than we realize.

Those are dangerous beliefs. They are heavy and ready to add their own layer of chaos to the pile of things worth stressing about. And up until now, I have "turned a blind eye". Yet, I feel it is time to apply the process to the process itself... if that makes sense.

Because apparently, handling stress well is not merely refusing to let things bother you by forcing them into unsee-ably dark corners of yourself. And it is more than cheap denial or delayed reactions. It is not storing it for later to be dealt with when no one else is around. Apparently. Which sucks because...well, I am so good at those. Or I was.

Until my body rebelled. Treason. I had done the hard work of persuasion. Mutiny from the inside.

Now, it turns out, I am not meant to house and store things for later and 'not now'. I am learning to be more intentional about letting things go. Which is strange, because I swear that that is exactly the opposite of taking responsibility and meeting life on its terms and not just being a victim of passive reaction. Yet, it takes so much more effort to say (in a way that my body actually believes), "This is not worth the pain I will feel if I hold onto this one second more."

It is letting go of my right to feel incensed, annoyed, piteous etc. But it is not denying myself emotions, because that also I feel in this seditious wreck. Instead, it is the highest honesty of feeling everything as it comes without letting it rule me. I have never been so aware of my own thoughts or how little true self-control I have. More often than not, it seems an impossible balance to strike; but I guess it is just a more mature version of choosing to feel. To feel without shutting down or being consumed by emotion. To feel emotions in wisdom, if that is possible (and I do not yet know if I believe it to be).

So here I am. Open window blowing peaceful wind across my typing fingers as I try to figure out why I hurt today. All I can figure is that I am pushing myself too hard this week and  my body is too tired to filter out the stressors. I was not always this fragile. But I did love my strength.




Also, art. I have very much enjoyed this photographer over the last few days.