Still Trying.

Every 17 seconds the hydraulics of the machine to my right hiss; and I pretend that I am part of that machine, folding t-shirts, putting them into the box right in time for the HISSSSSSS. In those 17 seconds, I measure my movements and focus my energy as if I were just an extension of the unfeeling metal that sends me clothes to count and box. Waste one second, fall behind, interrupt the machine. Here, we are all organic extensions of a steal heart pumping one HISS at a time.

My coworker says that he and I are too educated for this kind of work. It is degrading. I will blame his 3 unfinished degrees for why he does not see the purpose in education drenched in sweat. This is, after all, the “real world” outside of the classroom. In many ways, it is the most real world. Here are the people upon whose backs society stays afloat. Here are the people who do the work that no one else wants to do and they do it for loved ones, for sick ones, for family near and far because it is all that they can find to do for now. Here is our foundation and our backbone. We will only ever be as strong as such as these.

I was taught that St. Francis once said, “ the glory of God is man fully alive.” I was taught that he was right. And I wonder what that means for us in this place as we mirror our machines, as we indeed become machines in order to build our lives. Moreover, what does it mean for our cousins in other countries where the rules are different? The work we do is hard, but the work our cousins do is unfathomable to me. We print on t-shirts that arrive to us from every corner of the enslaved globe. Egypt. Mexico. China. Haiti. Every t-shirt is a reminder that someone else has it so much worse than me. It is a reminder that my work is not degrading. I am still human.

I think to all of my growing up in which friends and family were always “searching out God’s call for their lives”. It seems odd to me that “God” never seems to call the people around me to work in the factory. I suspect that is born more out of concern for our own glory than it is God’s. My education tells me that there is no biblical or theological reason preventing the work we do here from being glorious. There is no particular aspect of printing t-shirts that in and of itself prevents men and women from being fully alive. On the contrary, Ecclesiastes tells us that we are to find enjoyment in our work and obey God’s commands. It does not say “find work you enjoy.” That is not an option for every person. That is not an option for most people on this planet. Can we who work in the warehouses find enjoyment and partake in the glory of God?

And now I only begin to grasp the Scriptures that tell us that God uses the humble, the simple, and the lowly to shame the proud, the educated, and the elite.

My struggle is to remember that I am not all machine if for no other reason than because I feel. I have compassion. Compassion will safeguard my humanity as I conform to the search for efficiency and the drive of my employers for profits. Yes, I have been sent here to learn though I do not know what I am looking for or how long I will be learning. I do know though that we need education and sweat mingled in more places.

Flying has never felt further away than it has these last couple of days. I have been reduced. I am no longer the artist-mechanic-girl who cannot possibly learn fast enough to know what she needs to. I am just…a girl who folds t-shirts and who looks up at the sky always. I work in a warehouse where I count t-shirts, fold them, distribute them, pack them, stack and unstack them. When everyone goes out to smoke, I look up to the space between the giant concrete walls of one warehouse and another and I wonder why I am not up there. How do I get closer to the stars? How do I make a home among the clouds? That old yearning turns anew inside me. And I ache.

I ache the way I did in high school…so much so in fact that I feel as if I am back in that place, making plans and realizing that flight school was at least 5 years away. I do not know if you have ever waited 5 or more years for something, but it is a long time. And then to reach the end and feel no closer than when you started…well, it is a little disappointing. Besides, it is not just that I feel no closer than when I started, but rather that I have reached the end of the plans that I know anything about (and if you have seen the plans that I did know something about, you know how truly lost I am).

Historically, I have been gifted with an inordinate amount of faith and a total disregard for descriptors like impossible. And on the days where I have faltered, there has always been a reminder. I once spoke with a college recruiter who asked me what I wanted to do. I told him I wanted to fly but that I didn’t like telling people that because it seemed ridiculous, like becoming an astronaut. He scolded me soundly, apologized that his school had no flight program, and then immediately turned to a cafeteria full of people and announced what I wanted to do. Then, he told me I was committed. I have had friends arrange flights and dentists give me children’s books titled Violet the Pilot. I have had professors pay for mechanic exams and homeless people tell me that all I have to do is keep the faith because I will get where I am going. I have had all manner of unexpected persons pour encouragement into this silly little dream. They have helped to build a wall against the tidal wave of voices who doubt that I will ever make it, who need me to convince them constantly that this is where I am going and that I have not given up yet. They have given me rest from my constant defense of a dream when I was too worn out to convince both myself and other people.

Most recently, I met a man named Jeffrey Jackson in the unemployment office. We met to discuss my re-employment options as a mechanic. I told him that what I really wanted was to fly. He looked at me and said in his almost-northernized-southern-drawl, “Darlin, we all want to fly. The question is, how fast do you want to go?” We talked about his time in Vietnam and his flights over Montana. He told me that his wife won’t let him fly anymore because she knows that one day, he will just keep going and not come back because he’s crazy. “She’s right.” he told me. And as he talked about flying, that ache crept back. I had kept it busy with track and balance flights and promises to go to flight school when I had paid off my student loans etc.  But, talking with Jeffrey, I felt my bones and my heart begin to hurt. I felt the air in my lungs get heavy with desperation. Yes, I know this ache. Ten years I have carried it, ignored it, and been driven by it all at the same time. In eighth grade, I told a friend that I knew I would go fly because a good God would never give someone a longing like this and then ignore it.

And yet, flight school has never seemed more impossible. The sky has never seemed further away. Now, I simply do not know what to do. I pack t-shirts. I have come to the end of all of the obstacles that I thought were between me and flight school, but I feel as though nothing has changed. It is still out of reach. It is hard not to wonder if I did life wrong. By faith, I know how patiently I should wait. By faith, I know that God has brought me this far and He will bring me the rest of the way. By faith, I know that if I rest in His grace, I have enough and I can be content.

The last few months have been a ton of being removed from a bad situation. I hated living in Tigard, mostly because it was lonely and nobody had time for me. I needed encouragement and Tigard had none of that. Emotionally, I starved. My attempts to reach out to people usually ended in the realization that you cannot force people to trust you and that I cannot trust people who do not trust me. I hated working at HAI, except for the aircraft. The drama and the constantly having to watch your back and keep up appearances was maddening…and exhausting. I cried out to God for months asking Him to change the situation. I had meant that He should give me encouraging friends and teach my coworkers to be better people. Instead, I got fired and evicted…and I have never been so relieved in my entire life. I have never had such a large amount of stress evaporate so quickly that I can wake up one day and feel the difference from waking up the day before. God brought me out of Egypt His way.

But now I am in the desert.  I understand now why the Israelites got into the desert and then rebelled. The desert was not what they expected. They had been filled with visions of a fertile and gentle Promise Land. They had left the beautiful land of Goshen on the Nile Delta. They were not equipped for the desert. Sure they had been slaves before, but they knew how to do that. It is easy to work hard and cry out to God to change things. But when He answers by taking you into the unkind and harsh desert, you begin to wonder if everything you believe about Him is accurate. You wonder what else you were wrong about. And in the thirst there, the rivers of the Promise Land could not possibly feel further away. They decided to make their own way.

And I? I am being given a lot of advice that feels like making my own way. I want to do it. I would call it “good stewardship” or some other NIV-extricated word like “being faithful with what I have been given”. But really, it would be the golden calf of my own desire to control my life. It would be fear and selfishness. I know that I am here to wait and to learn. There are things you can only learn in the desert. I just wish I knew how long I will be here. I need something to tell the ache inside me so it does not consume me. I am afraid that it will. The desperation keeps building as I try a new solution, a new direction and God says, “No not that way.” Again and again and again…and again. I am lost in the desert with a mysterious God. I am not really sure of anything, only that I cannot help but be jealous of the wind. 

I miss camping. A lot. I miss it not as one misses a hobby or a skill that you just did not manage to keep up with or hold onto as you passed through life. It miss it with an intense ... nostalgia.

I miss it the way some of my friends miss airports, another state, or another country. I miss the forest as you would a good friend or a grandparent.

It has been...too many years since I was last camping. Years? How did it ever get to years? What have I been doing that I have not slept in the woods for so long? I actually do not know how long it has been, but I know that I have at least failed for the entirety of college.  The fact that I do not actually know when I last went camping is astounding to me.

You see, the forest, especially at night, is home in a way that very few places ever will be. When my family moved to Montana, we lived in a tent for awhile at the KOA. When my parents divorced, my dad moved to the rafting guide campground and I spent every weekend of the summer stretched out, looking at the stars hung between tall pine trees. The rules of the city are not like the rules of the woods. Freeways make poor substitutes for wild rivers. All of the open spaces are so full. Every minute passes with a roar.

When you are camping, the only limits are those that protect your own mortality. If it does not draw blood or give you hypothermia, why shouldn't you do it? The forest is about ability. The city comes with so many expectations. The city wants you to ask permission. I am not good at asking for permission, much less accepting limitations arbitrarily assigned.

All of that to say, it is summer time and the dirt roads are telling me that it is time to go; but the city asks so many questions. How long will you be gone? What will it cost to leave? Who will take care of....? When will you be back? Where will you go? How will you get there? How will you get back? 

People seem to think that these questions mean something to me. To an extent, they do. But only in the same sense as a second language that you can only speak with bad grammar. At some point, I need to stop having any sort of conversation and just leave. I will never be understood by concrete and traffic. I need moss and rivers. I want to listen to the advice of wind in the trees.

The morning after I no longer had a job, I went and took these photos.

A brief recap is in order. I think I said it best when I was on the phone with a friend. In February, I got evicted. In March, I was fired. Now it’s April and I am making cookies. Sometimes life takes you to different places than you expected to see much less live and make a home in.

On the way to work a couple of weeks before I was let go, I wrote (in very illegible handwriting since I was indeed driving while writing):

"The fog has turned the bare tree on the hill into a black and white photograph that I am living next to. All I want to do is drive into it. Their wild arms are stretched out and back-lit by a sun that has not yet overtaken the morning to chase away the fog. There are roads that I have only just noticed and suddenly a yearning turns inside me as if those roads are the home that I am always looking for. I curse my job in that moment and resent all of the things that I perceive keep me from driving down those picturesque roads awash in an ephemeral beauty that I will probably never see again. My own unpreparedness is more to blame than anything. I left my camera at home. Still, I am caused to question once again if it was worth it…the years in college trying to learn a new way of thinking, trying to unlearn my abstract patterns and artist ambitions in exchange for airplanes and helicopters (but not yet the sky). It has not been the adventure I imagined. At seven in the morning, that road looks like the adventure I promised myself that I would be ready for when it found me."

Needless to say, I am ready for a change. I am developing a very fluid identity. People try to tell me that getting fired does not change who I am…but I disagree. It changes the role I play in life. That may not be my very core, but it changes the way I express that core and I just cannot bring myself to draw a line and divide with finality my identity and the expression of it. It seems a matter of syntax. Changing my role in life changes my experience of who I am. And so, I am different.  But if you asked exactly in what ways, I would only have a lot of half thought out philosophies on how being truly hated by people changes you much like being truly loved by people does…except it’s different.

Now, I live alone. I live with my art. I am trying to teach myself how to make time for that again, trying to build a home, trying to learn new skills like baking cookies. I have never baked cookies alone before. But I have never done a lot of things before.

Here we are again.

I have a lot on my mind right now. There are lots of pieces threatening to come together, to resolve. The suspense is killing me, but the next 2 years are going to determine so much of the course of my life. And there are lots of questions that refuse to be answered. Mostly, I want a lot of conflicting things that God has little interest in helping me sort out. Instead, I am processing things that I thought I had long since finished the grief process for. But it turns out that you can start the whole process over in a moment's notice...and that has been a hallmark of my life.

I get angry when I realize that I am back in this familiar place. I have a lot of bad poetry from the first few times. I am not here to contribute anymore of that tonight. Mostly, I am here to write until I understand myself.

See, I loved my growing up. My running through the woods of Montana under the watch of mountains and sky. My making candy in mom's kitchen. My long ago friends with our silly adventures. These are all precious pieces with specific pictures of people and places.

And yet there is this haunting feeling of loss. I don't know how to explain it except that in psychology it is often referred to as abstract loss. It is the loss where you know that things as they are do not quite qualify as normal, something is missing...even if you don't know quite what the name of that thing is. It is not that something physical was taken away or stolen. For me, it is that I grew up so fast. I went from 7 years old to 18 and from there to 30 years old. Or something like that. From child to adult and from adult to parent before I ever turned 10. More or less. It is not an exact science. I cannot say that I was paying much attention to the details of the experience when it was all happening.

And now I am trying to explain what it means to have lost so much of your childhood, to grow up so early. It is not as though I can try to be 8 years old again. The best I can do is be the age I am. I get flack for that sometimes, for really holding onto being just my age and no older. Our society is so good at praising those who mature quickly. I loved being 19. It was horrible year of life filled with abandonment, but it was the first year that I got to deal with my problems as a 19 year old, my actual age. And I will never be 19 again because I grew up. But there are ages that fell into the chasm of survival. I never was those and it wouldn't be healthy to try to reclaim them now, ten or more years later. How do I explain the loss I feel in knowing that? There is no good comparison because I do not know what I missed except by the quiet envy I experience from time to time.

Looking back, I think I made the best of a bad situation. I think I chose well. I think it was all that could be asked of me and I would give it all again. The anger and hurt rise though when some secret wind whispers, it didn't have to be that way. The game was set and the odds were stacked before I ever had a chance. It is then that I remember that I live in a world under a curse. Most days, I am fine and grown up and unaware of the damage done. But then something small happens and all of the walls of the rooms that I have built inside myself crumble under a torrent of emotion that I wish I could control. Then the feeling of loss overwhelms and I wonder if healing is possible, if it ever really stays. And I think it does. It is just slower than I am patient.

But then that whispering wind hands me more discontentment as it howls around the ruins inside me.

You may heal but you will never be restored.
You will always be just a little bit

broken.

 It helps when I remember that we all have lost something in this curse, that we are survivors of a heavenly war that we chose the wrong side in. It is best not to compare pain and loss. No one wins that way.

Mostly, tonight I hope that healing is still possible. That restoration is a bigger miracle than I can imagine. And that eternity can provide things that are impossible amongst the mortal, cursed, and dying.

And that all of this grieving really will be turned to a celebration that is not forced or false in anyway.

I have been playing with an idea for awhile now. It is kind of silly in that I have been slow to accept it even though its truth is apparent and obvious to probably everyone but me. Ready?

I will be misunderstood and that is ok.

I have treated that fact with an inordinate amount of contempt. I have dedicated my entire growing up to knowing myself as best as I can with severe honesty so that I can explain myself plainly to others and escape miscalculation. I have not yet succeeded.

There are a lot of factors that have robbed me of my success. First, there are the sciences which teach that people are liars above all in their self-perception so you must disregard what people tell you about themselves. Second, there is the plain fact that many people are liars and so experience also teaches a wariness of other's opinions with a high value set upon the observer's limited view. Thirdly, people are human. They will see what they want to see, what they are afraid of seeing, and they will draw judgments when they should draw up a chair and ask more questions. We are busy creatures who contract business with misinformation as our currency.

And I am learning that all of this is ok. I thought that I needed to be understood; and I have benefitted greatly from that belief in what I learned from myself in order to correct the generalizations that I was saddled with but never fit.

The truth is, for the rest of my life I will fit the average American's definition of a man more than that of a woman. I will have the psyche of a oldest child crossed with a middle child and I will be a little bit culturally confused because of my growing up and it will defy the definitions people try to dress me in. I will always be confused about my socioeconomic classification. The truth is, I will always disappoint those who live their life under the rule and reign of stereotypes and generalizations. Part of me will always answer to a name that is not actually mine. And I am aware that that is just fine.

I am not the first to have to learn to survive in a world that is not built for people like me. I will not be the last. It is a lot to expect the world to drop their presumptuous habits, their hurtful ways of speaking about what is obviously true for "people like us" as I look over my should and realize that "us" means me and I don't identify that way. I often wonder what happens when they realize that, if it is either "us" or "them", I live in a different camp than them. The truth is, I do not suffer the worst of this assumption and presumption. In many cases, the identity I am handed is one of a privilege that I barely understand much less know how to use. Therefore my grievance does not cause me the suffering that it could if I was assigned a different descriptor.

I am still misunderstood, but I am learning that this is the rule not the exception. I am learning that people live and build their identities in the cracks between the names that cultures and societies give us. When you do not expect to be understood, the sting lessens and the disappointment fades. And those who do understand you and who take the time to know your real name become that much more valuable. It is then that you realize the gift they have given you and stop taking it for granted.