May The Weary Rejoice

**Disclaimer: This piece was written pre-deconstruction of religious beliefs and faith system. Many of these beliefs inform the sentiments of the writing and are not in alignment with my values. As this is a part of my journey and an extensive blog over years, I have chosen not to remove a majority of my posts written on faith. Please as a reader, take this into consideration and take what works for you, leave what does not. I also apologize for any harm my words from this past perspective may cause to any readers.**

This is my very favorite day of the year! Truth is I wasn't even looking forward to it this year, I just wanted to hunker down and get through it, and through 2016 to January. I thought I'd just be reminded of what a miserable year it was, feeling singleness even more, not able to afford to buy anyone gifts, it being just another day off in a sea...

I woke up today with another dang sore throat, but ya know what? I am excited. I'm quietly thrilled I get to spend Christmas Eve at my own home church that I love! I'm looking forward to spending time with my family even though it's been a rough year for a lot of us. Though it's new and uncertain as new things of its nature are, I'm awed that [Cute] Coffee Shop Guy, or CSG (whose name will come in due time), came around and has been sweetly sweeping me off my feet for a few days. Just the pick me up this year needed to not go down as the worst ever.

I sit and ponder this day, this eve. It's not really about gifts, and everyone I love is hopefully convinced of that truth without my buying them some thing to symbolize it. It's about love. I did my annual bell ringing shift, on Christmas Eve eve. It was harder for me this year, usually I'm oozing joy and that's only been coming back to me for a few weeks. Some people flat out ignore a greeting directed specifically at them, others give generously in a way that was evident. A few times it brought me to tears the matter-of-fact way that someone would give. It was like a subtle marker of the proverbial joining into the struggles of another without hesitation. Maybe that's just me, and I'm over thinking it, like I can do. But I think there's something powerful in this season. Especially this year, I'm hopeful to see it, to see a weary world rejoice.

Lesson of the Disingenuous

I had two very different interactions recently, and, juxtaposed, they point to something I felt the need to share because it's been on my mind:

In my job hunt, I've been working with a handful of recruiters - a sort of middleman between a company and a potential employee. [Surprisingly, all four of them are women.] Friday, after playing phone tag for a week, I finally got in touch with a recruiter I hadn't been working with yet but applied to a job he'd listed. He talked my ear off for 20 minutes, a miserable 20 minutes at that! At the end of the call, I felt this sense of exhaustion and disgust. When I went to sleep later that night, I couldn't escape the feeling I should cancel my in-person meeting with the guy scheduled for today. I finally sent an email last night, forwarning him apologetically that I would not be working with him further. No response yet today...

However, I got the nicest reply from one of the creative staffing recruiters I've been working with. I'd sent her my updated resume and a simple email saying if anything jumped out based on it, she should let me know. She replied, with lots of exclamation marks, a thank you and that she absolutely would. She also added that things will pick up after the holiday, and wished me an "awesome" one. Her reply was nice, genuine, and kind. I thought about our first phone call, she was my favorite of all the recruiters I'm working with from the get-go.

Her email got me thinking about these two professional interactions, trying to figure out why they struck me so. The juxtaposition led me to note a disparity in genuineness between the two people. The guy I spoke with was cocky, and smarmy, and just plain annoying. I immediately didn't trust him or feel like he would work to get me in the best fit for me, in spite of his claiming he would. The woman on the other hand (no emphasis on gender, just for differentiation's sake) was genuine in all of my interactions with her, and that makes me absolutely want to work with her.

I recently wrote some thoughts on the influence and ubiquity of social media on our ability to be real, or rather our tendency toward the contrived. It's been on my mind a lot lately. I've never seen the point in letting others' expectations or really any sense of pride determine how I live. There are obvious exceptions, but I think too often we all fall prey to living the way someone else wants us to, instead of authentically. I think the male recruiter might not actually be an annoying, egotistical person. He seemed concerned with proving himself, though I don't know to who because that's not even close to the point of being a recruiter. Granted, I can be the queen of a big talk - if you've ever driven with me, you already know that - but I have to keep myself in check. I don't want that to influence whether someone can trust me. I don't want to so filter my words or alter my portrayal of myself that I'm seen as untrustworthy.

I think that's the reason being genuine is important to me: it affects trust and speaks to integrity. The level of trustworthiness sets the limit for how deep the relationship can go. In twenty minutes of talking to someone, their disingenuousness could lead another to distrust them and their inauthenticity imply a lack of integrity. Or in a simple email, someone can make you feel completely at ease.

To some extent, vulnerability plays in, too. The person who isn't perfect but isn't afraid of that fact will more often earn my trust. Yes there's wisdom in discretion, but also value in honesty. Maybe the more we lead with our true selves, the more our opportunities for connection and all else will be successful.

Curation Liberation

Today I woke up and scraped the remaining makeup off my face from the day before. It was the holiday costume party for my part-time job, and I wore a full-face of makeup for the first time in...who knows how long. I did my hair. I wore the tights with the waist sincher. Everything short of heels.

When I'd finished perfecting my look before I headed to the party, I paused in the mirror, recalling how different I look with eyeliner and eyeshadow and mascara and any pesky zit covered slyly with concealer -- made up, to be sure. See, a few years ago, I found liberation from makeup; from the need to daily change my face to how I thought the world would better accept it. Years before, in high school, I discovered my natural hair was more than acceptable and that hours of my life had been wasted every week making it what I thought it should be.

In a second of giving myself the final look over, my altered look reminded me of something I'd been pondering already. A week or two ago, I was doing something - I don't even recall what - and I was straining to try to capture a picture with my ailing phone, in bad light, when I caught myself. Why am I doing this? WHAT am I doing? A pillar of the way I try to live my life has always been being genuine; I struggle with anything that requires me to do something I feel is contrived. And as I wiggled and bent and shifted to try to get the perfect shot I thought, this isn't what I'm about, yet somehow it's become second-nature. The joke in society is, "If you didn't instagram it, did it even happen?"

I don't do things in life for the sake of my instagram or facebook audience; I don't do them for the sake of someone else's approval of the picturesque parts of my life. I don't do things in life for any other reason than to experience it. I miss when taking photos of something was simply to memorialize it and capture its wonder or significance, not just to impress people with carefully created snippets of our lives.

So I've been taking pause and asking myself - and only myself - to be honest, why am I doing this? There are hundreds of people who have unbridled access to the curated version of my life, yet they don't know me. That's something to think about. How can I live true to myself in the hyper-filtered age of Instagram? How do I live life with a blind eye to the measuring stick that is Pinterest? Do my passions have any purpose if not exposed in a rant to whoever has yet to unfollow me on Facebook? Is this a wise or valuable use of my time?

I want to strive to have these questions, this pause be the only filter for my choices and my actions. I want to live to be who I aspire to be, not just appear to be who I think the world wants me to be. I want to go back to living life just for the experience of it.