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.

A Darkness Demands Light

**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.**

The thing about darkness is that it demands light.

Let me elaborate. This year has sucked - I'm trying to get more concise when including that in every post. I recently realized something about my year of struggling, wading through these months of pain: I'm still here, and that means something. Aside from the teen years being, well the teen years and chock full of angst for legitimate reasons as well as at the fault of immaturity, this has been the hardest year of my life. There have certainly been good things, too, but I struggled to enjoy them as much as I should, as I process through having loved and lost being a part of my history now. Then! I lost my first truly professional (in the sense of what I studied to do) job before even hitting the two-year mark - in the midst of house-shopping. So much for concise...

Understand, this year I've felt on edge of losing my faith, stuck, alone, depressed, and downright broken. A few months ago, I realized it was the actual, tangible grace of God that I'm alive. #Realtalk. It feels a little melodramatic to say that now that I'm less and less fragile every day, but I believe it's true. Then last week, something else occurred to me, a silver-lining: I've survived; I am resilient. And that gives me hope; it helps me know this isn't it.

Furthermore, I haven't exactly had it rough in a while. All that has been good and great and gloriously splendid in my life over the years makes a time like this feel heavier. I think we can all agree, things have just felt heavy lately. For starters, our president elect is frightening. There was some kind of shooting in Ohio that I don't even have the energy to look into right now. I just read the news about a friend from church's (a husband and dad of two kids) diagnosis with an aggressive cancer...

And it got me thinking, this Jesus thing just has to be real. I look around at people, and when I have that thought in the forefront of my mind, I see us all in desperate need of Him. He has to be real. All this heavy darkness demands a great light. Not only is it impossible to be a darkness without a respective light, but how much more sweet will it be when it indeed shines!

So it is, through welling tears, my weary heart mutters, Come, O Light of the World...

Thankfulness

This is my favorite time of year. I love it from the first snow, to the Wednesday night hockey game before Thanksgiving, to the Day of Food and my family going around [being positive for a change] saying what we're thankful for, Christmas time, Christmas eve church and Christmas hymns! It's the best.

This year however has been the worst. The downright worst. This year, I was dreading the 'sharing time' with my family, not having much I feel thankful for with my life in disarray. This year, my thankful list is rather short. I used to write these long posts, brimming with compliments to friends who probably didn't read it anyway.

Joy.

This has been a year where I feel like my joy has been stolen and for me that's like a car without fuel. It's taken me a while to build up any, for a sense of normalcy in my existence.

So what I'm thankful for are the people who actually prayed, when I asked or when I didn't. For the people who didn't dissappear, and the few that sat with me in my pain without trying to minimize it or claim they know it, or douse it with platitudes. This year, I'm thankful for things like a roof over it head, food on the table, and being alive. And the shrivel of hope that next year will be better.

The Lesson of Loving and Losing

Life is full of challenges, curve balls thrown at us every day or every other day, who knows. Losing a job. Losing a loved one. Car breakdowns. Family tensions, family breakdowns. Lessons around every unsuspected corner.

I've done the job thing before. I've done the car thing, too - in several variations. I've done the family thing with every member of my family. I am introspective to a fault, so I usually try to learn from the things that come at me in life. Well, some lessons take longer than others...

There's a lesson I've been learning and yet struggling to understand for what feels like my whole life; in grade school, middle school, high school, college, and now, even in adulthood. I've always had somebody in my life who I'm close with and feel a deep sense of attachment to, like they're "my person", as Grey's Anatomy would have me say. But as time goes on, that person slowly detaches from me. I feel it and start to question if I need them too much, and why they don't feel the same way. I've always wanted someone in my corner, steadfast, and have rarely felt like I've had it long enough or for very long at all. 

A married friend of mine put it really well when she was talking about how different and difficult it is to be single when others are coupled off: She noted how she has her husband to be utterly devoted to her, and of course she in turn is with him, in everything in life. Us single people don't have that. Maybe that's a part of why Paul says in the bible it's better to not marry, if you can manage (my paraphrase) - no wholly devoted distraction.

I always wanted to have a ride or die best friend. The older I got, the less I've held to that desire. I realized people come and they go, their priorities change. Maybe their tolerances change, I don't know. I became bitter, and then I became comfortable for the first time.

Then came The Relationship. Not only did I have someone in nearly every square inch of my life so to speak, but I felt needed, too. It wasn't just me. Then it wasn't even me...then it was what am I nuts? It was me too. Then it was just me. That place I hate to be in, I was in all over again and the deepest I've ever been. I thought I knew myself better than to end up there, especially with a romantic relationship. I thought I had a good enough read on people, I thought that maybe some more commitment was hiding around the corner - not a rejection. Not a dragging on. A year ago today was a sort of mile-marker in our relationship, for me anyway. I look back with fondness laced with confusion, seeing where we were and wondering how it got this far.

Throughout the last several months, I have seesawed as to what to do with this heavy love in me that had no home, no object. It has been a huge facet of my pain. Recently, as I sat with a friend who had a microscale-version of this experience and witnessed her heavy, saddened heart, I spoke words I needed myself: Love given matters just as much as love received and love reciprocated. As painful as it has been to love someone who is willfully not in my life, I believe it completely still matters. There is some great importance to loving when you expect nothing in return, and also great pain. We all experience rejection a time or two in our life, but I can say with certainty a general rejection holds far less weight than the very depth of love.

It teaches you about the value of loving. A painful way to learn, to be sure, important nonetheless. I can't say for certain because I'm not there [yet?], but I think the next time I have that kind of love I'll cherish it all the more. Until then, maybe I'll spend that love on those around me whom I'm not dating. Maybe all that heartache simply deepened the well from which I draw.

Fear of Being Known

Every once in a while I'll read back in my blog to see if there are trends I've been writing about recently or ones I haven't touched on in a while. Just today I noticed the presence of something threaded throughout my writing over time, a thing I've been toiling with lately. 

A goal I set out with in my writing is to engage what I consider to be a personal strength: vulnerability. As I've spent my entire life learning and yet striving to reject, vulnerability isn't just scary to engage in for yourself but it scares others to see you engage in it. So I have pushed back against the shame I've often received for my openness, because, as Brene Brown would agree, there is power sharing in my story. Even knowing and believing that to be utterly true, I struggle against shame and judgment for being willing to be open and raw with my story. 

That's the pattern I noticed throughout a handful of posts I read through, and oddly I'd been pondering the last couple days after receiving criticism yet again: I tend to feel pressure to apologize for my openness, as if it's something to be ashamed of. That simply isn't true. 

The truth is more likely that others feel a sense of fear and shame at their own stories; an inability to share openly themselves. I also realized that often the critics are the ones who allow few people to get close to them, are often unwilling to admit when they're wrong or they've messed up, and spend more time critiquing the lives of others than truly engaging in relationship with them. The irony is I find that expressing the sometimes gritty, ugly, or messy reality of my life levels the playing field and opens others up to trust me. And yes, there's a risk that vulnerability will only provide relief without reciprocation of trustworthiness - which again, ironically, is what critics are afraid of and yet perpetuate in doing just that! 

So, what have I been learning as I toil and wrestle through the shaming for being open and vulnerable and messy in a public space (which as a writer is an acceptable, even expected practice)? I do not have to internalize someone else's fear of vulnerability, or judgment of mine, as truth. Because the truth is I desire to be known; I don't fear it. My hope - and experience - is that being comfortable or brave in sharing honestly about my life will give others the courage to feel at home in their skin, if not to follow suit. Maybe if more of us would pursue honest tellings of our experiences, we could be more whole people; unafraid to be human and messy.

I've often said you can learn a lot about me from reading my blog. If you read this blog often or from time to time, thank you for taking in my stories and taking time to know me a little better.