I am an external processor. I can only work through my feelings on something once I've voiced them to another person or written them out, or in this case, typed them out. I stop blogging because I wanted to stop processing.
This doesn't mean life was all horrible. It just got messy. I didn't understand a lot of what was going on, and rather than blog as if those things never happened, I just stopped blogging.
Who wants to dredge up the messy stuff of life?
Last year, I would somehow make it through my work day, get home, and drown out my feelings with noise. Music, movies, TV shows, phone calls, whatever it took to not process what was really happening.
The worst part?
My life really wasn't that bad.
I was drowning out my feelings on being so far from home and not liking Ohio and not liking my housing situation, and in my misguided purge of thoughts and emotions, positive emotions and feelings went with the bad and everything seemed worse than it really was. That usually happens when you focus on only the bad...you can't see anything past it.
I would call friends and family and vent or share good news, but then I would stop thinking because it was all so confusing.
"Why in the world am I here?" was about as far as I would get. But...
I HAVE TO STOP ASKING THAT.
I won't ever know why I'm here. When I lived in Florida, I never asked that question. But, in all fairness, its because being a dolphin trainer living in the Florida Keys never stretched me like being the director of a student outreach department for a pregnancy resource center in Southwest Ohio is stretching me.
Its so easy to focus on the tears (as in something that is torn from being stretched, not boo-boo kind of tears…) and to miss the growth.
This can't be a way for me to vent to cyber space. This can't be a way for me to complain about a state that I still don't know how I feel about. And this can't be a facade of how my life really is.
This needs to be an outlet in which I can safely process life.
So far, this year has been….completely unpredictable. My one constant however is God and that He's going to keep throwing things my way that I probably won't understand this side of Heaven.
I've made it through a whole year of working full time for a ministry and 6 months of volunteering for another while working full-time (I never understood how everyone else did that back at SRCC student ministry…and now I know how…only with God's help!), and they haven't fired me yet, so something must be going right.
Instead of a "remember when", I want to share small positive experiences at the end of my posts. For example, a very small, inconsequential thing happened today, but was a positive spin on what was turning into a negative mental downward spiral.
At my church, they stop passing out the bulletins with the sermon notes in it once the service starts. Then right before the pastor preaches, the ushers walk around to pass out bulletins to anyone that came in late and missed them….so yeah, I'm usually raising my hand to get one. As I was sitting there waiting for him to walk down the aisle with the bulletins, I was feeling a little ostracized…the friend I usually sit with wasn't there, and the friends I'm still working on making don't usually save me a seat, and I tried to be a tiny bit chatty with the lady next to me, but she wanted nothing to do with me. So when the usher ran out of bulletins before I could get one, I wasn't too happy. It's hard starting up at a new church, and its been really difficult not to get discouraged when it still doesn't feel like I belong. Oh, and I also felt like I annoyed the person behind me because I wore heels today (#justcallmeshorty #whatupsixthree) and the lady behind me was so short she had to switch seats with her husband so she could see. So there I was, no sermon notes, no friends, and pissing people off all around me. But then the couple behind me tapped me on the shoulder and handed me a bulletin that had the sermon notes in them. It was something so simple and non-life changing, but in that moment, after feeling like I didn't fit there (physically and emotionally) this simple gesture showed me the light. I still may not have my community, but people do care. I may not be best friends with everyone in the church, but I'm still going and meeting people each time I do. So thank you to my thoughtful, short, church-pew neighbor for showing me a little bit of kindness when I really needed it.
