Notes from Northstar (church)

The point was raised today that in today's church, there is often a focus on the giving of "testimonies," and that the testimonies are expected to go like this:

"I once was lost, but now I'm found...and now I'm fine."

But life doesn't work that way. And so those of us who hear such testimonies and believe them and put stock in them find ourselves trying to match them--and failing. And when we fail we hide, and when we feel the need to hide, we feel ashamed. So there has been created, rather than a culture of love and hope, a culture of falsehood and dishonesty. It isn't good.


So here was the point:

It was never about perfection. It was always about relationship. When will we stop making it about perfection?


She said that when she was young, she heard a preacher say that "God helps those who help themselves." And at the time, being young, and "not knowing Genesis from Revelation," she thought, "well, it must be true, because he's old." But then when she grew older and studied for herself, she realized that there's no Biblical basis for that kind of thinking at all. Instead, there is a common theme of God helping those who are unable to help themselves--and that's all of us.


This reminded me of a whitewater rafting trip I took a long time ago, when I was seventeen. There was a flash flood on the river, and I and several others were thrown from the raft and nearly drowned. So here I'll start copying from what I wrote down in my notebook toward the end of church. (Excuse the melodrama. It happens more when I'm writing by hand and am feeling emotional at the time. Reliving this rafting thing brings back the residual PTSD stuff that I've still got going on sometimes.)

This reminds me of the rafting trip: this "God doesn't help those who help themselves! He doesn't make us pick ourselves up and climb, swim, crawl back! He helps those who cannot help themselves: all of us. So, the rafting: I fell out of the boat, off the wagon, into the dirty raging water, and I sank and I let it pull me down into its tumultuous, dark depths. I did not call out for help. I did not cry out to God. I did not even think to. I tried to swim against it on my own, and I could not. I could make no progress. I could not avoid the hidden snags and currents that repeatedly pulled me under. I did not know where I was or where I was headed or whether I would ever be able to snatch another breath of clean air again.

Still, in my stubborn and fearful silence, I was protected. In the midst of the flash-flooded, filthy, debris-filled torrent into which I had fallen, I was protected. I was not driven into an inescapable crevice [as commonly happens in such scenarios]. I did not dash my foot against a stone. [The whole time, the only things I touched were the things I was holding and the raft.] I did not run out of air, or time.

And when I finally realized my utter powerlessness and lack of direction, and when I finally saw that my death was literally inches and moments away, and I accepted it and asked for help, for breath, for direction, they were given to me. Instantly. I knew where to go and kicked up into the air with all my strength. And at the surface, still in the river, I was on the edge of the exact thing I needed: an eddy in the current, and a rock to which I could--just barely--cling.

And here it comes in again: help when we cannot help ourselves. No more than we can handle.

Treading water there, barely clinging to a sheer cliff face, I saw no help coming. I saw only rafts rescuing others--all too far out of range to help me. I was quite literally steadying my breath and mentally preparing myself to swim out to the only help I could see--which would certainly have meant my death--when a raft--the last raft--sailed around the bend in the river and pulled me in, and carried me to safety.


Of the four of us that fell in on a river that was so flooded that it was no longer legal to raft, in a rapid that, though it should have been a class 3, was now above a class 5, in water that looked like chocolate milk and ran full of propane tanks and tree limbs and coolers and, further down the river, power lines, none of us was injured. Though we all suffered from PTSD, not one of us was trapped beneath an undercut rock. Not one of us suffered a scratch. Though we were warned that we probably would, not one of us contracted a single disease from that filthy, sixty-degree water.

People die on the Gauley river fairly regularly, even under normal conditions.

On clarity, and waiting.

This is most excellent, and it needs to be shared. (Shared with me by Anna.)

Jumble sale:

I love this cat, but her claws-in-the-leg habit is beginning to try my nerves--particularly when combined with the paws-draped-across-the-keyboard habit. Once I attempted to remove her from said keyboard, and she snagged one of the keys (F7, if you must know) and tore it loose. Awesome. Luckily, the keys can be reattached to my keyboard. I did not expect this, and I was pretty excited. Thank you, Compaq.


I still want to write poems, but don't have any poems queuing up to be written. This is pretty much the story of my life. Creative energy - creative ideas = irritated boredom.


I was just perusing some stranger's facebook photo album, and decided that I (/we? Me and Sara? Me and Kelly? Me and [ ]?) need to have a party with a photo booth. For this to happen though, I need to live somewhere with less furniture. Or I guess the booth could center around some furniture. Whatever. Draped sheet plus camera plus whatever: photo booth. It would be good times.



I am tired, but I still need to walk Miley. Gosh, that sounds familiar. I've already taken her twice today actually, but the first two were both quite short. More like tide-her-over pee breaks than actual walks. And the weather's really nice, so I guess it's okay.

I went to a movie (The King's Speech--quite good!) today with a friend and former counselor of mine. I've seen her a total of four times since I was ten or eleven, and those all within the past six months. She's great--smiley and friendly and fun. After a few minutes of awkwardly positioned post-movie talking out in front of the theater, we went to a nearby barbecue (is it wrong to want to spell that "barbeque"? Spell check says so.) place for margaritas and hush puppies. We talked about Camp, among other things, and it turns out that as a camper she received a super patch* every single year. I, though I tried my best, received a super patch not even once.** I was a nice kid, liked everything we did, didn't fight, and (to the best of my memory) followed directions. I didn't even fight back if other kids gave me a hard time. My friend, on the other hand, was a part of such adventures as "smoking under the bridge" and "naked sunbathing at the lake." Super patch. Apparently I was the subject of such patch-voting discussions as "well she seems really nice, but how do we know she's nice when we're not looking?" No super patch.

At this juncture, I feel that a "WTF" is fairly well justified. Not that I'm bitter, or anything.



I suddenly want a pretty red party dress. Also: the ability to wear heels without pain/messing up my feet for days. And I don't want to hear any of that crap about "it hurts everybody's feet." I feel that the underlying message there is "suck it up." And I'm not saying that "it hurts everybody" isn't true. I'm just saying that if you wear painful shoes because they look hot (ESPECIALLY if you do this on a regular basis), then, well. I don't like calling people names. But that is a completely moronic thing to do.



I came across this picture earlier while perusing a few mom blogs. (Sorry it's so small, but if you're using Chrome or Firefox then ctrl [plus] + should help with that.) Some people are just so crafty. I think this shot is so cool. Can you see how they put it together? I had to look carefully before I figured it out.



A somewhat more coherent group of thoughts:


What is lonely? Am I?


The other day, at Northstar, Theresa made a good point, I think, if it can be called that. Maybe it was a claim. Maybe it was a statement of scientifically researched fact. "By the time we are five, we have already formed opinions of ourselves"--and we spend the rest of out lives trying to prove (or, imo, disprove) them. She asked us what our words were. A few people threw some out: pushover. Abandoned.


Stupid.


I nearly cried, hearing all the words spoken, but for almost an hour I couldn't think of what mine might be. For a while I thought maybe I didn't have one. Then, suddenly, near the end, it came to me:


Misfit.


And suddenly I remembered all the times I was made fun of in elementary and middle school, all the times I felt like I was watching life through a glass, all the times people tried to speak to me and I, confused and afraid, treated them with disdain.

In my life, I've had trouble with depression. A lot of trouble. There were times when the only thing that kept me alive was the fact that I was afraid my baby sister would find me if I ended it. I could not bear to do that to her. But every time I slipped or was thrown or threw myself into another wave of depression, the symptoms were different. One episode I would lose weight. The next I would gain it. One time I was totally unable to focus on even the simplest of tasks. Another time I felt that I was losing my short-term memory. One week I felt pretty okay, but was completely unable to sleep at night, and unable to stay awake during the day. Every time I would isolate a symptom, it would stop occurring. Not immediately, unfortunately, but in the next episode, it would be gone, or different. It was like my body or brain were trying to hide the depression from me, or trying to convince me that it wasn't there.

I feel that those last two paragraphs are linked. I don't know exactly how, but it seems like, even if I am an introverted person, there is something that I'm not seeing. Something that I'm hiding from, or hiding from myself.


Of course, I do tend to go through episodes of extreme frustration and feelings of being trapped and completely unsatisfactory and hopelessly lost and apathetic and incapable of making a life for myself that I will find pleasing and fulfilling and useful. The feeling arises that I will never learn to make room in my life for artistic endeavors, and that all of my dreams of photography and papier mache sculptures and wire lampshades and mixed media paintings and interior design will come to naught. That is one of the most reliable self-doubts. Another is that I'll never again have my own space to do with what I will. Or that I'll have it, and do nothing with it. Because I'd rather sit and stare into space than actually create anything. Or that I'll never find love. Or that I will. Or that I'll settle for someone with whom I am poorly matched, the way I might have done with David, had he allowed it. Sometimes I want things to be true so badly that I make myself believe them. Like me and David--even though, from the beginning, I promised myself that I wouldn't do that again. Mental snares die hard.

And following the above train of thought, the one about depression and introversion and deeply hidden secrets, I can feel one of those episodes coming. Perhaps it really is, or perhaps I only feel it because I was following one of the paths that can lead there. Maybe it can be averted. Maybe it's all best left alone, and maybe my mind will untangle itself in its own time. Maybe one day on a walk or in a dream or on the phone, I will suddenly stand still and look up to the sky, or bend down to the ground, and find myself holding the key. Right there in my hand.





























*At the time, kids who behaved, were kind, had a good attitude, etc most of (as in, more than 50% of) the time were given a patch. Kids who behaved and so on almost all the time were given a special, much-coveted super patch.

**Kelly says that I got one once, but I really think I'd remember. She got one every year, so I also think she might just be trying to make me feel better and/or make me shut up about never having gotten one.

Wednesday.

Too many things I do, I do thoughtlessly. I would like to be a more thoughtful person, but this is difficult for me to pull off.

The difficulty factor is increased by the fact that I also want to live less thoughtfully--that is, I want to learn to live instinctively, in the moment, without analyzing the life out of every action I take. So yes. It's a difficult balance.


I saw a rainbow ringing the moon tonight. I saw one last night too, not as strongly. But then this evening I saw rainbows around porch lights as well, and that made it far less special. Maybe it's something about my contacts.


Today was Jack's birthday--his 22nd. He went to a UVA game with my dad, and my mother and I made him a blueberry pie. Delicious.

There is a sleepy cat in my lap, deliberately, though I tried to discourage her. I'm warmer than the couch, I suppose. Every so often she lazily drapes her paw across my touchpad, effectively preventing me from moving my cursor. But I love her anyway. Faith.

Notes

I went to a beautiful international lessons and carols concert tonight with Anna, and... well, as I said, it was beautiful. The chorus was amazing. I liked almost all of the arrangements, and most of the carols were new to me. The orchestra was excellent. Each reading was in a different language, with the English translation projected on the wall. During each song, works of art related to the nativity (and often to the culture of the song and/or previous reading) were projected on the wall. I teared up a few times.

(Faith, our cat, is sleeping curled up on top of a sheet-covered milk crate. Her head just tipped off the edge and woke her up. Adorable.)

As we were leaving the concert, I was giving Anna a ride to her car, and someone backed straight into me. I have the worst reactions in these sorts of situations. I just sort of watch, dumbfounded, and maybe say something like "stop!" Eventually Anna said "your horn! Honk!" And then I had to find my horn, which broke a while back and has been relocated. Anyway, there's a small dent in my door, and I have the woman's name/number/insurance information. I haven't told my parents yet--I forgot at first.

I remembered when Anna called me around 10:30 to tell me that as she was leaving the birthday party she attended after the concert,

wait for it,

someone backed straight into her car, and hit her in the exact same spot as the woman at the show hit me.

What are the odds?



Speaking of odds, I spent the bulk of my evening after I came home shopping for snow boots. Originally I was shopping for thin wool socks for Scotland, and I was looking on planetshoes.com because they'd sent me a coupon. I searched "wool" on their site, and ran straight into these:

I want them. I want them so bad. But I have been able to semi-successfully convince myself that they wouldn't look good with jeans. Do not dissuade me. I can't even afford them at all. The best price I found was $122, and that took a lot of doing, and was a temporary sale. No one else had them on sale (reg price $160); hardly anyone had them in my size. It was slightly hellish.

I ended up with these, from footwise.com, with which I am pretty well pleased:

As a ridiculously fabulous added bonus, they were on sale because footwise only had them left in one size--my size. NO ONE else had these in my size except maybe Nordstrom's. Nordstrom's was charging $100. The footwise sale was $49. God loves me, I think. Now let's just keep our fingers crossed and hope they fit and all that.











On an unrelated note, I walked Miley tonight. She insists upon strangling herself. I constantly find myself thinking, "Buy a semi-choke collar! Strangulation theoretically optional."