General Thoughts

Knock, Knock. Change the Lock.

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Have you ever fumbled with your keys trying to get them into a lock and you couldn’t remember what the key even looked like?  You just had to try them all and hope for the best.  Once, I couldn’t get into my car.  I hit the button on my keyring on my automatic opener, but nothing.  I tried it a few more times because I thought there was no way the battery could be dead.  Still it did nothing.  Finally, I tried the key, and it didn’t even work.  There was a pretty big reason for this.  The car wasn’t mine.  It was identical to mine, but it belonged to my friend that had one the same make and model, and I was trying to let myself into hers.  Of course the key didn’t work, the lock wasn’t mine.

I spent years knocking on the door of a heart who never answered, and I ended up making my home on the welcome mat.  I was just optimistic enough to think that one day I’d finally pick the lock, hit the right combination, or be handed the key outright and I would finally see what made this person tick.  Some days I thought I was almost inside.  I had moments where I felt like I saw beyond the facade and beyond the day to day into something more real.  Conversations that were surface level ruled most days.  We discussed what we ate for lunch, what movie was being released on Netflix, who in the family was having issues, and then we’d hit this wall.  We couldn’t break through it, and I may never know why.

Trusting people is hard work.  Letting them see the you that most people don’t get to see isn’t easy because in order for this to happen you have to be vulnerable.  No one likes being vulnerable.  It carries risk, and the risk is rejection with a side of humiliation and a touch of unbearable pain.  So when someone lets you in, you should proceed with caution as though you are somewhere special.  Someone letting you in can happen in a matter of hours if you find someone that is a rare soul mate.  It can happen in days, months, or even years.  But there is a sad truth that some may never find out.  You can spend years with someone and never be handed the keys to their heart.  Their fences and walls may be up for even those most close to them, and maybe they just aren’t willing to risk it.

We lock our hearts up tight to protect us. We let some in and others seem to have their own roadmap once they get inside our hearts. But what I discovered is  there’s always the chance that someone is going to change the locks on you.  What happens then?  I had to change my perspective on this quite a bit.  What if there is a big reason you can’t get in? What if this lock wasn’t your lock to begin with?  What if the only way into the hearts with the highest walls  made of the toughest brick and stucco was from the inside out?  What if all those dead bolts they put up to keep people out of their innermost thoughts and feelings have to be unlocked willingly?  You have to deal with a reality that will make you pretty uncomfortable.  You were never meant to get in.  They didn’t choose to let you in, and they have their own reasons for that.  That lock isn’t yours to open.  Yes, it’s a hurtful thought, but either it’s yours and it won’t open from the outside, or it’s just not yours in the first place.

You can’t make someone let you in.  But when they do, make it count.  No one can live on a welcome mat forever.

Headed Home

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It has been said you can’t go home again, and I can attest to that. Home changes as you go through life. Home isn’t a real place. Home is a feeling, and depending on how you were raised or what your life was like up until this point those feelings can vary. When I was young, home was many places. Home was my house, my grandparent’s house, school, and church. I dwelled in those places, lived there, made them my own, shared memories there, and finally left them. Those places are actual places, but the memories are the real “home”. Once my father died, my grandparents died, I finished school, and the church ceased to be home because of the people I lost no longer attending I didn’t consider those places home anymore.

Home, once I married, was a place where my family was. It was a place where my children learned to walk and talk. They grew and made memories there. They lost teeth, they celebrated birthdays, they played outside, they hunted Easter eggs, and Santa showed up. Once again, those places ceased to be home once we moved on and moved to another home. Each time we moved more memories were made, and each time those places took on a sense of home.  Memories are the childhood.  Memories are the home.  You might not be able to go home again, but you can’t lose home totally as long as you have your memories.

So what happens when you lose your sense of home altogether? It turns out you don’t die. You feel like you might at first, but you don’t actually die. A few weeks ago, on the heels of moving out of my “home” because of my impending divorce, I lost my job. That job was what kept me afloat this past year. You see, I teach. Every day was something new and every day I lived to go into the building and see these tiny humans and share their lives. I loved the pictures they drew me, and their smiles fed me. They kept me human. They made me laugh at times when I didn’t feel like I would ever laugh again. They got me out of bed each morning and made me sad to leave each day, and they never even knew it. They were my home when my own home felt like a war zone.  I lost two “homes” in one week, and now I have a clean slate to start with. Sounds empowering to some, but it’s a daunting task in actuality.

What should home be? Home to me is a place to feel safe in your own skin. It’s a place to share conversation and laughter. It’s a place for inside jokes and great food. No one judges you at home. Home is a place you hate to leave, and you love to return to as soon as you can. It’s a place to make memories. Home is where your desk can be a bit messy, or you can read tacky fiction and no one is the wiser. Home is where you can decorate however you want. Home is where no one tells you how many books is a tolerable amount. Home is a place to be you with no one telling you differently. It’s a place for your people, or your person.

Being in search of home is an odd place when you are in your 30’s. Most people my age have it together, and here I am feeling a little lost. The good thing about being lost is you can’t stay lost forever. Even if you don’t move, the places you are become home. Memories are made there, and you can develop a sense of home anywhere. It is okay to feel lost. It’s okay to wake up and feel like you don’t belong somewhere. It’s okay to know you are on the way to somewhere great, but you just aren’t there yet. In a way that’s where we all are. We are all on our way to somewhere great, and we aren’t there yet. And that? That’s okay.

 

The Town Was Paper, But The Memories Were Not

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Once every blue moon I find a book that contains a page that requires more than one read in order to really let it sink in.  One of these books for me was John Green’s Paper Towns.  At first glance I didn’t have much in common with the main characters, but I think the heart of the story is relatable by most.  Who hasn’t felt misunderstood, lonely, and been full of uncertainty?  Who hasn’t questioned what is important in life? Who hasn’t questioned who really knew the real person beneath the masks we wear at school, work, and sometimes even home?  So, the main character finds himself at a crossroads: the end of high school.

“My locker was an unadulterated crap hole- half trash can, half book storage… I put it inside my backpack and then started the disgusting process of picking through a year’s worth of accumulated filth- gum wrapped in scraps of notebook  paper, pens out of ink, greasy napkins- and scraping it all into the garbage.  All along, I kept thinking I will never do this again, I will never be here again, this will never be my locker again…”

I hate things.  Given a book, a glass of sweet tea, and sunshine I’m pretty much set.  I have a fondness for highlighters, good pens, post-it notes, and things that make the air around me smell pretty.  I might be a bit of a snob about sheets, but if Egyptian cotton is my worst vice, I’m okay with that.  I hate clutter, unless it’s a books and important papers clutter, so I relate to this kid cleaning out his locker.  It’s exactly how I feel when I’m deciding what to bring with me to my new home after my divorce.  This kid is lucky; he only has a year’s worth of stuff to sort.  I find that I’m opening drawers and asking myself why this stuff is even in there every day.  Most of that stuff goes the way of the locker stuff.  Yep, it has gone right into the garbage. But even with my hatred of stuff, it’s weird thinking it is the last time I’ll be cleaning out that drawer.  It is the last time the cabinet will have my things in it.  I no longer inhabit this place.  This is not my home.

“And finally it was too much.  I could not talk myself down from the feeling, and the feeling became unbearable.  I reached in deep to the recesses of my locker.  I pushed everything-photographs and notes and books-into the trash can.  I left the locker open and walked away.”

I’ve faced this a few times, but mostly when it came to things that belonged to my kids, and I’m packing them thinking of when those items came into my life.  I might need a break after finding a binder of my daughter’s drawings or the outfit my son wore home from the hospital.  It’s not the items.  It’s what they represent.  The life I lived, and the things I felt were important enough to save invoke emotions in me that I can’t really dig deep enough to feel the enormity of every time they wash over me. That’s when I do one of two things, I either throw entire boxes of things away, or I just put the entire box into the move to my place pile.  Knowing memories are there and confronting them are two different animals. But, in the book, he leaves his locker open.  That’s where I differ from this character.  I am ready to close the door. Leaving it open is far more painful than closing this hall of pain I’ve been living in.

“And as paralyzing and upsetting as all the never agains were, the final leaving felt perfect.  Pure.  The most distilled possible form of liberation.  Everything that mattered except for one lousy picture was in the trash, but it felt so great.  I started jogging, wanting to put even more distance between myself and the school. “

The weird thing is the more I sort, decide to keep, and throw away the more I know I’m doing the right thing.  It feels so clean.  It feels so final and perfect.  Would I have been ready for this before right now?  No, I don’t believe I would.  It’s time.  In the midst of all the sadness, anger, hurt, and confusion is this freedom from the pain and lonely I’ve felt growing for years.  Might I be lonely anyway? Sure, but I don’t have to live amidst the lonely.  I don’t have to face each day attempting to get the attention of someone much more content with a glowing screen then a real person.  I don’t have to emotionally starve for conversation and affection in the presence of someone incapable of giving it.  So, I completely understand why this kid is not just walking away from school, but instead jogging.  Sometimes putting distance between you and something that hurts you is the start of the healing process.

“It’s so hard to leave- until you leave.  And then it is the easiest …thing in the world… Leaving feels too good, once you leave.”

Deciding to leave was much harder than the actual leaving process.  Deciding to leave requires hurting someone, and if you are a decent person hurting another person isn’t on your top ten list of fun ways to spend an evening.  In fact, with your empathy in play you can be downright miserable of your own accord only to have the misery of the person you are leaving exacerbate the problem until it’s almost unbearable.  The worst night of my life was spent when I finally gathered the courage to say what I needed to say, but it was also the best night, the most healing night, and the one I wouldn’t trade for anything.  Leaving a place when the time is right feels great.

“But then what?  Do I just keep leaving places, and leaving them, and leaving them, tramping a perpetual journey? …I had to tell them no, because I was closer than I’d ever been before.”

I never like to give up, but this time I feel like only good things are down the road.  Maybe it’s because I have a stronger dose of optimism from birth, but I believe things are going to be better.  I don’t expect miracles, but I expect progress.  A lot of times progress is its own reward.  I know I won’t make the mistakes I made again, and you can’t put a price on that reward.  I don’t leave, but I did leave.  My goal is to make sure I don’t have to leave again, but realistically we all leave.  We all grow and change.  We might not leave people behind each time, but we leave parts of us with every month that goes by.  Life is a perpetual journey.  The key is when we leave to be better, to love deeper, and to live instead of just exist.  I don’t want to just exist.  I don’t want to be the person that just phoned it in.  I want to be first in line to see what’s out there and take it on.  I’m ready for this.

 

Packing Up A Life

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I’ve moved before, and with moving comes a lot of feelings expected and unexpected.  I’m a survivor of my feelings.  I can feel them and move past them and keep right on putting things in boxes.  This time though, something is different because packing up a life is different than packing up a house.  I’m not moving my entire family to a new place and unpacking everything.  When you get a divorce you must decide what will fit into a new life that you can’t even imagine yet. I can’t fathom what it will begin to look like when I have my children half the time. Because of this  I can’t seem to finish a box or tote without a tear or at least a heartfelt sigh.  Sorting through things no longer needed brings up memories of when those items were important to me, and this can be a bit overwhelming.

When you pack up a house, you carefully put your belongings wrapped in newspaper into boxes and label them.  You do this because you have intentions of unpacking them in your new place.  You might envision them already sitting on the shelf, counter, or coffee table.  You are putting them in boxes to save for later, for another time and another place.  You are packing with hopes and dreams of a better life.

When you pack up a life, you are carefully packing your hopes and dreams alongside the items and putting them to bed.  You are labeling them in a different kind of way, but labeling them all the same.  You do this for closure.  You are deciding what is important, or necessary. You are swallowing your fears, guilt, and failures while you pack.  And the biggest difference is when you get those boxes to a new location there are no guarantees at what you will find.  Each box contains a different memory of its former residence.  Each box contains a hope and dream that has hopefully morphed into something new and worthy.  But there’s no way to know until you open them.  Packing up a life is a daunting task that isn’t for the fainthearted.  It’s a good thing I’m up for the challenge.

To Kill A Pacifist

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“Atticus said to Jem one day, “I’d rather you shot at tin cans in the backyard, but I know you’ll go after birds. Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it. “Your father’s right,” she said. “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing except make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corn cribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”
– Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird

I’m typically a pacifist.  Don’t get me wrong; I love a good argument. I like to debate about things I care about.  That’s when I can feel like I’m really communicating.  I don’t need to win, I just like to show up to the conversation and that is winning.  That’s why when someone is mad at me I don’t handle it well.  Sometimes, they don’t even have to be actually mad, I can just perceive someone is mad, and it will make me physically sick.  There is a big exception to this.  A person that hurts others just for the sake of hurting them is something that makes me feel like there is a special afterlife for those people.

There are people out there that can make a sport out of making you feel bad for something they did.  Maybe you didn’t even have control over this thing they are angry about.  Maybe they are trying to reconcile their own failures. For whatever reason, they decide to make sure those around them are as miserable as possible.  They do this without a thought for others, and they do it in a myriad of ways.  These same people also enjoy punishing those around them to make up for their own problems.  This is, in a word, unacceptable .

There are also people that get out of bed every morning and dress themselves in guilt and other people’s failures the way most will pull on a sweatshirt.  They walk around on eggshells.  They hope things will be better than they were the day before.  They just want peace.  They just want to be happy for a few minutes.  The one thing they would change about themselves is their level empathy, and they try to be as helpful as possible hoping that one particular gesture might make the day bearable for everyone.  This is also unacceptable.

Toxic people tend to go around aiming at mockingbirds.  They don’t care if they go through other people’s lives leaving scars.  The sin they commit is indifference.  They are indifferent to feelings, emotions, love, and respect.  They use the people in their lives that see the human inside the facade of pain, and they don’t acknowledge that the pain they create has its origins with their behavior. Causing pain is sometimes its own consequence.  Those that cause pain to others without regard to who they are will bear the pain when that person is no longer around. Because sometimes mockingbirds don’t die.  Sometimes they rise from the ashes a phoenix, a new creation ready for a new day.

 

Weakness Can Make You Strong

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“To love at all is to be vulnerable.” – C.S. Lewis

Who can you be weak with?  Who can you call up and tell when you are scared or lonely? Do you have a person you can just say anything to and know that you won’t be judged, and they might even agree with you about things that most of the world at large would decide you were both crazy for thinking? I’ve only had a few friends in my life that I could admit my weaknesses to, and even with those people it can at times be hard to show how weak I really am.

 Being weak requires trust.  You can’t be weak around someone that might share how weak you are with others, or might think less of you for admitting the weakness.  Being weak also means you remove your defenses.  My heart goes out into the world every day guarded by fences, barbed wire, and even a few junkyard dogs these days.  Letting people in is risky business, and risk taking with me is always limited to calculated risks.  If the reward is greater than the risk, then it is a sure thing, but finding those opportunities is rare.  I have a few great friends.  I have a person that I can say anything to, and know it will be received as I meant it.  I’d rather have a friend like that than any “thing” in the world.

Priorities, obligations, and commitments are heavy.  I carry them around.  I drag them from place to place, pretending they are somehow making me a better person, and I know this is decidedly not true.  I’m left sometimes feeling like I’m holding up the world (even though it is just my little tiny world) and being Atlas can grow tiring.  Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I just stopped holding it up.  I just need a few minutes to rest.  I get tired of being strong, and I feel like I just need to be weak, but this can be problematic, because who wants to admit they are feeling weak? Weak is the opposite of strong.  If I asked a crowded room for a show of hands of who was weak, I will bet no one would even raise a finger.  The reason is simple.  Humans don’t like to admit our weaknesses.  It makes us seem less than, or lacking somehow.  Does that mean we aren’t weak?  Hardly.  Sometimes we just need a safe place to go and be weak.  Vulnerability isn’t  something we set out to achieve.

Being weak is a blessing. Showing a friend a deeper level of myself that others do not get to see helps me be more human.  Having those that love me for who I really am, and not just who I am showing the rest of the world is a gift beyond measure.  It’s okay to be weak sometimes, and those that get to hold me in my weak times with words, hugs, or even love from a distance make me strong enough to pick that tiny little world of mine back up and hold it, even when I thought it was impossible.

Sacrifice or Surrender: A Dilemma

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On the surface the words sacrifice and surrender are similar.  Something is being given, and it is being received by someone or something.  However, the differences are titanic.   When you look up sacrifice in the dictionary there are several definitions.  The kind of sacrifice most of us feel good about is the one that reads  “to give up something of value for the sake of other considerations.” When you think of the word sacrifice it has a positive vibe.  It brings up warm feelings of caring and love.  On the other hand, when you consider the word surrender, it seems to bring forth feelings quite the opposite from sacrifice.  It gives off an air of being uncaring and unfeeling.  The synonyms for sacrifice are listed as “to offer up, yield, to suffer, and surrender.”  When looking up the word surrender, the listed synonyms are “succumbing to, yielding, to abandon, and sacrifice.” How can two words that can be used as synonyms be that different?

But there’s a more cannibalistic definition of sacrifice that can be detrimental to any relationship, and that definition reads “an act of slaughtering a person or animal as an offering.”  Of course this is not to be taken literally, but this definition made me stop and consider that not all sacrifices are equal.  This interpretation makes me think of relationships where giving of yourself requires a lot more than just what you are eating for dinner or what is going to be playing on the television that night.  Are there times when we are making a choice to forgo what we need for someone else to get what they want?  Can we sacrifice more than we actually should and still walk away unscathed?  We might not actually see our need as a need, but in fact, relationships have needs just like people have needs.  They aren’t all as simple as food, water, and shelter, and we might not fall over if we don’t get it, but it certainly does take a toll on us emotionally if we don’t get what we need.  When sacrifice eats away at who we are at our core, then it truly takes on another definition of sacrifice entirely, and this one isn’t one most would boast about.

Surrendering seems cowardly as a general rule.  If we surrender, we are giving up essentially.  We are walking away, crying uncle,  or throwing in the towel. It is ingrained in us at an early age that we should never give up.  What a powerful message in a little phrase!  It is implied that if we give up, we have lost.  If we give up, we are weak.  If we give up, we are selfish.  To those that have been sacrificing in the more cannibalistic sense of the word sacrifice, never giving up is exhausting.

Surrendering isn’t something we can be proud of doing.  It’s something you admit to, not declare.  Why is this?  Why is it that we can’t be proud of knowing our own limits of sacrifice, and instead choose to surrender?  What if someone is going to hurt either way?  If you are an extremely empathic person, you hurt because the person is hurting you, and you also hurt when you hurt them.  You are never going to win either way, but try as you might, persuading yourself to just give up isn’t the easy thing to do.  Waving the white flag on a relationship can leave you wondering what you did wrong, and how you even wound up in the place to wave the flag in the first place.  It can leave you breathless, tortured, and fresh out of tears.  Surrender is not the easy way out, but people tend to treat it as though surrender is easier than sacrifice.

How many chances are enough when your very soul feels weighted and exhausted? Could it be okay to just put down the tools you were working with and quietly step away?  What is the worst that can happen?  Disappointment in yourself or from other people can’t actually kill you, can it?  And, at what point are people quite positive that you tried everything you could before making big changes?  Do people ever think the best of us?  What would I think of the decisions I am making if I wasn’t me? Can sacrificing yourself ever be noble, and can anything good come from it? Is it better to sacrifice when your very self is at stake, or is it acceptable to surrender with the best intentions? I guess the only thing left to do is find out.  I’m hoping I find that ending up where you started can feel just like going home.

Broken Cellphones (and people.)

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On my way out the door this morning, tragedy struck at precisely 6:37 a.m. in my garage.  My cell phone decided to leave the warmth of my hands, and to fly violently toward the concrete and land in a way that can only be described as sickening.  In true INFJ fashion I started wondering immediately what it all meant.  What connection did I feel to my broken cellphone? After all, it is not just a cellphone.  It is my calendar.  It is my connection. It is my contact to the outside world when face to face is not an option.  It is my friend.  What does it all MEAN? (Yes, I see that look on your face.  And yes, I did in fact have all of those thoughts at 6:37, and if not then, definitely by 6:40.  I can’t help it if I’m a morning person.)

The way it broke was spectacular. It was the glass, the surface, the outer layer that the damage happened to, and it didn’t just shatter immediately.  There was a big ugly smashed place where it looked awful, and for about half a second I thought the worst had past, but I watched as a spider web of more and more cracks spiraled all the way around the glass and covered the entire front screen.

Humans are like that.  We are optimistic when we get hurt.  “Just a flesh wound,” we think, when in reality, it couldn’t be further from the truth.  Ground zero is just where it starts, the real damage is done once that initial crack is there. Soon, the outer shell of our humanness cracks so much that it seems just about hopeless.  Before long, our brokenness changes the way we see everything.  It becomes a filter through which we see the world.

The next thought that crossed my mind was whether the phone still would make calls and texts.  What happens once something is broken?  Is it still usable?  As it turns out, yes, sometimes things can look beyond repair at the moment, but still function, even if not at 100%.  At times when I used my phone today, I felt shards of glass fall out of the phone.  Sometimes they stuck to my finger.  Other times, they dropped to the floor making me hope I don’t find those the hard way.  With almost every use, I was wishing my phone was in one piece again.  Then something odd happened.  I got used to the brokenness, and started feeling as though if forced to, this broken shattered phone could become my new normal and I could use it this way indefinitely.  Each and every time I had convinced myself of this, I would attempt to do something on the phone and my fingertip would be sliced.

Isn’t that just like humans?  When forced into a reality that is downright terrible, we will try to make the best of it.  We can entertain ideas that we will be able to make things work.  We make excuses for people, and we maintain relationships that are broken beyond repair because we tell ourselves it is just the surface.  It is just that outer layer that is broken.  Deep down, everything is fine, functional, and we can deal.  But, just like my phone, those relationships will cut us; they will surprise us with the wounds they create.  We can know it is broken, and still be shocked that we got hurt once again, and we feel foolish for being so shocked by it.  Humans are quite different, because usually a cracked exterior is just a sign there is a deeper problem on the inside.  Humans, unlike cell phones, crack from the inside out.

At the end of the day,  I took my phone to the mall and had it repaired.  I have a cellphone that looks like new, and a sore finger from the shards of glass poking me all day.  Tomorrow, I’ll hold my phone a little tighter, and protect better than I did today.  In a few days I will have probably forgotten the inconvenience of having this happen entirely.  With broken people, it’s not that simple. We can’t just take shattered people to the mall and get a new outer shell for them to wear.  With humans, the choices are not as simple as choosing to replace the glass, buying a different phone, or getting an upgrade, but wouldn’t it be nice?