Dungeon or Domicile?

Whew. It's Monday, and somehow that day-of-the-week marker is comforting, even though I've been tempted to write that type of identification off as irrelevant. I am not in a dungeon, not surrounded by four stone walls with no sunlight. I am not trying to keep track of the days by drawing my own blood and making painful tally marks. I can take the orientations of day of the week and day of the month and time of day as beauty, and let them stabilize me, instead of resenting every day as life as I knew it feels locked. I have an opportunity to embrace the increased space and stillness to do some of the emotional work I have claimed I am "too busy" for. Even though life looks somewhat different right now, I am not chained. Even though life looks somewhat different right now, I am not chained. I always have the choice to be grateful. And I have a choice to reach out and love. Life is still a gift, if I choose to receive it. I have so much power. Today, I claim it.

my breakfast nook, a place of peace and solace

Hopeless, Obsessed or Somewhere in Between

So. It's a tiny bit past midnight, and as often happens after a long conversation with my best friend, I'm finding it hard to wind down and sleep right this minute. And so here I am, writing a post that I already had a name and a concept for, but is mostly a messy ball of ideas at the moment. So thank you in advance for reading this in its very raw form. Hopefully it will be coherent enough now and be part of something more polished later.

Before I left to come overseas and teach homeschool this year, I was talking to some guy friends of mine about how I find it really easy to swing from being hopeless (I'm never going to find anyone or No one will like me anyway) to obsessed (I have found the person I want and now they have to like me back, they just have to). Neither mindset is one I want to be in. Both of them make me miserable, albeit in different ways, but still miserable. When I feel hopeless, specifically about romance and love, I tend to look at all the ways I am still not who I think I should be. All sorts of negative thoughts go through my head about my past failures and my current struggles and my perpetual weaknesses. "You're never going to make someone a good partner anyways." "You've failed at so many relationships--what makes you think this time will be any different?" "You're not good enough." "If you were really captivating, someone would have pursued you by now, someone who would be good for you." And then it would turn into more action-oriented, cutting things. "Maybe you should just give up." "Why keep hoping? It only hurts you."

The verse I have thought of when I think of the hopefulness that, when unexamined and then disappointed, leads to this kind of hopelessness is this:

"Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life." Proverbs 13:12

I certainly know about the heartsickness, but I have taken this verse gravely out of context. I have used it to try and be angry that I haven't had what I long for, that it hasn't come to pass yet. I reason that a good God wouldn't want my heart to be sick, so why would he let my longing be unfulfilled? I wonder if I have been reading this verse all wrong.
*First of all, longing isn't painted as a bad thing, even though it can be vulnerable, sometimes painful, and even quite confusing at times.
*Second of all, it doesn't at all mention what kind of hope is being deferred. If the hope is for meaningful connection, acceptance, and love, then that is absolutely not out of reach, no matter what my relationship status happens to be.
*Thirdly, God has made us for longing, and He is the only one who can ultimately fulfill our hearts, so perhaps when hope is deferred it is not about our lives being really tough so much as what we choose to believe when our lives get tough and it feels like our deepest dreams or strongest hopes are genuinely never going to happen/come to pass.

If all three of these things are true, then that is very good news. And this verse isn't a license to rage and rail at God for withholding good things from us. Perhaps it is a reminder that he has given us Himself, the very best gift we could ever hope for, and He has also given us longing.

Longing is a gift. I know that is counterintuitive, but sometimes us melancholy people feel that truth deep down in the marrow of our bones. To deeply desire and to feel that ache is a beautiful human experience. But where I sometimes get it wrong is thinking that longing is the main gift, that in itself it is complete. But the thing about longing is that it always points to something. Maybe you long for adventure. Then adventure is the object of your affection and also your longing. Maybe you long for rest. Then rest is the object of your longing. The problem is that when we long for something deeply and for its own sake, we are so often catapulted right into the deep end of this spectrum, which is nothing less than obsession.

This is the opposite of hopelessness, but we are just as focused on ourselves. The other thing is that we are not trusting in God to do anything about it if we are in either of these extremes. We've either given up because we don't think there's anything we can do and we don't think He will make a move, or we have moved into the mindset where we will do anything possible to win that person over, get that job, or obtain perfection in a particular skill or habit. So when we are in that far extreme of obsession, there is this do-it-yourself attitude that shoves God out, puts us on center stage, essentially responsible for everything that happens without any input or wisdom from the God who created us. There is also a sense of entitlement that is dangerous. More often than not in this extreme, we leave behind the mindset that we're not good enough or that we don't have what it takes to move forward in our lives, and instead our egos have grown so much that not only do we think we're doing great, but we think we are entitled to get that thing or person or job that we have been wanting.

Longing is this place somewhere in between being hopeless and obsessed. When we are vulnerable and honest with God and ourselves first about what we desire and then safe, supportive people, there is something beautiful about that, and healing. We bring our feelings to God, and even if they are in the extremes of hopeless or obsessed, he can help us sort things out, bring us balance, and then redirect our longing to Himself, so that we don't drown in it. And being drawn to God in our longing can only help us. So longing is a gift—if we bring it to Him.

Why We Should Stop the Pursuit of Happiness

I know this title alone will have some people up in arms, especially Americans. It's written into the fabric of our country, isn't it? The inalienable rights. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I believe this phrase is almost as revered as the ten commandments used to be. In fact, don't we think something is wrong with the person who isn't doggedly pursuing happiness, or don't we at least think they're weird?

But it's gone too far. It's an obsession. We are obsessed with finding someone, some job, some house, some defining moment, some drink, some song, some book, some artist...and the list goes on. Someday we'll be happy if...

Maybe we can be happy when...  

I think we should absolutely have goals in our lives, and people to share our lives with. But we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking that with the acquisition of some new passion or relationship, we will suddenly be all-encompassingly happy. Our lives are right now, in this moment, not yesterday in the "if only I had done things differently" or tomorrow in the "if I just do things differently". Today we have to choose who we will be, and what our lives will be about. A happy, fulfilling life is just a bunch of those todays strung together. We don't even always make meaning out of them until later.

Maybe it's time for me to shift my focus. My happiness plans don't tend to pan out well anyways, and this intense focus on finding my fix or my niche or whatever just makes me feel more tired. I know it will take some time to break the habit; it's so well-formed. If I feel a little uncomfortable or the silence becomes too oppressive, my instinct is to put a TV show on. If I feel restless, sometimes it's shopping. Or a nap, that'll solve everything right? It just makes me feel more discontent. This gnawing for satisfaction is seemingly endless, a hunger not easily sated by anything for long. 

Just to be clear, I'm not demonizing happiness itself. It has its place. If I was never ever happy, chances are that there might be some questions to ask myself. I'm saying that the unrelenting pursuit of it in abandonment of everything else or at the cost of everything else is nothing short of selfish, and even crazy.

My thoughts on this are not fully formed, but I am noticing that the more present I can be in each moment, the greater the capacity for feeling alive. Not every moment is going to be happy, but I can choose to be content in whatever emotion happens to be moving through me in that moment, and maybe that's even better.

Processing Depression (and Living Well Anyways)

Someone told me recently, “Usually when things go to shit, everything goes to shit”. It’s also true that there’s never a good time to fall apart; it will never be convenient for the people around you. It’s why people who are clinically and chronically depressed feel like they’re "too much", because in a way, our pain and sometimes crippling emotions are an extra burden for those around us to bear. I’m in a tough place right now, and I’ve been doing a fair bit of leaning on other people. But I have to believe—to get through day after day—that it won’t always be like this and I will emerge from this season stronger and more resilient to the hurricane-force winds that life brings. And then I will be someone others can lean on, and I will be fortified so that I don’t break under the weight of their burdens.

There’s a difference between feeling inconvenient and being inconvenient. Life is not all about taking care of ourselves; we also care for others. Others’ needs and feelings and hurts are rarely if ever convenient, but that doesn’t make them any less important. It’s in these moments that we do something inconvenient, that we step outside of ourselves, that we are showing love.

It may seem silly, but when someone lets me turn right out of a parking lot onto a busy street, I am so grateful. I feel that they have done something lovely. Do you know why? It was inconvenient for them. And yet, when I see people waiting to turn right, so often my instant reaction is that I have somewhere to be, that someone else will wait for them to turn. But here’s the thing: everyone has somewhere to be. But if we never act outside of what is entirely comfortable and best for us, what a mad world it would be. And what a mad world it already is. What if we made it a little less mad? What if each of us did one thing for someone else that was inconvenient every day? I don’t know if it would change the world, but I think it would start to change us.