Day 8: Another best thing

In an effort to remind myself that we’re not in Job anymore, I’m going to make Sundays the day I post about a best thing.  So here’s today’s best thing:

Sometimes I just lie in bed and think about the deliciousness of life.  My life is mine, and I have tremendously wonderful people to share it with.  It is not fancy or overly exciting, but it is mine, and sometimes it feels like such a luxury. 

Thanksgiving was weird this year.  Holidays kind of just are. I think they probably would be any way because kids grow up (as they should) and parents die (as we all must), but our weirdness is exacerbated by the fact that our family looks different.  Our table was small this year, but each person there was there because they loved the other people there.  Every person chose to be there because they wanted to be there.  It was, as Queen Brené would say, awkward, brave, and kind. 

Over the course of the weekend, I visited other people who love me and chose me and remind me that I am worth choosing.  We wrapped whoever was around – families and friends – into the everyday ness of life for a bit.  We are at the point where it all just kind of blends into one big family.  Steadfast is okay.  I am safe.  I nestle in.

I am overwhelmed that I get this table, these people, this life.

This life is one I am making for myself.  I have tremendously wonderful people to share it with.  Sometimes it feels like such a luxury. Sometimes I bask. 

Basking is a long damn way from Job.  And that is a best thing.

Day 7: No help at all

My number one reason why I think hope is stupid is because it lets you down.  And when it lets you down, it hurts.  Bad.  Really bad.

And that brings me to my number two reason why I think hope is stupid.  In the really bad hurt, hope doesn’t help.  When the hurt is really bad, all you can think about is trying to get the next breath in your body.  And sometimes you don’t really even care about that. 

Maybe some pain can be eased by hoping for better or for different, but when you’re really hurting, hope is out of reach.  It feels like the happy fat of emotions, a luxury for those who have more than enough energy to breathe. 

Hope is not balm in the midst of pain like that. In fact, it almost feels cruel.  And if you’re hurting like that, you’ve probably had enough of cruel for a while. 

Day 6: Hope is stupid

As I saw Advent approaching, my disavowing of hope started presenting itself in my head. It was not as insistent as Job last year, but it was certainly there.  Not believing in hope really gives people pause.  People really want you to believe in hope.  I mean, really want you to believe. 

When I say out loud that I think hope is stupid, people get a certain look on their faces. It’s a look that borders on pity.  It says they want more for me.  I feel like they want me to live a little more so I’ll see that hope is actually pretty much one of the main things that keeps normal people going. 

So when I say out loud that I think hope is stupid, people want to challenge that.  I think that’s good.  I don’t have the answers about hope, so people pushing back makes me think.

I will say this for sure: hope has let me down.  Hard.  You can hope something with every single cell of your being and you know how much it matters?  Zero percent. 

After recent, intense hope-dashing, I now feel a physical reaction to the word “hope.” I have to pull on the reins of my eyeballs to stop them from rolling.  I feel my stomach lurch.  Hope seems like the stupidest thing in the world to me right now. 

I have some reasons for that, but it’s still weird to me.  Why does “hope” do that to me, but “faith” doesn’t?  How are those things alike?  And where does “trust” fit in?  What about “expectation”? 

These are some of my salad thoughts.

At any rate, I’ve learned that a visceral reaction probably means I need to pay attention to something there, so I’m going to press into “hope” a little bit more.  I’m guessing the creators of Advent probably intended some hope along with the waiting, so it makes more sense than Job does, that’s for sure.  In fact, now that I think about it, I think one of the candles on the Advent wreath might actually be the candle for hope. Puke.

Day 5: Cooking salad

I promise this salad thing is going somewhere. Bear with me.

I don’t like cooking by myself or for myself, but I like cooking salads.  And by that I mean that I like cutting vegetables.  They are pretty.  They have cool textures.  Radishes especially make me happy.  I don’t know why.  I like the red outside and the white inside. I like the way they give the knife something to go through.  Cutting radishes brings me an odd little joy.  It’s weird.

Even weirder, though, might be that cooking salad is good thinking time for me.  My hands are busy enough and my mind is occupied enough that other topics will bubble up in my head during that time.  I think about big things while I’m doing small things.  I wonder about the point of things.

The three things I’ve been thinking most about over the last several months are righteousness (does it serve any good purpose?), forgiveness (how do you do it while you still do not understand?), and hope (what’s the point of it?). 

Obviously, it’s super fun to be inside my head.

But these are the things I think about, which means these will be some things I will write about, too.  Because, if you’re me, what’s the point of thinking about them if you don’t write about them?  Does what you do with something define its worth?  Writing them down helps me nail them down a bit, forces me to consider things enough to articulate them.  And it gives me something to look back to remember that I felt that way or thought those thoughts on that day … and I might not feel or think that now.  And that’s okay.

Day 4: Processing

There’s no doubt that trauma does a number to you in all sorts of ways.  One way that it really got me was in my metabolism. I know it sounds weird, but it’s true.  I’ve always been a slow mental processor (and an even slower verbal one), but it hadn’t occurred to me that my body is a physical processor, too.  I think I had a fairly normal metabolism … until I didn’t.

Like most people, I generally carry a few extra pounds.  I always called my excess weight my “happy fat.”  It meant I had enough.  Actually, it meant I had a little bit more than enough.  It meant I could withstand a lean time.  For a girl who is scarcity-minded and yearns for security, more than enough feels good. 

Anyway, I knew my happy fat was there, but it wasn’t too, too bad, and I didn’t much care.  For all of my normal worrying and baseless fretting (and even legitimate problems), I never stopped eating.  But then when the world dropped out from under me, my body knew, and it changed.  My happy fat went away. 

I started eating a LOT of salads.  I had never been able to convince myself that a salad was a full meal before.  If I ordered a salad, I tried to sort of separate it on my plate (or at least in my head) so the protein and the vegetables felt like two different things.  But when my marriage fell apart, suddenly a salad seemed like enough chewing to constitute a meal.  There’s a book called The Body Keeps the Score about how trauma triggers all sorts of physiological changes.  I think my weird metabolism thing was probably some sort of score keeping.

My body seems to have settled back down to its normal processing.  I don’t know if it’s pre-traumatic normal or if it’s new-life normal, but my happy fat is back.  But I’ve kept the salad habit, and I’m glad of that. 

Sometimes the point of something can surprise you. Maybe part of the point of all of the upside down-ness was to make me feel differently about salads. I didn’t see that one coming.

Day 3: What’s the point of Advent?

I’m all about a schedule and a calendar.  I grew up with the church calendar and the different colors on the altar and the times of change and the times of decorating and the times of feasts and the time of the ordinary.  

Ordinary time is my favorite. I love ordinary.

I grew up with Advent in my life as a season, the time of decorating and getting ready for Christmas.  Our family Advent wreath was kind of sad, but it was a staple of the season on our kitchen table.  It was a simple wooden plus sign, two pieces of wood with holes drilled in each end that were supposed to be candle-sized.  They were not actually candle-sized.  They were candle-ish-sized.  The candles never actually fit.  If the candles were too big for the holes, we would shave the wax off their bases with a steak knife until we could cram them in.  If they were too small, we’d wrap napkins around the base to make it thicker because what could go wrong with wood, paper, and an open flame at a table with 5 kids? 

My mom would put the little wooden cross (which I later came to see as an indication of another cross) on a big, old tin plate that I never saw at any other time in my life except when it was under that cross.  Then she’d go out into the yard and pull leaves off the magnolia tree, branches from the pines, and berries from the bushes and use those materials to decorate around the wood to cover it up and make it look pretty.  And she did make it pretty because that’s what moms do. 

Also, 4-week-old, dry, crinkly greenery is really the only way to display the open flames wrapped in paper and supported by wood, right?  Maybe I liked Advent because it was dangerous.

We fought over who got to light the spindly, precarious candles on the fire hazard in the center of the kitchen table, and we fought over who got to blow them out.  My mom scraped wax off the table because we always blew them out with enthusiasm (and sometimes devious deceit).  As a family, we watched them shrink over the weeks.  As a kid, the shorter they got, the closer Christmas was.  I liked that they were all different heights. 

I loved Advent when I was little because I like the scratch of the match to light the candle and the smoke from blowing them out.  I liked that it heralded Santa and presents.  That was the point of Advent then. 

What’s the point of Advent now?  Is it just something that’s time for on the schedule?  Is it for waiting or for preparing or for decorating or for all of that?  And if so, what are we waiting, preparing, and decorating for?  

Day 2: The point

A question I often ask myself these days is this:

what’s the point? 

I don’t mean it in a cynical way. Not all the time, anyway.  I mean it in a curious way.  What is the actual reason?  Why do I need it? Do I need it?  Does it serve a purpose?  How does it fit into my personal life, into my community, into the shared corporate experience of the world?  I ask this question of things, of people, of relationships, and even of ideas.

I started doing this as I was rebuilding my life.  I want things in my life that I want in my life, not things that were assigned to me or things I inherited or things that aren’t valued or appreciated on all sides.  I want to know that they are there and why they are there. I want to be intentional about it. 

I don’t think I was doing asking this question consciously at first, but I was so terrified and hurt that I examined every single thing with a very strong microscope, a very fine filter, a very new lens, and a very hurt brain.  Very, very little passed through.  I believe that love is a choice, and I had chosen strongly but wrongly, and I was not about to let that happen again.

That’s the question that rattles around in my brain the most these days, so that’s what I’ll be pondering in these next few weeks.  What’s the point?

Day 1: A best thing

One of the best things about writing is that you can see where you were before. When I look back at where I was last Advent, my first instinct is to cringe.  I’m embarrassed by the melodrama of it all, the sheer pathetic-ness of me. 

But then I stop myself and offer a little grace to me.  It’s not melodrama.  It feels big because it is big.  And it feels even bigger because I didn’t grow up letting myself feel things.

Like Job, I am allowed to feel big.  I wrote how I felt.  I wrote to teach me how to feel.  I am allowed to feel it as long as I need to.  And then I am allowed to feel the next thing.

Sitting on that ash help was important to my healing.  I’m slow to process, so writing helps … even writing on the ash heap.  I’m quick to forget, so reading what I wrote last year makes me remember that I used to feel that way and that I don’t feel that way right now and that no feeling is forever. 

I wouldn’t say I’ve risen from the ashes, but I think I’ve walked far enough from that heap that the ash is wearing off my soles a bit.  My footprints and my footsteps are lighter. 

So this Advent-ure will be different than last year’s. I’m not on that same heap anymore, and I don’t have as much time for all of that scab-picking.  This years’ thoughts will be shorter and pithier.  Maybe these will be things I might delve into more when my internal timing points that way.  Maybe one or two of these will be things you’d want to think about, too.  Maybe not. 

Let’s just see, shall we?