Your Best Self

The Doctor - "900 years of time and space and I've never met anyone who wasn't important."  (New Season 6, Christmas Special)

You can surround yourself with inspirational quotes, intellectualize all your feelings, and consciously act according to the prescribed or determined rules. However, until you learn to actually love yourself – for all your faults and all your strengths and weaknesses- you’ll never be able to get over the negative things you think about yourself.  Until you accomplish that, you’ll never be able to move forward toward being the person you were meant to be. All that negativity will hold you back. To reach your potential, to understand the reason you were put on this Earth, you must let go of the negative, even the negative you do not consciously know you are holding. 

This is not an easy task. You have learned these things, and they can be unlearned, but they will not be unlearned easily. It will take time. But, have faith!  Be kind to yourself. You did not learn these things overnight. You will not unlearn them overnight. If you succeed, however, you can find that person. The person you were meant to be - your best self. Your contented self.The self that goes out into the world and lives your dream. 

“We’re all stories, in the end.  Just make it a good one, eh?” — The Doctor (New Season 5, Episode 13)

It's okay to be the 99%

I don't want to blend in. I want to blaze my own trail, make my own way, and be MYSELF. The trouble is...this world is not made for people like me. It's made for people who want to stay in the rut and believe they are rebels because they make 12 choices to order a cup of coffee.

Well, I'd like to believe that, but I'm faced with a reality that is a little different. I have become soft. I have become ill, and I've realized that the struggle against the confinement of my invisible cage is what continues to keep me ill. I envision the life I want, but come up short every time I face the obstacles that are keeping me shackled to this current life.  I'm so close, yet I have so far to go.  I look at the flat land in front of me and think it's going to be an easy walk, only to find that I can't see the great gorge below me until I am almost in it. Frustration is feeding back into my body and making me hurt.

I want to write something inspiring. I'll say it's for everyone else - because I want to feed positive energy into the world. But it's also a need to encourage myself. To remind myself that we all feel this way. We all come up against life's barriers. We look at heroes and laud them for making the effort, for overcoming the odds. The problem is that, if they've overcome the odds, that means someone has to BE the odds. If the odds need overcoming, it means that the majority of people AREN'T MAKING IT. Not a very inspiring thought, I know. But I'm facing this reality. That this IS the reality. The truth that most of us will not be the inspiring story.

But, you know what? I think that is OKAY. It is how we deal with that failure that matters.
The crazy guy in Colorado who cracked up and decided he must be the Joker from Batman? He didn't know how to deal with this idea.

We teach our kids that just participating gets you a trophy, but that's not true in life. Yes, how you play the game is more important than if you win or lose.  But how you handle losing is the most important thing of all. Anyone can be a good sport when they win. It takes grace to lose with dignity
Everyone is good at something. But the hard truth is that no one is good at everything. No matter what it looks like to us, the person who has it all together doesn't. We never see the behind the scenes.

Someone recently said "The problem is that we are comparing our behind-the-scenes to someone else's highlight reel." Ain't that the truth?!

It is okay to be average. Average is the backbone that makes this country run. Average is the woman who goes to work everyday to a nonglamorous job (possibly one no one even realizes exists), comes home and makes dinner for her 2.5 kids, goes to bed tired at night, gets up and does it all again the next day. It's a grind. It is not romantic. That's what books and movies and television shows are for. These people we see on television are not the average. No one writes stories about average people. People have ALWAYS wanted to hear about the above average.

What is important is that we are all okay with being okay - at least some of the time. Find something you love and do it the best way you can. Be happy. Be happy with who you are. There will always be someone who is better at something than you are. And that's normal, too. Don't be mediocre. Be the best YOU you can possibly be. No one else can do that better than you.

I had a lot of thoughts when I sat down to write this entry. The concept seems simple and short and sweet and to the point and all of that. But when I started to try to explain it, I realized how large and world-view changing this could be. I had so many thoughts on what to say. This is important.
This is not a rant or a manifesto of mediocrity. I'm not saying not to try. I'm not saying there is no point in trying. I'm saying there is every point in trying. Trying IS the point.

Growing up in the United Methodist Church, we would occasionally sit in front of someone who, for the life of them, could not sing. I mean, really off-key noises would assault our ears the moment the hymnal was cracked open and the organ music would start. But that person would sing their heart out. It was what my stepmother would good-naturedly refer to as "making a joyful noise". I was taught this fundamental lesson - God doesn't care if you can't sing. Your music is still beautiful to him. It's the heart that's in the noise that matters.

I might be burning to sing my own solo, but I know in my heart that what I really want is to find a way to sing my own part. I've been trying to sing with the wrong group - like trying to sing soprano when you're really an alto. The result is a screeching mess that leaves me with a sore throat!

So I'm saying to you - make your life your joyful noise. You may trip over the words. You may be hopelessly off-key. But your life is beautiful to God as long as you are living it with all your heart. And you shouldn't be ashamed just because you aren't the soloist all the time. Think how lonely that would be. Remember, we're singing in a large choir - and we all have to sing our parts. That's how beautiful music gets made.

Brownie Girl

The floor was brown. Not solid brown. In my mind's eye, I'm looking down at it now and I see speckles and confetti-like patterns of brown and black and red and a few gold splashes here and there. It's cold and cut in large square tiles. Outside the wind howls. It's late October and I'm trying to think of a cool Halloween Costume for the different parties I'll be going to this year. I am 10. I hang my coat on a hanger inside the door - the pale blue bricks make a walk-in closet just across from the quadruple doors. I don't really want to leave it there yet. My arms are cold and I still feel the chill from the walk to the church. I know I will be sitting on cold grey folding chairs, too There is a smell, too. Something uniquely this place - something that will stick with me throughout my whole life - through the Baccalaureate service for my high school graduate that will be held here, just down the hall in the sanctuary, and through to my suddenly remembering it in a fugue state at age 38. It reminds me of the kitchen in my elementary school, but it also smacks of a certain amount of disuse and dust.

I hear other girls milling, their voices echoing in the large room. Stage at one end, fronted by the children's toys from the day care that runs here during the day, this is where banquets and bridgings happen. At one end, girls are running around and sliding on the slick, dark floor. A circle of those cold folding chairs is set up nearer to the stage. To one side, the adult ladies are talking and looking at books and pulling things out of plastic bags, preparing for the meeting to begin. The meeting, which seemed so long to me then, will only take an hour and a half.

Most of all, there is a feeling of safety this place gives me. A feeling of belonging and love and trust that will disappear later in my life. For now, this place feels almost as much home as my family home half a mile away. In warm weather, I climbed the tree with the almost 90 degree angled branch in the parking lot. If I look out the window, I can see it there, appearing almost on its own island of grass.
I can smell the powdered soap in the bathroom down the hall. A tiny little room with two squeaky stall doors that never seemed to line up with their locks, it smelled of borax-like powdered soap and urine. My mind strains to remember a faint memory of a 70s-style orange vinyl couch from that room, but I don't know where that would have fit. The mind is an imperfect thing and these memories are arriving through emotion. That couch will have to float there, Schrodinger's Cat - like, neither existing nor not existing.

Brownies, and Girl Scouts in my later elementary years, is filled with memories of this place. There was singing "Silver and Gold" and playing "Gossip"to prove messages can be misunderstood. One shining memory was the night Lilly Umholtz taught us how to properly set a table. Why I found that so interesting I no longer know. Perhaps because I was a loud sponge soaking up any and all knowledge.

Despite her volume, I would love to be that girl again. She was opinionated and annoying, but she had brass. She was unashamedly curious and planned to take on the world someday. She saw nothing but promise in her future and believed she could do anything.

A small bit of that girl still resides in me - she's the part that wants to ride Camels and be a wise old woman. I recently let her loose to make a list of 101 things she wants to do. She came up with driving Route 66 and going on an "Amusement Park Crawl", as well as taking a painting class and learning to fly a plane.

Sometimes people forget that, trapped inside a sick woman, there exists a little girl who still wants to play, to run, to learn, to explore. I don't know if I'll ever get to do any of those things on that list.  I'd like to think as long as I still have that list, though, I can have hope.

Those Little Things

A recent post on Facebook started me thinking.

When my mom died when I was a teenager, I went through a really bad spot in my life. At 17, I didn't have the skills to ask for help or for comfort, or to really appreciate it when offered. One of our family friends was a secretary at the high school. Whenever I would come into the office, she would give me a hug. I didn't know how to react at the time, but when I looked back on it, it meant so much to me. Recently, I was finally able to thank her for that, only to find she didn't really even remember it. Point - sometimes the small things you do for people out of the goodness of just who you are can have a bigger impact on them then you ever, ever know. I'd say - go with those benevolent impulses!

Around the same time, I ended up being a Counselor at Camp Penn church camp.  Being a person with ADD and an inquistive mind, I have become really good at making plans, starting them, and then faltering as I try to keep the momentum going.  I am a deeply spiritual person as well, and I have made valiant efforts to read through the Bible (which I have managed to do, just not all at once) and to consistently read a daily devotional, as well as attempts at daily journalling, sometimes religiously-based. In previous years, I got to be what was called a Junior Counselor and, in that role, I was going through a phase where I was reading a college-geared devotional from Radio Bible Class, similiar to the Upper Room, called Campus Journal. For the duration of my week as a Junior Counselor, I was reading it regularly every morning.  I made friends with a younger girl who held the unofficial title of "Pre-camper Keeper." The job essentially consisted of wrangling the children of the counselors who were too young for this particular camp.  When I came back the following year in the role of full-fledged counselor, she had risen to my old rank of Junior Counselor. By this point, I was still trying to read the devotional, but I was pretty much failing to do so. One day, I happened to notice her reading her own copy. She told me she'd been reading it since I had introduced her to it the previous year. I hadn't even remembered telling her about it!

It's something I have thought about occasionally over the years. How many ways to do we really influence the world around us, without even knowing it? How many times do we interact with people, make offhand comments we don't even remember? There's a lot of news out there lately about bullying and how teenagers thoughtless comments have effected someone who is particularly sensitive about a topic. I don't believe for a minute that kids are more cruel than they have ever been. I know that high school has always been difficult. It's not a new concept that we don't fully realize our effect on the world around us. So what kind of solution can there be? The only answer I can see is that we strive, every day, to make sure we are sending positive waves of energy out into the world. Kindness. Generosity. Positive Examples. Encouraging Messages. The little thngs that can be the seeds for big things to grow!

As my sister Noelle's favorite quote goes - "The mightiest oak was once a tiny acorn."