Spring

Sitting here in my favorite coffee shop, I feel it.

It. That familiar electricity that comes with nice weather and new beginnings. That joy that creeps up in the small moments; when your heart begins to unfold and face the sun. I just want to sit here, cradle my cup of coffee and let the possibility and excitement sink in.

It feels like I've been in a long winter. I've been in a complete haze where the smallest task felt like the biggest obstacle. Not that things haven't gone well for me the past year, they've been great and there have been many more great moments than bad ones. But this haze was like a blanket over that, making the great moments a little tainted with an unexplainable weight.

But now, that blanket is slipping off and I feel lighter than I have in a long time. I have a new opportunity coming my way and a lot of changes on the horizon. I can't wait!

Spring, I have been waiting for you. And it looks like you've been waiting for me too.

Honest & Genuine.

I wrote the below in my journal the other night. Sometimes I fall into a different space when I write, a space where my heart flows to my pen before my brain really has a chance to think about it. It was one of those entries that I went back to read, and was surprised by the words that had come from me. As if I was reading someone else's words and thinking "yes! That's exactly how I feel!...wait a second, that's me"...funny how that works. So here it is:

"I am beyond restless. I want to scream to the world what is true. I want to demand truth from others. I want love and beauty to come from honesty. I want results. I want my honesty to be their honesty. We come to realize that we mean the same thing.

Unfortunately, that's extremely hard to come by."

I try to be honest with my feelings and genuine in my interactions with people. And I feel like you can never go wrong when you do that, because you're going with your grain instead of against it. Behind all of the weather talk and quick "how are you's", there are people. Actual human beings that deserve to be known and paid attention to. And they probably don't even realize that they want or need that until someone makes that effort to ask "how is your day going?" vs. "how are you?". I've had some of the best and most surprising conversations with the sales associates/baristas/receptionists/everyday people just by making that simple switch.

In this tech-saturated world (guilty: I currently am on my Mac with my iPhone next to me), it's even more important that we fight to know people. Fight to break that barrier and tap in to actually connect. I also truly believe, and have experienced, that honesty and genuineness can beget honesty and genuineness.

So here's to honesty, friends. May you be honest with yourselves and genuine in your interactions with others.

:)

Awakening.

I'm realizing some things.

Life is big.
We put it into a tiny, tiny box.
We live in that box, thinking that it's all we have...when there's this small ache telling us that there's more.
We realize that the only limits to our lives are the ones that we put there.
Sometimes the life that comes with truly living exists outside of those limits.

This week, I'm on a stay-cation. Which in my opinion can be so much more valuable and refreshing than a typical vacation, because instead of not going to work because you're going somewhere else, you're not going to work and staying where you normally are. Then it really feels like you're on a vacation because there's absolutely nothing new you need to worry about. I'm only on day two, and I'm happier than I've been in a long time. I'm not necessarily saying that it's because I'm not working...that's a huge part. But it's also giving me time to do other things, like join a gym, and sit in coffee shops and blog. This week my goal is to figure out who and where I want to be right now, without anyone else's input. When you discover that, you thrive...and then everything else falls into place.

Could be easier said than done, but you never know until you try.

Day 24: Color Scheme

Well friends, I did it...I set down my iPhone and picked up my beloved camera again. Back in 2012 I started my second photography challenge, and I've decided that it's about time that I finish it.

To new beginnings and renewed interests.

Why can it be so hard to be alone?

Tonight I came home and found myself without plans. When faced with a night like this, I usually have one of two experiences. I either revel in it and soak up the time to myself, or I freak out a little bit. Unfortunately, it tends to be the latter experience recently. But why?

Usually I am pro-solitude. I seek it often in coffee shops and books and runs. But this kind of solitude, this one that I don't voluntarily choose...it gets to me. It puts me on the verge of paranoia or depression. Or both. I think this quote describes it perfectly, which I've actually referenced in a prior post as well:

“There are days when solitude is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.”

-Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

I come home from work tired, drained, and deeply restless. I find myself in the house alone; everyone else has other plans. I begin to think about what I can do...it's one of those nights where nothing sounds appealing. I begin to text a few people halfheartedly, but I've done this dance before. I can feel the desperation creep up...where is this coming from? It feels like a twisting of my stomach as the thoughts start to come up and morph into the worst kind of lies. The realistic-sounding ones. The ones that tell me I'm lacking in something. The ones that tell me my life is lackluster, and that I'll always find myself in these lonely places of restlessness. Nevermind that I have plans with amazing friends 80% of the time, it's the 20% that can somehow inflate and overshadow everything else. And really, am I making the most of that time with friends? What if it was trimmed down to 100% investment into half the amount of people? I'd rather be the best friend I can be to a smaller number of people.

Thoughts turn to social media. Every minute I press to open the apps...Facebook, Instagram, Tinder...looking for some sort of affirmation. Mindlessly swipe, swipe, swipe, match? How many likes do I have on my picture? Should I post a status? All of it working towards a false sense of intimacy and validation. Eyes search the screen as if it can satisfy, but it only leaves me mostly empty.

I think what it comes down to is that I've been struggling lately with not having a person. I've had this person before, where you're so close that you think the same thoughts and being together is as easy as breathing. Laughter is your language and going to the grocery store can be the time of your life. It's hard to find, and sometimes complicated to keep. On nights like this, all I can do is think about how I don't have that, and how much easier a night like this would be if I did.

This will pass, as all things do, but if there is anything that I have learned in my many years of self-analysis, it is that it's valuable to sit with this for a little bit. Face it, understand it, and then when you're ready, move past it. Because it might not be the last time it comes around, and maybe next time it will be a little bit easier.

I never really know who I'm writing to on this blog. I'm not the "promoter" type, because this is vulnerable for me. I want people to stumble upon it because they want to, instead of putting myself out there to be open to criticism or worse...silence. I've included it on my public Instagram because maybe someone will find something from it. Is it too personal to invite strangers to? Maybe some earlier posts. But really, sometimes those posts are the ones who speak to people the most. Then again, I could be writing to myself on here. That's ok too.

Whether this post is read by a hundred people or just one, thank you for reading. I appreciate you.

"Twenty-Five" by Shauna Niequist

"Here are a few thoughts on being twenty-five-ish, some that I knew, because smart older people gave me good advice, and some that I really wish I had known, that those smart older people probably did tell me, and that I lost track of along the way.
I know that age is, of course, one of the most arbitrary ways of measuring a person. I have friends in their sixties who continually teach me about discovery and possibility, and friends in their young twenties who are as crotchety and set in their ways as Archie Bunker. Age, like numbers on a scale and letters on a report card, tells us very little of who we are. You decide every year exactly how young and how old you want to be.

When you’re twenty-five-ish, you’re old enough to know what kind of music you love, regardless of what your last boyfriend or roommate always used to play. You know how to walk in heels, how to tie a necktie, how to give a good toast at a wedding, and how to make something for dinner. You don’t have to think much about skin care, home ownership, or your retirement plan.

Your life can look a lot of different ways when you’re twenty-five: single, dating, engaged, married. You are working in dream jobs, pay-the-bills jobs, and downright horrible jobs. You are young enough to believe that anything is possible, and you are old enough to make that belief a reality.

Now is the time to figure out what kind of work you love to do. What are you good at? What makes you feel alive? What do you dream about? You can go back to school now, switch directions entirely. You can work for almost nothing, or live in another country, or volunteer long hours for something that moves you. There will be a time when finances and schedules make this a little trickier, so do it now. Try it, apply for it, get up and do it.

When I was twenty-five, I was in my third job in as many years—all in the same area at a church, but the responsibilities were different each time. I was frustrated at the end of the third year, because I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do next. I didn’t feel like I’d found my place yet. I met with my boss, who was in his fifties. I told him how anxious I was about finding the one perfect job for me, and quick. He asked me how old I was, and when I told him I was twenty-five, he told me that I couldn’t complain to him about finding the right job until I was thirty-two. In his opinion, it takes about ten years after college to find the right fit, and anyone who finds it earlier than that is just plain lucky.

So use every bit of your ten years: try things, take classes, start over. One of my oldest friends, Jenny, got a degree in child psychology from Harvard, and has worked for years at a bunch of fancy companies as a client account manager. A few years ago, she finally realized that what she’s always loved is helping to heal people through massage. Now after work and on weekends, she’s the world’s best-educated massage therapist, building up her clientele with every passing month, and happier than she’s ever been.

My dear friend Rachel has been a makeup artist since she was eighteen, and after ten years, she decided that what she really wants to be is a therapist. So she’s doing it now, getting her bachelor’s degree, making plans for her master’s, doing makeup all the while to pay for school. That’s what this time is for, to figure those things out.

Now is also the time to get serious about relationships. And “serious” might mean walking away from the ones that don’t give you everything you need. Some of the most life-shaping decisions you make in this season will be about walking away from good-enough, in search of can’t-live-without. One of the only truly devastating mistakes you can make in this season is staying with the wrong person even though you know he or she is the wrong person. It’s not fair to that person, and it’s not fair to you.

My friend Chrissie and her boyfriend were together for ten years, since college. He’s a great guy, but throughout their relationship, several people had told Chrissie that they observed a fundamental mismatch. They didn’t fit together like puzzle pieces. They didn’t fit together at all. But she stayed, out of love and hope and commitment, and then he proposed. And they just couldn’t get the wedding planned. They couldn’t agree on where or when or how many people, so they stopped planning for a while. In the meantime, she went to South Africa with a group from our church to work with AIDS orphans, and while she was there, she felt alive and full of purpose for the first time in years. When she returned, her fiancé wasn’t all that interested in hearing about it.

All the things her friends had been saying for years clicked into place, and a few weeks later, she gave back the ring. She’s literally like a new person these days, full of bright energy, hope, clarity. And those things are worth a whole lot more than a diamond from the wrong man, even if he’s a really good man, like this one was.

Twenty-five is also a great time to start counseling, if you haven’t already, and it might be a good round two of counseling if it’s been awhile. You might have just enough space from your parents to start digging around your childhood a little bit. Unravel the knots that keep you from living a healthy whole life, and do it now, before any more time passes.

Twenty-five is the perfect time to get involved in a church that you love, no matter how different it is from the one you were a part of growing up. Be patient and prayerful, and decide that you’re going to be a person who grows, who seeks your own faith, who lives with intention. Set your alarm on Sunday mornings, no matter how late you were out on Saturday night. It will be dreadful at first, and then after a few weeks, you’ll find that you like it, that the pattern of it fills up something inside you.

Try different kinds of communities, different sizes and denominations and traditions. My friend Monica grew up in a community church in Northern California, and now she’s an elder at a Lutheran church in Reno because she appreciates the history and structure of this new context. Our friends Kelly and Amy grew up in nondenominational churches, and now have spent a number of years as passionate volunteers at the Presbyterian church in their neighborhood.

I know that most people need a season of space, a time to take a step back and evaluate the spiritual context of their youth. I didn’t go to church for a long season in college, and that space and freedom was so important for me. It gave me the perspective I needed to find my own faith. But it’s very easy for a season of space to turn into several years without any kind of spiritual groundedness. It’s easy to wake up several years from now and find yourself unable to locate that precious, faith-filled part of your heart and history, because it slowly disintegrated over months and years. Don’t do that. Do whatever you have to do to connect with God in a way that feels authentic and truthful to you. Do it now, so that you don’t regret the person you become, little by little, over time, without it.

This is the thing: when you start to hit twenty-eight or thirty, everything starts to divide, and you can see very clearly two kinds of people: on one side, people who have used their twenties to learn and grow, to find God and themselves and their deep dreams, people who know what works and what doesn’t, who have pushed through to become real live adults.

And then there’s the other kind, who are hanging on to college, or high school even, with all their might. They’ve stayed in jobs they hate because they’re too scared to get another one. They’ve stayed with men or women who are good but not great because they don’t want to be lonely. They mean to find a church, they mean to develop honest, intimate friendships, they mean to stop drinking like life is one big frat party. But they don’t do those things, so they live in kind of an extended adolescence, no closer to adulthood than they were when they graduated college.

Don’t be like that. Don’t get stuck. Move, travel, take a class, take a risk. Walk away, try something new. There is a season for wildness and a season for settledness, and this is neither. This season is about becoming. Don’t lose yourself at happy hour, but don’t lose yourself on the corporate ladder either.

Stop every once in a while and go out to coffee or climb in bed with your journal. Ask yourself some good questions like, Am I proud of the life I’m living? What have I tried this month? What have I learned about God this year? What parts of my childhood faith am I leaving behind, and what parts am I choosing to keep with me for this leg of the journey? Do the people I’m spending time with give me life, or make me feel small? Is there any brokenness in my life that’s keeping me from moving forward?

These years will pass much more quickly than you think they will. You will go to lots of weddings, and my advice, of course, is to dance your pants off at every single one. I hope you go to very few funerals. You’ll watch TV and run on the treadmill and go on dates, some of them great and some of them terrible. Time will pass, and all of a sudden, things will begin to feel a little more serious. You won’t be old, of course. But you will want to have some things figured out, and the most important things only get figured out if you dive into them now.

For a while in my early twenties I felt like I woke up a different person every day, and was constantly confused about which one, if any, was the real me. I feel more and more like myself with each passing year, for better and for worse, and you’ll find that, too. Every year, you will trade a little of your perfect skin and your ability to look great without exercising for wisdom and peace and groundedness, and every year the trade will be worth it. I promise.

Now is your time. Become, believe, try. Walk closely with people you love, and with other people who believe that God is very good and life is a grand adventure. Don’t spend time with people who make you feel like less than you are. Don’t get stuck in the past, and don’t try to fast-forward yourself into a future you haven’t yet earned. Give today all the love and intensity and courage you can, and keep traveling honestly along life’s path."

Taken from Bittersweet by Shauna Niequist. Copyright © 2010.

Sufficiency.

I've been reading this amazing book by Brene' Brown, called The Gifts of Imperfection. And there was one passage that really struck me in which she quotes Lynne Twist's The Soul of Money:

"For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is 'I didn't get enough sleep.' The next one is 'I don't have enough time.' Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it...We're not thin enough, we're not smart enough, we're not pretty enough or fit enough or educated or successful enough, or rich enough - ever. Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we're already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something."

Scarcity.

She then goes on to say that addressing scarcity doesn't mean searching for abundance, but rather choosing a mind-set of sufficiency:

"We each have the choice in any setting to step back and let go of the mind-set of scarcity. Once we let go of scarcity, we discover the surprising truth of sufficiency. By sufficiency, I don't mean a quantity of anything. Sufficiency isn't two steps up from poverty or one step short of abundance. It isn't a measure of barely enough or more than enough. Sufficiency isn't an amount at all. It is an experience, a context we generate, a declaration, a knowing that there is enough and that we are enough."

I think this hit me so hard because I've been in this mind-set of scarcity for a long time. It feels like every night when I look to the clock and see that it's late, I think "I'm not going to get enough sleep tonight. I'm going to be tired tomorrow." Before I even go to bed, I'm already lacking. There is always something lacking, in my life or in myself. But even since reading this passage yesterday, I've been able to start shifting my thinking. I'm tired of living in that space where my life doesn't seem to fit around me, and I can't grasp why. I'm tired of being unfulfilled and not knowing how to fix it. But what if it doesn't need to be fixed? It's not really what I have or don't have right now, it's what I'm choosing to see as "enough". I'm going to set goals, small goals for myself, and seek hope. Today, and tomorrow, and hopefully each day to come, I will choose to see my life as enough.