Dozing on the sand.
There’s nothing to do but lay.
Out under the sun.
A fun trip with friends.
Always starts with excitement.
And ends with goodbye.
Living our best life.
Means having an appetite.
And being grateful.
While memories fade.
We’ll never forget the times.
We felt belonging.
We are all open.
To things we don’t understand.
Until they arrive.
Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood.
I’m afraid of people and what they think – and so I have become who I currently am.
Every waking moment is a careful calculation. What will I do? How will I do it? What will I say? How will he or she take it? Is this okay to do? What if they don’t like it? When is the right time? Now? Later? Am I hogging too much attention? Am I being too indecisive? Am I being too nice? What will they think of me if I choose to do this? My mind is a buzzing hive of activity. Very little is left to chance and/or improvisation. I am constantly scoping out my surroundings and making adjustments to myself here and there, editing out the parts of me that I think won’t be accepted. Liked.
I wish I understood better the concept of the like. Like why we like being liked so much. Why do I like being liked so much. What is it with me and my obsession with checking my phone every hour or so after posting something up on Facebook or Instagram? Why does it upset me so much to not get a reply to a message on Line or Messenger when I know that person is online and has “read” my reply? Why do I spend so much time slaving away at responses, trying so hard to get it just right?
Why do I pretend to not care so much about the people I care about most?
This is me thinking out loud on a platform that I know is going to be read by at least one other person, and so even now I am wondering if what I am writing will change the way whoever is reading thinks of me forever …
But I think that the whole point of me writing here is for me to better understand. To come to grips with my life and the things that trouble me most about it. Like my fear of not being liked. My fear of being seen as somebody who I’m not, or at least don’t believe myself to be. My fear of being misunderstood. Misread. Mistaken.
There are pieces to this puzzle that come together during the times when I feel most insecure. They are the things I turn to in my frustration, my inability to be who it is that I would like myself to be. They are the things that give me pleasure with little risk of effort. They are the cheap things in life – drugs, sex, and alcohol. Things that, for me, point towards something deeper, because without them, we can feel lost. They are representative of our addictions. Those things we have used to fill in the gaps. Places in our lives that need filling. But it is only in removing what we already have in those spaces that I feel like we can come to find what truly belongs there.
Which is why I’ve decided to give up a few things for the next year, starting today.
From left to right – Caitlin, Andrey, Philip, Audrey, Tiffany, Chandler, Me, Theresa, and Berline
Faith is a place of mystery, where we find the courage to believe in what we cannot see and the strength to let go of our fear of uncertainty.
I’ll admit it:
I’m a little scared of tomorrow.
Because honestly, I have no idea what is going to happen.
This has to be, at least for me, the most draining part of the Peace Corps experience. The not knowing. The who, the what, the where, the when, the how … the anything really.
Like this morning when I woke up to shouting from outside my window to find my neighbor’s kid waiting outside for me to let him in so he could come eat with me.
The daily struggle with water and never knowing if the tap will actually work or not.
Opening my door and having cats and kids come inside at random hours of the day to play, eat, and/or hang out in front of the fan.
Big bugs popping out of nowhere.
Roaches, rats, spiders, mosquitoes, and ants.
School days that turn into something completely else.
Like tomorrow:
We have a festival of sorts going on, I think.
Mostly because I spent most of today helping set up for it.
Also though, because there are a bunch of stalls being set up just outside my house, complete with lights and music.
I’ve been told that I am expected to put on a dance performance, sing karaoke, and play on the teacher soccer team.
Totally last minute if you ask me.
But then again, how was I supposed to know?
I find myself feeling the pressure of the unknown.
And my natural tendency is to get frustrated. Feel nervous. Angry. Annoyed. Shut down. But for some reason, I am finding myself drifting towards a different way …
I’m beginning to realize that I am not quite the person that I used to be.
Yes, I am still afraid. And I feel it with every ounce of my being. That weird prickly feeling in the pit of my stomach telling me to run and kick and scream. But there is another feeling there as well and it’s an even weirder one:
It’s telling me to stay and make a fool of myself.
To not be afraid of being afraid, because there is nothing I can do to help it.
All the best parts of life are the ones that start with a challenge and end with a victory.
So make this time yours. Go in with all you got. Fight. Maybe win.
But even if you lose, there is nothing you can do to make the uncertainty of this moment go away. Win or lose the outcome is going to be the outcome. It takes faith to believe that no matter what, you will come out for the better in the end. Always.
If all things were certain, then what need would we have for faith in anything?
Odd as it sounds, I’m finding myself looking forward to the challenge of being uncomfortable and awkward … Two places where I know I’ll be in the coming hours.
In her book, The Soul of Money, author Lynne Twist writes:
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 spend most of the hours and the days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining, or worrying about what we don’t have enough of … Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we’re already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something. And by the time we go to bed at night, our minds race with a litany of what we didn’t get, or didn’t get done, that day. We go to sleep burdened by those thoughts and wake up to the reverie of lack … What begins as a simple expression of the hurried life, or even the challenged life, grows into the great justification for an unfulfilled life.
I came across this passage while reading Brene Brown’s The Gifts of Imperfection and it really sung to me.
A big piece of my pride comes from my ability to stay busy – to keep my head down and work. I’m a very focused individual. When I put my mind to something, I know I can make it happen. This, I have found, can be both a blessing as well as a curse. The obligation to act weighs heavily upon me. And yet, I am always afraid of coming up short in the end. As a result, I am constantly training and practicing, training and practicing, training and practicing … for those of you that are familiar with the feeling, you might also know that you can get so caught up in the process that you forget about why you are training and practicing in the first place and, as a result, miss the show itself!
Part of my goal in the coming year is to make every day into a performance – to live in the here and now and be grateful for everything in it.
Most of all, though, I want to always feel like I am enough. That I do not need to necessarily do more or be more to feel successful or accomplished. And that what people think of me is not an accurate measure of self-worth. Only I can give my life true meaning and purpose.
So what do I think of myself right now, here in this moment? Do I care more about how I am being perceived than I care about being happy and at peace?
These are just a couple of the questions that I’d like to think about in the coming months as I continue my journey in great fullness.
A part of me wants to believe that I’m above it all – a hopeful part. That somehow I don’t need the things my body tells me I do.
Mostly because I think that they hold me back.
Prevent me from becoming the person I envision myself to be.
There is a part of me that wants to believe for the sake of my own sanity – a confused part. That somehow I am stronger than my weakness.
For I have been made to believe that my body is my weakness.
That its momentary yearnings are the fickle cries of an untrained soul.
And so I find myself believing in a part of me that wants to keep fighting – a tired part. Trusting that individual effort will win out in the end.
It’s funny, I think, to think that I am more than what I see in the mirror.
Especially when I stare deep into the eyes of that other person staring back.
Tell him that he can get up and keep moving. Despite the constant doubt I have in his ability to do that which is necessary to be more than he already is.
Because for some reason, I don’t think that he’s enough.
