journal

This is something I’ve been pretty embarrassed to admit: for the last year, I’ve been dealing with low-level but fairly continuous anxiety. Too many days to count, I’ve worried, I’ve twitched, I’ve been hyperactive but exhausted, I’ve snapped at people close to me, I’ve lain awake at night. I wouldn’t say these are the life-ruining symptoms of a disorder, but the real and uncontrollable responses of my body and brain to the stress of applying for Ph.Ds, getting married, and moving across the country. I try to pray, but so often I’m just worrying at the sky.

For the last year, everything in me has been pulling toward the South, but I never imagined myself in Charleston. I didn’t think we’d be entirely friendless or nearly seasonless or clueless in a hypercompetitive real estate market. And so the worrying that I thought might stop post-move keeps dogging me, mocking me even. Eight days into our Charleston life, I feel this desperation to get everything perfectly in order. I spend hours researching how we can be happy here. I am short with my husband. Mental lists of things to do scroll on a loop in my head. I begin to think that I am losing it. I begin to think that I am a tiresome and gutless person, unable to handle life transitions and unacceptably poor in faith.

Sometimes it is a relief when the lies finally start screaming; you’re able to shine a light on them and in the process, you illuminate the half-truths you’d been accepting all along.

Here is a whole truth: even when I don’t believe much else, I believe that we were called here—to the South, and to the careers we’re making. There was a time when I thought being called was its own kind of contract, that it meant things had to go well for you in some sense or another. I don’t believe that anymore. I know now that God’s love takes on more and deeper forms than just handing us our preferred circumstances or emotional states or even “lessons” we can file neatly in drawers. Transformation is more than that and life would be a little boring if it were entirely comprehensible. “Calling” isn’t a comforting word to me anymore, but I do still think it exists. I believe that if I sit, friendless and clueless, on the seasonless porch of this characterless apartment every day forever, it’s because this is where I’m meant to learn to praise the Lord.

Because when I set down the computer and the classifieds for just a minute, when I get my controlling self to simmer down, I can feel the other parts of me unknotting already, leaning with a sigh into this less-familiar bit of the place I love. My body stretches into the steamy nights and my voice springs back into an easy smile when strangers smile and chat. It is still vegetable season and my family can visit on the weekends and yes, there are all the South’s problems, too, problems that feel like mine. And a voice calls again: breathe. 

I crack an egg into a batch of zucchini bread.
I settle into the good company of my husband.
I let the list of fears hang where I said them this morning.
To breathe is prayer enough.

There is no good balance between trying not to “center yourself” in issues that are not about you, and acknowledging that everyone has to deal with racism and cultural conflict on an intensely personal level. This is part of my story.

I grew up reading books on leadership, beginning at the age of nine to take on every “office” I could, believing my role in life was to make things happen and to change the world. My college experience deepened this view of myself as I took on more and more stuff: a classic big fish in a small pond.

When I left Tennessee for a volunteer position in upstate New York, I thought it was the next step in changing the world, the next place to go be really good at things. And while I certainly wasn’t bad at things, I constantly worried that I wasn’t really earning my keep. I never fixed the East Side of Syracuse or started some kind of revival at SU, and it seemed at the time like I had done nothing. Every week someone at church would tell me how they were energized and challenged by my presence there, and every week I would go home and ask God why he wasn’t “using” me.

I decided to go to seminary partly because it was time to have A Career. I would become a beloved, influential writer and teacher; people would look to me for leadership and advice. Then I actually started the work of grad school, and nearly every day
felt newly confusing, often discouraging. When I failed to get in to a Ph.D. program, I had to finally wonder whether any of this had been worth it.

I can list for you fifty ways that I have grown in these years, but I still struggle to accept that the measure of success, and even of my worth as a person, is not only in quantifiable achievements or the world, changed. I am more likely to believe that I must have taken some wrong turn, or not tried hard enough, because it is the destiny of people like me to Do Great Things but I—I have only twiddled around earning a master’s degree.

It is no exaggeration to say that all of this time I have felt oppressed and often angry about the lack of clarity and purpose I have felt in my life. And much of this time, I have heard God saying to just be here, to let myself feel small and bewildered. It is enough to keep trying to pray, to try to love, to not know.

It is enough to be humble.

Still I fought for the need to achieve things. Today, in fact, I fight for it; I think I will find significance in becoming An Author, I pin my self-respect to my Hustle, and I write and write but nothing is ever good enough because it is not The Best.

It has only begun to dawn on me that true humility—contentment in doing my little part—is not only enough for a time. It is the foundation of Doing Great Things.

Excruciating honesty is one of the truest signs of humility and so I will tell you: I have been burdened by how to write about Black Lives Matter. Or so I have told myself. Deeper down, I have believed that I could Steward my Privilege and Make a Contribution by writing the perfect piece, the essay that would educate without condescending, take a stand without offending, succinctly communicate the nuances of the cultural conflict at hand and also inspire both sides to come together under the universal hope we share for safer communities and a more loving world. This would be the essay that would cut through the noise.

I’ve tried to write this essay many, many times in my mind and a couple of times on paper. I’ve tried to balance everything I’ve learned about oppression, privilege, and being an ally with sympathy for those who don’t have a graduate education in the humanities: trying to explain each side of myself to the other. And each time, the essay ends up with some conclusion along these lines: I guess the best I, or anyone, can do is to keep listening, being honest, asking for forgiveness, speaking up with imperfect words, and praying we’ll all have the courage to set aside defensiveness and seek one another’s good.

Then I start over on the essay, because I so much want to come to a different conclusion. I don’t want these things to be all I can do. I want to Fix Racism and Classism, I want to go viral, I want to solve a problem or at least lead a nonprofit that makes me feel like I’m solving a problem. I am the target audience for all those quotes you see: What will you tell your grandchildren you did about racism??!! I don’t really want to tell them I stayed in tough conversations and wrote some letters to my police commissioner and cultivated peace in my own heart.

It occurs to me that this need to Tackle Problems and Accomplish Change seems like a self-evident, universal human, but only because it is such a white lady approach to the world. In other cultures, people can be sad without compiling action items. They can believe in change before statistical evidence for it exists. Groups can work together to do things without everyone demanding credit for the group’s accomplishment.

The world may someday need my overachieving habits and even my Extraordinary Writing Ability, but today is not that day. Today is the day I listen and learn and try to support the people who are fighting for their own lives. Today I add one medium-sized voice to the insistent chorus: Black Lives Matter. The best I can do is to follow so others can lead; to be patient so others have space to be angry; to ask my own family and friends to have courage, to understand. But I cannot ask them to set aside their defenses unless I have taken my own ego out of the equation.

Maybe once I’ve done that, it won’t matter whether one side thinks I’m a dupe for joining the liberals or the other side polices my language. I’ll be able to learn and ask forgiveness even from those who seem unfairly accusatory. My self-worth won’t depend on whether I fix anything. And I won’t mind writing my little, non-viral pieces, because this is how I know to be faithful, this is how I know I become less fearful, because honesty, over and over, is where we will eventually recognize ourselves and one another as agents of a difficult, unthrilling, humble peace.

In a Pinterest wedding, it is always sunny or sunset. Pinterest weddings exist in a land of perfect weather, of greenery without precipitation.

Pinterest wedding preparation consists entirely of papercrafting, cake tastings, and bridal salons, all of which are accompanied by champagne. Engagement is, in fact, just a year of champagne. Being engaged, apparently, empowers you to do things and make decisions while buzzed, just as awesomely as you thought you could do things while buzzed when you were a single, mortal person.

On Pinterest, life stops when you become A Bride. You not only have time to go the aforementioned cake tastings but also to shop for your cake tasting dress, and the other 20 Outfits Every Bride Needs. On Pinterest, moreover, you do not have any emails, spreadsheets, or weird relatives’ preferences to deal with when choosing said cake. Cake is fun. Cake is pretty. Cake for 200 is easily managed.

Pinterest weddings generally treat grooms the way society treats women every other day of their lives: they are considered vaguely necessary if not terribly interesting, assigned to look adoringly at the bride unceasingly throughout the day. Under no circumstances are grooms included in Pinterest’s decision-making process without careful prior consideration on the part of the women in charge.

Pinterest wedding guests examine the event’s components minutely. They are wedding conoisseurs, and not in the sense that they love drinking and dancing; their attention is primarily occupied by comparing the centerpieces, wedding logos, signature cocktails, and useless doo-dad favors of every wedding they attend. “Your guests will appreciate these details,” Pinterest proclaims in all seriousness.

Pinterest weddings consist mostly of glitter, carefully avoiding most any whiff of marriage. And Pinterest engagements consist entirely of white-smiled women laughing in a circle around a blonde bride somewhere floral.

You do not learn from Pinterest that life goes on and on while you are engaged, that while you try to wrestle your role of Bride into submitting to your wishes, your boss keeps giving you deadlines and your friends keep needing you and your relationship with The Groom keeps growing and changing. You don’t expect to develop, overnight, skills like overseeing a budget of several thousand dollars, working with contractors, project management, or people appeasement, but you do it; you accept this inauguration into the world of women’s work, unpaid and unrespected, the way you accept the workout plans and etiquette guides tailored to your Situation, which would be laughable if aimed at grooms.

You learn from Pinterest that your engaged life will be happy, and it will be, but the airy photos don’t show just how full and even crowded life becomes. You quickly discover that no color-scheme paint swatches can cover over the family history and identity crises that demand you finally deal with them; no cute graphic can depict the timeline of fights and reconciliations, money talks and politics talks, silent drives and quiet hikes that really make up your life with your beloved. It is all deeper and more boring and brighter and darker and stranger to be engaged than people bother to say to you. And to be a bride—at least in the South—is all of these things and more, because it binds up so many threads of your womanhood for display and therefore scrutiny. It is, by very odd turns and at very odd times, to be searingly lonely and to be overwhelmed by sisterhood; to be feminist, and unfeminist, and guilty about betraying tradition, and guilty about betraying feminism; to be the gracious and caring woman-hostess-daughter-friend-fiancée you always wanted to be, and to be the weary bitchy mess of a person you thought you left behind with your teenage years.

All this is too much for Pinterest. You can throw all the neatly-lettered slogans of empowerment you want at it, but they won’t crack it. And you won’t have time to resent it, either, only to carry on with whatever you figure is best for you and your family and the new family you’re creating. That is what a good woman does, in the end, traditional or feminist or gracious or not. And by the time you make it to the end of the aisle, ready or not, you’ll be a Bride, and with any luck or work or help, all of this will have helped you recognize that you were Beautiful all along.

If not, at least there will finally be champagne.

A few weeks from now, it will be four years since I graduated from college. It is one of those personal milestones you might try to tell people about, and they will probably kind of get why it’s important, but only you can really know all that it means to you. Broadly, it means that a little college in a little Tennessee town will no longer hold the majority of my days as an “adult.” Specifically, it means that I’ve fallen in love, changed my mind, lost my way, had my heart broken, re-found grace, and reset my course a thousand and one times since that town sent me on my way.

I’ve grown as much in those four years as I did in my four years of college, but it’s all a little more lonely and a little less exhilarating. Sometimes it seems people don’t want to tell college students this, as if holding out hope that someone will have a better time of it than most of us have. But you have to recognize, before you leave, that college is a helpful but highly artificial environment. College lends a certain rhythm to life, an immediacy to big ideas, an urgency and intimacy to friendship, that just don’t easily materialize in the average adult’s life. Could the things we loved about college teach us about building a happier society? Probably, but it hasn’t happened yet.

I digress.

It was exhilarating, in its own way, to step off a plane in Syracuse, searching for a stranger I knew only by voice to drive me to my new home. It was exhilarating to walk out of a catering shift at Boston’s Museum of Science at 2 A.M. and find myself bowled over by the beauty of a city I’d dreamed for years of living in. But these things are also lonely and exhausting, and in between are many days trying to demand purpose from life, feeling small.

It was worthwhile to learn new things, meet new people, and change my mind, but it was also confusing, frightening, difficult to navigate, sometimes using up all my reserves of generosity and humility.

It made me stronger to work a few 50 and 60 hour weeks there in grad school, to bite my nails wondering if the rent would get paid, made me more responsible to try to plan those things around a long-distance relationship. Those things also felt completely overwhelming and, through the irrational lens of exhaustion, hellish at times.

I wish I’d gotten a tattoo when I left college.

I wish that every day I’d opened my eyes and somehow been greeted by these words: trust the process.

You can’t really see yourself growing. Often other people can, but to you, it just feels like struggle. Far, far too often in the past four years, I have been lost in anger and disappointment because I couldn’t understand the purpose of things. I have needed my stories about How God Was Using Me to remain intact so that I could feel in control. I have wanted to find A Lesson in something that, at the time, seemed to represent only cruelty, or futility, or depressing weather. I have expected, time and time again, that doing my best to follow God would result directly in my own happiness.

When you start a new workout routine, everything in you screams that you should quit because you are so weak. You have to believe that these actions, which seem to do nothing but demonstrate your weakness, are actually making you stronger. When you start a new job, and the routine of it makes you feel utterly unimportant to the world, you have to remember those times you prayed for humility.

At these times, I’ve found myself returning to the stories of the wilderness. I don’t know if that sounds melodramatic, but the wilderness itself isn’t that exciting. It’s where people learn, one day at a time, to trust in God’s provision. It’s where people get over themselves. It’s where people learn to pray. In between all of these exciting and heroic stories are these episodes in the desert, where the purpose of things is uncertain, the way forward is unclear, and the landscape is monotonous. Here, the work of God is slow and inscrutable. Here, there is danger without much excitement, and boredom without much to show for it. But here, God is faithful, and it slowly dawns on us that God’s work is bigger than this moment and bigger than us.

trust the process.

I don’t have to understand every moment of the last four years to see that I have emerged with a much clearer vision of my vocations, a better understanding of the world, a re-sorted list of priorities, and a relationship with God that’s been refined. All are things that could fill up an essay of their own, and none I could have found any way towards other than the twisting paths I’ve traced.

God willing, I will soon be moving into a more stable phase of life—not wondering what I want, but trying to make it happen. Others I know made it to that phase sooner, and some have no desire at all to stop wandering yet. But I wish we could all gather to toast each other for this graduation-versary and tell our best stories we couldn’t have predicted on the day we performed that weird, robed pageant. All those stories would be parts of who we are now, and I think most of us are finding we’re really happy to know these selves. Maybe we’re even starting to really make friends with the process.