joy

I've been thinking about joy lately.  What does it look like? How do you know someone is feeling it?  Is it a feeling or a state of being or both? Can it co-exist with sorrow, stress, and anxiety? Could someone have the joy of the Lord and not experience it every single moment?

Normally I ask all of these questions, and then I write about what I've learned. This time, I'm still thinking.

I was doing small yoga this morning (that means just a little bit), still wondering about joy, and the only sort of conclusion I've come to is the song my mom used to sing when I was a child.  "The joy of the Lord is my strength. The joy of the Lord is my strength."  Just that one line over and over.

Tanner and I get married in three days.  Maybe it's a bride-zilla thing to say, but the majority of our wedding is not going to look how I began to envision it would in December.  So many last minute decisions need to be made, and I care too much.  My former expectations need so badly to be thrown away, and it's hard work.  But we don't give up, we keep moving forward despite the tears.

I don't know all of the things joy looks like, but I think one of them is strength when things are hard.

jellyfish

when I was 18

my mentor told me I didn’t have a backbone yet

but he hoped I would someday.

I thought that meant I was spineless.

I thought that meant I was a jellyfish.

I thought that meant I couldn’t stand up to anyone

for anyone.

but he really meant there was a difference

between easy-going and a doormat.

he meant he hoped I could get over the guilt of “should be”

to experience the power of “am”,

to acknowledge my character without apologizing.

I am 27.

nine years later, 

and I thought I had a backbone, finally,

but the love of my life

sees my heart riddled with the spikes

of “should”—

I should be stronger

I shouldn’t cry so often

I should focus my emotional energy elsewhere—

and he doesn’t understand.

he says,

“you are big love and big care.”

“if you had been raised to believe strong people cry,

you would know you are mighty.”

“just because you’re good at helping others, doesn’t mean you’re great at helping yourself.”

“there are so many shoulds buried in your heart.”

“God gave you your character and he’s not apologizing

so why are you?”

and I don’t know the answer.

and plans change

We’ve been waiting for a while, now. Waiting and planning and hoping. And it’s difficult to believe that it wasn’t all in vain.

Our wedding venue has decided to cancel, six weeks before what is supposed to be the best day of our lives. Everyone has his or her own opinion about how we move forward. Unfortunately, I’m still a sensitive middle child who wants everyone to be happy, wants everyone to think I’m making the right choices, wants everyone to think I’m handling this like a champ.

On my scroll through Instagram this morning, I was reminded of other people’s hardships. One post in particular was from a mom whose three-year-old daughter is terminally ill. She is grieving all of the memories she will never have with her little girl. But me? I still get to make memories, they’ll just look different and it’s really okay if they don’t measure up to everyone’s standard. Perspective is a bittersweet companion, because empathy means I want to weep with those who are weeping from sorrows much heavier than my own. Jesus, help them.

So plans change. Hoping and dreaming and moving forward does not.

apartment 15B

What do you do when media and politicians push their agenda to convince you to see a changed world—a world transformed for the worse—yet aside from arrows on the ground, cancelled appointments, and moderate mass hysteria, your world feels very much as it always has?  It stings, maybe just a little, the first time someone mentions this will most likely affect the most important day of your life. But maybe you’re an optimist and “logically” this can’t go on that long. We’re not experiencing the Bubonic Plague or the Black Death here. But then the unrest continues and more people, more friends, more family lose hope that everything could possibly turn out okay. So what do you do?

The eye twitch that left in February is back.

There is no gym to burn off steam at.

America’s Next Top Model can only distract a person for so long.

So far, a total of three mail-ordered bras will not work for under a wedding dress and cannot be returned.

Who knows if a July wedding in New York will even be possible?

Who knows if going to school in September will even be possible?

There is only a certain amount of sanity a person can maintain while locked inside a studio apartment for over a month.

So Tanner and I take turns reminding each other that we’re staying in motion. That we are getting married in July regardless of whether or not it’s a party. That we have done every step we can do for school this fall.  That every aspect of our lives right now is a firm reminder that God is the only one who actually has a say in where we go and how and that’s what we want.

My sister reminds me that it’s still okay to cry and be a little stressed and not always feel peachy.

My best friend commiserates beautifully.

It’s going to work out the way it’s supposed to.

But that doesn’t mean my eye isn’t going to twitch for the next two months.

And that’s okay.

stage fright

There are parts of being human that I think will always be a part of being me. Throughout my life, I have been told that I'm very good on stage, I'm good with people, I'm understanding, I'm dramatic, I'm expressive.  I never thought the fear was allowed to interact with the qualities other people saw.  So I would try to push past the trembling legs and shallow breathing.  I tried to pretend I didn't break down into hysterical tears before every performance. I was supposed to be thriving.

A couple recent experiences have brought these memories to light, for a whole new angle of examination, which I'll talk about now:

1. For a short while, a friend and I were working together and she expressed a surprising sentiment. She confided that she was frustrated because she felt that her anxiety prevented her from connecting with our coworkers, that I couldn't understand her level of anxiety because she clearly has more of it than I do, and that people are more drawn to me as a person in general.  I was stunned.  Did she not know the amount of turmoil I experience on a daily basis over texts, let alone human interaction?

2. My roommate and I were joking about depressing yoga, and I did an Instagram live video describing the hateful universe while doing basic yoga poses.  Friends and family laughed, sending me comments about how funny it was, but some people missed it.  And I thought, "Hey, I could do this again, right?"  WRONG.  I turned the camera on and immediately began shaking.  Stage fright wrenched my thoughts from my mind and I sat in front of my phone, paralyzed in warrior 1.  In the end, I gave up, turned the camera off, and practiced yoga on my own in the quiet.

 In the end, my question is always this: who knows me better?  Me or the people around me?  And I think the answer I keep coming back to is not an answer to that question.  Rather, I'm encouraged to be thankful that God has enabled me to overcome crippling fear, and that He has allowed the people around me to see someone who is not afraid of the world around her, even if I still feel it.  Still human, but maybe a little less flesh and a little more soul.

buzz lightyear to mission log

Quarantine Day 20: There seems to be no sign of intelligent life anywhere.  The ant colony that wintered beneath our faux wood flooring has officially moved in.  They appreciate any dry oats and rice that we drop and forget to sweep immediately. Sadly, they don't appreciate the bright blue disks of death we set out for them quite as much.  I've been praying that God will give them a new home because I actually really appreciate their hard work, I just don't want to share a house with them. Like I said, no sign of intelligent life anywhere.

The days have formed a strange routine without work or social commitments.  I can't figure out if it's really good for me, or  really bad.  I'm reading three different books right now, compiling a poetry collection, walking upwards of 10 miles a day (complete with a daily stop at the post office), planning my wedding that hangs in the tenuous clutches of the CoronaVirus, shopping for bras online, and attempting to cook balanced meals without going to the grocery store. My mom and every close friend I've ever had have joked with me about my pending hermitage.  Friends, the hermitage is upon us.

It's funny how life changes when you actually don't have any responsibility, other than staying home and staying safe.  So much of my time was wrapped up in getting to work on time, picking up as many hours at work as possible, meeting this person here, and that person there.  Those aren't bad things.  They just might not have been the best things and choices.  It gives me a wild rush of anxiety to think about going back to work, and I get the same rush when I think of not going back at all.  There has been no option but to trust that God will care for us each day, just like he cares for the grasses and the new flowers stretching into bloom.

I've been reading Psalm 73 the past couple days.  I've always resonated with the second and third verses, "But as for me, my  feet had almost stumbled, my steps had nearly slipped. For I was envious of the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked."  And I feel like that sums up so much of the Vivian I used to be.  She was so afraid of missing out, so concerned with belonging, and somehow always ill at ease. The psalm ends with a breakthrough in verse 28, "But for me it is good to be near God; I have made the Lord GOD my refuge, that I may tell of all his works." That is the person I started becoming close to 6 years ago, and it has been good in this time of forced rest to remember it again.  It brings me around to the other psalm that I've been meditating in this time, particularly the first verse.  It's so simple, yet powerful in that simplicity: "I love you, YHWH, my strength."  That's where I want to be.  That encompasses everything about learning where I belong.

normalcy in a realm of relativity

8:30 AM: I'm on the phone with my parents, doing my best not to audibly hyperventilate in a Starbucks bathroom.  Change, unknowns, current and future stressors feel like a typhoon crashing against the bamboo shelter of my soul.

Moments, minutes, hours later, my premeditated typhoon is nothing more than a ripple in otherwise calm waters.  You'd think that I would learn.  You would think that the next ripple wouldn't fill me with dread at its approach, but it does.  Because what if this is the one that packs enough punch to knock me over?

Fast-forward exactly one week.  I'm blogging these thoughts from a quarantined apartment.  Fragility is the front page of every newspaper, the headlining comment of every conversation.  It is the topic of my internal monologue on the potential rebirth of a planet after a cataclysmic event while I walk around the block for fresh air, and for the first time in a long time, I see no one - no cars, no children on the playground across the train tracks, no one.  Just me and the late flakes of spring break snow.

And yet, in the fragility, there is an iron-wrought spine holding my shoulders straight and head high. In a day, free from the script of work and imagined social responsibility, there is still quiet prayer, loud prayer, laughing prayer, singing, questioning, wondering...moments, minutes, hours alone with the Creator God of the universe.  That is security, a sense of normalcy, in a world that would love to break her neck in an attempt to twist upside-down in slow motion.

7:30 PM: I'm on the floor of my kitchen, doing my best to remember today has been a day.  Not a week.  Everything on the quarantine checklist doesn't need to be marked off yet.  Today has been a day.  Tomorrow will hopefully be another one.  And maybe, after a while, this, like so many things, will be something we all move forward from.