Accepted

I've been thinking a lot about this word today, with the ice keeping me home from work. It's interesting, how your mindset can change when you move from "applying" to "accepted." For me, the fear kicks in. I start to doubt. It's as if, during the application process, I've been daring the program not to accept me. Knowing that I'm good enough and expecting them to see. But once that little word changes, I begin to worry that I've made a mistake. They've made a mistake, after all.

A week before I left for Peru, I was on the verge of chickening out. (And ended up having the experience of a lifetime.)

As I finally got ready to leave for Spain, I wondered if all the visa headaches would be worth it. (They were.)

And now, I am happily announcing that I've been accepted into the World Race, my multi-country mission trip that I've been excited about for literally a year now. (Yay!)

But also: eeek!

I know that this is my calling, this is my passion, this is my route. And yet.

And yet.

I'm a little nervous. The doubts and questions start pouring in. I'm not the best at talking to new people, so am I really qualified to be a missionary? I don't have a ton of spiritual discipline, so am I really qualified to be a missionary? Etc, etc, etc.

How interesting, that we humans do this to ourselves, despite the mountains of evidence saying YES! Go for it! Reach for the stars! (Insert your preferred motivational phrase here.)

I'm sure in the next few weeks of preparation, this feeling will subside. I plan on keeping myself distracted by writing short travel story blog posts and sharing some of the pictures I've gotten onto Facebook on the blog as well. And of course, tending to a demanding class of 2 year olds :)

P.S. Further posts about the World Race can be found at: http://corinnehurlbert.theworldrace.org/

Finding Meaning in the Modern World

Confession: I spend way too much time on the Internet.

I'm pretty sure I've referenced that fact here before. It's been a recurring problem, except for that glorious and tragic stretch of time that my charger was still broken and I had access to computers only as long as the campus computer labs were open. I got so much reading done during those two months.

But recently, I've had excess access. I can't even feel guilty about turning my laptop on to check one little thing because there is always a computer on in the house. Usually at least two, now that we got a replacement for one that died. And the one likes to wake itself up so the screen is always inviting, always tempting. [I know, it's a terrible American thing of us to be so wasteful and it drives me insane.]

I am not very good at resisting that kind of temptation.

If only my cat weren't so fat and lazy, he could do an intervention for me.

And so I spend all this time, doing...stuff? I follow all these blogs, read all these articles, laugh at all these memes, and then? Forget most of the content the next day.

I have this weird, OCD habit when I start to follow a new blog, that I try to read through all the previous blog posts. The entire archives. Sometimes years and years worth. There are still a couple I haven't even finished yet. The other day, an author was deleting a bunch of posts, all of which I had gone back and read, and I was relieved that I hadn't missed my chance. I was thinking about it later, and I couldn't remember what any of them were about. Why had I needed to read a hundred something posts? And sure, they were wildly entertaining when I did read them. But did it matter?

That's what I'm coming back to more and more these days: does it matter? As I sit in this comfortable little big house and eat my privileged meals and drive my efficient car and use all this water and electricity. What am I doing to matter?

It feels like most things on the Internet are so temporary, so meaningless. The social justice parts of it, I really love. The sharing of ideas, spreading of open-mindedness. The ideals of what being online could be. And there's lots of places that aren't like that at all, places that I try desperately to avoid because they just make me sad for the future of humankind. Then there's all the art on display. The authors, the painters, the musicians, the filmmakers, the actors, the dancers, the photographers, the people doing crafty things because they love it. There is meaning to be found in art, a deeper connection across all of us that I long for.

I found this image and proceeded to read 5 pages worth of comics.

I'm still struggling to rectify these two ideas, filling a life with campaigning, raising awareness, spreading healing and also with beauty, entertainment, suspension of reality. I have to remind myself that all the reading and TV watching and gossip following that I do is not wholly in vain. My brain needs a chance to relax, unwind, rid itself of all the garbage that gets into it every day.

And I am not embarrassed to acknowledge that sometimes, the best way to do that is to watch a movie where nothing makes sense and everything blows up.

Time for Brutal Honesty

***I'm sorry I forgot all about writing about San Fran. I've been a smidge busy and also a smidge disconnected. I'll get back to that...eventually! But I have a few more serious things I need to say first.***

I cried myself to sleep the other day.

Let me reassure you that nothing bad happened to me. I had a typical day, full of playing Internet Spades and cleaning and eating and watching the Olympics. From the outside, it’s hard to see how a bunch of little things pushed me over the edge emotions-wise. It’s not life itself, but my perception of it, that depresses me so much.

It’s weird how that works. Cognitively, I know how good I have it. I want to be very clear that I’m not complaining about the circumstances of my life. I am well aware how much privilege I have, in almost every aspect. I get that.

But emotionally, I’m miserable. Not all of the time, and probably not whenever anyone else has seen. I like to think that I have a really solid mask up when I need to hide my emotional state. Also, it’s a lot easier to feel happy around people that I love, even the ones that I just like :). But at home, by myself, it’s not as easy to be positive about things. I tend to focus on the future, which seems so far away, and it’s hard to enjoy the moment.

 

 I feel the need to interrupt the seriousness with a lovely song.

Especially because the two things that I have always wanted most – my dream job/non-profit and my family – feel like they’re getting pushed further from the present. I’m still just checking off the steps as I inch closer to those goals. Ever since I can remember; well, probably since about 7^th grade. First, it was 2 years to high school. Then it was 4 more years to college. Then it was 2 years that turned into 3 to get done with college. Now it will be at least 2 years until I [hopefully] will be leaving the country as a Peace Corps volunteer.

[I also, naively, thought that I would get married super young. Clearly, that is not about to happen. And really, I'm totally okay with that, it's just so different from what I thought I wanted.]

All this waiting just tires me out. In retrospect, it wasn’t all that long or all that bad, but in the present, it feels like it’s taking forever. There’s always another step I have to take, another delay, another requirement of living in American society. And I have enough trouble tolerating this society without the added burden of depression.

I figure I could get diagnosed with mild depression, but I don’t know for sure. Some days I feel really crippled – it’s hard to get out of bed, it’s hard to get anything done, it’s hard to care. These don’t happen often when I’m busy and have things to distract my over-active mind. Other times, the mean side of my brain yells at me and tells me to quit whining, I'm just always looking to have a pity party focused on me, that I don't deserve to be super insanely happy. Then the nice side points out that that’s really making a case for the opposite point of view and they just go back and forth and give me a headache.

I don’t know why now is the time I feel compelled to share this with the world. I just…as I was lying in bed trying to sleep, I started composing this. Then I typed it up the next day, but I just couldn't post it. I guess I needed a day where I felt really great about things before I could talk about the not-so-great stuff. It’s a part of me, part of my story, part of my life. I don’t necessarily give a lot of thought to it. I don’t talk about it, except occasionally with my sister, who always knows how to make me laugh. I’m not looking for an intervention or sympathy or anything. It's one obstacle out of many, and certainly is not among the most insurmountable [for me].

But it's something that I've always hidden before, and I shouldn't have to want to, because it's not a curse or a disability or what have you. It's some shoddy wiring in my brain, that's all.

Or something like that. I am not one for explaining complicated medical things very well.

Where I Admit to Being a Scaredy-Cat

This week I started reading Divergent (Veronica Roth) which is a pretty awesome dystopian book. Apart from being very engaging, it's given me a lot of human-nature type questions to consider. I'll do my best not to spoil any of the plot for y'all in writing about these.

Also, look how pretty the cover is. I definitely judge this one by its cover :)

So the novel takes place in a future Chicago where society's split into 5 groups defined by a singular characteristic.

• Abnegation [selflessness, non-indulgence or austerity]
• Candor [honesty, often to the point of bluntness]
• Amity [peacefulness, cheerfulness]
• Erudite [intelligence, general studiousness, also ambition]
• Dauntless [bravery, recklessness, sometimes fearlessness]

Which, of course, got me thinking about how crazy it is to try to define a group by a single personality trait that they share in common. Also, the selfless group being called Abnegation just strikes me as a very negative word for a very positive quality. And finally, I wondered which group I would choose to be a part of.

Dauntless was immediately out. These people jump out of moving trains for fun. No way. Candor was also easy to get rid of. It's not that I'm a pathological liar, it's just that I value non-conflict in most social interactions. That doesn't happen when you feel free to tell people how you really feel about them [or their views, or their clothes, etc.].

These are for riding in. NOT for jumping out of.

The other three, at first glance, seemed pretty equally spread. But I certainly don't have the thirst for knowledge the Erudite seem to in the novel. And I definitely am not ambitious in the traditional sense.

So. In real life, I figure I value peacefulness and selflessness fairly equally. I believe very strongly in eliminating the need for war as well as serving others for the purpose of eradicating poverty, ending the orphan crisis, etc. In the context of the book, I suppose I would choose Amity, if only because I wouldn't be comfortable living forever at Abnegation levels of selflessness. And for their red and yellow clothes :)

[Clearly, this vanity means that I would be terrible at being selfless.]

But this prompted me to think even more about the reasons I wouldn't choose the other factions. The one that's hardest to come to terms with is the Dauntless one. I think this is because being "cowardly" is involuntary and irrational. I'd certainly like to be less fearful and constrained by rules, but my brain just doesn't work that way. I decide whether or not to tell the truth. I decide to educate myself or not on various topics. I decide to give things up to accomplish a greater good.

I can't just wake up and say, "I'm not going to be afraid of _____________ anymore."

Which is tough because there are a lot of things I'm afraid of:

1. Wasps/bees/dragonflies/flying insects that look like they could sting
2. Failure
3. Ladders [as in, falling off of them]
4. Making myself look incompetent 
5. Elevators
6. Being alone/rejection
7. Scary movies [I got nightmares from watching Jurassic Park. It was no fun.]
8. Hate groups 
9. Dying/being murdered in particularly painful ways

There are other, smaller fears that could be added to this list, I just can't think of them right now. But they're out there, I assure you.

Also, these are in no particular order. For example, I am not more afraid of wasps than I am of elevators.

Combining two of my fears into one mega-fear. I can't watch even a second of that trailer.

On a completely unrelated note, the Google search for "evil elevator" was much more effective than my previous attempt to find an image conveying my sentiments towards "evil electric mixers."

The Stuff I Carry

I have trouble letting go of things. Events, mistakes, insecurities, you name it, I tend to hold onto it.

[Yeah, okay, maybe that's a bit much of a blanket statement. Hyperbole is a perfectly acceptable literary tool that I intend to employ fully.]

Clothes. That's another one I don't like to part with. And papers. Especially papers. So much so that, just the other day, I handed down two dresses to my youngest sister that I haven't been able to fit into in at least three years. So much so that I have to go through the piles of stuff under my bed every summer to throw away things from elementary or middle school to make room for the stuff I've accumulated at college that I might need someday and absolutely must hang onto.

I also have tons and tons of pictures. Surprise! Many of them are of cats.

Now that I have my computer back, I have come to terms with the fact that it is just as much an avenue for hoarding as that hidden space beneath my bed. I have hundreds of sites, pages, images, links bookmarked - because I was inspired, I thought they were funny, I could use them for writing/reading/homework. I never rarely delete them. I have multiple folders of bookmarks labeled some version of "More to Read."

So today, I deleted a bunch of them.

Don't worry. None of the cats were erased.

I'm sure there are still too many by "normal" standards. I'm also sure that I don't, in fact, need most of the stuff that stays tucked under my bed 362 days of the year. I'm okay with that. I understand that I get emotionally attached more to the idea of saving things than the actual things themselves. It takes time for me to process and get rid of things - but the important part is, I do eventually get rid of them. Unless, of course, they really mean something to me, and then I try to find a better place to put them than in an old shoebox or buried between random articles.

Out of the frying pan and into the fire? Are the excess cat pictures the next to go?

Since I'm on the subject already, I can extend this not-throwing-anything-away mindset to my collections. At various points in my life, I have collected coins, figurines, rocks, dreamcatchers, erasers, candles, etc. While I really only collect old coins and dreamcatchers and maybe candles at the moment, I still have all these other things:

• The rocks and erasers are in some jar or drawer or box, along with other things I don't even remember collecting.
• The candles and figurines I have arranged on my shelves at home. There's also room for some books and tons of stuffed animals. Another thing I probably have too many of.
• Dreamcatchers are easy - they lie flat on the walls [except for my 3D one]. 
• My coins are split between a piggy bank and a jewelry box that I may have misplaced.

To be honest, it wasn't until a few years ago that I realized how silly these things were. How I was surrounding myself with possessions that I would lose or not use or were only good for being looked at [or smelled, in the case of candles]. I quit buying figurines - I wasn't even tempted to buy any while I was in Peru. I pushed back the dates on what I considered a "collectible" coin. I started to actually light some of the many candles that I own.

No - I could never get tired of seeing this cuteness!

And you know what? The planets continue to orbit, the sun continues to shine, and I don't feel any differently now than I did before. Incredible, I know. I enjoy the stuff I have, but a lot of it, I know I don't really need. I mean, I have good taste and all, but I want most of my possessions to have more meaning than just being pretty. There's only so much time in the world and, though I hate to say it, it can't all be spent being sentimental or stargazing or shopping.

Or partying. Or CAT-partying. See what I mean about the cute factor?

I have stuff to get done, darn it, and I can't let all my other stuff get in the way of that.

Not even pictures of cats.