Better Story

I felt like such a rage-aholic today. Such a ferocious wet blanket. And I indulged this, yes, with Natalie Merchant songs about resigning, stepping down from the task it is sometimes to keep moving on a dark day. I threw things around my room--paintings, drawings, piles of books, sweaters. And I swore in such a way that would make Eminem hide in my closet whispering prayers that the storm would calm and I would light a joint or take a sleeping pill.

Why, you might ask, was I such a hurricane of a human being? Honestly, it's difficult remembering. I have the slightest cold. I was going to have to work outside in the rain with my disgusting cold cinching my sinuses and clouding my brain, my hands numb and achey. The internet went out at my house, and I didn't do all the things I wanted to (like putting together portfolios, improving cover letters and resumes, finding businesses to actually approach about positions). I think that last reason was most of it. And the fact that I am so deeply disappointed in myself ninety-two percent of the time.

It was the lack of doing those things I had planned on doing, and the sudden leap from my not finishing those things to the thought that I am an entirely irresponsible human being, that I am ugly--my hair making sloppy shapes in the humid air, and the thought that my ugliness coupled with my irresponsibility tripleted with my terror of approaching men would inevitably lead me to a life of loneliness and poverty.

And I packed my things, loudly. I drove depressed and gray and full of self-pity out to Grand Rapids, to the Bitter End. I listened to Natalie Merchant, and I didn't feel so alone. I remembered a moment when the girls I used to work with at the cafe in Zeeland hugged me in the back room and started crying when they saw my tears about something my dad had done. I felt a little warmer. I remembered other moments where people were super-humanly empathetic.

Those memories redeemed life for me, despite Natalie Merchant (who only has one remotely positive/hopeful song on that whole album). And then The Bitter End coffee house. Looking now through the front windows, rain settled in luminescent drops, leaves limp and wet, green as ever against the dark oak of this place, I feel settled. Danielle called me and told me that she can't imagine me enraged (though she's such a wonderful friend that she really listened and believed that I am capable of rage). She told me what she knows of me. She was very kind, for the most part. I actually surprised myself by not contesting the nice things she was saying. I listened. I studied her words, and took them like water.

Chase told me a few days ago that he thinks most of what I think are my problems, are merely perceptions I have of myself that are entirely incorrect. Nobody apparently sees what I see of myself. This fascinates me, because I've always thought I was good at knowing myself. Apparently, I'm wrong. I'm glad I'm wrong.

Sometimes, we have to listen to our friends. And we have to believe people. Really believe them. We have to sit in their words and let them come into our skin. We so often are lost in our misconceptions of ourselves, that we don't live in the great goodness that lives in us--we don't use our gifts, because we deny them.

I just finished Donald Miller's new book, A Million Miles in a Hundred Years, about our lives as stories--about living them as if we are "graceful participants," rather than, "unwilling victims."

At one point he writes, "Not living a beter story would be like deciding to die, deciding to walk around numb until you die, and it's not normal to want to die."

In all honesty, there have been quite a few times within the past few years that I have wanted to die. I have wanted, sometimes desperately, to be out of it. To be done. To have the pressure off, the burden lifted. Even though I'm terrified to say that because I'm afraid of how I'll be percieved, I say it, because I know there are plenty of people who feel the same. Don's book, as well as my beautiful, generous friends, have really made me want to live the better story, which may simply mean living into me, into whatever good I am bestowed with.

I love thinking that perhaps the better story is here, and we are already the better characters, we just don't know it yet.