A Very Good Place

I am afraid to write posts lately. I used to do it all the time, and then the wimpish side of me got bigger and I began to get to know lots of different people who might be critical about lots of different aspects of myself. I still haven't gotten over that adolescent stage where you think you are the center of the world and there are eyes of all sorts along your cupboards and walls sizing you up every moment of your life (even when you're alone).

The adolescent still punching around in my veins gets hurt awfully easily. I'm working on that backbone, but I've noticed that in effort to work on my backbone, I've tried to tape up the mouth that is genuinely afraid and worried and doesn't feel quite up to par in most circles.

In effort to approach my growth holistically, I want to take the tape off, and let that mouth speak a little more. So at long last, I have steadied myself in a desk chair by my best window overlooking my festively green and lush backyard and turned my fan to its softest setting to write a post about a few of the feelings Virginia and graduate school have brought me.

This transition has been difficult for me. I feel smaller here than I did in Grand Rapids. I used to enjoy hiding in colorful cafes, smiling brightly over all the new art on the walls and the shops and people walking the messy blooming streets. I used to feel invisible, but in this really important way. Like I had some secret, and lots of joy. I think the secret has to do with possibility. I was in Grand Rapids wondering and wishing and hoping and dreaming and fantasizing about all that might happen in a few months. I wasn't living in reality. I walked around Grand Rapids in dream goggles. Everything smelled sweet because I was expecting sweet just around the corner. And Grand Rapids is beautiful, and the art is luscious, and the cafes are such fun places to hide in journals and books and still be near enough to lots of other people doing the same things.

But the point is that I felt possibility. Now, possibility has arrived. A big fat chunk of it. I mean, I have to fulfill this chunk. I have to write and publish and grow and learn and all of that. But the opportunity came. I am in the place. And the surprising thing is that when I arrived, color seemed to fall out of the atmosphere. Not entirely. My little cottage-y apartment is color-full and feels like home. But my life in general feels a bit more on the gray spectrum.

David told me one night that he thinks this is because my self-worth doesn't come from myself. It comes from the situations or people in my life. The hope of the future gave me a strong feeling of self-worth, but I didn't have any plan for keeping my bright composure after attaining that hope.

A friend of mine commented on me when we were in our early teenage years that I was always bent on growing, on re-inventing myself, on starting fresh toward some new me. A part of me whispers that it is wrong to locate myself in my own possibilities. And perhaps that's true. I cannot define my own worth, I cannot let color drown when I attain or lose a hope or possibility for my life. My worth cannot be dependent upon that.

I need to work on defining my own worth. I need to learn how to cover up the eyes all over my apartment, in the clouds as I walk, and say, "Nobody's watching. Just do as you please." I need to take some joy in my own way of living. I need to take joy in my quirks. I need to press guilt back into it's stoney throat and let myself just be thrilled about watching a Murder Mystery when I could be chugging away at accomplishing this or that.

I love Anne Lamott's words, "Rest and laughter are the most spiritual and subversive acts of all. Laugh, rest, slow down. I recommend that you all take a long deep breath, and stop. Just be where your butts are, and breathe. Take some time. Refuse to cooperate with anyone who is trying to shame you into hopping right back up onto that rat exercise wheel."

I love how spirituality rests on this tenant that there is more to you than what you do and what your skin and swank says about you. I think the big huge sacrifice of living a spiritual life is taking on that lightness and emptying the stones from your pockets.

I think this is the way I'm going to tackle the gray in my life. I'm going to try and live into a new possibility. That I can take joy in myself. That I can sit and paint and write and that no one even needs to know or approve or give me pointers or anything. I can be myself and revel in that. Perhaps that sounds childish, but to me, today, in this new place, it sounds like taking a forkful of chocolate desert. It sounds succulent.

And I need to see this place as a possibility I am still moving into. My writing has possibility. There's this whole shadow over my writing since I got here, as well. I just don't care about it. And I think it's because I don't know where it's going. Now is the time to revise it, to work it out, to strengthen it. And I've never been there with my poems before. It's always just been my own pair of squinty eyes working over the page. Now I've got dozens of others, and they're so smart, and I just don't know what my writing will become, and that unknown stage I'm in is scary and repels me.

The thing is, something will become of it. I'm in this process, now. No getting out. And I will enjoy it. I just need to be vulnerable to it and enjoy it because there is possibility there. There is hope there. My creations are inside an important process. They are not finished, but they have come from a very good place.