Snack/Nap Time

The link to this picture has been circulating amongst my family. It is a picture of my niece Callie at daycare. She is the bald one wearing pink...asleep at the table while the rest of the kids eat snack! It just gives me the giggles every time I look at it so I thought I would share it. I love her.

The Oatmeal Gospel

We had our annual MuckFest for Young Life tonight and it remains in my Top 5 favorite ways to spend 45 minutes. It's awesome and encapsulates so much of what I love about high schoolers and the "me" I want to be. I know when we started doing the event a few years ago that we had a purpose/strategy. It was a means to an end. I think it had something to do with a fall kickoff and spreading the word about starting up our weekly club meetings. I'm sure it still does this, but even if it didn't I think we should still keep doing it. I'd be perfectly happy if it were the end in and of itself. And that end being a night to just play.

The night is basically a giant food fight. The second portion consists of the 4 teams attacking each other first with flour bombs, then shaving cream, and finally oatmeal. Like I said it's awesome. When's the last time in your adult life that you've cupped your hands together in an attempt to hold as much oatmeal as you can before smashing it into your friends face, hair, nose, ears, and anywhere else you please (for the record I learned tonight that down the pants is a fun option). When's the last time you had a rubbermaid tub of gluey, heavy, slimy oatmeal dumped on top of you to the chorus of shrieking freshmen girls? Have you thrown an onion at your husband recently? Have you whipped noodles of spaghetti at the back of someone's head in the past few months? I think there's something very magical about this kind of "letting loose". I think I will remain a YL leader because nights like this are a spiritual experience for me. I know I'm not the only one, but if I told many people this they would think I'm crazy because I think oatmeal and shaving cream in your ear are a thing of beauty.

I think we'd all be better off if we played like kids every once in awhile. (And not relied on alcohol as an excuse to act silly. I think we can play without it too.) I was talking to a friend this weekend and commenting about how as I get older I am drawn to people who are 1. laid back and 2. positive. I wish I were more laid back and I wish I were more positive, so I love being around people like that as they bring it out more in me. My peers can be so negative. A casual hang out with my friends can turn into a b@*#% fest within the first 5 minutes. (If you're my friend and you're reading this I'm not talking about you. My blog readers are only the most lovely of company to keep. wink, wink) I leaned over to Daniel tonight and said, "I think one of the reasons I like hanging out with high school kids so much is because they're so positive." He remarked, "Oh yeah, they're just excited about life." Yes they are. Everything is new and exciting. They're not cynical or jaded yet. One of their biggest concerns is having fun. They don't look at a tub of oatmeal and cringe with disgust, but instead see the possibilities and potential for fun and dive right in. I want to hang out with oatmeal people. I want to be an oatmeal person. I don't want to sit on the sidelines and watch because it would be too much trouble to wash the oatmeal out of my hair. I want to be an oatmeal person.

Be Faithful with a Little

Image from someone's Tumblr. Not sure of the source. Just found it on Daniel's computer. Don't judge me for not crediting it.

I had another interview today. It went well (I think). I will let you know if it materializes into an ongoing opportunity. How's that for vague? Just trying to be discreet. Each of my employment opportunities is small, entry level. But I'm still excited. I'm entering fields that I have little to no experience in. All I've ever really known is high school kids. So I anticipated having to gradually work my way up as I learn the ropes. It isn't always easy to maintain this level of humility, but it's the reality of my situation. I feel God reminding me of the parable in Luke 16 about faithfulness, "If you are faithful in little things, you will be faithful in large ones. But if you are dishonest in little things, you won't be honest with greater responsibilities." So I'm trying to work really hard at what is given to me. My generation has so much innate entitlement, so this is a challenge for me. I have a feeling I'll be coming back to this verse many times over the next year when I feel like complaining about the size of my paycheck. So here's to chipping away at any pride and ego in me and to building a better work ethic and gratitude. It's time for me to just show what I can do instead of talking about it. Talented people are a dime a dozen, but without hard work they're just a bunch of empty talk.

I'm an Examiner

Another endeavor I've taken on is writing freelance for Examiner.com. An ad came up on Career Builder, I submitted a writing sample and now I have the chance to write about local shopping and style. It doesn't pay much of anything, but it'll keep me writing and gives me an excuse to pursue my love of clothing (even if that just means window shopping and writing about it). My first article went up today. If you'd like to support me this way feel free to click through. Any small amount of money I'll make is based on how many hits, comments, and activity my articles get. You can subscribe to my articles too, but only Greg will probably do that :) So now I have two forms of employment that involve clothing. I'm really getting sidetracked here as I'm attempting to do event planning!

Miracle on Green Street

The heavens parted today and my phone finally rang. I got a job at J.Crew. Thank the Lord. I don't know if I'm as excited as I am utterly relieved. A reason to get out of bed in the morning comes as a huge weight off my shoulders. My journey still continues as I will try to be faithful with a little before I am trusted with more. I am so grateful...so grateful. I was on the verge, forget that...I HAD already lost it. I am so thrilled to have co-workers, a schedule, someone to tell me what to do, a paycheck for God's sake! Daniel and I will be working just a few doors down from one another at Town Center which is kind of hilarious and convenient.

Just when I'd lost all hope (seriously) something finally worked out. Again I know I still have a long road ahead of me, but a job is a job is a job. Unemployment is the most demoralizing experience I've ever been through and the darkest I think I can remember feeling. Thank you to all of my friends who have loved me over the past month and a half (and in my final months on YL staff) who put up with my Debbie Downer attitude and constant complaining. Seriously your belief in me helped me to survive when I stopped believing in myself or that God had anything intended for my future. I know this job won't fix everything, but it is a HUGE step in the right direction. I get to rejoin the living. Now I can complain about work and being tired instead of a lack of motivation to get out of bed after doing nothing each day.

Keep going, keep going, keep going.

A Response to "How Honest is Too Honest?"

So last week I wrote a post about balancing how openly I talk publicly about a struggle with anxiety and depression. Since writing that post I've received countless emails and facebook messages from some of you who read it, not to mention a comment or two on the blog itself. The reactions were all identical. "Thank you for your honesty," "You are not alone," "I struggle the same way." Each email or message was an encouragement to me personally in this very difficult time of unemployment and lack of purpose or place in the world. It is such a gift to know that other people see my plight and acknowledge the discomfort of it. So thank you for holding me up during this time and this past year as I've come forward on this blog with my struggle. Thank you.

I'm still torn, even after all those unanimous messages, as to what exactly is appropriate to share publicly. I hear people telling me how much they appreciate my honesty and writing and what a benefit it has been to them and still I wonder about what or how much to say. As much as I want to validate the struggle for myself and apparently so many others who have stumbled across my blog, I also do not want to play the victim any longer (as I've been known to do). I really do want to write from a perspective of living in spite of anxiety instead of at the mercy of it. It's easier to write about how crummy I feel some days than it is to write about how successful I am being in the midst of my struggle.

To write about my victory over the struggle means I have to really dig in and beat this thing by managing these emotions each and every day, which is perhaps the hardest to do while dealing with the identity and motivation issues that accompany unemployment. I don't know that there's anything that causes me as much anxiety as the fear of the dark abyss of nothingness.

As I continue to dream and seek out vision for my future, the love of writing remains. You wouldn't know it based on the low caliber of the writing on the blog over the past few months. I don't know what it would look like to write full time. I don't know what I would write and what medium to pursue, but I'm leaving that option open. Out of all the ways I've "put myself out there" this past year, the one thing people have responded to the most frequently has been my writing. I'm not sure if it's been more my commentary about anxiety and depression or the writing itself that people have responded to. It's just kind of funny to me that I built an entire website dedicated to showcasing my event planning portfolio and it's this blog that has received more feedback than anything else. Interesting. Not sure what it all means though.

So my conclusion from all the responses is to just keep writing. I don't think I'm ready to take the blog super public again yet, but I'll keep writing honestly. I'm living in an extremely uncomfortable tension in almost all areas of my life, the writing on this blog being just one of many areas. But who isn't? Maybe it's the honesty about this tension that people are responding to, the fact that I can't end every post with a moral lesson or tied up with a bow, but rather just hanging as a loose end, a to be continued. So for now I guess all I can say is what most of us feel at some point in our lives: to be continued.

Introverted

I missed 3 posts. Ugh. We had a busy weekend of hanging out with people. Socializing shouldn't be so exhausting. I took naps both yesterday and today and just can't seem to recover. I had a very fun weekend, but I think this is a good sign that I really am an introvert. I've learned a lot about being an extrovert vs. an introvert over the years through all the various personality tests we had to take on Young Life staff. Now I'm defensive when people assume I'm shy, quiet, or a loner because I say I'm more introverted than extroverted. What I've learned tells me that your bent is not determined by how outgoing (or not) you are, but by what means you need to recharge. Do you gain energy and refreshment from interacting with others or from spending time alone? I consider myself outgoing. My job for the past 6 years required me to be as I was paid to "hang out" with people. I can be shy, but I'm usually pretty comfortable with new people. But when I am stressed or tired or need to recharge, I go off by myself. I'm an introvert. Once I've spent some time at home reading, watching TV, or cuddling with my pups, then I'm ready to jump back in to the party. But this weekend there were so many fun, new people in town hanging out from Thursday night through Sunday morning, that I didn't get a lot of Hattie-happy-place time. Now it's Sunday night and I'm exhausted. I'm also realizing that in my exhaustion, my brain must be fried because this is the dumbest post ever. Why did I just spend the last few minutes writing about this? I'm ridiculous. I need to go to sleep. On a positive note, I just spell checked my entry and had no misspellings. That's a score right?