Be Careful With Me

I love people. For as long as I can remember, that’s who I’ve been. I make friends easily and I keep them. They’re important to me and I let people know. I’ve gone through periods of time where I was too social. I typically wouldn’t recognize it for a few weeks when suddenly I’d realize I was exhausted. I wasn’t even giving myself time to breathe before I’d be making more plans. I was afraid to just stop and be with my thoughts. I know that I was trying to outrun those thoughts that come when I would be by myself. I found self-worth in the people who loved me. I found self-worth in knowing that I loved people well. Then the last three years happened. The last three years brought a lot of pain. There were brief moments of joy in the midst of all that pain, but there were definitely periods of time where the pain blocked out so much of the sun. There were heart attacks. There was cancer and mental illness. There was a move away from the people I loved most in the world. There were broken marriages. There were months on crutches. There were degenerative diseases. There was rehab. There was distance. There was pain. There were weeks of the hospital food and fold out beds and hours and hours spent in my car driving. There was death. I want to be on the other side of all of that. And there are moments when I feel like I am. And then there’s tonight. I find the effort to be pretty damn exhausting. I know that I need to be available. I know that I need to be social. I know that right now in my life I need to be seeking community. But I’ll be honest, I’d rather just be alone. I’d rather spend the day reading a book in the sunshine of my living room. I’d rather spend hours among paper and songs and silence. This is the me that I don’t really quite know how to deal with.-this sudden turn around to being an introvert. The me who finds that if you’re going to ask me to explain myself or do anything more than just breathe, I just don’t want to even begin. I long for community. I long for relationship. But somehow the thought of the work that’s involved there just seems too much. I find myself justifying an entire weekend where I don’t spend time with a single person. I tell myself it’s healthy to enjoy time by myself. That this is the grown up Liz. But is it? Is it me adjusting to what life looks like as a single 30-something whose family and closest friends are hours away? Or is it me afraid to try- afraid to love anyone else when I know that’s opening the door for more pain? I know that you can’t have love without pain. You can’t be vulnerable without risk. And in my head, I know that it’s worth it. I look at the people that I love and I know. But right now my heart is just really, really tired. This version of me- I just don’t where to begin.

Be careful how you bend me
Be careful where you send me
Careful how you end me
Be careful with me.
p. griffin

I had someone ask today what dream I most look forward to coming true in my life. I really had to stop and think about it for a while. I guess it must be a sign that I’m growing up when I don’t think of my dreams as much as I used to. Or maybe it’s just a sign that I’m really happy and fulfilled. I’d like to think it’s the second of the two but sometimes I worry that maybe I don’t dream as often as I used to for fear that if it doesn’t come true, the disappointment is worse. If I’m honest at this point in my life I really only have one “dream” and that is to eventually get married. I’m not someone who talks about my singleness often because I don’t want to perpetuate the stereotype of the single girl in her 30’s who feels incomplete without someone to spend her life with. To be completely honest, I think my life is a lot more fulfilled than it ever would’ve been had I gotten married younger like I always assumed I would. My relationships are stronger, my independence is healthier and also there’s that awesome cat I have. (Really everyone’s life would be a little more complete if they had a little Helena in their lives.)

I guess my question is though, at what age does one stop dreaming? Especially about those things so out of our control. Or is that something we should never outgrow? I lean towards never outgrowing it, but there’s such a fine line between too many dreams and too little reality. And vice versa I suppose.

Can someone take a year long break from blogging and then just come back and pretend like they never stopped? I think that’s easier than making excuses for why I didn’t write. Sometimes it’s a lot to just live our stories and it’s too painful at times to talk about them. 2009 was that year. Sometimes brokenness calls for change so I changed. Jobs and apartments and state lines. 2010 didn’t start out much better, but I guess somehow I was. Better I mean. Or more realistic about life. When it comes down to it the one thing I’ve realized about myself more than anything else is that my story is to simply love. Whether that’s loving through others ‘ joy or pain, or cancer or loss, or peace or laughter, I want my love to fill in all the spaces and all the air that I can’t fill with words. I guess that’s a dream I’m ok with keeping around.

And Helena. I think I’ll keep her around too.

2 Steps Away

There was a routine on last week’s So You Think You Can Dance about a girl and her fear. I finally had a chance to watch it tonight and when I say I watched it, I mean I watched it over and over and over again. It was one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen in a long long time. And it totally spoke to me. I have an incredible fear of being alone. There’s an element of that that is so incredibly ridiculous because my life is filled with people that I love, that love me. But I still fear being alone. I think that’s part of why I made the move I just did. I guess I just want to embrace that fear. Pretending it’s not there hasn’t really done a lot of good when it comes to healing, so I decided to face it head on. Some days, it’s really really hard. This last week especially. I found myself on several occasions worrying that I was going to fail in this job, that I won’t ever find a place that I really fit in here, that maybe I’m just not strong enough to do this. Really that I’m just crazy to move away from the people who love me most in my life and start again.

The song that was used with the routine about fear talks about being two steps away from loneliness. That resonated with me on so many levels. Right now with this move I think I’m walking a bit of a tightrope. I don’t want to fall into the loneliness that’s below, but at the same time I’m not sure the journey is going to be complete if I don’t fall off a couple times before I make it across.

Life is hard. This past year has been really really hard. I’ve found myself missing my friend that I lost in May almost as much this last month as I did when we first lost him. I’ve seen people that I had to look twice because for a split second I thought it was him. He’s been in my dreams and I still can’t even get myself to delete his number out of my phone. Isn’t that crazy? Grief is a lot like fear in that. It’s completely irrational. You can pretend it’s not there and some days you don’t even notice it. Then one day you wake up and it’s so thick it’s like a spiderweb that you can’t seem to brush away no matter how hard you try. I think part of me is just starting to wake up again. I’d allowed myself to become a bit numb with life in the last year. I think a lot of that was a form of self-protection. Sometimes life is just hard to process. I think it’s been a while since I really tried. For the last year I’ve been going through the motions because some days that’s all I could ask myself to do. I know that God won’t give us more than we can handle but the past 11 months have been rough. It was the hardest year that I’ve ever dealt with and I fear- there it is again- that this past year is just life- it’s the way life works. It’s the way life is.

But I need to learn to love through that. I need to learn that Joseph is not the only person I loved that I will lose. Losing him doesn’t make the loving him any less worth it. It just made it that much more real. I need to learn that our family is sometimes all we have and this past year helped remind me that I don’t have to be related to someone to be their family. I need to learn that I can succeed in this new place I’m in. It might not look like what I think it will but that doesn’t mean it’s not successful. More than anything else though I need to keep learning that life is fragile and tenuous and hard and that maybe we’re all two steps away from loneliness. It’s worth it though. It’s so totally worth it.

So I guess now is as good of a time as any to admit to being a closeted control freak.

With a new job comes that moment or moments as I seem to be having many of them, when you realize that you’re doing exactly what you’re supposed to be doing at the exact right moment. I really loved my job. Really. I loved the people I worked with. I loved the people that I talked to on an everyday basis. I loved having a job where I felt like I was making people’s lives better by what I was sharing with them. I loved getting up and going into work in the morning, even when I knew that it was going to be a day when I could never possibly get everything done. As I’m going on month 2 in this new position, I’m also discovering something else I really loved about my position. I loved being in control. This is a strange discovery for me. I have never thought of myself as a control freak or really even someone who enjoyed being in charge. Apparently I hid these qualities so well, I even overlooked them in myself. When I was in my old position, I set up and executed every step. Doing so ensured that the level of quality was where I wanted it to be as well. If it wasn’t good enough, the only person to blame was myself and I had to recognize that and fix it. It’s just not quite that simple in this new job. I think one of the biggest lessons I’m going to learn in PR is that you’re never in control. Even when you feel like you’re in control, there are a million things going on along the sidelines that could totally derail where you were planning to go.

I don’t think that this discovery in myself and this change of career at this point in my life is by chance. Really I don’t often think things happen by chance. I think our decisions are constantly shaping where we’re going to end up. I think more than anything else, at this point in my life, I need to realize I’m not in control. I need to stop trying to be in control. I need to just let life happen around me. My views on God have changed a lot in the last several years. The way I love people has changed, the way I view the “church” has changed, the way I view Jesus has changed. The one thing I’ve tried hard not to change is my desire to not control the important things in my life. The more control I’ve tried to impose on life around me, the more I seem to get lost in the details. Not that the details don’t matter. They matter a lot, but all I can do is my part and then learn how to adapt to how my part changes and shifts into something else. That’s what I want my life to look like. The difficult part is getting there. I guess it’s no coincidence that the getting there is actually the most important part.

And then all of a sudden life changes, and things don’t look the same anymore. The landscape is different. You’re crossing bridges and state lines and the cornfields are gone. The coffee tastes different. The people seem distant. I guess you’re starting over.

I realized that I could become whatever I wanted to be in this change. I could either find myself here or I could hide myself here. Finding is a lot more difficult than hiding. But then again, I guess it’s not supposed to be easy. One of my very best friends shared a quote with me as I was packing up to leave Indiana. “Bloom where you’re planted.” Maybe it really is that simple. I’m nearing the end of what has easily been the most difficult year of my life. I’ve had to face things that make my chest ache to even think about. And these things changed me. Tragedy creates such a strange dichotomy. There’s the part of you that wants to love recklessly because you never know how much time you’ll have. Then there’s the part of you that wants to shrink into the smallest version of yourself you possibly can in hopes that maybe life won’t leave you so raw. If I’m being honest, I’m not past that yet. I’m not ready to go back to loving recklessly. It looks different after you lose someone. It looks different when you see that your parents are not ageless like they seem in our minds. It looks different when the people you love most are hurting in ways you can never begin to fathom. “I don’t know nothing except change will come. Year after year what we do is undone. Time gets moving from a crawl to a run. I wonder if we’re ever gonna ever get home.” I guess it’s a lot less about where we’re going and a lot more about how we get there. So tomorrow I’ll get out of bed and I’ll try to love someone just a little bit more. When it comes down to it, I guess that’s all that matters.

Go where you want to go
Be what you want to be
~The Weepies

I’ve been trying to do some much needed cleaning out because I’m getting ready to move. It’s really amazing how much stuff I can pack into approximately 25 square feet of living space. (really, it’s that small. You should see it. I’ve seen bigger closets). Anyway, nothing new here, I’m not good at throwing things away. Whether that’s clothes, shoes, cards or letters, I just don’t throw things away. In fact my mom told my sister that she wanted them to just show up as I was leaving for work one day and clean out my clothes without me. She said if I asked about one shirt in the next two years she’d gotten rid of, she’d consider it a success. Super. I’m really working on it though, and not just with what I own. But with who I am. I’m going to say something that is going to come across probably really selfish, but I’m not sure how else to put it. I think for a long time I’ve just been ignoring myself. I live in this body and this world and I go through the motions and soon all the days run into each other and I wonder what it was about the day before and the month before that, that I’ve allowed to make me numb to what’s going on around me. And I realized I hadn’t been paying attention. I think I had become this person that I hardly recognized. I knew I was still in there somewhere, but I had covered it up with distractions and stress and unhealthy relationships and weight and fear and frustration. And I saw it all, all of a sudden. I looked at a picture taken right after Christmas and I didn’t recognize myself anymore. It wasn’t just about the weight, it was about the girl inside. And I didn’t like it. And I realized that no one but me can change this. I’m the only person responsible here. So I’ve started doing something about it. And slowly I see myself coming back. I’m trying to love my weaknesses as much as I love my strengths. But it’s such a difficult process. I have to clean everything out and start over. And I realized as I was cleaning out things at home, that I’m the same way inside. I came across some old letters, and not the ones that you want to keep. The ones that really sucked to read the first time. The ones that point out your faults and your failures. And these are from years and years ago but I’m not at all sure why I decided to keep them. I realized something when I picked them back up though. I do the same thing in my heart everyday. I don’t let things go. I don’t forgive myself. I don’t let go of my failures. And when I saw the picture in December, I could see that in myself. And I didn’t even recognize that girl. I had become this muted version of myself that was slowly disappearing the bigger I got. I don’t talk about my weight on this blog. As much as I’ve talked about everything else, and tried to never have a censor, I stopped just short of the weight talk every time. Because if I talked about it here, even to the three readers I have, it would be admitting it was a problem. And I saw that every day. When I got up, when I looked in the mirror, when I went to work, when I came home, when I went to bed. The more I held on to my failures and my weaknesses, the heavier I became. Why would I even bother telling you something you obviously already see? But the truth is, it wasn’t just weight. It was years of never really looking at myself. Never looking at who I want to be. Never looking at where I want to go. Years of reminding myself of the ways I’ve failed, the relationships I’ve ended, the people that I have hurt. And the truth is, I was only hurting myself in this. The things I still allowed myself to feel guilty for, were forgiven a long time ago. So this year so far has really been about just that, me cleaning out my life, for lack of a better metaphor. Physically, emotionally, spiritually, all the things that I’ve been ignoring for a long time. And while it’s only about 4 months in, I can already see the differences. In how I love and how I breathe. In how I laugh and how I feel. And for the first time in a long time, when I look in the mirror I see myself.

I can’t really say why everybody wishes

they were somewhere else.
But in the end the only steps that matter

are the ones you take all by yourself.
And you and me, walk on, walk on, walk on
Cause you can’t go back now.
~The Weepies

I think I have a problem. I feel like it’s important to just get it out in the open. Admit to it. Move on.

I’m an apple snob.

I will even visit multiple grocery stores to find the right kind. There is only one right kind and not everyone carries it. Kroger unfortunately has let me down on numerous occasions. At numerous locations. So far Target has my back, as well as the Marsh/O-Malia’s across* the street from work. But I worry that they will stop carrying them and I’ll be forced to go back to my second place finisher, Fuji. Which up till a couple months ago, really got the job done. Just not anymore. Now it’s only the Pink Lady for me. That’s a sentence I sure never imagined myself saying. The older I get (which is almost 30 ladies and gentlemen who are still paying attention, if anyone is still out there) the more I realize that I can be really picky about specific things. I only like 1 kind of turkey lunchmeat (archer farms honey roasted turkey, shaved) and I typically only buy 1 kind of milk, Oberweiss. I think I’m becoming a snob all around. I think I might need to go buy some potted meat just to even it out. (Hey Kevin, do you think the Swifty still carries it?)

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, you didn't blog for almost 9 months and you come back to discuss your grocery habits. (I'm thinking it too.) Well apples are just that important. And I can't make it something profound, or you will come to expect it. And that's just not how I work.

I am moving in less than 3 weeks. Who wants to come clean out my shoes for me?


*Why does a large percentage of the population feel that across needs to have a past tense put to it and say acrossed? Because it’s never ok. And I have to admit, having that word in my business’ name means that I hear it, over and over and over again. And every single time, I just want to yell ACROSS! IT’S JUST ACROSS FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY! Some people like to call this overkill. They would be correct.