Alone

I am as weak as anyone, but I tell myself I am strong and this will only make me stronger. "Kick butt and take names," I tell my mirror. "Show the world that you're determined it will never bring you down."  And most days that works; most days I am confident and fearless.
But that is just days. When shadows start growing outside, shadows grow in my mind, too. They make me realize that I am alone. I take aloneness in stride, though. I like having alone time; it is healthy. It is loneliness I cannot stand. The difference is that I am isolated and do not want to be. Being alone is mostly self-imposed isolation; loneliness is when that self-imposed isolation or some other isolation outside of my control goes too far and is not what I want. Loneliness is what happens when I want friends and have none, or when I want to talk to a specific person and they do not want to talk to me. Loneliness is usually due to factors partially outside of my control.
Being alone I can handle; that is when I "kick butt and take names." Loneliness is the chink in my armor, my weak spot, my Achilles' heel.

The Last Two Posts

The last two posts are essays I wrote for my C. S. Lewis Major Works literature class. I found that in writing about these two topics I honed in on what I thought about these things. I think these two essays have chiseled away at my surface and revealed more of the woman I'm becoming, or to quote Lewis, I am "turning the central part of [myself], the part of [me] that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before." In short: these essays are important to me, and should have a place here in the workings of my mind as I tackle issues in myself and my life.

Being in Love

“Being in love [is] the explosion that [starts]” (109) a marriage, like the key turned in the ignition sparks the battery to life. But the “engine of marriage” (109) runs on a different love, like a car does not run on the juice of its battery but on the fuel in its tank. The state of “being in love” (109) is “glorious” (108) and “good for us” (108) because it inspires us towards noble traits, such as generosity, courage, and overall selflessness, and it “opens our eyes” (108) to the beauty around us. While “being in love is a good thing” (108) we cannot stop there and remain content. Being in love sparks a fire but even the strongest fire eventually burns low and dies, in which case we need to understand a higher love.

The Greek language has multiple words for love, but two in particular apply to “being in love” (109) and the love that forms a “deep unity” (109). The first, eros, means “desire” in ancient Greek and describes a romantic love akin to “being in love” (109), and the other, agape, describes an unconditional love like we find in marriage. Because God made humans to “be combined together in pairs” (104) as one entity we often desire and search for that unity, and stumble into eros: a wild and uninhibited form of love. But as our eros continues a quieter and more constant love begins to form; this love is “maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit” (109). This constant agape love is not so much an emotion (like eros) but a dedication that comes from a purposeful attitude of will.

My mother and father have this agape-like dedication to each other. They started their relationship with a passionate eros love for each other that burned like a raging fire, but through the years an agape love has formed underneath like smoldering embers. The eros has not left entirely, just as the ability to flame up has not left banked coals. The concept of eros versus agape is important for Christians to remember during the process of dating. If we do not remember this we will build our relationships solely on emotions that can fade without the support of dedication and unconditional love. A relationship built on the shifting sands of emotions is bound for failure when we wake up without warm and fuzzy feelings.

(Quotes taken from C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity)

Chastity

C. S. Lewis writes that the “Christian rule is, ‘Either marriage, with complete faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence’” (95). But if we begin to suggest complete abstinence to society at large we receive howls and moans about how we take away their fun. General society feels no need for abstinence because “it is so difficult and so contrary to our instincts” (95), and if it feels good it must be good. Too much of a good thing is bad though, and just like too much food turns us into gluttons, “sexual appetite . . . grows by indulgence” (97). Society at large places great importance on sexual pleasure, but has missed the bigger picture and design of pleasure.

A little girl possesses a strand of plastic pearls she absolutely adores, and every night her father asks her to give him the necklace, and every night she refuses because she fears losing her most prized possession. But one night, that little girl gives her father the plastic pearls and in return he gives her a strand of real pearls. That plastic necklace represents sex for the world; we are “gorged” (97) and “like titillations” (97) because sex is our greatest possession and our highest pleasure. God made us to “be combined together in pairs, not simply on the sexual level, but totally combined” (104). The real strand of pearls represents total combination of two people because then we no longer have purely sexual pleasure but the pleasure of a deep emotional and spiritual connection with another human being. The problem of “Chastity [being] the most unpopular of the Christian virtues” (95) lies in society’s inability to see the greater purpose of an intimate sexual relationship and thus let go of their plastic pearls to receive the real pearls.

(Quotes taken from C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity)

Well-Traveled

My most-complimented piece of clothing is probably a skirt I got from my great-grandmother's closet when my grandparents went through the process of cleaning up her house a couple years ago. The skirt sat in our guest room closet until my clothing tastes bloomed into their own creature. It's really too big for me, but until I can take it in a safety pin works just fine. The skirt has blue and red panels with green and white accents all over it, with a braided and beaded tie at the waist. I want to say it's from India; that wouldn't surprise me since my great-grandmother traveled extensively up until about the time I turned 10.
I remember one birthday I was upset because I didn't get her usual card, and someone explained to me that she was out of the country, so I would get the card when she got back. Instead, when my family visited my great-grandmother a couple months later, she gave me a beautiful little doll from China. I don't know if any other gifts from her have seen more of the world than I have, but I know that in her house she has all sorts of boxes filled with memorabilia from places like Africa, Europe, Asia, and I think I've even seen one labeled "Antarctica."
I love wearing her skirt  because I feel well-traveled. Maybe she wore it on some of her trips. Maybe I'll wear it on some of mine.

When everything feels like the movies

Life seems to be in a surreal state right now. The best way to sum it up is through a line from the Goo Goo Doll's song Iris:

"When everything feels like the movies, yeah you bleed just to know you're alive"

When life gets to the point that it no longer feels real to me, I seem to have a habit of subconsciously turning to small manners that could be described as self-harm. I stay up late so I can either indulge myself with thoughts of self pity, or to avoid being alone with the images my mind dreams up in my sleep. The other major thing I do to myself is avoiding meals. This morning, for example, I woke up exhausted and with a slight headache (because I stayed up too late the night before) and though I felt slightly hungry, I avoided eating a true meal. I made myself a cup of tea and finished off a bag of Chex Mix while I sat at my desk to prepare for class. It wasn't until about 6 pm that I realized I hadn't eaten a legitimate meal almost all day. It's days like these that I worry about myself.

Unloved, unappreciated, and worthless

In youth group on Sunday we talked about feeling loved and appreciated, and how difficult it can be to feel like we actually have some worth to anyone. I sat there and recognized the feeling being described, but the only thought in my mind was, "Pff, that's not me now, I have no problem feeling loved and appreciated and of worth." I simply brushed it off. But as I listened more, I realized that that place of feeling unloved, not appreciated, and without worth was right where I was standing; even more than that, I realized I had been standing there for awhile.

I have never had a problem with comparing myself to other females, at any age; I have never felt ugly, fat, too thin, or like I was never enough. I do not think I ever felt unloved at any point in my childhood. I have an idea of where I could trace the beginnings of feeling of not being appreciated to, where I started feeling like I was not loved; but it is not worth discussing specifics. I will leave it at this: someone came into my life and I felt like I was constantly in their shadow, when I should never have felt in competition with them.

But most recently, someone has pulled themselves--if only temporarily--out of my life, and that has been the catalyst for reviving my feelings of inadequacy. I am usually independent: I do not live off of validation from other people; but when someone very important in your life suddenly disappears from it, I do not see how you can keep from feeling even a little worthless. I have been expecting this event (let us call it the "Expected Event") to happen for nearly two months; in fact, the more I think about it, the more precisely I can pinpoint when I realized this would happen, even if it was only a subconscious realization. But that expectation does not lessen the feeling of being unloved, it does not decrease how unappreciated I feel, and it certainly does not boost my sense of worth. Actually, that expectation has made the blow perhaps a little worse in certain matters.

Let us add a move into the mixture. While I moved before the Expected Event, I still had not made substantial friendships before being punched in the stomach. The people I had in my corner were, in fact, what seemed like a completely different corner of the globe; I had no one in my corner here. I take that back; my mother, my father, and my next two siblings (J and C) were in my corner. But even with such wonderful support (C offered to call the offending person and verbally beat them down for me; I think all four of them would have done so if I had asked), I cannot help but feel out of place, alone, unappreciated, worthless, and even a tad unloved.

But since Sunday, that has slowly changed. At youth group we divide into age groups and gender; due to number of attendants, the junior and senior girls are put into one group. That group, my group, is the best group I could have asked for (if I had known to ask); we all struggle with school, boys, parents, and the culture we are living in, but we all pull together and support each other, too. We have only met three times, but I have a feeling that this group of girls could be the closest group of friends I have this year. Then on Monday, an old friend posted the simplest thing on my Facebook wall: I love you. On Tuesday another friend--completely separate from the first--texted me and told me she hoped I would have a good day and that she loves me.

In the worst of these lows, God always sends some of the most random or unexpected people to comfort me, people that probably do not even realize what I am going through. So while I may feel in instances that even God does not love me, those people are my proof otherwise.