In the Office and Off the Road

My travel season (the main portion at least) has finally ended.

The odd thing about travelling is that while the months seem to go extraordinarily quickly, they finish leaving you feeling as though you have lived 8 months.

That's actually a pretty fair assessment since you're (willingly) dragged from city to city to hotel to hotel to school to college fair to random restaurants and crappy fast food joints and awesome holes in the wall. Thousands of people, thousands of stories.

Then home, you hope, to breathe, breathe, breathe, but in reality it's to attend meetings, answer emails, answer the phone, facilitate preview weekends and tours and visits, drop by local schools on your list, eat food you froze knowing you weren't going to be home long enough to buy more groceries, see your housemates and workmates and "special friend", and go home to crash every night.

My schedule this year was pretty nice because I was basically on a week, "off" a week. However, since I have local schools, my weeks off were spent out of the office as well. At least I got to sleep in my own bed, though.
Another counselor was out of the office for nearly 6 weeks straight.

Even then, though, we have it so good. At fairs--which we love because we get to meet other counselors who understand the job and don't say things to us like, "Oh, your students see you as professionals? I thought you were, like, student buddies"--we talk with one another, and it always makes me cling so tightly to my school when I hear them talk of how they are set out on the road for 9-12 weeks at a time.

When we're on the road, it's hard to remember our office and real lives are still existing without us. We miss announcements, jokes, fun local events, birthdays, etc. What we gain is time with our applicants, our soon to be applicants, family members of our applicants and soon to be applicants.

We love it. I think the time that we realize just how much we missed home is when we turn the car toward the barn or when we get that first hug and can't seem to let our loved one go.

On the homefront, it's a season of deserts and floods.
You try to cram in all the love and snuggles (and emails) you can before you leave and in those intermediary pieces between trips, then spend all the time on the road subsisting on text messages, crappy internet connections, and promises.

Now I'm home. Time to settle back into routine as well as I can, buy some groceries, re-learn how to spend appropriate amounts of time with my friends (reassuring myself that I can see them again the next day), do my chores, and sleep.

Struggles to Human

Let's talk plainly about social anxiety.

Personally, I find it frustrating.
Yes, also debilitating at times, but frustrating.

For me, I gt so angry with social anxiety because social anxiety feels selfish to me.
There's an event, usually very casual, that's designed to be fun and easy and you, because you just can't handle it and just can't help it, make it about you.

At the same time, I recognize that it isn't something that I can think myself out of, though I have indeed tried.

There have been some methods of coping that I have learned and have imparted to other of my socially anxious friends. Things such as going to check out that restaurant/school/baseball field/shopping mall before you have to go there with a friend or date.
Things like searching on the internet for a campus map if you're visiting a university friend or a museum or a hospital.
Knowing the name of the person you're dropping by to see: "Hi! I'm here to drop off materials for Angie Smith".
Doing anything to get acclimated to the new surrounding.

For me, a lot of my social anxiety is over-stimulation.
I can handle brand new location if I'm with someone I'm very comfortable with.
Or, I can handle a brand new person if I'm in a location I'm comfortable in.
I can even handle brand new location with brand new people so long as I have one solid person I know.

It's when everything is new, everything is unstructured, everyone is new that my ears drown and I can't hear what anyone is saying to me and I can't differentiate shapes and shadows and my heart starts racing and my nails start sinking into my palms and I have missed that gap in time where I can recover and cope and have disappeared into the dark place where I need to run away and cry and find solitude and silence.

It's embarrassing. It's selfish. And yet, at the same time, it isn't intentional even a bit, which is a key aspect of selfishness I think. More than anything, we'd like to feel like we were a part of the wallpaper, able to observe without the pressure of engagement. Able to exist without being noticed too much but still kind of noticed. Noticed enough.

It's a struggle I sometimes feel I've learned to manage.
And it's a struggle that still knocks me completely flat and bepuddled when it isn't on my radar to prepare for.

Pregnancy, Weight

Though it's called the miracle of birth, and we get so excited when we learn of a friend's pregnancy, there's something sinister about pregnancy.

For some women, like my mother, it actually has the potential to be kind of a miraculous experience. My mama and her birthing hips had a lovely time during pregnancy. 

For others, not so much. 

Currently, all of Siloam is pregnant it seems. 

I've got a whole theory about the role that essential oils is playing in this (they are not an alternative to birth control, friends), but nevertheless, cute pregnant bellies fill the streets here. 

A friend of mine (home birth types) just gave birth (in a hospital) after being more than 2 weeks late and after more than 48 hours of labor. 

Another friend has been ill every evening at 5pm since she first learned of the human in her belly. 

The wife of a professor friend--the one responsible for getting myself and Julius initiated and integrated with our church--has horrible pregnancies. Horrible. 

He is a compulsive coffee drinker. I remember as a student in his class during her last pregnancy that he made his coffee on the porch of his house because it would make her vomitous. 

During her last three pregnancies, she's been ill to the point of hospitalization. 

This one was awful as well. But with pregnancy, unlike other diseases and abnormal growths, there's a heightened layer of joy and anticipation to pair with the anxiety and nausea. At the end, you'll have a squirmy life. 

However, though she was an invalid for a couple of months, she found joy and comfort in the fact that through pregnancy acupuncture and other homeopathic remedies, she had been able to avoid the hospital and had finally made it back to church and most of her normal life. 

Today, we received a short email from our pastor--The family mourns the loss of their unborn child...pray for her as she'll have to go through delivery soon. 

I've heard mothers compare labor and delivery to a lot of things I can't unhear, like volcanic eruptions, dinosaurs escaping, being dipped in acid. 

None of those are comforting images. 

Again, though, they are mixed with this peace because it's worth it. It's worth it to finally be with this creature that you and your beloved have created together, procreated in the image of God. And it's beautiful. And it's valuable. And it's good. 

I've just got this image in my head, though, that I can't release myself from. 

We are not meant to grieve like those without hope. 

But finding hope in more than "We'll be together one day in Heaven" is surely impossible in the midst of excruciating pain that will leave to the inevitable delivery of death. 

Today is a reminder to be thankful for children, thankful for nieces and nephews, thankful for our own lives and the lives of the women who gave birth to us. 

Some miracles become people. Some, hidden miracles I suppose, are an opportunity to grow closer to Christ, as that is the only option, the only source of true reprieve when our hearts feel like they're being torn out.