Non Compos Mentis

Christmas: anxiety levels at atomic mushroom heights.

Children screaming. Wrapping paper everywhere. And the anxiety of potential flight complications looming.

 
Yet while I sit here, conscientiously stilling my breath and taking some Lamaze notes for my own stress levels, I let the reminder of life's brevity overtake me.
 

These people, these loud, just unbelievably loud, nuanced, weird, testy, loving, fun, funny people are what gives me a reason to come home.

Tulsa is just a city. Its shops and hills and predictability are comforting, but it's the chaos of my family that makes my heart so full.
 

I would be devastated if I ever lost even one of my people. Our unit is messy and sometimes I need to leave the room--maybe drink a little contextual beverage--and chill my introvert sensory self out a little, but I love them with my whole heart.

So let them scream. Let them eat cake. I would rather have a ringing in my ears than a hole in my heart.

Nap till It Ends

Days and seasons whip through me.

It's still fall semester. It has felt longer than a year, and I feel like you can see at least a year imprinted on my face and spirit.

There was an Aflac commercial running a few years back where the duck and a dude are in a little fishing boat, and a hole starts spouting water. Aflac duck plugs it. But then, oh no! Another hole. And another and another and another until he has his whole beak plugging a whole and filling him with water.

There have been some truly good moments, but I feel a little like an Aflac duck. I plug one hole and another spouts. Meanwhile, while my focus is away, another spurt spurts.

To actually have a grip on all the projects and the problems going on, I'd need 18 hands working simultaneously.

At the same time, I'm so thankful to be alive and alive in this stage of life. I often find myself internally angsting hard, but, at the same time, I don't want to wish away my life. I love my life. I love my husband and so many of the people I work with and work for. I love my near and far distance friends.

I love teaching and the ability to share my crazy ideas with people paying to listen. :)

It's just so hard to maintain a spirit of thankfulness in my divided heart and mind when everything in me wants to sleep and sleep and sleep.

I Know You By Name

If you've never read The Book Thief, you're missing out.
Found for a quarter at a garage sale down the road, this book was a steal in and of itself.

The Holocaust is not something to be taken lightly, but it gets as close as you can without crossing any lines. Why is that important? Because humor, even dark, is part of the human experience, and Book Thief's purpose is to show the human experience as colorfully as possible, the whole of it, not just in part.

The entire narration is from the point of view of Death. It's the first I've read of its kind, but the most interesting part is how Death describes himself. As "amiable. Agreeable. Affable. And that's only the A's" (Zusak 1). He calls himself a result. And, when asked to describe himself, he says for humans to only but look in a mirror. Humans, he posits, are the real carriers of death.

However, in my English II course, we explore how that's the most powerful and hopeful statement. We have the capacity to carry death, but that also means we have the power to carry life, to promote joy and healing and goodness.

Death searches, throughout the entire novel, to answer the question of why human existence is worth it. He knows it is, but he is on a quest to show how.

So, that is our course thesis for this novel: Human existence is worth it.

At the end of each class period, we spend time answering the half statement, "Human existence is worth it because..."

It's my second time teaching through this book, but this semester has hit nerves so much deeper inside me and, I believe, my class.

There's something about this semester at my university that has just been a little off-kilter, a darkness felt by so many of our students, faculty, and staff. As a believer, I do believe that spiritual warfare is alive and well and that the enemy seeks to steal, kill, and destroy, especially when there is so much life and light in a place.

I have, thus far, had 3 students drop my course out of overload. Two stayed at the university, one withdrew due to suicidal ideations. Another yet is taking next semester off because of similar mental and psychological stress. And then there's [Claire].

If we are being honest, Claire bothered me. She came to even the first day of class late. She would sit there and I just felt uncomfortable by her presence because it came off as almost hostile. She rarely turned in assignments. It was as if school--and my class--were below her. Which surprised me, as she is an English major.

Then, one day at Walmart, I saw her with another student of mine who I had recruited, a student I dearly love. Call it Jones' Effect, but if she's friends with my student, she is a good person. My whole perspective changed, and I felt it deeply that I needed to reach out. Her tardiness had gotten much worse, if she showed up at all.

She shared with me of her depression, how she wasn't coming because she couldn't get out of bed. She hadn't turned in her major paper because she had never even started her paper.

We talked. We met together. We made compromises and worked through her missing pieces. I told her how valuable her feedback in class was to course discussion. She didn't even know she had been "seen."

She started showing up to class right on time. With assignments. Good assignments. Blew me away with her next paper. I thought everything was going better, going better than better.

Then came an email telling me she was hospitalizing herself for self harm.
Then came emails from the registrar asking if she would succeed if she came back; I confirmed.
Then came an email from her asking what work she had to make up, if she could.
Then came the first day of class back after Thanksgiving. Late. No paper.
Then came the second day of class back after Thanksgiving. No Claire.
Then came the classified ad posts desperately asking for help toward this "new treatment" and a public expose on her mental illness.
Then came the text from the university at 10pm last night saying they were searching for a student they believed had self harmed.
Then came heartbreak.

A reassurance of her life was sent about 20 minutes later, but so much damage had already been done. There isn't anything that could convince me that it wasn't her. I'd be delighted to know it wasn't, but it was. I know the evidence too well.

Human existence is worth it because...

The heartbreak is because I know the answer to that question. I know it for me, and I know it for her. In fact, I could write a full list for any one of my students about why their specific human existence is worth it.

It doesn't matter if a person is Christian or not. Their human existence is worth it because they each have the capacity to love and be loved. To bless and be blessed. To care. To listen. To give. To write and think and create and dream and dance and play and BE.

To me, today, human existence is worth it because I know the Lord. I know that he has the capacity and desire to restore the broken and to pour love and compassion and grace out on us. Human existence is worth it because I am known by name by the creator of the world, and he has given me life and the ability and opportunity to love and individually care for so many people around me--and to forgive me when I sometimes suck at loving and individually caring for those around me.

I know that he sees Claire. I know that he sees her hands full of tears and the pieces of her life and that he loves her and has a plan for how to make her broken world into a stained glass mosaic full of light and color and loveliness.

Human existence is worth it because we have potential. No matter how old or young or broken or ignorant, we have potential.
There is so much more than we can see in our frozen moments of life.


*student name changed to protect privacy

First Year's Stones and Waffles

Marriage year one is in the books. There were so many firsts for me in our love story, but they were mostly seconds for Julius. Of course, every experience is different, but it feels really nice to say that our first anniversary was the first wedding anniversary he's ever had as well.

Our first year, I suppose, was very straight-forward. And, in others, not so straightforward. There's no "normal", though, so I guess we were normal.

We kicked it off with a honeymoon at Galveston beach, which is quiet and quirky and perfect for us. Then a week with my family at the lake.

It felt like I left almost as soon as we got home, however. Texas scooped me up for five straight weeks. In the moment, I really like travel season. Months before I start in with the anxiety and dread. Luckily, last year this manifested in packing up meals to freeze. By the time I left, he had a meal for each and every meal that I'd miss. Needless to say, the freezer was packed. Meanwhile, Julius played tennis, went to work, hung out with his friends, and went to graduate classes. I couldn't help but feel he had more fun than I did.

We had our struggles. Like me coming back from travel season to find the dishes not done for 5 weeks and a stench of a bachelor in every room. This was not aided by the old individualistic patterns that had allowed themselves to reinstate in us during our 5 weeks apart.

It took a while, but we got back into a groove. Meals started reappearing with consistency, the floors and bathrooms, dishes, were cleaned, laundry was washed and folded, roles began to establish in terms of who does what.

Winter sunk in, and with it, the darkness. It's hard to go play and do when the world closes in around you even before you leave the office. We learned hard lessons about togetherness and friendships. How, when your work and class schedules dominate your time, sometimes you have to sacrifice additional fun things with non-spouse friends because, well, you haven't seen your spouse in days.

We learned about grace and immediate honesty, how that generally bodes better than eventual honesty. We learned about unlearning.

Family was new again, as well. His who had been used to him living with them now had to share and relinquish. Mine who is used to me showing up often had to anticipate me less and for shorter periods of time. I experienced what only-child holidays are like, and he learned to cope with what I'm sure felt like repeat scenes from My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

We discovered that we get along best if I drive. He also learned the importance of packing snacks. Always.

Probably hardest was finding the balance between roommate and romance. He was used to coming home and disappearing away to be by himself for hours. I was used to coming home to a happy house of introvert women I loved with all my heart. Even if I was alone in my room, best friends were right outside. Marriage changed both those things. Julius had to learn to communicate with another person when he got home--and that coming home is an essential part of that equation. Meanwhile, I was alone. How does a reclusive introvert with an open office layout day job make friends and engage with others when she leaves work if she comes home to an empty house? How do you not attack your husband with love and a desperate need to connect when he arrives home exhausted and uninterested in connection? Where do those needs find balance?

At the end of the year, two very strong-willed, hot-tempered people found ways to compromise, to learn, and to love one another. We threw stones, we made waffles, we figured it out.

Faith like a Lunchbox

My husband has a new habit of taking everything but the correct lunch. We'll have a full conversation about where the right lunch is and what the right lunch is but, as soon as he gets to work, I'll get a text with the truth of which lunch he actually took.

Last week, he took both his lunch and my lunch instead of the muffins I'd baked him for breakfast. Husband up two lunches and down one breakfast and wife left with no lunch.

Last night, I packed up his lunch and didn't even tell him about the second one hidden in the back, just saying, "Remember, your lunch has the blue lid." And, since blue is his favorite color and the lunch was the only one visible and sitting right at the front of the fridge, I thought we'd be golden.

I actually thought he was joking when he texted me this morning saying he could swear I'd said red push lid.

Allow me to explain. The red lidded lunch had about 4 stale noodles and a drizzle of marinara. It was also buried in the back of the fridge. The blue-lidded lunch had a big, delicious slice of homemade quiche in it.

**When I say stale, I mean, we forgot them in the pot in which they were made on the stove all night and a full work day sometime last week.**

Instead of a healthy well-balanced meal for lunch, he will be jawing his way through his handful of mostly naked penne that is not going to sustain him through his work day and night class.

As I was joking with a coworker about this, I thought about how often God must think the same thing about us:

"Jamie, I prepared and set aside for you this amazing, healthy choice for you. I wanted that for you. Did you take it? No. You went digging around the backside of life and found door number 3 which, I know for a fact, will not satisfy you."

It's so easy to make the right choice, but we get caught up in ourselves at the last second. We think, "this is too simple. I must have misunderstood." We convince ourselves it has to be someone else's, that we should look for something other. We think that we deserve something less, that it's too good for us. We're simply not paying attention.


"Wake up, you sleepyhead city! Wake up, you sleepyhead people! King-Glory is ready to enter."
(Ps 24:7)

May our minds daily be awakened to truth, to God, and to lunch.

Slip into Spandex and Live Your Live

Texting a friend overseas today about the life-crushing "disorder" of perceived self-rejection.

It's a topic currently dominating her life and one I am not unfamiliar with in the least.

My childhood was full of love, but I was not a happy child. In fact, I spent the majority of my first 17 years wallowing in a depressive state I could not escape from. I was utterly convinced everyone hated me, thought I was ugly and stupid and were talking about me. I didn't get invited to the parties and, when I was, I was convinced they invited me because they pitied me.

One of my "life philosophies" is the theory of capacity. I've mentioned it before, and it's not complicated or wise. I just think about it a lot when I'm processing past actions.

At each stage of life, though many choices may be available, I believe that you are only capable of making a select few of those many choices based on your emotional/spiritual/psychological capacity at that time. And, unfortunately, it takes making some "life growing" choices to increase that capacity. Good doesn't always feel good.

When I was 17, I saw a sign advertising a new sport in my high school. The word saber was mentioned. For the first time in my teenage life, I went alone: autonomous action. Not one person in that meeting understood why I was there, as they were all band members, and I had no connection to their world. I joined. The next two years were full of spandex, face-hits from wandering flags, and mockery from classmates that I would be involved in something so absolutely ridiculous. For the first time, though, I did not give one flying crap what they thought. Winter guard made me indescribably happy. There was mockery, but there was not shame.

I felt more comfortable dancing in a blue spandex onesie than I ever had in my own skin. My freedom started to seep into my real life, as I was happy. I was truly happy. Clearly, I was a teenager, so happiness is relative to whatever mood swing was going on that day, but it was a marked difference in personhood. I began to believe good things and behave out of that perception. The last two years of high school were fun.

Sometimes, the solutions to problems come in unconventional solutions. I wasn't in counseling or doing any mental exercises. I was doing something silly that had no direct or obvious "purpose."

The devil doesn't always speak to us like a trenchcoated man trying to sell contraband in a dark alleyway. Sometimes, he helps us "focus". And we focus and focus and focus on the problem until we can't see the solution without somehow spiraling deeper into the problem.

Alleviate. Escape. Breathe. Do things that scare you, that inspire you, that refine you.
Stop trying to force a solution and start letting yourself live your life.

Pooper Scooper

The bathroom is a weird place to think about your brother.

And yet, that's the place mine comes to mind.

Whether it was toting me around with him in the truck to SNAC with the teens after church on Sunday or letting me pal around at Sharpe's while he was working or showing up on Valentine's day with a flower even though he worked ridiculous hours or sneaking me some cash before I left for Belfast or giving me a car for my 16th birthday, my big brother has taken care of me for as long as I can remember.

Maybe it's because he is 14 years older than me, but he's just always taken special care to show not tell love.

I have a different relationship with each of my brothers.

The youngest one and I have always been the most tumultuous, as he went from tormentor to best friend to the adult constantly trying to mentor me. The last part is what turned me back into my original relationship role of thorn-in-side sister. I like to think of myself as the one designed to keep him humble and mindful of his humanity.

It's hard to keep super close to a sibling who lives very far away, but the middle brother and I always enjoy one another. He's got a big, booming personality that keeps people from realizing how soft and squishy he is on the inside.

The oldest is the one I always find myself being the most gentle near, perhaps because he's always been the "safe place."

But growing up is hard. Jobs in different states and a year overseas can't help but make me feel distant. Marriages, babies, preoccupation. The closeness between siblings looks different over time.

Then, two months into my engagement to my husband, we bought Cliffhouse, which turned into a renovation project I honestly just did not anticipate.

It was through this project that I was punched in the chest of what adult sibling and family love looks like.

Weekend after weekend, parents on both sides, friends, and two of my brothers and their families showed up.

We tore up floors, tore down walls, painted, cleaned, disinfected.

At the heart of it all was the bathroom.
We used to call it the hobbit hole; the door wasn't 6 feet tall.
The floor sloped in.
The floor was covered in a strange purple-ish concrete.
The vanity was starting to rot and was covered in mold.
The window was rotting.
The shower head came to my chest.
The door hit the toilet.

Yes, my love for this house was clearly blinding.
And yes, I did intend to leave it like that.

Until Jacob.
I don't know if it was the third or fourth time he smacked his face against the door, but next thing I knew, he was up in my attic inspecting the capacity for expansion.

Exploration turned into confirmation which turned into tearing off the concrete of the floor which turned into a flurry of destruction and revolution.

Firemen took care of removing/replacing my failing floor (without telling me) and moving my toilet (without telling me) to prevent the door situation.

But other than that, my brother became a monster of help and my brothers and parents decided they would gift the project to me as a wedding gift, footing the bill for materials. It was Jacob (and sometimes his sweet neighbor Mike) who were the hands and feet of the labor.

Soon, it wasn't just weekends but each day after work that I would find his big silver truck sitting outside my new house.
That in itself is impressive. The insanity comes if you know about the normalcy of him working 80 hour weeks, waking up at 4 or 5 to get to work early enough to work a full day then drive to Arkansas and work until 10pm or later.

The vanity was torn out, the walls were torn down, the window was removed, the shower was raised, the rotten studs were removed, new studs were built, the roof was raised, the drywall was replaced, the tiles were cut/placed/grouted, the new vanity was purchased and installed, the new mirror was installed, and the window was replaced by one custom made by Jacob.

Each inch of the massive project of that little room is constructed with love.

I was 24 years old, financial independent, steadily employed, and had both my bachelor's and my master's degrees in a 4 year span of time by the time I was 22.

It sounds terrible to say, but I have a point: my family knew I was okay.

They would have taken care of me absolutely if I had been in dire straits, but I was stable and okay.
That's what made the care feel so particularly overwhelming.

Love isn't just reaching out when you know someone needs to be loved.
Love is overflow. It's replacing floors. It's renovating a bathroom. It's showing up when it's inconvenient--so inconvenient--because you want to take care of your daughter, your little sister; you want to, once again, help her transition into yet another new chapter.

When I walk through the rooms of my home, I see the love of my family.
In the sunroom, I see the dresser that once sat in Jacob's room I would raid every morning for snuggles.
In the den, I see the peach couches that sat in my parent's house until this point, I see the television we couldn't have afforded given to us from Jonathan's home, the circuit board my parents-in-law painstakingly traced the brakers of, the laundry machines they gifted us, and the soft, sweet carpet my parents got to replace the rotted predecessor.
In the garage, I see the cabinets my father cleaned the inches of poo out of (a task he's particularly proud of).
In the kitchen, I see the walls my daddy chipped and chipped and chipped the layers of wallpaper off, the floors that are clean and new, the tile my mom learned how to place and replace, the light my dad and brother replaced, and the sink sprayer we were told would never work but magically the boys brought back to life.
In the front room, I see high, lovely curtains with their rods hung by my mother on walls newly painted by my parents, the big chair passed from Jacob to Joey to Jon to me, the couch given to us by Jon again.
The guest room is a testament to mom's ability to paint color-match and wall patch after the house-raising cracked things up and the bed given to us by my grandmother.
Our bedroom with its wall repairs as well and the bed gifted from the other set of grandparents.
And, at the middle of everything, the bathroom.

I don't get to see my family nearly as much as I used to or would like to, but I do come home each evening. And it's hard to feel distant when each room is intrinsically infused with love.

Even Change

I neglected to spend any time reflecting when my 24th birthday came along, but I did at 23.

Today, I turn 25. A whole quarter, the coin and the fraction of a century.

And, while my 24th birthday didn't leave much to mention, my 25th does.

In the past year I:

1. Kicked off the year by getting engaged to the very best person.

2. Together, through a fantastic real estate agent (the husband of a coworker) we bought quite the fixer-upper and embarked on a ridiculous journey with our entire families of getting it to a state of livability. 

3. I finished my second full year of working as an admissions counselor and decided to stay on for a third year. 

4. We got married, surrounded by our very best friends, our families, and waffles. :) 

                           

                                 

5. We moved in together, made it through a particularly long and brutal travel season, continued working on Cliffhouse, spent Thanksgiving with my three brothers, their wives, their six kids, and my parents in Atlanta, Georgia, and spent Christmas with his parents and grandparents. 

It's been an emotional year, a constantly evolving year. 

I deeply loved living with two of my best friends, Sarah and Makayla, but it's such a feeling of peace to have removed division of my spirit that I felt being apart from Julius. 

This year, I made wonderful friends, strengthened my relationships with my coworkers, and had to let go back to her home in Arizona one of the bedrock friendships that I have had in Arkansas. 

This year was the first that I really felt like I had to take true ownership of my adulthood, much more than I ever had before, though others would probably say I had already done that. 

It's been a journey, but I am happy. So, so happy. 

You never know what the next year will hold.