fame & fortune

Want to hear a confession of mine?

There are so many days when I feel like so many of the things I do aren’t worth it anymore, that so much of it doesn’t have a point because it’s not “making an impact,” or maybe just not in the way I might expect it to. There are days when I wonder why I still keep up this blog, why I still write my famously long (and sometimes dramatically pensive) captions on my Instagram account, or why I have my separate Facebook page for my blogging and writing. There are days why I wonder why I still write at all, why I did NaNoWriMo when the chances of actually being a published novelist aren’t always the highest. And these are thoughts that most creatives probably have once in a while.

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hazy light & thankfulness

Something about foggy mornings filled with gray light always seems to pull me out of myself, in the best way possible. Still not sure exactly why. Maybe it’s the way everything seems to stand still and you’re more cognizant of all the little sights, smells, and sounds around you that might normally get lost in the chaos of a typical American day. Or maybe it’s the atmosphere around you that seems to whisper that it’s finally okay to let all your muscles relax and just breathe and be for once, taking a moment to slow down in our world that’s normally always running at a million miles an hour. Whatever it is, these slow, tranquil mornings always seem to return a little more of the perspective I’ve been missing throughout the rest of the week. And maybe we all need a little more of that.

setting sail from ephesus

I feel like this is probably a super millennial thing to say, but the transition to the adult world has been pretty jarring over the past few weeks. My college student body isn’t used to getting up at 6am to make it to work at 7:45am and then going to bed early to do it all over again, and my mind isn’t accustomed to all the new routines and mental switches I have to make during the day. All of that being said, it hasn’t been too rough yet, but I think one of the hardest things for me was also one of the more cliche things you could probably say about leaving college and starting to work full time: I honestly miss Bethel so much, and not necessarily specific friends or specific people at Bethel (though I definitely do miss all my friends and everything SO much; don’t get that mixed up, haha). But it’s more the sense that Bethel really did become my second home over the course of my three years there and it was so bittersweet to graduate and leave. I actually applied to a couple jobs at Bethel as graduation was coming up just to see if I could stick around a little longer, and as my job search got longer and more tedious over the summer, I actually started to get upset about the fact that I wouldn’t be going back (now that fall has rolled around, it’s more like tears and a lot of emotions, lol).

 

Currently, I work in the office at a charter school in St. Paul, and even though I do really like it, there’s still a large part of my heart and soul that misses Bethel and aches to be back there this fall, coupled with the fact that so many of my closest friends are still seniors there. At the same time, I wholeheartedly believe that wherever we happen to find ourselves at any given moment is exactly where God wants us to be for that season of life. That’s something that was hard for me to accept, being in a place where I maybe didn’t want to be, and something that I’m still working on and through during this period of so much change and adaptation to a different world, a different schedule, a different mindset, and a different group of people that I find myself spending the majority of my days with now. But I still cling to the promise that God never has us walk through specific corridors of life in vain, and right now, as much as I might not like it, I know that where I am is exactly where He wants me to be.

 

writing challenge reflections

Today marks the end of my 14-day writing challenge (though this post might not actually end up making it online until day 15, since it’s currently storming and the internet and things don’t like that too much), and I can honestly say that working through these two weeks of writing definitely was a challenge, but it was also incredibly growing from a creative standpoint as well, which I’m thankful for. I originally decided to start this project because my creative reserves were basically empty, and I had recently had a good conversation revolving around the idea that sometimes simply stoking the fire of whatever you might be struggling with might be exactly what you need. So, instead of taking some time to think and brainstorm for creative purposes, I chose to force myself to write something, anything, for two weeks instead, to see what I could come up with, and it was surprisingly effective.

inhale, exhale (you’re okay)

Sometimes, I think fiction is one of the hardest styles and genres of writing to want to excel at. Maybe it’s just me, but I think the inability to churn out piece after piece of fiction (since I’ve been finding that even short stories are challenging to mass produce, for lack of a better term) makes it seem almost like the loftiest of writing goals. Unlike poetry, nonfiction, or other types of essays, it takes time to develop the voice, style, characters, flow, and all the other elements that go into crafting quality fiction, which I think frequently prevents writers from being able to showcase their fiction ability regularly. It seems to come down to actually publishing a popular novel or getting a short story published in a good literary mag, and that can be discouraging for a lot of writers I feel like.

 

This has been something that’s run through my head a lot as of late, especially since I’ve mentioned that I’ve been doing a good deal of storyboarding and outlining for fiction the past few days, and it almost feels like all of that work has nothing to show for itself, since I haven’t actually written anything yet, just conceptualized ideas and thought through them.

 

At any rate, that’s some of my internal process I’ve been going through while trying to write fiction the past couple days. So, today, I’m publishing another piece that I wrote a little while back. Even reading through it now, it sort of seems all over the place, but that makes a little sense since it was originally born out of a sort of literary pep talk I was trying to give myself at the time.

have we become the pharisees?

Currently doing some storyboarding for some more fiction I’m working on, but I discovered another piece hidden away in the archives that I had never published (seems like this is a semi-frequent occurrence). As I’m transitioning back to writing some fiction, I’ve been finding that it’s taking me a lot longer to figure out how I want to write things and what kinds of ideas I want to use, but maybe that’s more normal than I’m giving myself credit for.

With this piece, the primary idea behind it was conceived through a series of discussions I had at my Bible study where we talked about what it means to actually be a Christian in the 21st century, in 2016 and how we can sometimes read our own biases into the parables and stories we read in the Bible. Oftentimes, this manifests as us, as mostly privileged, American Christians, identifying more closely with the oppressed people groups described in the Bible rather than with the oppressors. However, something that we realized over the course of our discussion and Bible study was that while the Israelites and the entire nation of Israel have typically been the minority ethnic group and minority religion in the majority of eras, that’s not really the case for most Westernized or American Christians. What we decided is that more often than not, our actual lived realities align more with those of the oppressing Pharisees than with those of the oppressed Israelites. Interesting food for thought for sure.

roses

It’s funny to think about some of the things that inspire certain pieces and how long it can take to actually complete one even after the original idea has come to you. This piece was inspired by an older show that I watched when I was younger. One of the characters has a rose motif, and part of her personality combined with some ambient creative energy to give me the initial image that I used to conceptualize this piece, throwing around some abstract ideas critiquing how we tend to think about love, specifically romantic love, and how roses have traditionally been one of its icons. I suppose in some sense, that means that this post vaguely fits into my summer friendship series, but just tangentially.

 

One last thought: I’m definitely not a poet, and I would’ve always been hesitant to use poetry as a literary medium until recently, but I originally tried to put this piece through the filter of a couple different written mediums and it just turned out better this way, which was just so strange to me. I would’ve much rather done this as a short story or as nonfiction, but it came out in this form, so I decided to run with it. I just think that’s so crazy sometimes, how your writing takes on a little bit of its own sentience and guides you as you’re shaping it.

clouds

Here’s to continuing to write something every day in order to keep that fire going. Today’s poetry edition comes from some reflections I made while driving home through a thunderstorm from seeing a friend I hadn’t seen in a while. It’s not very long, and poetry has never really been my thing, but there’s a first time for everything, right?

—

clouds

Do you think the clouds feel heavy

When they carry seas in their bellies,

Waiting to unburden themselves in a downpour,

Or a slow drizzle when they can’t bear the weight

Of a thousand tears pulled down by gravity?

//

Do you think the clouds feel lost or lonely,

Drifting along the atmospheric tides,

As perpetual nomads with no rest,

Traveling by night and by day,

Not knowing where they’ll go or arrive?

//

Do you think the clouds would tell their stories

Of the endless journeys they’ve made,

All the lands and peoples they’ve seen,

And all the waters they’ve weathered and crossed,

If we only just asked them to?

//

Do you think we’d even believe their words

If they told us everywhere they’d been,

Places we humans can only dream of,

Untold, unseen, unexplored, and unimaginable?

Do you ever think about the clouds?

middles

In a lot of ways, I think middles can be some of the hardest places to find yourself in. That’s not necessarily because they’re the most stressful or the most arduous places to be in, but perhaps more because of the perspective you’re afforded from the vantage point of middles. From the middle of most things, you can usually still see a shred of the beginning, where you started, and at the same time, you can probably start to see part of the end, where you’ll end. Regardless of whether the ends or beginnings are the points where things get better or worse, being able to see things from the middle can instantly conjure feelings of comparison and contrast between those two endpoints. If the beginning was good, it can be discouraging or difficult to see an end that doesn’t seem quite as shimmery, or even harder to see one that’s much worse before things start to get better. Similarly, if the beginning was trying, it can be easy to look at the end and all the good things, or perhaps even the minor improvements, that lie there and forget about all the work and all the trials you’ve overcome to reach the middleground where you’re standing now. Instead, having the perspective of the midway point can create feelings of longing for the end and bypassing the rest of the work you have to do to get there. Either way, middles can be just as difficult, if not more so sometimes, than the beginnings or ends of things.

 

how I finally learned what love is

The air was cool for Minnesota summer, and a fire crackled and snapped over wet logs in the fire pit in front of me. I was about to tell a story I had only told once before, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that the words still felt almost fake as they churned inside of me, bringing a new sensation of reality to the term word vomit. It just didn’t feel right. In a way, it felt selfish, what I was about to do. At a cursory glance, everything about my life seemed to be just as it should, if not better, but I was about to confess that for the majority of my life I had felt like I had to earn love and wasn’t quite sure what it actually meant to be loved.

 

I mean, honestly, I’m 19 years old, have a college diploma hanging on my bedroom wall, my family is great to me and always has been, my friends are some of the best you could ask for, and I have everything I need, among other things, but I couldn’t escape the voice of God trying to convince me, for the umpteenth time in however many years, that there was no possible way for anyone to ever earn someone else’s love. But along with that, He also seemed to whisper that the reason was that you didn’t have to. His love, as well as anyone else’s authentic love, doesn’t need to be earned. That seems like such a simple, basic concept, but it’s one I’m honestly still processing and learning to be true.