the phone call effect

As I’ve been working on a couple short stories based on prompts I’ve been given by friends, I think my mind has also been reflecting back on a lot of the posts I’ve written in the past several days. Specifically, I’ve been pondering the effect technology has on our relationships in this day and age, since so many of us (myself included) practically treat our phones as an extension of our bodies at this point.

 

At the same time, I’ve been trying to organize my thoughts and divert more energy to these short stories so I can actually get them done (beside the fact that I haven’t written fiction in quite a while and those creative muscles are still a little stiff), but going through my old archives, I discovered this piece talking about relationships and technology that I had written several months ago but for some reason or another had just never put up anywhere. Its style is a little different and a bit harsher than some of my more recent pieces, but I think it’s still relevant, and I definitely still resonate with the original point behind it as well.

 

Side note: The next couple days are going to be packed, so I’m really hoping to churn out those short stories in a timely manner, but I suppose we’ll see.

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the lie of nonexistent intimate friendships (part two)

This is the fifth entry in a series of posts on friendship. To find the others once they’ve been published, find the menu button in the upper right corner of the blog and see “Summer Friendship Series.”

 

Something that I’ve noticed about American relational culture recently, and perhaps especially so with Christian American relational culture, is that we really like to have lines clearly drawn. I see this as the reason why we have phenomena in Christian colleges like DTRs (defining the relationship). There seems to be an increasing neediness to always know what the status of your relationship with another person, and it doesn’t necessarily come from within ourselves. More often than not, it comes as an external question, when we may or may not have been thinking about it.

 

I think most of us have probably found ourselves in a situation, or at least observed a situation in which two people have begun spending significant amounts of time with each other, prompting some or all of their friends to probe them on whether they’re “just friends” or something more than friends. This can be an incredibly awkward or frustrating experience for everyone involved, regardless of whether the two people actually might have feelings for each other and are trying to navigate that or whether they are close friends who enjoy spending a lot of time together.

 

Either way, I think this fascination with needing to define relationships has begun hurting our conceptions of friendship, because along with a desire to know exactly what status a relationship has, there also exists an assumption that the relationship will also fit neatly within the preconceived assumptions of what “just friends” or something more than friends might look like. (That being said, I’ve really grown to hate the term “just friends” as I’ve been learning more about friendship and working through this series, because I’ve come to realize it’s a rather derogatory way to refer to a relationship as beautiful as friendship.) If we really think about it, friendships already tend to exist in the middle ground of a Venn diagram, but our attitudes toward them skew towards trying to keep them cleanly isolated to only their safe extremes on a gradient spectrum and this severely limits our ability to understand and have healthy friendships in my opinion.

 

I’ve really grown to hate the term “just friends,” because I’ve come to realize it’s such a derogatory way to refer to a relationship as beautiful as friendship.

when our words kill friendship (part one)

This is the fourth entry in a series of posts on friendship. To find the others once they’ve been published, find the menu button in the upper right corner of the blog and see “Summer Friendship Series.”

 

As a writer, you could say that I think about words a lot. Part of both the joy and frustration of writing is being able to find just the right word to express exactly the sort of sentiment you want to convey. For the most part, the English language usually does a pretty good job of supplying words that have the proper nuance, but something that I’ve been thinking about recently is how sometimes we don’t have enough words to capture the depth of some things that we consider to be so basic. Friendship is one of those things.

 

In English, our single word ‘friend’ encompasses such a wide range of meanings that other languages might divide into different words in order to convey the proper amount of nuance behind them. I mean, I think it’s a little strange that we use the same word to describe people that we’re connected to on Facebook, many of whom we might not even talk to or interact with on a regular basis, as well as people that we share our souls with and can call late at night to cry with. It seems almost disrespectful to use the same word for both of those kinds of relationships. After all, many people call their spouses or their siblings their best friends, and yet we’ll still use the same word to talk about that person we might’ve shared a class with freshman year of college or high school and haven’t talked to since.

 

That’s one of the things I loved most about being a linguistics major. By at least rudimentarily studying several other languages, you gain a broader understanding of how other people express different ideas across different languages, and the subtle nuances that those untranslatable words and phrases carry tell you quite a bit about how that language or culture thinks about and treats various aspects of life. With friendship, I think the contrast between English and other languages is quite striking.

when your friends strip you down

This is the third entry in a series of posts on friendship. To find the others once they’ve been published, find the menu button in the upper right corner of the blog and see “Summer Friendship Series.”

 

Vulnerability. Intimacy. Authenticity. Those are all pretty popular Christian buzzwords as of late, usually accompanied by an Instagram photo of daybreak from a mountain view or a crashing waterfall in the middle of an evergreen forest with a hipster backpack brand or some sort of “supply company” tagged toward the margins. Cheeky, right?

 

I’m not going to lie. I love a great nature shot or artsy portrait on a curated Instagram feed as much as the next millennial, but I think that perhaps we’ve turned those words into a brand in and of themselves, passing over their actual etymology in favor of a trendy aesthetic. All of a sudden, words like those get commoditized into hashtags and lose their meaning and appeal just as fast as the Billboard Top 40 and cheap gum, the difference being that people still listen to the same overplayed songs and buy $1 gum while we’re quickly losing the ability to actually be vulnerable and authentic.

when marriage has a monopoly on love

This is the second entry in a series of posts on friendship. To find the others once they’ve been published, find the menu button in the upper right corner of the blog and see “Summer Friendship Series.”

 

American society seems to be going through something of a love crisis if you ask me. We’re completely captivated by love, or at least the idea of love. There are hundreds of songs, movies, books, plays, and talk shows, among other things all revolving around the concept of love. I’d wager that it’s probably one of the most commonly talked about things in this entire country. Without our fascination (or perhaps obsession) with love, I would also be willing to bet that the majority of pop musicians and young adult authors would probably be out of work.

 

But at the same time, it appears as if we don’t really know all that much about love despite our insistence on saturating our existences and media with talk of love. According to the American Psychological Association, somewhere between 40-50% of marriages in the United States end in divorce, with subsequent marriages only having higher rates of divorce. For the one relationship that we’ve all been taught and socialized to view as the epitome and encapsulation of love, it’s not doing the best job at upholding the standards that we’ve been spoon fed with love songs and romcoms. And yet, we still hold to these sensationalized stereotypes of love that don’t seem to quite square up with reality. Now, don’t get me wrong. I love a good Taylor Swift album as much as the next (and seeing her in concert is still up there on my bucket list), but I think that all the emphasis that our culture has heaped upon love, specifically romantic, idealistic love, has poisoned and tainted our view of what love really is and how it covers a lot more ground than American pop culture is willing to give it credit for. Instead of giving us a well-rounded, holistic view of what love is, we’ve been offered a distorted version of love with all the rough edges blurred out until it’s been censored to a warm, fuzzy feeling inside that gets us drunk on fairytale delusions and leaves us with false hopes when reality rouses us from our stupor.

sometimes christians surprise me…and i’m a christian too

So I’m not even really sure how I’m supposed to categorize today’s post/reflection. It’s a weird jumble of feelings that are currently swirling around in my head, mostly related to some of the interactions that I’ve had with people the last few weeks, and those interactions have been extremely positive. So, I’m conflicted. Also minor confession: I wrote this post a few weeks ago and forgot to post it. So…I don’t know why I just told you that.

Okay, none of that probably made any sense. That’s just sort of how my brain works, so apologies in advance (…retrospect?). These are some of the things that have been churning around in my head the past few days: since coming out, I’ve gotten basically only positive responses from the people in my life. People have been so supportive, and I’m so thankful for that. Even with the things that I’ve written on here and in the real talk conversations I’ve had with people the responses have been so encouraging. And the weird thing is that I’ve been surprised by all of it.

friendship is a tricky thing for gay Christians

That title isn’t even totally accurate. I could remove the “for gay Christians” part and that title would still be as true as ever, but I also just want to talk about how friendship can be even more inherently complicated for gay Christians. Sometimes it just adds so many more layers of awkward that you wouldn’t think would ever come up or be a problem. Also, contrary to popular belief, I’ve been feeling lately that for the majority of people “being satisfied by friends and family” isn’t a suitable way of coping with a call to singleness (post on what I think about singleness coming in the future, I promise!).

Since most of my posts tend to come with some sort of random disclaimer, the disclaimer for this post is that these are simply reflections on my own emotions as well as the emotions of some of my friends who have discussed this topic with me. If any of these things make sense to you or you’ve felt the same way, awesome! If they don’t, feel free to comment and let me know why, but I mostly want to present a perspective from this side of things, because I think that it’s something that gets talked about a lot, but also doesn’t get talked about a lot at the same time. I’ll explain as we get further.

my story: part one

This post is going to be started by promising, once again, that I will definitely get to answering any of the questions that people have sent me, because I really want to. However, I think that before I do that, it would be beneficial to everyone reading if I told my story of how I came to this place, because it definitely has not been easy. I want to make that abundantly clear. But I also think that it will add another layer of understanding of where I’m coming from and why I decided to start writing about this.

a reintroduction: the who, what, when, where, and why

Wow, it’s been almost a week since I’ve been around here. That’s kinda crazy. Spring break feels like it was barely yesterday when I first put this up publicly and watched God do some crazy things. But life seems to have gotten ahead of me a little bit. As short-ish update: I’ve been sick this whole entire past week (story of my life), so getting by with school and getting healthy again have been my priorities. However, I’ve definitely been keeping track of how many days it’s been since I last wrote anything, and hopefully, I’ll be able to be around about once or twice a week with a new post, God-willing and life-providing in the future.

Anyway, something that I neglected to think about when I initially put this blog out there was the fact that I had already been writing for two months before anyone saw any of it. Thus, I’m sure people have inferred from reading the newest posts what this blog is about and sort of what my stances are, but I thought that a nice little reintroduction post was in order before I get on with talking about some more things. And I promise I will! I definitely have some questions from followers and readers that I’ve been meaning to answer in posts; I just need to wrap my head fully around them and make sure that I’m saying what God wants me to say about those things. So be on the look out for those after this post.

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Again, I just want to thank everyone who visited this blog yesterday for being so overwhelmingly supportive and wonderful. It really means so much more than you think, and I appreciate it so much. God has been so good, and everyone has been really awesome.

That being said, I also received a minor flood of messages and things like that yesterday filled with support and also questions. I may have forgotten to mention that I absolutely love hearing your thoughts and your questions. If there’s anything specific that anyone would want me to talk about, look into, or address, please, please, please feel free to message me, text me, email me, whatever you want.

The whole point of this blog is so that I can share what God has been teaching me, and if you can help God teach me more by asking me hard questions, I’d absolutely love that. As I said in my last short post, everything I write here is for His honor. So, if there are questions, please ask them. I’d love to address them here for the benefit of everyone.

Jesus loves you ❤