righteous frustration

It's difficult to separate things that I love to do from the things that I do well; one of the things that I love is doing things well. I feel pretty swell with every pat on the back, kind of like a dog (what an upsetting analogy), but have I grown accustomed to this satisfaction as the best that there is? Have I forgotten what it's like to feel the thrill of achieving something that's truly important to me?

It's difficult to re-evaluate every day what it is that I want and then compare it to what I have and what I could conceivably have. It's utterly exhausting, but I think it's the only way. Righteous frustration with where I am and where I am not is the fuel that can propel me toward my actual best case scenario.

The question is: What is my actual best case scenario? Am I living it? If not, is it even achievable at this point in my life? And finally, if it is within my grasp, of what do I need to let go in order to reach it?

Guilt is not becoming.

This post is the first post belonging to a synchroblogging project in which a small group of bloggers have agreed to write on the same topic regularly. (We don't really have any rules, so I believe I'm allowed to discuss the synchroblog within the synchroblog. If not, let the synchroblogods strike me now.)

Our first topic is guilt.

For days I sorted through possible post topics related to guilt - mostly stories I could tell, because stories are the best kinds of posts. There was a problem - I couldn't think of a story involving guilt that I really wanted to write about. Writing about something is kind of like agreeing to go on a date with it. Sure, the experience may not last long, but it could be quite uncomfortable.

I wasn't willing to go on a date with guilt.

I consider myself to be a very practical person. I'm not entirely sure whether or not others would agree. I can also be a very silly person, but don't believe these two things to be mutually exclusive. I define practical as being toward an intended end. I am silly toward the end of having joy and then gratitude. Therefore, my silliness is quite practical.

There are certain things that, when I set them next to my particular brand of practicality, I find impossible to embrace. One of these things is guilt. Guilt serves no practical purpose.

Remorse, sure, that's helpful. That's a feeling that can help me make a good decision next time, help me make things right. It works together with empathy and reconciliation, I think, to unite people, even in painful times. Guilt, on the other hand, only alienates people. It stops people from loving themselves and prevents them from building relationships. Unbound guilt could well be a death sentence to joy and any meaningful social interaction.

I don't have the statistics in front of me, but I would guess that guilt is number one killer of Christians, who, by definition, aspire to be godlike. It's like a diet, or anything else we try to stick to for our own good - once you start to stray, the guilt starts to eat you, and sooner or later, most people just fold completely to avoid it.

In an attempt to stay alive, I decided long ago that guilt was not for me. I wasn't made for it and it is not becoming.

And that is why I didn't want to go on a date with guilt. It makes me nervous.

Fellow synchroblogger posts:

passionately pensive

Word Shepherd

nightsbrightdays

I wish I could sing

One of my earliest memories is of singing with my dad. He taught me to sing "I Will" by the Beatles. I stood by him, not quite his height, even as he sat at our keyboard. He pointed out my lyrics with one hand if I lost my way, while the other perpetuated the bass so the song could go on.

The song ends on a note that's both higher than the rest, and not quite intuitive. I had a hard time landing right on it. I was only 9 or so. Not wanting to disappoint my dad, who was so talented and happy to teach me, I recorded myself singing those last notes on my Talk Boy (made popular by Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone 2) and listened to it in bed, in the dark before I fell asleep. I tried to practice quietly, but more than once my late-night rehearsals would received the cease and desist order from one of my parents in the next room.

As I got older, and after many performances for family and church-members, I came to think of myself as quite the little singer. The enthusiasm that follows the performance of a small (er than average) blond girl known and loved by everyone in the room is often more than the performance warrants. I didn't know this.

It wasn't until my early teenage years that things began to change. My oldest brother, home from college, was telling me about how he'd picked up the bass and wanted to start a band. I asked if I could sing in the band. He told me that they would need someone with a more mature voice. I shrugged. I was young then. When I was older, of course, he's change his tune.

Then began a painful tradition. I began to sing with the family band. Every time I sang, though, my very supportive and well-intentioned mother would motion for me to bring the microphone closer to my face. Then, she would gesture to anyone near the PA head to turn my microphone up. After the song was done, she'd approach the stage and explain that no one could hear me. Someone would explain to her that I was turned up as high as could be. The next song would start and she would look at me with her eyes wide and her mouth open - exaggerated facial expressions that meant I should sing louder.

I couldn't sing any louder.

My mother wasn't the only one, either. There were other perplexed faces - furrowed brows of those trying to make out what it was that my mouth was doing behind the microphone. Apparently, as you grow older, as a singer, different things are expected of you, like a louder, stronger voice. I don't know where mine was, but no one seemed to believe that I wasn't hiding it. Why would I hide it? If a louder voice would stop the wide eyes that meant I was doing something wrong, I would have given anything for it.

By the time I went to high school, I had accepted that I really wasn't very good at singing after all. It was difficult to accept because I loved it so much. I may have stopped altogether - I certainly wanted to at times - if music weren't so inescapable in the DeConto household. We had a band. We were called upon at most family gatherings to perform.

This sounds like a sad story, but as I think about it, it was ultimately kind of liberating. To do something that you love to do with the belief that you're not in any way exceptional kind of frees you to enjoy it in a different way.

Like I said, I never really stopped singing. When I went off to college, I began to sing more. I learned to play the guitar. The family band started up again a couple of years later and I entered it with a different, more casual attitude. Funny thing, though, the more I sang and the more I performed, the better I became. Now, I think I love it more than ever, and have reclaimed it as an important part of who I am.

The downside of having experienced those years of resignation is that I may never really believe that I'm in any way exceptional (though it's so much fun for me now, I really don't care if I am or not). The upside, which, believe it or not, I find more valuable than the ability to think I'm awesome, is that I have come to attribute any success I have to confidence and experience, which are things in which anyone can invest. Now, when people say to me "I wish I could sing," I can say back to them, without hesitation, "You probably can."

anxiety doesn't make me a better person

A quick glance to the sidebar here (if you're reading on blogger, that is) will tell you that I haven't written in months. I've been feeling strangely inadequate lately, specifically in the area of writing. I'm not sure why that has stopped me from posting here. We all know that blogging is not something reserved for the writing elite. No one required a writing sample when I logged into blogger for the first time. What, then, is the issue?

Today, the madness needed to stop. I still feel nervous and so have begun by discussing the thing closest to the tips of my fingers - this curious writing block.

At the risk of making connections where there are none, I offer (to myself) a shrugging explanation.

I have lately been reflecting on this small world I set about putting together almost three years ago. (No, I don't mean that I created the world three years ago.) I have pieced together, with jobs and people and churches and homes, a rather full life for my graduated self and it is now beginning to feel something like complete. Without the distraction of certain difficulties that have been overcome, my worry, forced out, spills into new arenas.

And these new arenas are filled with questions relating to the role I have played in the small worlds of others, while building my own. I've spent the past few years decided who I am and trying to discover who some other people are, with some career and home-building filling in the gaps. Now, the questions, which are not not new, begin to rise into a place to be disregarded with more difficulty. What impact have I made? How are these people and places different for having known me? I've spent time writing here about the fingerprints left on me, and lately I've been wondering about my own fingerprints. Where are they? Did I mean to leave them there? Do they appear as I expected? Can anyone see them? This, I believe, is why I have hesitated to write. Perhaps, in looking for my life's consequences, I have put considerable pressure on myself to write regarding things of consequence.

The more I write about this, the more I am deciding that it is fruitless to do so. I can't imagine that Mother Theresa spent much time worrying about what impact she was having. (She certainly didn't blog about it.) No, she just did what she saw in front of her to do without vanity or much self-consideration.

So, there we have it. I can't change my impact by thinking about it and so, there should be less whine-ging (whine-blogging) and more doing of things, or at least the same amount of doing of things. Moving forward with confidence that, truly, all I can do is what I can do, and anxiety doesn't make me a better person.

Thomas Merton and tequila

I have decided to start writing with capital letters because I recently had a conversation with an excellent fellow blogger and friend (http://wordshepherd.com/) that brought to light how seriously I do not take my blog entries. That might not be fair to say. I do take them seriously, but I try not to put too much pressure on myself, or else I wont post anything. The more I believe a post needs to be perfect, the less likely I am to sit down and write it. So, I try to have a somewhat careless approach. Also, I would be lying if I didn't admit that, along with the increased frequency of posting, the careless approach also helps me to avoid disappointment when a piece is not met with the enthusiasm that I had envisioned for it. Avoid a little, anyway.

My new offering to the serious blogging world is capital letters. That, and I am going to try to post more often than I do. It's good for me.

I feel better already.

Tonight, I'd like to speak to you about my life in terms of a Venn diagram.

Throughout my life, I've had the privilege of building relationships with a great variety of people. This was almost entirely due to my constantly changing educational environment: Christian, secular, private, public, boarding, tiny, big, at home, and abroad are all words that describe my education at one time or another. I don't regret this. If you ever see my mother, tell her that I said this. I think she is afraid that I hold some grudge about having been to 8 different schools before high school. I don't. It was, for the most part, fun. If being the new kid is an art, then in my prime, I was Botticelli. Except, without the naked women. That would have been inappropriate. I became pretty good at reading people, discerning what they wanted, what they valued, interpreting reactions, etc. (These skills would later serve me well in customer service-type jobs.)

What does all of this have to do whth a Venn diagram? Well, because I learned how to make the outsider-insider transition at an early age, and with all sorts of circles, I have always found myself drawn to different groups at once, able to see the merit of multiple social codes/sets of values. And right along with these many people have come ideas and interests, as varied and conflicting as the people by whom they are presented. Be it over tequila shots or a Thomas Merton piece, I have found stimulation and growth in expected and unexpected places. For the most part, this is great. I find myself with many friends and even more acquaintances.

And now you're asking yourself "Well then, what's the problem?" Of course there's a problem, or I wouldn't be writing about this. And, further more, I have yet to explain the Venn diagram connection, even though I began this last paragraph in a way that would lead one to believe that an explanation was coming. (In my defense, I thought it was.)

Here it is: I feel like the section in the middle - the oddly-shaped piece that is shared by both circles. This piece represents the common ground. That's all well and good, but what identity does that piece have beyond the fact that it holds the common elements? It has nothing of it's own, and it doesn't really belong wholly to either circle. If it went to a party in one circle, it would belong, sure, but would always stick out at least a little bit.

Like Popeye said, I am who I yam, and I don't want to change it. But, those little pieces of me that don't fit, wherever I am, the ones that always want to be somewhere else, the ones that can make dating and building strong friendships hard, the ones that I'm certain other people always notice, they sometimes make me melancholy.

playing baseball using the rules for chess

one of the most valuable pieces of insight that has ever been given to me was offered by, adorably enough, my mother. i was in high school and our family was experiencing some *ahem* relational turbulence. it was very painful. what she told me was that it was okay not to know what to say, how to feel, or what to do, because the situation in which we found ourselves was one that we were never intended to face. we weren't built to hurt one another.

since then, this pearl has continued to find it's way into my thinking and even, on occasion, out of my mouth for someone else.

i think that it's easy for people who follow a particular teaching or set of teachings to get very caught up in applying principles to situations inappropriately. and then, it's kind of like trying to play baseball using the rules for chess. it just doesn't work.

for example, many people believe that abortion is wrong, and so they blow up abortion clinics and kill doctors who perform them. woah. i don't know about you, but i'm having a hard time finding the connection between abortion being wrong and destruction and murder being right. the passion for one cause grows so large that it spills over, clouding judgement.

i will now introduce the "what now?" concept. let's say you find yourself in a situation that you don't believe you were designed to handle. there's no passage in the Bible that begins: "when your spouse leaves you..." what now? well, in the Bible, along with all of the verses about premarital sex, there are other instructions: love. grace. compassion. forgiveness. justice. it's okay to not know how to respond to situations that are upsetting, but when in doubt, apply these principles and you can't go wrong.

like a married dude at a night club

i went to church twice today. that's right. twice in one day. no need to tell me you're impressed. i already know.

even though i was at church last week, for some reason it felt like a long time away. the feeling i get when i go to church for the first time in a little while is kind of like the feeling i used to get in college when i pulled up to my parents' house, or entered the city of manchester. it's a feeling of homecoming, a feeling of familiarity, the absence of needing to prove myself or explain myself. it doesn't have to be dramatic, but it certainly is pleasant.

it was while singing a song tonight that an interesting analogy popped into my head. (i like those.) the refrain of the song spoke of freedom. now, here i am, feeling all homey and singing about freedom, when my mind drifts to a night club. don't ask me, i'm often just a spectator in my own head. i began to think about how my being in my own life, is like a married dude at a night club.

the married dude is at this night club, and he may be very participative - having a few drinks and doing the robot, but his goal is largely different than that of most other men there. other men may be anxious about trying to meet someone to date, or even just take home, but the married dude is free to just take everything in and enjoy himself, knowing that he has already found a permanent version of what everyone else is looking for. as the night wears on, the other men may become more anxious about leaving alone (as some of you women may have noticed, men are much more bold as closing time approaches...), but our married dude is as loose as a goose.

this is how i feel. i live my life. i love my life. i participate in the world around me. however, i have no cause for anxiety, because i've found what so many others spend their whole lives looking for: purpose, and the confidence that comes with being unconditionally loved by the One who created me carefully.

happy sabbath.