a "calling"

I don’t feel complete until I write. And I need to feel complete every day. What I write varies. Sometimes it’s my blog, sometimes it’s my “semi-daily musings” journal, sometimes it’s just emails to someone I’ve met online I’m writing to, and sometimes it’s my 62 pages and counting story of my life in an alternate universe. Which centers around me being loved, by the woman of my dreams, being married and a writer that can make a living off my words. I never called myself a writer. I only ever said I love to write. But one day one of my friends called me a writer, to my face. It was the first time anyone called me “ a writer.” It kind of made me puff my chest up a little, being given that title. I liked it. I always assumed you had to have published your works in some form or write a blog that thousands of people talk about on social media somewhere, or you get paid to review movies or something like that. I haven’t done any of that, and I may never will. I don’t choose to try to make all those things happen. I don’t go to workshops or seminars to “work on my craft.” I love writing and I will always do it. I don’t know if I’d say it was my calling though. All my life I thought my calling was to be a wife and mother. I still feel that that is true. Whether or not it will happen, well I have no idea. I like to think your “calling” means that you are drawn to whatever calls you, and you work hard to reach it. But most importantly, you do reach it. In the end, you will, because it was your calling. You were meant for “it.” Nothing can keep you from your calling. In the end (not the end of your life, but somewhere along the line) you will have reached that place, where you are living the life you were called to live. Not that that life is easy and perfect and happy and rainbows and unicorns all the time, but you still reached it and it feels right and you are at peace knowing you are doing exactly what you are supposed to be doing with your life. I don’t think I’ve reached that yet. I don’t think my calling is to help families and babies with disabilities. It’s my job, it’s even a career, I’d say, but it isn’t my calling. I like it, I may be good at it. The families may be grateful and the babies may light up and smile when they see me, but it’s not what I want to be doing with my life, ultimately, in the big picture of life. Some people’s jobs are their calling. They dedicate way more than 40 hours of their life to it, not because they have to, to keep said job, but because they want to.  They are so passionate about their work and they know that this is what they were put on this earth for. I guess in actuality, we are put on this earth for more than one reason. I guess our “calling” is only part of it. We are put here to love and be loved, to help and be helped. To change people’s lives for the better. I’m confident I’ve done that and will continue to. I don’t think you have to listen to anyone else, but yourself, when figuring out your calling. In fact I think it is better that you don’t. I think we look outwardly too much, trying to find our purpose and what we should be doing. We read stories of brave people doing amazing things and we think- “that’s what I should be doing! I found it!” We read quotes by scholars or winning authors and we say, “they got it! They have the words to spur me on to do what I was meant to do.” I’m not saying you can’t use all these things. I’m just saying I think a true calling comes from deep inside you. I think you might actually be born with it. It was deep in your soul and it gets unlocked at some point. Maybe you just know in general that your calling is to “help people” and along the way you discover what that means, from interactions and experiences in the real world. Some could say, well Christie, you just want to be a mom because it was grounded in you as a very young child to be one someday. Maybe. I honestly can’t remember anyone telling me I “had” to get married and have kids, at least not at a very young age. I definitely felt that as a teen and up. I saw what was “normal” and what all my friends did and what my mom wanted for me, but the basic “I want to be a wife and mother someday” was in me always, from the very beginning. I think I was born with it, and not something I learned. I know I always thought those 2 things went hand in hand, and even though that’s not the case for much of the population today, it still is for me. Besides beyond reasons you can’t control, I wouldn’t willingly have a child on my own. I want a partner to share in all of it with, the good the bad and the ugly. I can’t and don’t want to do it on my own. Not only because it’s extremely hard, but because I want someone there with me to be just as excited as I am that my child took his or her first steps. Friends and family can only muster up so much excitement. The person that has been with you since before that child was even born and every day since then, that’s the person that will be equally invested in that moment and all the other joyful moments, God-willing. It’s funny that in my memories of play, taking care of a baby and teaching it, was always #1 on my playlist. My “husband” was an afterthought. I think he was at work…I don’t really know. He wasn’t talked about, yet I still couldn’t fathom having a baby without one. It was a given in order to make said baby. That was the hardest part to “let go” of, when I was figuring this whole thing out with myself; coming to terms with who I really am deep down. I tiptoe around the words I use, because it’s difficult to explain it, unless you’ve lived it. I didn’t want to let go of this “normal lifestyle” that pretty much every friend I had ever made, currently was living. I wanted a baby half me and half my husband. That’s normal to want that. I also wanted the security and feeling of being taken care of, I thought only a guy could give. And also just that the world wouldn’t notice us at all. We could live so easily anywhere. That was in the first year of my self-realization, soul-searching, whatever you want to call it. I’ve since moved on from that. When you’ve written a 62+ page story that even just thinking about a scene you wrote in it, makes you break out into a huge smile; you just know that the life you’re writing about, with the girl of your dreams, is a reality that you not only want, but need. It’s a reality that is who you are deep down and nothing can change that and no one can change that. People deserve to be happy and loved, sharing their lives together as a married couple, and other people shouldn’t stand in the way of that.

So I think I got my fill of writing for today. I’m feeling completed for the day. I’m feeling hopeful and reassured that my calling is still my calling. It hasn’t changed. It’s okay it hasn’t been fulfilled yet. It will be someday. You got to tell yourself that. And in the meantime, I’ll keep on writing about it…

 

the god-honest truth.

I've been thinking about my 60+ page "story" I've been writing. Yes it's a story, and yes it's fiction, but the "problem" (if there really is one), is that I wish that it wasn't fiction. I can’t really explain it all, nor do I want to in this capacity, but it’s just something I need to do. I need this creative outlet. I need a way to express myself in a way that I can’t do physically, because I literally do not have a single person to do it with. I’m not going to apologize for it, I’m not. This is holding me together (for the most part, minus last night’s breakdown in the car, which came because of a night of all couples. see blog: “my keyboard bottle”). I literally don’t know what to do anymore, but ignore the fact that I desperately need the human physical affection and intimacy I long for, and just write about it instead. That is all I can do. No one ever said life was fair. No one ever said that everyone gets love, physical love. No one ever said that you’ll find someone that cares about you more than anyone else in the universe. I just have to continue to suck it up and continue to get used to it, and continue to accept that this is how it is for me. To be alone without any physical affection of any kind. Maybe not forever, but it is what it is for now. We are all broken people. We all have something big that we struggle with or weighs us down or eats at us or affects us tremendously. I just have to ignore it. There’s nothing else I can do about it. I can’t make anybody want to be with me in that way and I can’t make myself want to be with anyone in that way either. It has to be mutual and it has to come from a deep emotional connection first off, at least for me. I don’t and will never sleep with random strange women I meet on the internet, like some people I know. I’m not going to sleep with a bored and curious housewife or a horny slut girl who’s only message to me on okcupid is “hey babe.” I’m like who the fuck are you? That is never going to be me. Even if I have to be alone for the rest of my life, that just can never be me. I’m sad though. I am. I’m sad that this is where I still am. I mean I feel like a stronger person and I’ve come a really long way, and am really good at being alone and single, but I can still get beaten down at times. I’m still a human woman. I’m not some super powered nun or mother Teresa or someone I don’t consider “normal.” Sorry, but I don’t understand people who say they have no sexual need or longing or desire. Who doesn't want to be touched or held or physically loved? Who doesn't need intimacy and deep connection in that way? That’s not normal to me. Either they are denying what they truly feel deep down, or they are lying about it to sound “high and mighty” or they have autism or aspergers, (which is the same thing now apparently, diagnosis wise). I sometimes wish to not feel this way. I don’t want autism, it’s tough enough with everything else that goes along with it, but I definitely sometimes wish all my desires would just go away. Would just vanish. I mean, if I’m not using them, then what use do they have to me? All they do is get in the way and make me depressed…among other things. All they do is make me sad. There’s this song Sara Bareilles sings, and I don’t know exactly what she meant with the lyrics in reference to her own life, but I know what it means to me. She goes: “I just want you, to take it all away, if it isn’t’ meant for me. I don’t want the easy way, I just want you. They can give me everything, but at the end of the day the only words I’ll say is I just want you.” The first line of the song hints at God, at least that’s what I think. She asks for “…a heart to hold the godlike truth. Give me one good soul I can tell it through. Give me good reason to believe in you and give me strength if you have time. Give me two hands that will hold this up and though you give me no more than just enough, you gave a pair of brown eyes that can call a good bluff and somebody that thinks they shine.” So since I see that line as referencing God creating her and giving her these other parts of herself, I take the chorus as asking God to take it all away, “it” being the parts of her that make up the feelings, the desires, the longings for someone, “if it isn’t meant for me,” she says. Which makes sense. It holds no purpose, without someone to give it all to. *heavy sigh*  But I don’t think it’s how we were created, or at least not most of us. We crave it. Otherwise there wouldn’t be so many unwanted pregnancies out there...

Like so much of what I have to say, I end up concluding that it “is what it is.” This is life. This is it. I won’t go quoting Garden State again, since I did that in a recent post. All we can do is be open and honest with who we are, and be open to new people coming into our life, which I try my best at on that front. I guess the rest will work itself out. I guess. Either it will or it won’t. I don’t really know what to say about that. 8 years feels like a million. Maybe it’s not that long to other people I do not know and have never met, because I don’t know anyone that has gone that long without love; but it is an eternity to me. It is crazy long for being a good portion of your 20s and the beginnings of your 30s, which is when you’re supposed to have girlfriends and boyfriends. It's a really long time. These are my years. This is the time. I can’t wait to have a baby for forever. And I certainly don’t want one in our first few years together. That seems insane to me. I’ve waited too long to not get to enjoy what it’s like, just the two of us, for as long as possible. Babies change everything and are extremely difficult. I work with them every day, I know. Your life is not your own anymore. I want my girl all to myself, for as long as possible. But enough of all that. Let’s move on to bigger and better things…whatever those “things” are.

 

my keyboard bottle

Some people run to the bottle, when they're upset. They drink until they can't remember why they were upset in the first place. Me, I run to the keys, to my purple keyboard attached to my tablet. I run to write. I tried my hardest to be okay as the only single girl in a group of all couples. All 8 or 9 of them. All guy girl pairings. I tried my darnedest to at least hold a conversation with at least a few of the girls. But as the night went on it became harder and harder to hold myself. To just be there. I left a little angry that I didn't get to have a real conversation with my friend with whom I was there for in the first place. I felt like she had had lengthy conversations with every girl there, except me. So there was that. There was also the kiss between a couple and the light petting of hands on arms. Well regardless, I hadn't let the fact that I was the only single girl there get to me till right up until a few minutes before I left. After at least saying bye to the 2 girls I did know there, I got into my car and sped away entirely too fast for that area. I started to scare myself a little bit and did slow it down until the highway. I felt myself boil up deep inside. I felt it coming to the surface, mostly anger. Anger that I didn't get to talk to my friend, anger that I was the only single girl there and it was making me feel incomplete, after all this time being a complete person, all on my own. But mostly anger that I don't have someone to kiss or stroke their hand, at a party. That was really the issue. I felt my anger boil over, with angry tears swelling up in my eyes but not coming out. I finally just screamed in my car as I drove 80 down the highway- WHEN IS IT MY FUCKING TURN!!! It's one thing to hear something in your head, but to hear it out loud..it has such great power. Words said out loud have more power than written ones. I'm not saying written words don't hurt people, I'm just talking about hearing them out loud. There's a different kind of power in them, a real, tangible one.
I was almost shocked to hear myself say it, the tone, the anger behind it, the frustration. I had been doing great, just chugging along and living life. I didn't need anybody. My life is full with all the things I put into it. It's definitely full, throwing my extensive writing I've put into it of late. It held great power, saying it out loud. I don't know whether it was good or bad power, but it was powerful. I found myself yelling it once more WHY ISN'T IT MY FUCKING TURN!!! I think moments after the second one was when I burst into tears. Not the quiet tears, slowly and peaceful and quietly rolling down your face. The heavy sobs of a girl just so done. Just so over pretending that being single is just so fucking fantastic and wonderful. It's not. It never will be. I can make the best of it, I can be happy at times, I can do lots of fun things and have lots of good times. But I can't kiss myself, I can't hold myself, I can't do anything that only whoever you're dating or in love with, can do. I couldn't remember the last time I sobbed like that. The medicine I've been on and got myself taking every day instead of skipping days like I was before, evens me out a ton, and just doesn't allow for breakdowns like that. I can tear up and if something dramatic and shocking happens on a show I'm watching, I will actually cry a little, but not the desperate sobbing of a girl who has had enough. A girl who wonders, who the fuck is this God or who the fuck does the Universe think it is, to leave me alone without deep human touch and companionship and love and intimacy for 8 goddamn years? Like who does "he" think "he" is? (or "she" or "it," I don't really know or care). Or am I really just that unlucky of a person? Well whatever the case, I've had enough. And then I remembered why I don't cry like that, that hard; because I inevitably will throw up or almost throw up. It chokes me out and so it never can last very long, which is a good thing. Crying is good for you, but intense and hard for a long time, probably isn't.
There's no conclusion to this story, there's no lesson to be learned. I calmed down as soon as I held my cat and stroked her fur. At least I get to stroke something, I guess. I ran for my tablet, sat on my porch and started typing all this, while my cat is enjoying outdoor night time, which I hardly let her have, because I don't want to hunt her down in the dark. But she hangs out in the general front yard vicinity and front yard adjacent, when I'm on the porch, so that's a good thing at least.
I don't think anything is going to change. I don't think that I am going to change. This is who I am. I am someone that needs the physical touch of another human being that loves me and thinks I am the most special person they've ever met, and chooses me to spend their days with. For life. For the ups and the downs, they choose me. I'm never going to not need that. I don't understand why I still haven't found anyone. I don't know where this person is, that I'm supposed to end up with. None of it makes any sense to me, but it is what it is and there's nothing I can do about it. I'm already doing or have done everything imaginable. Well, except order a mail order bride, of course. But that's ridiculous. But it is what it is. Things will go back to the way they were before. I don't' hang out in groups of couples every single night (thank God). My life will return to how it was before, filling it with things that lift me up and that I love to do and that make me happy. I probably won't be down long. Writing is already helping tremendously. Mollie helps. My medicine helps. My TV shows and movies help. And I do not use them as a distraction or escape. I thoroughly enjoy watching them and thinking about them. I do not watch reality crap. I watch well-written shows that entertain, and provoke thought and emotion. You wouldn't say listening to music or reading books is an escape or unhealthy. I think all of those things are a wonderful means to feel good, challenge you to think or feel something. They all are creative, inspiring, or just make you laugh. Music has the most impact, I think. I don't know what I would do without it.
So in the words of Ingrid Michelson- "all that I know is I'm breathing, now. All I can do is keep breathing. All we can do is keep breathing, now."

cheers to connecting!

It only takes one chance meeting with one person, to restore your faith in humanity again. To make you believe in love. Or in this case, tonight, to make you believe it IS possible to connect with someone again, to make a new friend again. You go so long feeling alone, feeling left out, feeling forgotten, feeling unimportant to the people and friends you once were “special” or important to, that you completely lose hope that it will ever happen again with someone new. You forget that it happened before. That it had to have happened before or you wouldn’t have those other friends that you hardly ever see anymore. It totally IS possible and CAN happen again. I’m not one of those really social people that just chats up everybody and is “friends” with everyone or thinks that they are. Actually they probably are. All those people would consider that person their friend, what the actual outgoing person thinks about who truly is their friend, well I don’t know because I’m not that outgoing person. But I kinda was tonight. When you’re standing there talking to 3 other woman and the conversation is interesting to you, then you join in, right? I felt like between me and this other girl who I already think is a new friend after just one evening together, we were doing the most talking out of the 4 of us. I wasn’t the shy one this time. This rarely happens. I read people so well, like TOO well, so often I see boredom or uninterest in their eyes, I stop talking, I close up, I shut down. I shut up and let the type A person take over, the outgoing one, the joke teller, the scene stealer, the one with all the stories. But when I see the other 3 woman staring back at me with interest on their faces about what I’m saying and are commenting back about what I said, man I took that and ran with it. And I didn’t look back. I was interesting and funny and had stories and experiences to share. I wasn’t doing all the talking, which is not the way it should ever be anyway. It was well balanced, at least 2 out of 4…sometimes 3. I made sure I looked at each girl, even the one that hardly talked, because I AM that girl, most of the time, and I hate being left out. Thank God we were in a home and not a bar. There is no way I would’ve been heard by a single person, if we were anywhere with loud drunk people and music. I know that for a fact. I was even standing on the other side of an island, and I still was heard. This is a big deal people. I’m used to not being heard, I’m either not loud enough or not interesting enough, I don’t know. I’ve literally stopped talking before because I said things and nobody responded to them. Well that wasn’t this night. This night was awesome. I’m even going to brunch tomorrow with some of the same girls and some new ones. I think I made a new friend tonight. I could just tell. Really connecting with someone and feeling heard and responded to, with interest…well that’s not something I experience very often. It either takes a lot for me to find that, or I’m too picky. Either way, it felt really good. It made me happy. It made me feel connected to real people in the world again. And not just the ones I create in my writing. And that is always a good thing ;o)

                                                                                                                    

Scrapbook of life

I bumped into the shelf by my bedroom door as I came in lugging a 20 lb container of laundry detergent, causing multiple items to fall to the floor. As I cussed over it (as I do when I'm alone), I bent down to pick everything up and saw my large journal, a "scrapbook of emotions" if you will, toppled over on the shelf. I opened up the first page which read in handwritten cursive pen, "the rest is still unwritten..." The line was stolen from Natasha Bedingfield's hit song of that summer- "Unwritten," but it was written there by a person who I don't think I've ever been more intensely close to in my life. She was my best friend at the time, in Colorado. I told her things I had never told anyone else in my life. She was as goofy as me, if not more, she had a huge heart and was one of the most talented artists, I had seen. She gave the blank, bound scrapbook to me for my 25th birthday, along with a party she threw for me. There are still blue silly strings remnants, that are raised and you can feel them, on the inside of the first page, which I thought was an accident from the party, but maybe she did it to add some color to the blank white page, the artist that she is, that wouldn't surprise me. I wrote inside, along with the date (June 17, 2006) and lyrics straight out of the song; "All I know is that it (the journal) will represent my life and the things that I'm going through, and how I feel at the time. It should be interesting- a creative expression of my angst...we shall see what it will become! It shall be fun!" Why I was talking like it was the medieval times, I don't know. But it definitely has served, and is serving that very purpose, to this very day.
I've made collages on every page, with real photos, and cut out words and pictures from magazines, and things I've written in, describing what I was feeling or experiencing, mostly about a certain person, or just singleness in general. It's not all bad things, either. There are several pages of good memories with really good friends, even a boyfriend. But then there's ones post-boyfriend too. I'm glad I did a page for the best friend that gave it to me. I didn't realize till later that I had done her page upside down, accidentally. Nor did I know at the time that this would mean something. Just a couple months after my heart was broken by the guy that said he wanted to marry me and would never leave me, like my first boyfriend in college did, this girl, this best friend, broke it again, by walking away from our friendship. I remember bawling on the floor to her, I didn't understand what was happening. Any attempts to reach her were met with indifference.  My world had been turned upside down by losing the 2 people I had been closest too, within a couple months of each other. I ended up moving back to Texas at the end of that year, for many reasons. I heard from a mutual friend years later that she had been suffering from mental illness and had passed away. My heart stopped when I heard this. I couldn't fully comprehend what she was saying. I was broken for her, for all that she had been going through, for her family, her loved ones that were left behind...I think I thought that maybe one day, we'd be friends again, in some capacity. But that wasn't going to happen. I do take comfort that all of us that knew her and loved her will be with her again in heaven one day. I think at this point in my life, she would be the first person I would seek out when I got there, head straight for her and hug her and tell her that I've missed her. That I understood, and that I loved her.
"The rest is still unwritten..." That is true. Maybe God knows it all, but I don't think he's written it all, in the sense that he is directing us, we are the actors reading lines in the play he wrote. We have some control in what we write for our lives, where we go or what we do, where we live, who we decide to trust and let into our lives and who we fight for to stay there as well. But we also don't have control over a lot of things, what is placed in our bodies, in our minds, without our consent. What is forced upon us by people or the environment...stuff just happens. It's both scary and exciting that we don't know what's going to happen next. I could meet the woman of my dreams tomorrow or I could win the lottery...that is if I played. I don't need to spell out the bad things that can happen...we all know them.
I know in my heart that I'm doing the best that I can, with what's been giving to me, both internally and externally. And that's really all that you can do.
I'm so extremely grateful that she gave me this big, white, line-less, spiral bound journal scrapbook. I have used it well. I read over it, less lately than in years past, but seeing it again today and opening it and realizing the last time I filled it's pages was last summer; it just reminded me I need to do another page or 2. This book is ME. It's about people and experiences and emotions. It's how I feel about myself; it's filled with encouraging words to remind myself that I am a pretty awesome person and to keep carrying on. It needs a new page. And I'm sure I will find what I need, when the time is right...both for the pages in the book, and for my life.