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…