Beyond Avoidance

This one comes from the Reverb Prompt for December 20th:

What should you have done this year but didn’t because you were too scared, worried, unsure, busy or otherwise deterred from doing?

This question is easily answered.  I should have found a full time job.  Why haven't I found one yet?  I have asked myself this many times and I have lied to myself over and over, rather than telling myself the truth.  I have been telling myself that it's the economy; it's a bad time to looking for a job; there are no jobs out there to be had; etc.

The truth:  I'm scared.  I am scared because I don't know if I am cut out for the social work field.  My internship with the Lawndale Christian Health Center helped to solidify my fears.  I constantly felt out of place, even after I had been there seven months.  I keep telling myself that there has to be some kind of social work job out there that would fit with my personality, but I haven't really looked for one.  I have applied for a few jobs here and there, but my job search in general has been half-hearted.

I know I say this over and over, but it is the dominant theme in my life right now--I'm stuck.  I am not happy with my life the way it is, but I am still afraid to get myself out.  Despite the fact that living at home provides some level of comfort, I am not happy here.  I was for a little while, but it has slowly been getting worse and especially in the last few months.  My mom is worried and stressed and when she gets like this she takes her anger and frustration out on the people around her, specifically me.  My father and my brother get some of it, but most of it lands on me.  I think I am a fairly patient person, but I am at my breaking point with this.  I do a lot for her here, and I honestly don't know how she is going to function if I am not here, but I do not feel appreciated.  Most of the time I feel unwelcome and unwanted in my own home.

I am convinced that taking the brunt of my mother's anxiety and anger over the last five years has re-triggered my depression.  I think that part of the reason I have been so stuck is that I am seriously depressed.  I wish I could get some kind of medication, some Prozac or something, to give me a boost to help me get out of this emotional hole, but unfortunately without medical insurance that is not going to happen.  So I'll have to do this the old-fashioned way, the way I did last time I was depressed back in high school--sheer will power.  Thankfully my depression is not as bad as it was back then.

My goals for next year, my New Year's resolution for 2011, are:

1.  Get a full time job
2.  Move out of my parent's house

That's it.  I'm keeping it short and sweet this year.  I'm leaving out my usual goals, such as losing weight, exercising more, and finding a boyfriend.  Those are important to me too, but I have not been successful with those in previous years so I am taking a new route this year.  I think these two goals are the most important for me right now and would make me the most happy in the new year.

I hope that if I can manage to get away from all the negative energy in this house I will be so much happier.  Once I am reasonably happy with my life, then hopefully the other things I want (such as losing weight and finding Mr. Right) will come.

Community

The second prompt that I like from Reverb 10 is from December 7th: Where have you discovered community, online or otherwise, in 2010?  What community would you like to join, create or more deeply connect with in 2011?

The community that I have been the most involved with in 2010 is my young adult group at my church.  We call ourselves TNT, which stands for Twenties 'N Thirties.  I did not discover TNT in 2010, we got started a little over five years ago, but it has been a big part of my life this past year.  Over the last five years the group has been growing and changing.  There have been a lot of marriages and serious dating relationships that have come together as a result of TNT.  We even have a new baby in our midst, and another one on the way.

Though all this has been wonderful to witness, the fact that I only witness it has been a bit disappointing.  I am not the only one who is still single in the group, but it still bothers me a bit.  There is no one in the group that I am interested in, however, so I don't think I will become one of the TNT couples.

Other than that one little issue, I have loved the group.  Through TNT I have made some good Christian friends, people I actually hang out with outside of church.  It is such a blessing to have friends, my own age, who are practicing Christians.  As much as I love my other non-Christian friends, and I do love them a lot, sometimes it is just so much easier to be around my friends from church.  One of the biggest differences, and one that I appreciate the most, is that the topic of sex rarely, if ever, comes up.  With my other friends, our conversations almost always end up on this topic.  We end up talking about what new guy so-and-so slept with this week, or they start pestering someone else about whether she and her boyfriend have "done it" yet, and so on.

I don't mind these conversations once in a while, because I want my friends to share their lives with me, but we talk about it all the time.  Every time we get together as a group the topic comes up as some point in the evening.  Eventually it gets old for me because I have nothing to contribute to that conversation.  But it's more than that.  It is the attitude associate with the sex conversation.  It is never stated, and I know my friends would never say this to me, but I get the impression from the conversation that if you are not having sex then your life must be deficient in some way.  Even though one of my friends is married, sex is never discussed as something intimate to share with a significant other.  I have very different views on sex than they do, but I don't feel comfortable bringing my thoughts into the conversation because I know they are not valued.  I am fairly certain that some of them would look down on my opinion and see it as naive wishful thinking that only someone who has never experienced sex would have, rather than a legitimate, and equally valuable, alternative view of sex.

With my church friends, there is an unspoken, but shared belief about sex.  With them it is not a bad thing to abstain from sex, there is no pressure to hurry up and get some, and no one is pestering new couples if they have done it yet.  Conversation just feels easier because I am not seen as the cute, goodie-goodie  token Christian in the group.  With friends from church we are all on the same page.

I don't mean to speak badly of my non-Christian friends because they have been tremendous friends to me and we have a long history together, much longer than any of my Christian friends.  Most of the time we all get along great, but sometimes it becomes painfully obvious to me that there is a big difference between us.  I wish with all my heart, and I pray constantly, that my non-Christian friends would come to know Christ.  I do not think that I have been a great witness to them over the years, but I hope I have made some impression, however small.

Writing

I have been looking through the Reverb 10 prompts for December and I don't think I will use them all.  There are a couple I like, so I will post about the first one today and the second tomorrow.

The first one I like is from December 2nd: What do you do each day that doesn't contribute to your writing -- and can you eliminate it?

This is a tough one for me because the answer is immediately obvious and it is something that I could give up, but really don't want to.  The answer is television.  Sadly I watch a lot of television.  I have been trying to cut down the number of shows I follow.  When a show ends I try not to add another one, but this has not been working out all that well.  For example, when Lost ended, I got hooked on Dexter shortly after.

Before I started my final year of grad school in the summer of 2009, I took a serious look at the shows I was following because I knew my last year was going to be very busy.  I dropped a number of shows that I felt I had low interest in.  I don't really miss them, so even though I have graduated from my Masters program, I have not started watching them again.

The struggle I face is that watching TV takes up a lot of time that I could be using more productively for many things, not just writing.  TV is also not essential to my life, so theoretically I could eliminate it completely, but I really really don't want to.  I enjoy following all these stories and I get wrapped up in them, even though they are not real.

What I need to do is simply be more aggressive about slimming down the list of shows I follow.  There is at least one that comes to mind, maybe two, that I could get ride of.  Maybe at the end of this season I will take them off my list.  I need to find something more productive to fill the void that television fills right now, but I have no idea what that could be.  I am not too optimistic that I will find anything.

Escapism

As I was working on my last post, and reflecting on my old LiveJournal, I decided to go back and read some of my old posts.  I went back to the very beginning and started reading.  My first entry was May 24th, 2005, just weeks after graduating from college.  I am up to July 20th, 2007 now.  It was very enlightening to say the least.  There were so many things that I had forgotten about.  When I first started that blog the final season of Queer as Folk was playing and I was almost entirely focused on each episode as they came out.  I had forgotten about that.  Queer as Folk has sort of fallen off my radar for the most part.  Strangely enough I have had a hankering lately to re-watch the show.  I have turned my "obsessive" focus completely to Harry Potter now.

I have never really tried to understand why I become so completely focused on a TV show or a book series until recently.  I simply saw it as my form of entertainment.  However, I know very few people my age who are so engrossed made-up, fantasy stories.  I started to see my obsessions as a form of escapism.  It is my way to get away from the stressors of everyday life and envelope myself in someone else's world and worry about their problems for a change.  I thought this was a good thing.  Without it, I told myself, I would collapse from anxiety and stress.  The more I think about it, however, the more I think I use this form of escapism to avoid my problems entirely.  Rather than just taking a little time away then coming back refreshed and ready to deal with the problems in my life, I disassociate myself entirely and fill my head with meaningless knowledge about Harry Potter or Queer as Folk.

As an introvert, I live in my head.  I also suffer from crippling indecision.  So when I am faced with a problem, my head becomes so full of negative and anxiety producing thoughts that I feel like I might suffocate.  I need to get away, except how does one get away from their own head?  By filling it with other, happier thoughts, such as Harry Potter or Queer as Folk.  This as worked quite well for me over the years.  The problem now is that I have gotten so good at escaping from troubling thoughts using distractions that I have separated myself from them altogether.

So how do I find the right balance?  I feel like Goldilocks.  This level of distraction is going too far and this level of distraction is not enough, except that unlike Goldilocks I can't find the level of distraction that is just right.  Enough that I don't lose my mind, but not so much that I avoid dealing with any of my problems.  I have no idea how to find that balance.

I think finding balance in my life needs to be one of my priorities.  I can't move forward until I have this taken care of.  I have written before, in other private journals, that I feel stuck in my life right now and I don't know how to get moving again.  This might be why, because I have lost my focus.  But it still doesn't explain how to un-stick myself.

I think I need to pray more and ask God for guidance and discernment.  I have been trying to reconnect with God over the last few months, ever since the Harvest Crusade.  I started out well, but have since tapered off again.  I signed up to get Greg Laurie’s daily devotion emails and so far I have been reading them every day.  I am not sure if they have been a huge help, but at least it is something.

I pray that God would show me my next step or at least help me find my next step.

A new phase in life...a new blog to match!

I used to keep a blog of sorts on Livejournal.  Some of you may have even followed me at one point.  If you have visited my Livejournal recently (I would be shocked if you have), then you will have noticed that I have not posted anything in a year and a half.  For a while I was posting more frequently.  In 2007 I was posting something almost everyday.  The reason 2007 had so many posts was because I used my Livejournal as a means to vent my frustration.  I was in a very unhappy job situation at the time, among other things, and I needed an outlet; Livejournal provided that for me.  Thankfully I am no longer working at that job.  I left in the fall of 2007, around the time I started grad school, and about the same time my journal posts dropped off significantly.  I no longer needed a place to vent, and I no longer had endless free time sitting at desk twiddling my thumbs.  Grad school gave me purpose and focus, something I was desperate for.

Here we are three years later and I have now graduated from grad school with my MSW.  So why am I starting another blog?  The reason is because I am once again in a similar situation to the one I was in three years ago.  It is not the same, only similar.  It is different because I am not working in a job that I hate.  In fact, I love the work I do.  It is similar because I am once again feeling ambivalent about my life and I am filled with a whole new set of doubts and fears.

So why didn't I just start up with my old blog where I left off?  Two reasons.  The first is kind of superficial.  I feel like Livejournal is past its prime.  Many of my friends are no longer using their Livejournal accounts and some have deleted their journals altogether.  Secondly, and more importantly, I feel like I needed a fresh start.  I don't want to go back to an old journal, filled with old problems.  I am at a new place in my life and I wanted a new blog to reflect that.

I am not yet sure what I am going to use this blog for.  I have a couple ideas, but I'm still thinking about it.  I don't want to use it to simple complain about my life, which is what my old journal was mainly used for.  I think if you put too much negativity out into the world, then that is all you are going to get back.  Does that mean I won't ever complain on this blog?  Certainly not!  But I will try to keep it to a minimum.  In the interim, I might try to use Reverb 10 for inspiration.  I got the idea from my wonderful friend Chrysti on her blog (I miss you, and I hope you are enjoying your new life in a new country!).  I am a couple days behind, but no worries.  I can post a few at once if I need to.

Feel free to follow me on this journey.  I hope that I can be more productive this time around.