I have been thinking about that time right before you go to sleep when you’re just laying there in the dark, alone with your thoughts.  This time does not exist for me.  I work until midnight, I come home and enjoy some alone time with Netflix, and then I fall asleep at about two in the morning or whenever my head happens to hit the pillow.  It is rare that I am conscious of a single thought before it is suddenly morning.

I didn’t start thinking about that time before sleep until the problem with my foot (which, it turns out, is a stress fracture) stopped me from walking everywhere.  As I was already quite aware, that is where I do all of my thinking.  I get most of my ideas while walking to work, listening to David Gray.

I spent a lot of my senior year of college driving.  Between home, school, and two jobs, I was always on one side of town and needing to be on another.  I hated it, but then when I moved here months later and was suddenly in a situation where everywhere I needed to be was no more than two minutes away, I missed that time I had to think before arriving at my destination.  It seemed I was always in class, having only been awake for a few minutes.

Early on in my life as an absolute crazy person, when I had just started working a million hours in addition to all of my school work, but had not yet become good at it, I walked around looking homeless and feeling half asleep (it was a strange time very well-documented on this blog).  By the end of the week, it was all I could do to keep my head up.  I was always running from one place to another, and if not for all of those quiet hours at night in the library, I probably would have gone crazy from lack of time to think about anything other than where I was going next.

Even when I had nearly mastered being a crazy person, when I started wearing real outfits again and stopped trying to pull off the messy bun as a cute hairstyle, I still suffered some effects of having no time to reflect.  In part due to the circumstance and in part because I had no time to ugly cry when I needed to or take a night off to drink wine and read a book, my emotions were heightened and I took to walking everywhere as a way to deal with myself.

I have a lot of feelings, but I am a super calm person, and that has only been double extra true lately.  Everything is suspiciously quiet and I don’t even know what to write in my journal, because not much has changed since the last time I wrote.  Over the weekend, I did think to say that at least half of the joy I get from life is in reflecting on it and writing about it later, but maybe I have the balance off right now.  For once, there is too much time to reflect and not enough to reflect on.

So I have been thinking about that time right before you fall asleep, and something about it seems so appealing.  I imagine this moment of clarity, the kind you can only have in the dark when everyone you know is asleep, and how it could change everything.  I am very big on single moments changing everything, especially when things have been the same for too long.

Then it happened last night that for once I didn’t fall right to sleep.  Instead I found myself awake at four in the morning, staring at the clock.  I tried every way to trick myself into falling asleep, and then I thought to finally capitalize on this moment, and instead of peace and a clear mind, I found my heart was beating quickly and my head was foggy, and I didn’t know anything more in the dark then I know when I am surrounded by people, and when I woke up the next morning, nothing was different but I felt dread in my stomach.

More than usual, I feel the need to admit that I did not write this post with any direction in mind.  It was really an exercise in seeing whether I could pull a bunch of different things, vaguely associated in my mind, together into something coherent.  But here at the end, the apparent conclusion is that you can place a lot of value on quiet moments of reflection, and you can try to manufacture them in meditation or long walks or the moment before you fall asleep, but more often they will surprise you.  And just when everything was starting to seem so suspiciously quiet!

Dana Gould is one of my favorite comedians.  He was on Marc Maron’s podcast a while ago, talking about the time he had an anxiety attack on stage.  He said, “Fortunately, I’m not that smart, so I could never outwit myself . . . in avoiding dealing with my shit . . . you know a lot of people who are too clever for their own good and they never hit the wall.”

I think about this all the time.  I am intuitive and incredibly stubborn, which means that I rarely believe anyone’s lies except my own.  Especially when I’m feeling anxious or sad, my mind just spins and spins, trying to calm down and see things clearly.  My perspective is too limited to do much more than glimpse reality, so I tell myself all kinds of things.  Whatever I need to hear.

I spend a lot of time talking myself out of feeling the way I do.   I don’t know where the line is between dealing with your problems constructively and completely undermining them by denying that they are really problems.  I’d like to think my self-talk is constructive, but I fear that more often it is dismissive.

Writing fiction taught me something about this.  I was writing this story, and I found myself constantly trying to downplay the drama, because I have trouble with conflict.  At a certain point, I realized my character was not clever enough to see the wall, and the story could not move forward until she hit it.

Some people are very good at saying a lot without ever really saying anything at all.  They make smart observations about other people and don’t realize they’re talking about themselves.  A personal blog can be a place where you confront yourself or it can be a place where you say so much that you make yourself feel like you’re doing the work you’re really avoiding.

I’m good at being introspective.  I’m good at writing about my feelings.  I am less good at talking about them.  I only turn to other people after I’ve thought myself into a circle that I can’t get out of and then I’m like, “Here’s how I feel and here are the seven ways I justify feeling the way I do.”  This is how I make you realize I’ve thought about this more than you can imagine, so you’ll probably have nothing to add.  I’m hoping you’ll just pat me on the head and admire how self-aware I am.

I’m not out to fool anyone but myself and I am not even aware I’m doing that until a friend gives me that look that says, “Slow down, crazy.”  I don’t need any brilliant insight that cuts straight to the heart of it all and points to what I’ve been missing.  I just need that look that implies that there’s no reason I should be doing back flips to justify feeling the way I do. You can’t always avoid the walls.

Those of us at WBWV (We Blog, We Vlog) use Penguin Awareness Day as a chance to vlog about an arduous journey we will be undertaking in the year to come.  In preparation for my vlog this year, I watched my video from last year. 2011 was not at all what I expected, but I spoke in vague enough terms that it almost sounded like I had some idea of what was coming.

A year ago, I was finishing coursework for my PhD and working two jobs (for a total of 55 hours a week).  I had just come to the end of a 14-month journey of getting myself out of credit card debt, and after working like a crazy person for all of that time, I was ready to slow down.

As difficult as it was to get myself out of debt.  As little sleep as I got.  And as many sacrifices as I had to make.  I loved that time.  I rocked those 15-hour work days.  I continued to do really well in school.  I even managed to do my hair every day and maintain two blogs.  I just kept getting better and better at doing more and more.  I was kind of amazed at myself and I didn’t mind the way it impressed other people.

I’m a perfectionist with an impostor complex, so I can’t even call myself a workaholic without thinking, “Well, someone sure thinks highly of herself!”  But the facts are that I’ve done really well in school since sixth grade, and at 28 have never not been a student working toward a degree. I have had a job since I was legally permitted to and have always worked way more than any of my friends.  The longest amount of time I have been unemployed in the last 11 years was a month in the Summer of 2008, and while I was searching for a job that July, I finished a 90,000 word novel.  In the last six years, I have almost always worked more than one job, and for the last three years that has meant working more than full time while being a full time grad student.

I don’t resent or regret any of this hard work, because it was all self-motivated.  It’s just that I was very aware that my self-worth was completely wrapped up in proving how hard I could work and if anyone so much as vaguely suggested that I wasn’t working as hard as I could be, it made me defensive and I would react by working harder.

There were some side effects (anxiety), but I was almost alarmed at how easy it seemed to just keep going a million miles an hour.  I decided to slow down less because I needed to and more because I worried that if I didn’t jump off the speeding train now, then I never would.  I said in my video that 2011 would be about learning how to do less even if doing more would sound great and look awesome on my CV.

So I got off the train.  Not all that gracefully.  I held on too long looking for the perfect place to land and then when I finally did let go, I hit the ground and kept rolling.  The challenge was not in doing less, but in doing less without losing myself.  I was nervous about all the time I’d have to spend with myself if I stripped away so many of the distractions.  I was worried that when I finally had the time to do the things I wanted to do, I’d fall apart under the weight of my own expectations.  I felt like the best version of myself, and I was scared that slowing down would me sliding backwards.

I know from experience that these concerns were all valid.  I think what saved me this time was that I’d worked so hard in 2010 to get out of debt that I no longer had anything to prove, to myself or anyone else.  I was satisfied knowing that I could continue to work that hard, but I didn’t have to anymore.  I felt free of my own ridiculously high expectations.  I was ready for something different.

Of course when I ran into a super ambitious classmate of mine and she said it takes everyone at least a semester to adjust to being done with coursework, I thought to myself, “Well, I can beat that.”  But when it turned out I was exactly like everyone else, I didn’t take it badly.  I’m in good company.

With this new level of self-assuredness, I will say that I think maybe I got awesomer this year.  I know I got happier.  It’s probably all the sleep I have time for now.  And I really don’t miss people looking at me like I’m crazy when I tell them all the things I’m doing, though I did get a lot of joy out of that.

I have this very simple narrative in my mind about how one accomplishes goals.  You make up your mind to do it, then you start, then you kick some ass, then you high five everyone, and then you carry on feeling pretty damn good about yourself.

Well, I’m a fairly ambitious person and also madly goal-obsessed, and in my experience it’s more like decide what you want to do, then get overwhelmed with what to do next, then try and find that things are difficult, then don’t give up but maybe flounder for a while, then question whether you are making any progress at all, then the slow fade, and then discover months later that you kind of did end up doing what you meant to but there were no high fives and you missed the moment when you were supposed to feel awesome about yourself.

Despite the evidence, I insist that I can change my life in an instant.  It seems that I can actually change my life, but it happens on a schedule that does not work for a crazy impatient person like me.  This is especially true when it comes to feelings.  I had some experience last year with bitterness, jealousy, and self-doubt.  I could feel them eating away at me and so I got very good at talking myself out of them, but when I woke up in the morning, they were there in my stomach filling me with dread.

I know I’m never going to have the patience to approach change with any kind of perspective like, “Hey, this may take a while.”  And that’s probably for the best.  I think running at things full speed, ready to put in all the hard work, only to get tangled and grow uncertain in all the messy details, is more effective than playing it cool.  I admire my own irrational optimism.

Because I do change.  I have let go of bitterness and crippling self-doubt, and maybe I would have reached this same destination with time alone, but I doubt it.  There is still power in trying really hard.  So often it looks like failure, but then I realize weeks and months later that success just didn’t look the way I imagined it.

The simple narrative is the one that motivates me to jump out of bed in the morning, but I am developing an appreciation for the slow but meaningful reality of change.  I just wouldn’t mind if it hurried up.

I’ve had it in my mind for more than a year that I am really ready to move.  I’ve been in California for five and a half years now, and I have grown to love it way more than I ever expected to, but I’m ready to go somewhere new.

That seemed perfectly reasonable. But in the Fall, what was reasonable became something else.  Let’s call it unreasonable.  This place started to suffocate me and getting out became urgent.  So urgent that I was projecting my own feelings onto everyone else, thinking “how does anyone stay anywhere for more than a couple years?”

And that’s when I started to question my motivations, because there are some problems that putting yourself in a new location will solve, but you’re still going to be the same person, living the same kind of life.  I wasn’t trying to escape myself–I actually kind of like being me these days–but I was ready to take off to anywhere to solve a problem that would only follow me.

I think the reality was that I had grown bored with my life, which strikes me as both a simple and terrifying problem.  Most of the time I’m trying to figure out how to do everything at once, but sometimes I find myself not wanting to do anything at all.  I’m not talking about a lazy Sunday on the couch, but a loss of meaning and purpose.

I’ve always hidden myself from thoughts like these and buried them under piles of distraction.  I know a lot of answers to the questions I am asking myself, but I am hesitant to take the obvious steps. When your world has gotten too small, then you have to make it bigger, but everything is so comfortable here and does this mean I have to talk to people I don’t already know?

I was thinking a lot of thoughts about staying where I am, and then it seemed that every movie I watched was set in LA, and it was like I had to be reminded that this is an interesting place, and even if I plan to leave sooner and not later, there is a lot here that have left to do.  I’ve never been to Griffith Observatory, I want to see San Diego, the last time I hiked the big mountain behind me was four years ago, I could waste many more hours at Manhattan Beach, and the people responsible for the comedy podcasts I have been obsessed with for years put on cheap shows all the time and I never go!

I have a new attitude about staying here.

This time of year always reminds me of my first Christmas after moving away to college.  I came home to find that home didn’t feel like home anymore.  That loss made me incredibly anxious about creating some kind of future for myself that was certain.  But the reality was that I had no idea what to do with my life.

I considered everything.  I talked to everyone.  I panicked and panicked and panicked.  I was strangely jealous of my favorite musicians and writers who all seemed to know from birth what they wanted to do.  I thought that if I just had that information for myself, then everything would be easy.  Hard work was something I knew how to do. I just needed a direction.

I figured out pieces of it along the way.  After considering almost every option, I finally decided my junior year to stop being an idiot and just major in English like I should have known I’d do from the beginning.  After wrestling for years with my more practical side, I finally realized it made no practical sense to study anything but what I was most passionate about.

That same year I took one required theology class and I knew immediately that I would never be able to walk away from those questions, so I might as well pursue them seriously.   It happened that for all the angst and as much work as I put into figuring this all out, the answer was: do the thing you’ve always done and also the thing you never saw coming.

So there I was at 21 and I had it all figured out!  Just kidding.  I spent the following four years (for a total of at least seven years) in a state of almost constant doubt and anxiety about my decisions and where I was going.  What a privilege it is to be overwhelmed with possibility.  I can’t say I handled it well, but I took it seriously.  I considered my happiness to be my own responsibility.

Everything is so obvious, but it took so much hard work to get here. I criticize myself for being too careful and not taking enough risks, but maybe I should give myself more credit for never giving up. The clarity I have now–not just about what I should be doing, but what I shouldn’t be doing–was worth all of that.  It feels pretty damn nice.

But, of course, it’s the beginning and not the end.  The thing about knowing what you want is that then you have to actually go get it.  And it turns out that’s the hardest part.  That’s where I am now and have been for quite a while.  This is a new kind of overwhelming.  The kind where you can’t quite see your way into the life you have imagined.

Here’s what I need to do: sit at a desk and focus.  Here’s what I find myself thinking about instead: doing anything else, especially if it includes big risk and possibly fire.   Finish your degree, Ashley, and write everything.

This is not a matter of getting myself to do the things I think I should be doing.  It’s about being disciplined in doing the things I want to be doing.  Because they make me happy.  So I don’t have a real conclusion, because this is something I’ve written about several times and yet it remains a struggle.  By its nature, I think it always will be.  But maybe I have found a theme for 2012.

2011 by the month: January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, and November. 

When I was a senior in college, I worked in the writing center of a university that was not my own.  My training involved sitting in on a lot of sessions and reading a lot of books about writing and tutoring.  Most of what I know about grammar, I learned that year while I was simultaneously studying German, taking a seminar on the English language, and helping other people with their writing.  There’s a reason I never used semicolons before 2005.

I will never forget reading in one of the tutoring books about fake light bulb moments.  If a light bulb moment is when you suddenly understand something, then a fake light bulb moment is when you pretend to finally understand something.  Say for instance a really nice (I used to be nicer) 21 year old is trying to explain why a dependent clauses is not a sentence and you have no idea what she’s talking about, but either you want her to think you get it or you just want her to move on, so you’re like, “Ohhhh!  I understand.”

It is important to understand fake light bulb moments so that you can spot them.  If someone is only pretending to understand what you’re teaching, then you are not doing a great job of teaching.  The problem is that then you start noticing them in your personal life.  I can be intense about the things that matter to me, and sometimes I notice people agreeing with me just to please me or possibly to get me to be quiet.

But that is not really what this post is about.  I want to talk about my own fake light bulb moments.  I think because I am obsessively introspective (good spin: thoughtful; bad spin: self-involved), I have some huge realization about every ten minutes.

Despite the fact that I am in the academic field that comes along with the least amount of certainty, I have a hard time tolerating uncertainty in my non-academic life.  I can leave the question of the existence of God unresolved, but are we on good terms or not, because real drama makes me sick to my stomach. And here’s how much tolerance I have for people being upset with me: zero.

When you combine introspection with this need for resolution, you get a person who is constantly making up her mind about the way things are only to realize all the time that she is wrong and life doesn’t really work like that.  That might deter someone else, but not me.  I am particularly prone to these life-changing realizations while in movie theaters and on planes.  That’s right, those places where I have plenty of time to think, but am not burdened with the ability to actually do anything about my life.

Of course I am constantly driving myself crazy making premature decisions only to have everything go the exact way I did not predict, but I guess there are things about yourself you just have to accept.  It turns out I do not control the future with my mind.

As for these light bulb moments that result in little change, well, I keep having them.  And all I can say is that I feel like I’m ready for something big.  Maybe that’s only because my life has calmed down to a pace that I do not find adequately overwhelming.  I don’t know the difference between quiet productive and quiet apathetic, but I’m working it out.

I could say that I don’t often experience jealousy and it would almost feel true.  It certainly is true that I don’t experience it in the same way that I often hear it talked about.  When I open facebook to see another friend is engaged or having a baby or has been accepted into an awesome grad program,  I share in their happiness and don’t think much about what their accomplishments say about my life.  I always have this feeling that what I want is different.

I was thinking all of this several months ago, but I didn’t go as far as to pat myself on the back, because I had the sense that I experience jealousy in different ways.  I just couldn’t name them. And then Amy linked to a series of posts by Helen Jane on some of the unfortunate feelings experienced by bloggers.  “Healing from Painful Comparison” was the one that articulated my particular brand of jealousy.

It involves coping with jealousy by being dismissive of the people you really envy.

It’s like I try to convince myself I’m not jealous by deciding that whatever I am jealous of is really not that awesome and certainly not worth my time.  Too obvious. Not clever enough. No risks taken.  Somehow it’s easier for this person, because they’re outgoing.  They have so much time to study, because they don’t work full time.  They can dedicate all of their time to this, because they don’t have these other interests.  And a million other untrue and increasingly awful thoughts.

I never express any of these things, because even when I’m not self-aware enough to realize jealousy is my motivation, I do know that my criticism has no place outside of my head.  I mean, that is not the person I want to appear to be.  But, also, it’s not the person I want to actually be.  When someone does something awesome, I want to acknowledge that awesomeness without becoming defensive.  I want the work of other people to inspire me because it is great and not because it makes me feel like I have to prove myself.  I want to be all full of love and good feelings for everyone and not this sometimes dismissive, defensive, petty negativity.

I have been thinking about all of this for quite a while and I cannot say I have any great insight into how to get over jealousy.  I am all about taking breaks from people and things when I need to, but I do not want to cut myself off from people who could be great sources of inspiration for me.  It feels like giving into the pettiness when I would really rather rise above.

Mostly I just try to recognize jealousy for what it is and correct it when I can.  I realize that all of my negative feelings toward other people are a reflection of negative feelings I have about myself.  When I dismiss them, I dismiss myself too.  I can work on myself and hope that changes the way I think about other people, but I can also change the way I think about other people and hope that changes the way I think about myself.

I recently listened (again) to this interview with Patton Oswalt where he talks about taking delight in the work of other  comedians, in laughing at their jokes and letting their work inspire his own.  I like that approach so much better than any effort to be unaffected or create in a vacuum.   I could cut myself off from sources of jealousy or I could go running at them for bear hugs.

I would tell a heroic story of how I got this scar on my foot, but most of the time I forget it’s there.  There was pain¹, there were some trips to the doctor, there was surgery, there were crutches, there was another minor surgery to remove the screw placed in my foot during the first surgery², ten years passed, and here we are!  Or maybe I got tangled in barbed wire while saving puppies from certain death–you decide!

The scar is clearly visible, but I am so used to seeing it that I don’t really see it anymore.  I have only been thinking about it lately, because after years of occasional and very mild pain in the other foot, it has begun to bother me again, and tonight it hurts so much that it’s hard to think about anything else.  It is this kind of radiating pain that does not quit.

This post is not about how much my foot hurts, so I’m going to stop talking about that now (unless you’re my mom, the nurse–expect a call from me, DZ).  The pain just reminds me of the scar, and though the scar has very little meaning for me (different from most scars, I’d assume), I keep thinking about the fact that I’ve been carrying it with me for 10 years now.

Unlike that other major reminder that 10 years have passed (High School Reunion), this one is less about reflecting on who I was 10 years ago (me at 17: it’s a boring story), and more about thinking of my own history and how I have internalized the passage of time.

I am a person who spends most of her present preoccupied with the future.  Studying theology has really changed the way I think about the past and made it seem more dynamic and more influential than I realized before, but I often feel alienated from my own past.  I remember having surgery, I remember Lisa putting up with my grumpiness, I remember my PE teacher giving me the nickname Cripple, but I feel like such a different person.  I feel like there should be more continuity between my life then and my life now, but I barely recognize that person.

I spend a lot of my time thinking that this makes me weird–that other people do not feel this way–but there is nothing in my past that should make this a unique experience.  I look much the same as I always have.  I have most of the same interests.  Nothing traumatic happened.  I never even dyed my hair purple and took off for Germany–next year!

I think that being a person and maintaining a cohesive sense of identity over decades is just a really strange thing.  Strong elements of my personality (intuition, sensitivity, imagination) have persisted, but I have become this person I never would have imagined.  Not because there are any gaps in my story, but because I could have gone so many different directions.  I can look back and tell a fairly simple story (I probably will one day), but I remember all the time I had no idea what I was doing, all the decisions I made on a whim, and all the mistakes that were truly mistakes, but are now impossible to regret, because they took me in directions I would not have found otherwise.

Studying theology made me change the way I look at the past, but blogging has done much more to force me out of the abstract and into the actual details of my life.  Though I often feel removed from my past, I find myself writing posts where I try to put my experiences now into the context of the whole mass of experiences that have made up my life.

I like the way my history resists being reduced to a simple narrative, but I will continue trying to tell the story anyway.  So much of life falls away–people, memories, opportunities–but some things persist.  Maybe they aren’t even the most important things, but they’re enough to construct this mostly-truthful history that determines the person you are and shapes the person you are becoming and grounds you right here on Earth, where it might be 11:12 pm and regardless of how many words you put together, your foot still really hurts.

1. I have bunions on both of my feet. Possibly not what you think, but googling is dangerous (really scary pictures).  Basically one bone is out of line and it pushes another into the wrong position, and there is no need to fix it unless it causes pain, but in my case it does.
2. I don’t know why they gave it to me or why I kept it, but I have the screw.

I’m not sure how to say this, but I really like being me.  And I’m good at it too.  Actually, the best!

When you’re a perfectionist with an impostor complex, life is full of possibility and disappointment.  You may be thinking that life is full of possibility and disappointment for everyone, and you would be right, but when all you want is to feel authentic and you think that the only way to feel authentic is to be perfect, then every single possibility is full of disappointment.

You mourn the ones you missed and think of what might have been.  You mourn the ones you took, because it meant missing the others, and no matter how hard you work, you never meet your own ridiculously high expectations.  Worst of all, you never get to celebrate an achievement, because you fell short of expectations and, anyway, there are so many more things left to accomplish.

I want to pull back and say this is all exaggeration, but I have been doing that for a long time.  Even as things have changed, I’ve denied that perfectionism really screwed things up for me.  I am embarrassed that I was not smart enough to see what it was really doing.  It could have been far worse, but as it happened, it just really got in the way of my happiness and made it harder for me to get close to other people.

There is no deciding not to be a perfectionist and even knowing you have an impostor complex does not stop every irrational feeling of inauthenticity, but really slowly over time, I came to realize that I had it all backwards.  Trying to be perfect was not getting me closer to authenticity; it was only making it seem more impossible.  I kept trying and failing and every so often, I would fail so completely that I would just give up for a while.  That’s when I was happiest.

To be clear, I did not give up on school or work or any of the things that really mattered to me.  I just gave up trying to be this perfect person I had in my mind.  I let myself relax for a while.  The happiness I felt then is the same happiness I feel now, but it was indicative of failure, and so after a while, I would always try again to be perfect.

I’m not sure what it took to finally see my corrupted thinking for what it really was, but letting go of perfectionism has been a process.  I realized that it was a coping mechanism for me and that’s how it had always managed to perpetuate itself.   It created a lot of disappointment, but it was also my way of dealing with that disappointment.  More than anything, this is what I still struggle with.

Disappointment and rejection hurt so much more when you have to just accept them, instead of viewing them only in the context of how you will remake yourself so that you never experience such disappointment again.  Accepting yourself sounds like such an easy alternative, but that means taking full responsibility for things instead of always thinking, “That wasn’t really me.  I’m working on being a better person.”  Perfectionism offers the perfect excuse to never be in the moment.

I am not free of any of this kind of thinking, but it certainly does not have the hold on me that it used to.  I have come to realize that I am pretty awesome.  I can always think of a million ways I could be better, but I like myself as I am right now.  I take delight in the things that I love.  I have fun in the moment.  I’m not scared of being known.  Things just keep getting better.

A thing I never understood about myself until I learned I was an INFJ, was how I could have a creative brain, but live that out so practically.  My thoughts swim and yet I am obsessively efficient.  I am a dreamer, but also really focused.  I am highly sensitive, which means I could easily be overwhelmed by sensory data, but I am good at seeing right to the heart of things.

I knew these things about myself, but I was always trying to reconcile them, because they seemed contradictory.  Nothing in the profile of an INFJ really makes sense of the contradiction; it just points it out and says, “this is the way it is,” so you can accept it and carry on.  And that, I think, is the real value of knowing your personality type.

Right, so I have big ambitions and regularly freak out when I think of how to work toward them all at once.  And then people are like, “Calm down and take your time,” and I’m like, “I hear what you’re saying, but I want the opposite of that.”

I look as calm as ever while freaking out.  I actually get quieter, because my brain is going a million miles an hour, and that doesn’t leave a lot of room for thinking of what to say.  Then in an effort to turn order into chaos, I write lists.  That Einstein quote about making things as simple as possible, but no simpler is the best description I’ve found of this process.  Feelings and intuition, which make up an estimated 98% of what’s going on in my head, do not translate very well into lists, but I try.

It’s a fun, though slightly maddening, process that involves multiple platforms ranging from Evernote to a Sharpie and a piece of paper.  These lists are always incomplete.  They often resemble each other.  And they rarely serve any practical purpose beyond meeting an immediate need to feel like I’m doing something.

Some are sprawling and consider every detail and then, overwhelmed by that, I try to narrow things down to the highest priorities (something like: PhD, novel, marriage, live different places).  Then I think I haven’t been practical enough, so there’s a new list of what to do first.  And then I realize I’ve lost sight of the big picture, so the lists become sprawling again.  You can see how this never ends.

What follows is a list I wrote last night.*  It troubles me for being too long and yet incomplete, but it served it’s short-lived purpose and then there was the Sharpie high.

*In this story, last night means last Thursday.

1. Think about something obsessively for a really long time.
2. Decide in an instant what to do.
     a. Try talking myself out of doing anything at all, because doing things is scary.
     b. Know I will not be able to change my mind, but go through the motions anyway.
3. Decide in the next instant to do the exact opposite of whatever I just decided to do.
4. Stick to that.  Act surprised when things do not work out the way I thought they would.
5.  Look back on decision with satisfaction, because things have changed and progressed.

I am a decisive person.  I can think about things for a really long time, but I always seem to make up my mind in an instant.  I consider every option, but there are no lists of pros and cons, because I make my decisions based on feeling, which is not at all divorced from reason, but is better articulated in paragraphs than lists.

The method above is not the way I choose to make decisions.  It’s just the way it happens.  And being decisive does not mean I am free of doubt.  It means I get bored when things stay the same.  It means I love the excitement of grand declarations.  It means I have a hard time living between the lines.

I still agonize over every big decision.  Perhaps even more than other people, because not knowing what to do or not knowing how to think about something makes me crazy.  I try to force decisions, so that I can have peace of mind, but they never stick until everything comes together at once.

Pretending to be indecisive is a major part of the decision-making process for me.  I make my decision and then I act like I’m still considering options.  I might even ask for your advice.  This is fear.  This is procrastination.

So I make my decision and either I stick with it or I immediately change my mind and then stick with that.  The only guarantee in all of this is that things will not work out the way I imagined.  If I was ever able to hold onto this perspective, I’d realize it’s not really about what you choose, but what you learn from what you choose.

In the short term, I regret a lot of things. My most common regret is having done anything at all.  It really doesn’t matter how much you try to prepare yourself for risk, it always hurts.  ”Oh, is this the feeling stupid that I said I would be okay with?  Well, I’m not okay with it!”

And because life would be no fun if things made sense, I seem to completely contradict myself by studying theology, which is all about asking questions for which there are no satisfactory answers.  Or perhaps it makes perfect sense that this is what I study.  The pursuit of truth, even in a sea of doubt, is always worth the effort to me.

1. Even within the context of my theology, I might see the influence of God here, though I do not always look at it this way.
2. This is actually a life philosophy of mine.  I can sum it up most simply by saying dropping out of college is not the way to figure out what to major in.
3. I wrote a little about this once before. To prevent myself from doing this kind of revisionist history about something that happened recently, I wrote YOU DID NOT KNOW THIS WAS GOING TO HAPPEN in my journal.

I started my job at the library very soon after starting this blog.  It was kind of a desperate time, and I didn’t have many options, and then this perfect job appeared.  The main thing was that I needed to be working full time, but I really did not want to put school on hold.  The hours were kind of unconventional and even in the interview my future boss found a subtle way to ask, “Really, you want to work until midnight every night?”  It sounded a little crazy to me, but I needed a job.

If my blog had an acknowledgments section, the library would be listed first.  I basically spend the last three hours of every night sitting at the circulation desk and when I’m not helping people, I can be working on my own things.  This is where I’ve done at least 85% of all of my blog writing in the last three years.  Whenever circumstances are different and I don’t have this time, my blog suffers (see: every Summer).

There is something magical about this time.  I am trying to describe it right now as I am currently experiencing it.  The library is quiet, but not too quiet.  Most of the internet has gone to sleep. It is the end of the day. Spending this time blogging is my reward for getting the things I really needed to do done earlier in the day.  This is a large part of why blogging has always been fun for me and not an obligation.

It is by no means a real hardship, but there is something a little extreme about working until midnight.  Because there are parts of the year when I work a normal schedule, I notice the contrast.  Working days, it’s a lot easier to slip into autopilot.  That thing where you get up and go to work and spend all day there and then come home and do nothing and then get up the next morning and go to work. Known also as that thing that scares me to death.

The other thing about working late is that I spend a lot of time alone.  It has taken me by surprise this week, and at first it gave me pause that I even noticed it, because I like being alone.  Being alone is not lonely to me.  But the quiet of being alone is noticeable and it makes it harder to ignore yourself.  Over the Summer, I got used to the distraction of other people, even if I wasn’t really connecting with them.

Combine time to write with awareness and solitude, and you get Advanced Level Introspection that results in posts like the one I wrote yesterday.  It is obvious and yet so interesting to me to realize that I would never have written that under different circumstances and I would not have written most of the 650 posts on this blog under different circumstances.  The obvious part is that the content would be different, but the less obvious part is that the person writing would be different.

I have learned about myself in the last few years that despite being possibly the most reasonable person you know, I like extremes.  You know, the highly-structured kind that take place in safe environments like libraries.  As far as you know, I don’t fight crime, but here I am still at work when most people are somewhere near bed.  I think it’s fear of monotony with a dash of why the hell not? and a sprinkling of ambition.

All of this to say that I am still awake and feeling more myself this week than I have all Summer.  Currently contemplating, well, everything and with at least ten posts in mind to write.  I should probably space them out to avoid sounding like a crazy person.  I should also probably thank you for not just giving me a reason to spend this time writing, but for so often keeping me company these late nights.  Love your faces.

I had one of those experiences last night where you feel something, but you don’t even know what it is until the right word finds you.  In this case: lost.

That word makes me so uncomfortable.  Maybe because it is not quite accurate.  Maybe because it is such a cliche.  I say this not just because I am desperately trying to escape that cliche, but because it is the most accurate way I can express this feeling: I think that I am lost in being found.  I have been lost in a sea of possibilities before.  I spent most of my early twenties that way.   This is very different.

In the last two years, I have stopped running from the things I’ve always loved but found excuses not to commit myself to.  I admitted that writing is more than just this thing I do. Or, more than just this thing I talk about doing.  I decided to go for the PhD, because I knew that every other option would feel like settling.  It was fear that kept me from doing these things before.  In facing that fear, I’ve come to feel more myself than ever before.

When I was lost in the sea of possibilities, I remember thinking how much easier everything would be if I just had a clear idea of what I wanted to do with my life.  Now I have that clarity and it is overwhelming.   I know I’m on the mountain, but it’s foggy and I can’t see the top and I’m not sure if this path will take me there.  Choosing this path meant excluding a lot of others.  Going deeper into the fog meant losing all the perspective I had admiring the mountain from afar.  Maybe I will get to the top only to discover I climbed the wrong mountain.

In writing, I realize that those are not the things that really bother me.  I took risks and they might not have been the right ones, but I am proud of myself for taking them and they have changed me so much that I could never regret them.  Where I feel lost is in the everyday.

It seems the only way to manage feelings of being lost in the midst of being found is to focus on what’s right in front of you.  When I was working all the time, I didn’t feel lost, because I knew exactly where I needed to be every hour of the day.  There wasn’t even time to look up.  I just trusted that I was going in the right direction.  There was a lot of comfort in that, but I’m glad it was temporary, because that level of distraction can give way too easily to monotony and loss of consciousness.

Last night when I found the word to describe the weird way I was feeling, I realized that I have been completely underestimating the changes happening in my life right now.  I was focused this month on VEDA and the trips I had left to take, and I knew what was waiting for me in September, but I was thinking of it all in terms of a new routine I’d just have to get used to.  It’s more than that.  So many of the things that were taking up all of my time and defining me as a person have ended, which means that right now I am involved in a lot of beginnings.

I woke up yesterday and for the first time in two years, I had no idea what to do with myself.  That feeling of being lost freaked me out not because I think it will never pass (I know it will), but because I thought that being lost was a feeling I’d left behind.  Now it feels like something I can only ever distract myself from for periods of time.  There was some kind of permanence I was clinging to and it has just revealed itself as false.

I know that sounds depressing, but studying theology has taught me that there is more comfort in truth and authenticity than things that are warm and fuzzy and unreal.  Saying that I feel lost again suggests that I am right back to the place where I started, but that is not true.  Those things that made me feel found before still give me that same feeling; they’re just not enough anymore.  I thought I could dive straight into new things without dealing with feelings of being lost, but I think I need to at least be honest with myself about them.

This is one of those posts I am happy to have written for myself, even if it doesn’t make sense to anyone else.  When I first realized I was (a little) lost, there were no other thoughts to go with it and it seemed it would make more sense to write about it later with a little more perspective, but then I started typing anyway and I’m glad I did, because that feeling of being lost, much like heartbreak, is not preserved very well in memory. It loses its intensity.   It becomes very romantic and part of a much bigger story with an ending.  You forget the pain of uncertainty.

Maybe this lostness will pass by tomorrow.  Maybe it will take a year.  It’s the not knowing that I want to capture, because that’s where so much of life is really lived.

I’m pretty comfortable with feelings.  I’ve been riding tumultuous waves of them my entire life.  But there is one that scares me to death: bitterness.

I was largely spared bitterness growing up.  The first time I experienced it as an adult, I knew what it was without really knowing what it was.  I knew that it was bitterness, but I didn’t have a strong grasp of what bitterness was. I went to the dictionary, but it wasn’t just the lack of definition that was bothering me.

When I experience jealousy and regret, I know that something is wrong.  There’s a situation I need to fix or a decision I need to make.  Sadness I have to sit with for a while longer, but I know that it will pass.  The bitterness, though, it came out of a situation where I had done everything I could and so there was nothing for me to fix.  I knew it was a corrosive feeling and dangerous to hold onto, but I couldn’t talk myself out of it.

And that’s what scares me about bitterness: the fear that I will never move on from it.

My inability to let it go was what defined the bitterness.  It made me associate negative feelings with people and places and songs and movies that I used to love.  Never did the bitterness cover my life entirely, but it would creep into my thoughts unexpectedly, undermining whatever happiness I had created for myself.

More than other feelings, bitterness felt like something alien living inside of me.  And so my instinct was to fight it.  I am unwilling to claim that bitterness cannot be fought, but it didn’t work for me.  Fighting only increased my fear of bitterness and its hold on me strengthened.

I know it’s not time alone that fixes everything.  I was working toward something that whole time.  I was trying to forgive. I was doing the things I know make me happy.  And, so slowly that it was almost imperceptible, the bitterness faded.  Things I couldn’t let go of before, I am able to let go of now.  Maybe not completely, but so much so that I do not have to keep my guard up, fearful that bitterness will steal away what I’ve worked for.

The strange thing is that the path I chose for myself at one point seemed like an outrageous and risky thing to do.  Getting a PhD in the humanities is pretty ridiculous.  Professorships are scarce and even if I get my dream job, I will probably make about the same amount as most people make right out of college, which is fine except that I will have spent an extra eight years of my life in school.

A really big predictor of whether or not you will get a PhD is whether your parents have advanced degrees.  Mine do not and though I could go on and on about how incredibly supportive they are now and have been through most of my life, I didn’t feel like they were completely behind my decision to go to grad school. I think they knew the reality of the situation, which was that I had no idea what I was doing.

It was a financial risk, I had only been studying theology for a year, I wasn’t sure if it was really what I wanted, and I didn’t know if I was talented enough.  I didn’t know things would work out.  I didn’t know I would ever be this happy with myself or my decisions.  I didn’t know I would spend most of my years in school also working full time.  I didn’t know I would recover from near financial disaster.  I didn’t know that I do have what it takes.  I spent at least two years daily considering running away from it all.

But lately I have been looking at my life and asking how I ended up in such a traditional track.  I mean, grad school isn’t all that different from what it’s always been.  I work full time in a library where I have benefits and paid time off.  I’ve lived in the same city for five years and the same apartment for two years.  I haven’t seen much of the world.  And more than anything, my life as it is right now is pretty much the way it will remain for the next several years.  I’m in the middle of things.  I have a lot of responsibilities that mean staying right here.

I look around and see people I know who are on the brink of huge life changes and I feel like I should be setting the world on fire too.  Not out of envy, but because that’s what I want for myself!  I dream big dreams and ask myself all kinds of challenging questions, but what I come back to is that I am still doing exactly what I want to be doing.  And I am also on the brink of big things.

It’s just that big things require hard work and it’s not all that romantic when you’re the one actually doing it.  I am moving as fast as I can, but sometimes it’s not fast enough to set fire in my wake.  More often it means sitting at my desk putting words together.  Not with a flower in my hair and a delightful tea cup next to me, but instead a headache and self-doubt and a cup of coffee bigger than my face (at least some of which I will spill on myself).

I romanticize the idea of having the courage to take over the world, but what I need right now is the courage to be still and take myself seriously enough to not just talk about my dreams, but actually work toward them.  I have a degree to finish, novels to write, and a Kilimanjaro to climb.  If you need me, I’ll be at my desk.

When I was home for Christmas, I made my mom cry.   We were shopping and I was anxious about other things, and I said something that seemed innocuous to me, but that touched a nerve with her.  She accused me of treating her condescendingly and said that what hurt most about it is that she knows she treated her mom the same way and she regrets it.  All of this seemed to come out of nowhere to me.  It is rare that I have been accused of hurting someone like that, and it made me sick to think about it.

I apologized and tried to explain that really isn’t at all how I feel about her.  It was a quiet ride home from the mall, but we didn’t talk about it again.

Fast forward to last weekend.  I sent my mom flowers for Mother’s Day and when she called to thank me, she told me she’d been very touched by the note I’d written in her Birthday card the month before. We’d talked several times since then and she’d never mentioned it and in truth, I couldn’t even remember what I’d written.

She told me that I’d said I was proud of her and asked me what I meant by that.  The truth was that it was another nothing comment.  Saying, “proud of you” is just this thing we do in my family and though we are proud of each other, I guess, it doesn’t refer to anything specific.

But, I am proud of my mom.  I told her something I have been thinking about a lot lately: the older I get and the more I experience, the more respect I have for the way she handled a really terrible divorce and then went on to be a single mom to my brother, sister, and I.  When I think of the way I’ve been knocked to the ground by heart break and failed pretty terribly to do adult things like support myself financially without debt, I realize that she must be a million times stronger to have survived all of that and come out on the other side without bitterness.

I followed up with, “And, you know, you’re just a really good mom.”  But, she didn’t know, because maybe I’ve said it a few times, but never so explicitly and I think that for comments like that to have any lasting meaning, they must be repeated often and made obvious through every action.

This is my mom! One of the people I am closest to in the entire world!  And I don’t even think of how my offhanded comments might hurt or touch her.  Yes, I am sensitive and I pick up on the feelings of others very easily, but I am completely farsighted.  Up close, everything mixes with insecurity and need and projection, so that I have this big ass blind spot that prevents me from seeing that the things I say might actually matter to people.

Sometimes I do hold back for fear of giving too much away or caring more than the other person, but most often I just don’t even think about it.  I don’t recognize the power I have to make someone’s day or, in a rare instance, ruin it.

Even if I don’t say it, I probably am thinking that you look nice today and I think we should be better friends and I admire that thing you do and I only tease out of love and is that a new dress because it looks fabulous?  Am I missing the point?  Okay, fine!  I will try to say these things.  Someone please remind me that they matter if I forget again.

Any honest person contradicts herself regularly.  It’s okay.  You don’t even have to quote Whitman as a way of pointing out your own inconsistency.  We all contain multitudes and we understand.

Maybe I don’t want to be that bold.  Contradiction is a powerful thing, but it’s really only meaningful if you encounter it in the pursuit of consistency.  As soon as you stop fearing contradiction, everything becomes relative.  There’s no point in searching for the truth when you can settle for contradiction.

But you can go too far with consistency too.  You can force conflicting evidence to match your own logic or you can ignore it all together.  You can develop a perfectly coherent system that has no relevance to the living world.  But what good does any of that do you?

In theology there is a big emphasis on being systematic.  There are many ways to be critical of this, but it is still what most of us strive for.  What we’re doing is trying to explain everything in the universe and how it all fits together.  The wrong way to do it is to create a system and then explain how everything fits into it.

The better way to do it is to develop a system with the evidence you have and then change and grow that system as you gather more and more data.  You’re going to need the help of other people, because your perspective is limited.  But, even still, you’re going to have to accept that you will never have it all figured out.  It’s optimistic enough to think you can explain anything.

The assumption is that the world makes sense, which means that any contradiction is not really a contradiction.  It only seems like a contradiction because perspective is limited and we don’t know enough yet to explain it.  Maybe this is actually true, but I’m starting to think that contradiction should not so easily be dismissed.  There’s something of importance there.  This is where I get stuck, though, because I’m trying to explain what can’t be explained. I’m trying to say there’s something of value there, but I don’t know where or what there is.

I just have this sense (and I’m not alone) that we shouldn’t rush to explain contradictions away.  It’s not all that revolutionary to claim that we can learn something by studying the point where two things come into conflict, but I think it’s more mysterious than that.  Maybe even mystical.  The tension between two things that matter.  The allure of the paradox.   Ah, maybe if I read more philosophy, I’d have the words to at least makes sense of how some things don’t make sense.

Conflict is not at all the same as contradiction or paradox, but it’s related, and in my mind it’s all part of the same conversation.  Conflict is something I’ve spent a lot of time in my life trying to avoid.  I do not tolerate it well; it makes me physically ill.  So sometimes I don’t say how I really feel or I bend my will to save a relationship or I just go running in the other direction.   The least worst thing I can say about avoiding conflict is that it’s horrifically boring.  The worst worst thing is that by avoiding conflict you avoid all of those other things that constitute really living.

There is beauty in contrast. And, really, everything that matters happens when two or more things come into contact.  Unless they’re self-same, there’s going to be some level of conflict.  Maybe even contradiction!  I’m all for peace, but maybe we don’t have to rush it.

Some conflict can’t be avoided.  Some contradictions can’t be explained away.  That makes for pain and awkwardness and disappointment and not knowing, but some good things require walking through the fire.

I’m a highly sensitive person and it’s really annoying sometimes.  I have sympathy coming out of my ears.  I watch crime shows and feel bad for the criminal.  I can’t watch most reality TV because the awkwardness that other people find amusing kills me.  Even scripted shows I sometimes have to mute to keep from dying of sadness and second-hand embarrassment (before I lived in a studio apartment, I would just get up and leave the room).

Perhaps most annoying, I cry at every movie ever.  I mean, I’d like to forget that I cried at Drumline, but Lisa won’t let me.  Guys, he couldn’t read music and for some reason I found that to be very sad (spoiler alert).

Several years ago, I started to notice that I don’t cry as much as I used to.  I think this has a lot to do with the fact that I don’t live at home (or with anyone) anymore.  But, I noticed that I wasn’t even crying at movies as much as I used to.  I would talk to normal people  and they would mention crying at a scene in some movie that didn’t even give me that pre-tear tingling behind the eyes.  When I watched two movies on divorce and didn’t shed a tear, I knew something was going on.

I started to think that maybe I’m just not as sensitive as I used to be.  Then life was like, “No, that’s not it.”

Slowly it dawned on me that it was a problem of engagement.  I don’t get lost in books anymore.  I don’t let movies sweep me away.  I’m always distracted.  Usually when I’m watching a movie at home, I’m doing at least three other things and thinking of seven more things I’ll do when it’s over.  Sometimes I’m actually thinking of what I’ll say about that movie instead of letting myself experience it.  Any reading is interrupted regularly to check my phone. I don’t stay away from the internet too long for fear it will disappear without me to stare at it.

I’m not blaming technology, because I think the deeper motivation is to save myself from all those annoying feelings that come with being so sensitive, and in technology, I’ve found an easy way to do that.  I like that I am so able to be swept away.  I like being a deep feeling person.  But, if you ask me on any given Thursday evening if I want to put myself in a situation where tears are guaranteed, I will say no.  All those emotions to wrestle with, the running mascara, the salty tear streaks down my face, and the headache to follow just don’t seem worth it. I pull back to keep from getting pulled under.  I hide behind a veil of distraction.  I defer to that imaginary point in the future when I’ll have time for feelings.

I’m trying not to do this so much.  I’m trying not to resist the sweeping feelings.  It would seem that if you’re sensitive and cry easily like I do, then you’d be good at it.  I want to say no, because sad feelings are sad no matter what.  But, even when they knock me down, I don’t stay there.  So maybe I’m not so bad at it.

To be moved is one of the sweetest things in life and I don’t want to keep my guard up to that. But, sometimes it just makes sense.  So I’ll stick to watching my comedies before bed and save feelings for the weekends! (I kid. Feelings, seven days a week!)

Since we’re on the topic of tears, I’ve always found it strange that I never cry at happy things.  Tears are for when I’m sad–for myself, someone else, or a fictional character.  When I’m happy, I grin and jump around.  I’m not one to burst into tears at the end of a difficult day (that’s what wine is for), but people can make me cry very easily.  And then there’s that one question that always pushes me over when I’m on the edge: “are you okay?”  Gets me every time.  It’s weird to blog this much about crying when I’m currently feeling just fine.