"Do You Feel Like You Were Allowed to Show Emotion As a Kid?"

For the past few months, I've been getting closer to a friend who enjoys the same kinds of conversations I do: marriage, spiritual exploration, coping with depression, personality types, emotional intelligence, childhood development, boundaries—you know, the fun stuff XD

In some ways, I consider myself to be an open book, or at least a book that is willing to be opened. I don't go around wearing my heart on my sleeve and I can usually hide socially inappropriate thoughts and feelings, but I will answer almost any question you ask me. There are VERY few topics that are off-limits for me. This friend has never asked me anything that I wasn't happy to answer—but she has asked me a lot of things no one has asked before.

A few weeks ago, during a conversation that I'm gonna simplify into "having difficulty expressing feelings," she asked,

"Do you feel like you were allowed to show emotion as a kid?"

I hesitated for a second because I'd never considered that question before. I think I probably dry chuckled before saying,

"Well, the short answer is yes...but with two big conditions. I do think my parents believed that emotions were natural and healthy, but for one parent, the emotion had to make sense. Emotions that were irrational or of unknown origin were often unacceptable. For the other parent, I was allowed to have emotions as long as they were polite. Emotions that came out in ways that were perceived as disrespectful were not treated as legitimate."

I think when I was growing up, society emphasized...I honestly don't even know. Appearances, maybe? Kids were trained to appear normal and polite, and the neatest way to do that was to teach them to get rid of everything inside that was inconvenient. Lots of "YOU MAY NOT THROW A TANTRUM" and less "Your feelings are very real. I recognize that you are three and you do not have the cognitive development to manage your disappointment in the way that I, an adult, would. You are having big feelings and I am going to be in this moment with you calmly, and after I've helped you regulate yourself, we'll talk about better ways to manage your disappointment in the future."

I'm still processing all of this, and while I do, I'm also holding a lot of other truths in mind:

1) Every generation of parents tries to do better than the one before.

2) Every generation of parents is doing the best they can with the knowledge they do have.

3) As far as I know, these findings about how children's brains develop is new-ish, or at least new enough that parents twenty, thirty, forty years ago didn't know they were asking their kids to do things that their kids were developmentally incapable of doing.

4) Science and philosophy are constantly evolving. It's possible that what I believe now may be deemed ridiculous and inappropriate by the time I have grandkids.

5) I have no children and have no idea how difficult it is to go the long route when it comes to helping a child develop emotional intelligence. All this stuff may sound great in theory until I have to do it. Maybe I'll get to see one day.

I'm definitely not blaming my parents for being feelings-repressed myself. I think I was born that way. On the enneagram, I'm dominant in Type Eight, and Type Eights are, in fact, feelings repressed. In MBTI, I'm an ENFJ, which is other-peoples'-feelings dominant, but my-feelings repressed. That checks out too. It's just interesting to think about the frameworks we were raised with, and how they manifest as an adult. Growing up is about learning, but it's about unlearning too.

I'm so grateful that God gave me Gabe, who is my opposite in most ways. Enneagram-wise, he's feelings-dominant; MBTI-wise, he's his-feelings dominant. He's slowly teaching me that there really is a place for feelings and that MY feelings—independent of anybody else in any way—deserve a second glance. They're not always the deciding factor (which is what he's learning), but they deserve to be dug up and acknowledged.

Sometimes my feelings aren't going to make sense—and that's actually okay. They don't have to be logical to be real. Feelings aren't truth, but neither are they trash. Sometimes my feelings aren't going to manifest politely—and, as an adult, it's my job to figure out how to fix that, so that if we ever have kids, I can teach them to do it too.

Starting to think that becoming a good human is gonna take a lifetime ;)

~Stephanie

Grief and Gift Lists

I consider myself to be bad at gift-giving. It's one of the reasons Gabe and I switched birthdays. Years ago, to alleviate some of the stress of gift-giving, I started keeping a note in my phone of gift ideas. I add to it throughout the year whenever I see good gift or whenever a person mentions wanting/needing something. It's helped me a lot.

A few days ago I was going through the list and two names leapt out at me: Paw Paw, and Nana. We lost both of them this year.

I found myself just staring at my phone, sort of shocked and frozen. Then in a flash of heartstring snipping, I double tapped and deleted Nana's paragraph of ideas.

No, my heart said gently. Put it back. I shook my phone, selected Undo Typing, and was once again staring at "glass bird feeder things you stick in the ground, pink poinsettia, Target gift card, wind chimes, coloring book, Adopt a Cardinal (see screenshot 12/10/21)."

Suddenly the realization that I would never get to do the Adopt a Cardinal thing for her was really sad. She would've really liked that, I think, or at least thought it was weird and funny.

We'll never get to build a contraption that allows Paw Paw to play the piano without his leg, or give him music for his harmonica, or interesting colored pencils for coloring.

Nana and Paw Paw will never get to see if Gabe and I have kids, or if I publish the Fire Faery Story. Paw Paw always asked about my writing; Nana read the first chapter of Book 1 and said that "it wasn't really her thing, but she thought it was very good."

Gabe and I have three Christmas ornaments of Paw Paw's that he gave us a few years ago when he stopped having his own tree. We've put them up every year, but this year it felt different, of course. As we decorated, I started thinking about the Gift Ideas note and seeing Paw Paw's ornaments and realizing that this is the first Christmas Mom has ever had without her parents and it all just felt so sad. I started crying.

"I feel sad," I said, because, as with a toddler, Gabe and I have been working on my acknowledging and voicing my emotions.

I don't remember all that I said, but it really boiled down to "I'm sad that my grandparents aren't here anymore."

Gabe hugged me and I cried and after a couple of minutes we pulled apart and I was like, "What's weird?" because the vibe between us was really off, unusual.

"I don't know," Gabe said, confused and taken aback.

"No, something is weird with you," I said, watching him. "Your energy is weird."

"I don't..." Gabe seemed at a loss.

"I guess I don't really do this," I said. "I don't really...cry about things."

"You really don't," Gabe said, with the hopeful, nervous energy of a friend watching Hulk shrink back to his human form. "I guess I don't really know what to do."

I shrugged and kind of laughed. Me neither.

For a while I've been thinking about the idea of thinking your emotions versus feeling your emotions. I'm pretty sure blogging about it counts as "thinking," but being shocked by the gift ideas, deciding to keep them, and crying while decorating the tree...maybe that's feeling?

I'm sad. I miss hearing Paw Paw answer the phone with "Hey sweet girl!" I miss Nana telling me that I "look so prurty." They both always made such a point of telling me how much they loved me, and Gabe too.

It feels confusing/incomplete/truncated that they're gone, like getting to the end of a book and realizing the last page is torn out, like going to update my NaNo word count and the + button is gone, like driving to an old house and finding it bulldozed. A bewildered feeling of, "What, wait, I wasn't finished yet." How can they be gone? Forever?*

I haven't dealt with a close death in the family since Papa died when I was seven. I guess I'm learning how to grieve as an adult. I hear it comes in waves, stages.

I'm gonna keep their gift lists in my phone.

~ Stephanie

* I know, Heaven and everything. But it feels permanent right now in a way that is so alien.

Did I Actually Win National Novel-Writing Month?

What is NaNoWriMo? It's National Novel-Writing Month. The goal is to write 50,000 new words of a novel in November. It usually goes something like this for me, but this year was different—in a lot of ways.

For NaNo 2023, I had three goals, in order.

1) Have fun: don't stress about voice and point of view, don't get bogged down trying to avoid YA taboos, don't be afraid to write scenes that are "just for character development" or don't have explicit scene goals.

2) Stop if my mental health starts to deteriorate.

3) Write 50,000 words.

Did I win? The short answer is yes, but if you're here for the short answer, you're in the wrong place. This blog is for the long answer, which is...like, it's still yes, but with caveats.

What Was Different About NaNo 2023?

1) For the first time EVER, I did not write part of the Fire Faery Trilogy. I've been writing and rewriting the Fire Faery Story since I was twelve years old. I took a long break after high school, started up again for NaNo 2019, and have been at it ever since. Not only does the story now have a lot of baggage, guilt, and stress associated with it, but I was starting to believe that it was the only thing I COULD write. I mean, I haven't tried to write something different in like twelve years. Gabe and Aaron have been encouraging me to write writing something else for a long time, and I finally kind of did.

I wrote the backstory of a FFS character named Kamaria. This may seem like cheating to some people since Kamaria is still a character in the Fire Faery Story, it's the same world, and a few other FFS characters appear in it.

I hear you, but believe me, it was not the Fire Faery Story. It felt like a very different assignment.

2) I did not write every day, and I didn't worry about it. This was huge and absolutely unprecedented for me. Gabe and I went away for a weekend and I didn't write at all on the Saturday, nor did I let that bother me. No guilt. No preoccupation. I did not write that day, and it was fine. I also didn't write any on November 29, the day after I'd hit 50,000 the day before, which brings me to the next thing.

3) I did not max out my word count. Confession time: Hitting 50,000 words alone doesn't usually mean much to me. NaNoWriMo is never really a question of IF I'll win, but by how much. Every year since 2019, I've ended the month with a higher word count than the year before. Sure, the NaNo website and my Facebook page say that the goal is 50,000 words, but I know about the SECRET goal, which is really to surpass the year before. Anything less than that is technically a loss. I've backslidden. I've deteriorated.

As a result, my NaNo progress typically looks something like this:



This year, it looked like this:



This year, a huge part of me is still screaming that while, sure, I got over 50,000 words, I didn't get over 55,875, so how good should I REALLY feel about myself?

I'm working on it.

As a result, I don't feel the sense of relief that I usually feel on December 1, which I am kind of missing. Instead of going from "obsessive and exhausted" to "sweet relief," I'm going from "having a goal I'm casually pursuing" to "not getting to track my progress every day on a chart." It's kind of a bummer.

4) I counted more types of words toward my goal than I usually do. The NaNo rules are somewhat flexible. Some writers count only the words in the manuscript itself, some count their outlines, some don't even believe in hitting Backspace during the month. In the past, I've been a "just the actual manuscript" type of WriMo and I definitely hit Backspace a lot. I have even been known to—*gasp*—EDIT during NaNo, which is universally discouraged.

This year, I gave myself what felt like a truly ridiculous amount of grace. I counted everything I wrote toward the story in November, including outlines, character information, deleted lines, and one embarrassing paragraph of 1,300 words that is not even about the story; it's a stream-of-consciousness brain dump from Thanksgiving night. (Don't worry, I still got over 50,000 words of book-related content, so I still won.)

What Did I Learn?

1) Maybe most importantly, I learned that I still CAN write something other than the Fire Faery Trilogy. It had been twelve years since I'd tried to imagine a new culture and I wasn't sure if I could still be creative in that way. As it turns out, I CAN. What a wonderful surprise to find new colors and customs and languages in my brain just waiting to be uncovered.

2) I can successfully meet a goal without sacrificing my mental health. I don't think I believed this before NaNo this year. Something about my personality was CONVINCED that if I didn't obsess over writing to the exclusion of all else, it wouldn't be enough. Well, that's not true, and now I have to rethink some things.

3) I have issues with expectations of myself. I'm still having a hard time "feeling" like I won NaNo, for many of the above reasons. There just seem to be a lot of asterisks. Gabe insists that not only did I win NaNo, I should feel extra good because I did it while taking care of myself, which ought to be a victory in itself. I hear that, but...it just sounds like a participation trophy.

I'm working on this too XD

4) I think I need a stronger prescription in my glasses. This is pretty self-explanatory, but there is no reason I should need Word to be at 180%.

5) There's something wrong with my relationship with the Fire Faery Story. For the past couple of years, I actually feel sick when I work on it. It's like all of my energy goes to the story instead of to digesting food. If I set a timer and only work on the story for one hour at a time with NO exceptions, it seems to be manageable. I did not have stomach issues while writing Kamaria's backstory for NaNo this year—until it intersected with a character from the main trilogy.

On November 15 I posted on Facebook that my stomach had been doing well so far. The next day, Kamaria encountered a certain character, and from there on out, I did have some issues.

The mind is a powerful thing—too powerful for my taste XD

In addition to all the things I learned about myself and my process, I learned a lot about Kamaria too. I've always known her backstory, but being able to flesh it out was fun and beautiful. I now think that I will publish it one day (this is in the universe where I actually get around to publishing ANY of this), but it'll be a little stand-alone that serves as like Book 2.5 of the trilogy. It will not have a grand "story question" aside from answering the question, "How did she get here and why is she like that?"

In the meantime, Fire Faery groupies can listen to Billie Eilish's "bury a friend" and let their imaginations run wild.

~Stephanie

They Kissed, and I was Pissed

A few months ago, I was watching a TV show about two female best friends. At the end of one episode, they kiss. Apparently their love for each other had become something other than platonic.

I was pissed. It took me a couple of days to wrestle through why, because I could tell that my outrage was unrelated to the gender thing. I wasn't mad that they were surprise bisexual; I could tell it was something else that bothered me.

It's that I detest the best-friends-to-lovers trope. Like I cannot overstate to you how much I HATE that.

I had (misguidedly) assumed that I didn't have to worry about that trope with female best friends, so I felt blindsided/betrayed/bummed by the show. Like now I can't even safely enjoy best friendships between females in media.

Here's why I think I hate BFTL so much.

1) Best-friends-to-lovers devalues friendship. The trope makes it seem like the ULTIMATE stage of any relationship is romance. It makes relationships a hierarchy of strangers > acquaintances > friends > best friends > dating. Being best friends with someone is just the last stage before it "elevates" to also being romantic.

The AUDACITY. Lovers is a DIFFERENT type of relationship. It's not necessarily "BETTER." My relationship with Cassidy is no less meaningful, vital, healthy because it's not sexual. I didn't date anyone until I was eighteen years old, and I can tell you that every non-romantic relationship I had before that was better and more important than the romantic one, especially in the long run.

I resent fiction for conditioning the world to think that best-friendship is a lower category than romance, which leads me to Reason #2.

2) The relentless portrayal of BFTL in media distorts expectations in friendships, especially in opposite-sex friendships. For me, there was nothing worse than becoming close friends with a guy only to have him confess that he had romantic feelings for me*. As a Christian girl, I was taught to expect this; it's why opposite-sex friendships can be so "dangerous." As a thinking human, that offended me, and still does.

Telling a guy that I didn't want to become romantic with him was not an INSULT. In fact, it was usually the opposite. I've always felt that romance is temporary, whereas deep friendship is eternal. By declining to become romantic with guy friends, I felt like I was saying, "No, I'd rather love and trust you forever, rather than until we grow apart." For me, friendship and familyship (looking at my brothers: Aaron, Daniel, David) was so much more important, even intimate.

This kind of sounds like Reason #1b, so let me anchor it back into Reason #2: I feel like the relentless media portrayal of best-friends-to-lovers gave my guy friends unrealistic expectations about where our friendship was "going." The trope set them up for disappointment, and me for disillusionment. Guess they only cared about me until they found out they were never gonna kiss me. Cool.

3) BFTL is just cliché at this point. It is NEVER** the case that girl-guy best friendships stay that way in fiction. Even KIM POSSIBLE and LIZZIE McGUIRE went there in the end. STOP IT. Stop devaluing best-friendships by portraying them as the dissatisfying level before things get good. Stop writing predictable plots.

Here's my new philosophy: I think romance should be thought of as an add-on. Romance not a type of relationship; it's a quality of some relationships. If ALL you have is romance, you don't actually have a relationship of any type. You have to add romance to some type of relationship, and you get different things based on that equation. You can be strangers + romance (one-night stand), acquaintances + romance (friends with benefits), friends + romance (friends with benefits or dating), and best friends + romance (dating/engaged/married). Romance is not the highest type of relationship because it isn't a relationship at all; it's a quality.

Now, do I recommend being friends with someone before dating them? Yeah. Do I recommend dating your best friend? Maybe—but not NECESSARILY, and neither of you should be in a friendship or best-friendship only because maybe one day you'll get to sleep with each other. Gross.

So yeah. Glad I got this off my chest XD

~ Stephanie

* I know that for every one of these stories, there's the opposite side too: the poor guy who really liked a girl, got up the nerve to tell her, and got rejected. That is also really hard, and I'm sorry.

** I mean, I haven't seen everything in the world, so maybe not NEVER, but—okay wait, Little Women. And that goes over like a ton of bricks*** due to all the social conditioning. Sigh.

*** Okay tbh, I kinda do prefer Laurie to Professor Bhaer. Have I fallen victim to the very thing I want to destroy? Hm.

P.S. You may be wondering why this post has a crocodile as its photo. Well, I went to the free images site I use and typed in "mouth," because I was trying to get something related to kissing without getting something romantic. I saw this crocodile and I liked it, and it also fits with the blog's color scheme, so here we are.

Boundaries and Fe: A Match Made in Hell

You may remember me writing about striving for healthier boundaries XD In June, I read Boundaries, Gabe and I had a life-planning weekend trip, and I committed to holding several specific boundaries for the next six months, June to January.

Well, boundaries are difficult to adhere to, and I haven't been doing a great job. I think the main reason is that I have an unhealthy relationship with other peoples' feelings and opinions.

As a kid I was labeled "lazy." I was also labeled "selfish." As a kid, neither label bothered me. People could label me all day long and I'd continue being/doing largely what I wanted. However, somewhere along the line I became interested in self-improvement, and all the labels started mattering to me. I leaned into my ENFJ, away from my Eight, and decided to make other people the most important thing, to overcompensate for naturally being "so selfish."

My MBTI type is an "extroverted Feeling type." The primary way I see the world is by registering other peoples' feelings. (How *I* feel is so far down the list of factors that I often can't figure it out even when I'm trying. It feels like the absolute least important factor of any scenario, because I know I can handle feeling whatever/anything*.)

For me, this means that during dance class, I'm consumed with the fact that one person in the group isn't getting the choreography and is feeling embarrassed about it. At church, I can't hear what the speaker is saying over the roar of how he accidentally made someone in the second row feel silly. At movie nights, I can't focus on the film because of how much the person on my left dislikes someone across the room. When I accidentally take someone's seat, I feel how awkward THEY feel having to deal with it. When Person A recommends a book to Person B and Person B doesn't care, all I can worry about is how Person A must be feeling.

Now, before this starts sounding selfless and angelic, I need you to know that it's not XD Just because I'm in tune with other peoples' feelings doesn't necessarily mean I'm sympathetic. It might mean I'm annoyed because it's distracting. It might mean I feel like I'm being manipulated when I'm absolutely not.

And being others-focused can also be a form of self-focus: how are others feeling about ME? Do they think I look bad in this outfit? Did they expect me to be more interesting than I am? Do they think my shifting priorities as a Christian are a sign of succumbing to "the world"? Some things don't get factored in—like I'll never care that you think I shouldn't have tattoos or listen to metal—but other things are impossible to ignore. 

Recently on a trip, I found myself so wrapped up in what others were thinking and feeling that I couldn't focus on anything else. I tried to stop, wanted to see how long I could go before I was consumed by the wants/needs/opinions/feelings of others. I literally couldn't go, like, a couple of minutes. It was all I could focus on.

One of the things I committed to doing until January was not going to church while I heal from "shoulding," unless I felt specifically called to go one week. Well, I've been doing a horrible job of that.

I skipped a couple of weeks, people would ask Gabe where I was or text me saying they missed me, but then there would be a church function I needed to be at, or Gabe wouldn't be able to attend one week and I felt like at least one of us should be there, or blah blab blah and I'd end up going. Then I'd go another week in a row. And I could imagine the people around me thinking, "Okay good, I'm glad she's gotten whatever it was out of her system and she's back now."

Well, I shouldn't be. I still need to be gone. My boundaries and my feelings are too messed up for me to return in a healthy manner right now. I know that. God knows that. Gabe knows that. My therapist knows that.

But other people don't, and their thoughts/feelings/opinions are all. I. Can. Register.

It's not other peoples' fault. They aren't manipulating me or guilting me or projecting onto me. No, *I* am the one taking on other peoples' stuff when I shouldn't. Other peoples' opinions of me are none of my business. Other peoples' feelings about me are not within my boundaries to control. They can think/do/say/feel whatever is natural for them and that doesn't have to affect me.

In theory.

This is really hard for me. I don't want people to walk on eggshells around me or worry about me**. I don't want other people to DO anything; they don't even have to be understanding or kind. They can be whatever, and I can be whatever, and we'll all work on our own stuff, the stuff that's within our own boundary lines.

I still believe in community and accountability and not making a brother stumble and a bunch of other stuff that probably feels contradictory to some of this, but that's another post (or five).

I dunno. All this to say: boundary work is hard, I guess.

~Stephanie

* Emotionally. Physically, a hangnail will take me out.

** So why am I vomiting this onto the internet? Partly because writing is the best way I can access my own thoughts and feelings, partly because these posts seem to be helping other people wrestle through their own stuff, partly because I'm a validation-seeking millennial. You can assign the percentages however you want.

Tragedy and Teaching

I make a point not to take it personally whenever students don't appreciate a moving book or short story.

What do I feel? There's a kind of frustrated grief, a mild exasperation, but not at the students, at...just reality, I guess. The order of things. When you're young, you don't see how sad everything is. Deaths in books don't mean anything (unless it's the death of an animal). Personal sacrifices that are not enough and end in tragedy just seem like...stories that didn't have a point. The hero failed, if he or she can even be called a hero after failing.

Stories that are very sad seem sort of funny at best when you're young, and boring or pointless at worst. Sometimes a teacher will try to get you to think about the story more deeply, but even if you go through the motions to make her happy, the story still seems bad. Maybe you have some interesting conversations about it in class, but it doesn't touch you. The story wasn't good.

I don't think there's anything to be done about this. I've learned to brace myself for students' innocent apathy. They aren't being rude or heartless or stupid. They're just...not there yet, and that's as it should be. It's probably worse to be a teenager who has experienced enough tragedy to recognize its reflection in literature. If you "get it" when you're young, it's probably a bad sign.

But it's not like I've had any big tragedy in my life. I don't think you have to have tragedy to appreciate the deep, haunting, beautiful grief of sadness in literature. I guess you just have to have...experience? Even that sounds pretentious. I don't know what happens when you get older. Maybe it's whatever last development happens to the brain at age twenty-five, when you start to understand risk and death, that the risks you take could make you die.

It is difficult to talk about sad literature with students because I want them to feel it, know that they won't, and know that they shouldn't. I end up putting on my upbeat "let's talk about this" suit, and we do. I ask for overall thoughts ("Who liked it? Who didn't? Why?"), what the plot was ("Okay, so what all happened in the story?"), and try to draw attention to the themes ("Was that fair? Why did he do that? How did that affect the other characters? What do you think that means?") and any symbolism ("Where have we seen that before? What might that be a symbol for? What does that make us think? Remember when another character said...?").

We always have good conversations, but I leave them feeling like I didn't break through. The students still don't care. They still think the story was boring/pointless/bad/not to be recommended.

And that's okay. This post probably sounds like complaining, but I don't mean it that way—at all. I love talking with students. It is my absolute favorite part of teaching. The conversations I have with eighth graders, eleventh graders, are unlike conversations I have with any other group. I love hearing their thoughts, what they liked and disliked, similarities they see in other areas of life, weird and unsubstantiated opinions that will probably change in ten years, insights I never thought of before, things I never noticed.

I don't blame students for not "getting" sad stuff in literature, although it does make me feel farther away from them. Like we're standing on opposite banks of a river and I'm asking them to cross a bridge that's invisible to them. I make my voice welcoming and excited, describe the bridge in vivid detail, to the point that they could probably describe later it to someone else, but they can't actually see it, so they don't cross. Fair enough. I wouldn't cross an invisible bridge either*, and I appreciate their even listening to me describe it :)

Like most blog posts lately, I'm just thinking. There's no "point" to this post; I just want to get a little bit of the yearning out of my system. I yearn for students to see what I see in beautiful, sad stories.

Maybe one day some of them will be teachers too, and they'll read the same stories and be struck with how different they feel about them at age twenty-two, twenty-five, thirty. Maybe they'll call to other students across the river, voices full of eager promises, and settle for the students describing the bridge back to them.

Life is weird. Literature is weird. I love them both.

~Stephanie

* Okay, I would cross a literally invisible bridge—and most of my students probably would too—but that's not what we're talking about XD

Evanescence—But Not the Band

Tuesday, August 29, 2023

I'm reading The Great Gatsby again. When I began reading it the other day, I remembered a post I made last time I read it called "On My Third First Reading." I didn't reread the post, but I couldn't remember what I meant by that title. What was a "third first reading"? I'm sure I had thought it was very clever when I wrote it.

For days, that question bounced around slowly in the back of my mind like the DVD symbol screen saver. Today, as I read Chapter 3 of Gatsby, I frowned and sighed.

The book didn't feel the same. Instead of feeling ethereal and enchanting, Gatsby's parties felt...superficial and sarcastic and sad. I've been to many parties where there were "enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names," but while the deliberate evanescence of such parties felt fitting in college, now they feel...sort of spiteful and unsatisfying.

Maybe this poor impression was because a Gatsby-hating friend had recently put some disparaging ideas into my mind. Maybe it was because I've been pretty overwhelmed and depressed for a couple of weeks.

Maybe it just depends on how you're feeling when you read it, I thought dejectedly.  I guess I've never read the book feeling exactly the way I do right now.

And that's when it hit me again: that's what I meant two years ago. YOU can never read the same book twice. You can read the same BOOK twice, but YOU will always be different.

This is my fourth first reading: my first time reading The Great Gatsby at age twenty-nine, about to release four chapters of the Fire Faery Story to beta readers,  having just paid an unexpected $1800 for bloodwork, after surprise-starting my period two days early while wearing white pants at a coffee shop, with Nana in the hospital, since beginning therapy for the first time, with an undercut.

Part of me is desperate to recapture the inexhaustible joy I felt the first few times I read The Great Gatsby; but another part of me respects this "first reading" theory too much to wish away this next impression.

This won't be the last time I read The Great Gatsby. I hope it will come around again for me, but if it doesn't, well...

You can't repeat the past.

~Stephanie

I Wasn't Myself This Morning

Until this morning, I'd forgotten the extent to which books influenced me as a child.

When I was little, books weren't just a pastime for me, they were...bodily organs? When I was reading a Little House on the Prairie book, there was something fundamentally different about me as a human than when I was reading Beezus and Ramona or one of the Betsy-Tacy books. The kind of book I was reading temporarily reshaped my...something. My brain? My soul? I was still Me, but I was Me as if I were living in the late 1800s in the Dakotas/1950s Portland/Deep Valley around the turn of the century. The words of my thoughts would change; the plans I had for my days would change.

It was like inhabiting a different version of myself. It was inspiring and refreshing. It was nice to get a break from being Regular Me and become a Book Me—like the seasons changing. We're all a little excited when the seasons change because it's something different. We wear the clothes we haven't worn in a while, do the activities we remember from years past. It's just different. That was what being a Book Me felt like.

It also made me try out different ways of living. When I read some books, it made me set my alarm early and get my chores done right away. When I read other books, it made me a more responsible big sister—even a little tired of the childish antics I'd employed the day before.

The Book Mes that I became were always very...respectable, which is so surprising to realize because I never actually cared about being respectable. I was always more interested in thieves and rogue heroes. The characters I wrote stories about were never "respectable." However, when I would wake up as a Book Me, it was always a Book Me who got things done and held her head high and spoke clearly and wanted to be efficient and good.

I'm baffled. Somehow, counter to everything I think and have thought about myself, I must've found "good" characters the most compelling and worthy of being emulated.

Of course, that's exactly why we want children to read good literature. We want them to be inspired by the good and right. We want the good and right to be so compelling that it molds children into better people.

I guess I just never realized that it actually WORKS.

I was suddenly, vividly reminded of Book Mes today as I read an Agatha Christie novel over breakfast. I wanted to keep reading, but I had finished my food and thought, in a very Gudgeon-the-butler sort of tone, "Yes, well, one doesn't always get to do what one wants, does one?" and I got up and started clearing the table. It was pretty easy to make myself do it, and that's when I realized with a shock:

For the first time maybe in years, I'd become a Book Me again. I'd become a brisk, dutiful, mildly cheerful servant who knew what life entailed and had quite made peace with it. I felt like I could do my day, when just moments ago the tasks before me had felt a little dark and heavy. I had had the vague impression that maybe I was going to try to get out of as many things as I could.

But that impression wouldn't have occurred to the servants and noble people of the Agatha Christie novel, and so, when I became Book Me, the impression evaporated for me too.

I've read hundreds of books in the last 10+ years, but I can't remember the last time I became a Book Me. I can tell you for sure that none of the thriller mysteries I've read have transformed me. None of the YA fantasy I've read lately has transformed me. None of those books felt like a bodily organ inhabiting my person and triggering an alternate version of myself.

Even as an almost-thirty-year-old, it's still the old, classic literature that transforms me.

In the words of Ross Geller saying the wrong name again, "Gah, what IS that?"

Is it really that there's something enduring and magical about older, well-written books? Maybe it's the same kind of magic that inhabits the real Statue of David compared to the copy in the Duomo Square. You can feel that. The copy is not the same, and it's downright eerie.

Maybe classical educators really are onto something when they insist that children read old classics. If they could inspire a little wannabe villain like me to get up at 7:00 and sweep, they're capable of almost anything good.

I like the Book Mes so much. I'm going to see if I can hold onto this one, a least a little bit longer.

~Stephanie

The Missing Element

At dinner the other day, Rachel talked about examining the stories she's written to see if there was an element or theme that appeared in all of them. She found that there was. Naturally, I wanted to see if that was true for me too.

"Older brothers" was the first idea that came to mind, but as much of a chokehold as that trope has had on me for my entire life, I immediately knew that wasn't it, because there is no older brother character in the Fire Faery Story.

I sat down with my journal and two lists: one list of all the stories I could think of off the top of my head, and one list of all the elements/themes I thought might be The One. I assigned symbols to the elements/themes, and wrote them next to the stories they applied to.

None of the elements appeared in every single story, though some came close, like "something is wrong with the powers that be" and "magic." However, 90% of what I've written has been YA fantasy, and those are like the bread and butter of the genre. I also traced "relationships that don't/can't work," but that wasn't every time either.

I put the exercise aside with the intention of mulling it over more later. There abso—

—ohhh, wait, is it the "found family" trope?* Mmmmm not quite. Fire Faery Story and many others, yes, but not The Mirror or The Virtue Chronicles or Powers Story.

Anyway. I put the exercise aside. I wasn't thinking about it at all when I was walking around the apartment complex and a thought hit me:

There are no couples in the Fire Faery Story. It's not just devoid of, like, teenagers who are "together"; I mean NO CHARACTERS ARE DATING OR MARRIED**. Even the adult characters are like single, widowed, etc. No one has a significant other.

I couldn't believe I'd never noticed this before. It wasn't an intentional choice; I had never even noticed. I just hadn't met any characters in my head who were married or together...ever.

Gabe's theory was that as a kid, I was still exploring the concept of relationships, so subconsciously, I didn't feel qualified to write about them. But how much do you really need to understand about relationships to throw in "oh and this man has a wife" or "oh and this character has both parents." Most of the adults I knew as a kid were married. Most of my friends had both parents living with them at home. My subconscious had plenty enough fodder for a cursory couple to EXIST IN MY WORLD?!

It was several hours later, while stir-frying chicken, that another thought hit me and I froze, wooden spoon hovering over the pan.

It's not just the Fire Faery Story that is devoid of couples.

It's ever story I've ever written.

No one is dating. No one is married. Single, widowed, widowered, mom's dead, dad's dead, both parents are dead. Usually there's some kind of secondary romance plot for my main character, but 1) it's conspicuously, intentionally, almost-breaking-the-fourth-wall-level secondary, and 2) it doesn't work.

Is that The Thing? Is that the element that's present in every one of my stories?

Well, first of all, yes. But does it count as The Thing if it's something missing instead of something present? And is that...really it?

What would that mean?

This post is a result of texting my parents about the revelation and ending the conversation with "Maybe I'll blog about it and see what happens."

My dad reminded me that as a kid, I had asked him why there were so many songs about being in love. To me, romance is still the least interesting quality of relationships. It's genuinely boring to me, like someone showing me pictures of their cat***. Like, I'm happy for you, but I really don't care.

"Romance" is different from love though. Even if I avoided "romance," I should still be able to have, like, John and Jane Doe living together in the periphery of the story, right?

I don't think it's a head-heart conflict either, which was my dad's first theory. I'm heart-repressed as an Eight, sure, but I'm other-people's-Feelings dominant in MBTI.

Since I haven't written any new stories or characters since I started self-discovery and personal growth work, I guess it's possible that if I were to write something new now, it would have a couple in it. Maybe maybe one day we'll see?

As I try to puzzle it out, the only reason I've come up with is that I'm most interested in characters as individuals. I see people as individuals, not who they are as a team or a couple. I see the individual first. I want space—I want to give the character space—to be who he/she is, without all the baggage of another person. I don't—well, I haven't—ever write two people trying to come up with a stance together as a unit. The whole "two become one" thing isn't part of my default.

Is that it? I'm not satisfied with that. It doesn't feel like the big Truth at the bottom of this concept. I totally believe in marriage; I've never had a problem with "one flesh."

I don't know.

I guess I'll keep thinking and talking and writing and see what happens.

What a weird-o quirk.

~ Stephanie

* This is happening in real time, by the way. This isn't a stylistic device XD

** One tertiary character has parents that we know are married, but we never even so much as see them in the same room.

*** There are exceptions to this. I would follow an Instagram page for Aaron's cat, Sombra, and the video of Cassidy's Mia fake sneezing is one of my favorite things of all time.

Boundaries: It Takes a Village

One of the things Boundaries makes clear is that it's impossible to do boundary work in isolation. That's not because boundaries must involve other people (you have boundaries to enforce on yourself, and you and God have a relationship with boundaries), but because boundary work is HARD. We need the support of people who love us in order to do it.

Over and over, Boundaries talks about practicing boundaries with "safe" people while you build up strength to face the people who are likely to react with anger or guilt-tripping when you try to set limits. Your safe people will be proud of you for respecting your property lines, and they can remind you of what's your responsibility and what's not your responsibility in the aftermath of holding a difficult limit.

According to Brené Brown, the most compassionate people seem to be the people with the best boundary skills. When you don't constantly feel resentful or taken advantage of, you can help with a happy heart. You're not a walking mess of compassion fatigue.

Basically, I guess I want to do two things in this post:

1) I want to encourage you to recognize your "safe" people. Who can you talk to about your journey with boundaries? Who can help you say No when appropriate, and cheer you on for doing the difficult, right thing? Who can you trust to tell you if you become a boundaries Nazi who might need to reevaluate?

2) I want to thank the people in my life who are supporting me in this work. I thought people would be mad at me and judge me for being lazy and selfish when I started working on boundaries. Ninety-nine percent of the time people have understood and replied to my refusals with "Good for you! That's so hard!" It's been humbling in a tearing-up kind of way. I tend to prepare for the worst, emotionally, and it's nice to be proven wrong. I don't know why I assume everyone is out for my blood*, but I'm working on stopping that and I've loved being pleasantly surprised.

I think boundary work gets easier as the process continues? I'm new at it, so we'll see, but what I'm noticing is that my boundary muscle is growing at a surprising rate, and the people around me are getting more used to it too. There have been hiccups, but everything has been working toward healthier expectations and communication, so yay!

I love my village so much, and I'm excited to become a better villager every day :D

~Stephanie

* Okay, maybe it has something to do with fear of betrayal/being an Eight, but good grief, why can't I chill? XD

I Apologize—or Do I?

I've been thinking about apologies a lot lately, from a lot of different angles. We'll see if this fits into one post or if it takes off into A Series.

Apologizing versus Sympathizing
I think this is one of the times English sets us up for imprecision, like the way it only has one word for "love." Nine times out of ten, when you say, "I'm sorry," some wise guy retorts, "wHy ArE yOu sOrRy iT'S nOt LikE it'S YoUr fAulT." Yeah, I know, Jim, I'm expressing sympathy; I'm not apologizing. English needs more words XD

Over-Apologizing: My Version
Gabe and I both over-apologize, but very differently. For me, appropriate apologies weren't something I studied as a kid. However, like many female Eights, I did internalize the belief that much of my natural behavior must warrant an apology. Because of this, I tend to apologize a lot because I feel like I don't have an accurate read on what people expect me to regret. I apologize for things that didn't need it, and sometimes miss opportunities where an apology would've been helpful.

Since Gabe is the person I'm closest to, I apologize to him the most. I apologize mostly 1) when I think I'm being "too much," and 2) because I've imagined blame/passive aggression from him. For example, I might notice that he started the dishwasher and assume that he's mad that I didn't do it first. I'll come to him and apologize for not starting the dishwasher, assure him that I was planning to do it, and ask if he's mad at me. We talked about this last night.

"It's like...it feels like a test," I told him, thinking out loud as usual. "Like you're waiting to see if I'll apologize for not doing it. If I do apologize, then of course you're not mad—and I pass the test because I apologized. But if I don't apologize, then you are mad, because you think I should've done it and if I don't show remorse that I didn't, I'm in the wrong."

He stared at me and then said, "I assure you I'm not putting that much thought into it. I just started the dishwasher."

Over-Apologizing: Gabe's Version
The way Gabe over-apologizes is...an absolute disease. He'll basically ask the waiter for the check and then apologize. When we checked into our hotel for our anniversary, we couldn't remember if we had reservations at one hotel or its sister hotel next door, so we needed to ask at the front desk. As we stood in line, I said to Gabe, "Do not apologize at any point during this interaction. You are doing nothing wrong. I'm sure people have this question all the time."

And he would've made it, too, but when we stepped up to the desk, the girl said, "Just give me one minute to wrap this up" as she typed into her computer and Gabe immediately: "Oh my gosh, I'm so sorry, yes, I'm sorry." BRUH.

When Apologies Become About the Apologizer
Gabe's apology disease (sorry, Love, I love you) leads into one of my biggest pet peeves about apologies: when the apologizer makes it about him/herself.

I believe the point of an apology is to express regret to the injured party, and maybe make plans to avoid causing pain/inconvenience in the future. Apologies should be about respecting or honoring the injured party. This goes awry in two ways:

1) When you fall all over yourself apologizing for something that doesn't merit an apology, you force the "injured party" to reassure you. It's no longer about expressing regret to the injured party. Now the injured party has to do the obligatory dance of, "Oh goodness, no, you're totally fine, don't even worry about it, no problem, no apology needed" and it's all about you, the apologizer. You've put a burden on the injured party. Now they feel a social obligation to reassure you that you were fine, your apology is unnecessary, etc. If you really want to do something kind or take a burden off the party you feel like you injured...don't force them into this dance of having to make you feel better. They'd probably rather just get on with their lives. Stop being annoying and emotionally demanding.

2) I also have beef with people who replace "I'm sorry" with "I feel so bad!" No. This isn't about you. You did something that hurt or inconvenienced me. If your reaction to hurting or inconveniencing me is to share how you are negatively affected...you're missing the point of an apology. Once again, you've put the burden on the injured party to reassure you: "Oh, don't feel bad!" etc. I am just about done with interactions that go like this:

Me: "You hurt/inconvenienced me."

Other person: "What?! I feel terrible! No! I would never do that on purpose! How could you think that of me? I would never! You always ascribe such negative intent to me! That's so unfair!"

Me: "Oh my gosh, I'm sorry! I didn't mean to make you feel bad."

I was in a relationship for years where the other party turned every situation into something I needed to apologize for. Imagine a situation where Person A was driving Person B around while high on acid, and somehow Person B ends up profusely apologizing. A master of madness and manipulation, I tell ya.

If you are in the wrong, apologize first. You can share how broken up you are about hurting the other person second, if you have to, but for heaven's sake, is the apology about genuinely expressing regret or about assuaging your own conscience?

Of Interest, Particularly If You're a Five on the Enneagram or an INTJ
Technically—etymologically—I guess apologies ARE about the apologizer. I'm pretty sure the word means "away word," as in, using words to cast blame away from yourself. "Apology" implies a defense/justification of the offender's action, so maybe all the obnoxious "I Know You Think I Hurt You But Here's Why You're Wrong" people have a leg to stand on after all XD

Anyway, I'm sure you have your own opinions and pet peeves surrounding apologies—or the English language :) What are they?

~Stephanie

It's Not a Nightmare; It's Something Far Worse

I was thinking about this in the shower today, and it occurred to me that I could blog about it.

"Ha," I said to myself. "Nope."

And that's when I realized that posting about this felt like ACTUAL vulnerability. Not the transparency and openness I use so often on this blog, but actual vulnerability. As in, this will allow people to take educated guesses about my insecurities and fears.

I'm sweating XD

And it's funny because when I get into it, you're for sure gonna be disappointed. It's not even a big deal. Like this intro is going to feel like clickbait when I get to the point, even though I'm not lying or exaggerating the way it makes me feel. It feels vulnerable to post about this.

*clears throat and begins the post the way it came to her in the shower*

Do you have any recurring nightmares, or themes in your nightmares?

I have two in particular that stand out to me: 1) tidal waves and 2) not being able to scream.

People who know me well know that I am big into dreams. I have dream dictionaries, I love Bible stories about dreams, I recorded my dreams in a folder on my computer for years, and I ask a handful of people pretty regularly if they've dreamed. (If you're not in the handful, this is your open, standing invitation to tell me your dreams. Believe me, I want to know.)

I've had all the standard dreams/nightmares: misshapen/missing teeth, being in a runaway car, showing up places naked, ummm...what are the other common ones... I don't know. Those. I've had those, many times as well.

But the tidal and the not being able to scream...those hit me different.

~Tidal Waves~
There's...nothing you can do about a tidal wave, or a guess "tsunami" is more accurate. You're standing on the beach, and suddenly, there's a wall of dark water rising up in front of you. It swells higher and higher, and absorbs all the sounds in the world as creation holds its breath, waiting for the inevitable. It's a gasp with no more breathing. It's the period at the end of everything.

It's that jolt of adrenaline. The sinking in your chest and stomach. The way your soul goes dark.

I think it's the inevitability of a tidal wave. There's no running. There's no swimming. There's no diving through it to the other side. You're frozen, and it doesn't matter. Even if you weren't frozen, what could you do? Nothing. It's a crushing wall of death.

Tidal wave dreams aren't nightmares to me. I actually love nightmares. I find them exciting and dangerous and they show me my true colors and buried reactions in new ways.

Tidal wave dreams are like something turning off the light in my soul. They reach up and yank the cord on my soul lamp, and click. Everything winks out. That's it.

I don't like that.

Oh, and the wave never crests in my dream. The photo for this post is misleading, but it's also pretty and teal. The waves in my dreams are just impending walls of water and then...well, you know how dreams are.

~Can't Scream~
The theme of not being able to scream recurs too. Sometimes it's that I can't get my mouth open (Think Neo in The Matrix), but more often it's that my voice is hoarse. I am screaming, funneling the energy of every cell in my body into the act of making sound, but a weak little croak comes out. I bend my whole body into the scream, hands on my knees if I can, throwing my chest into the scream, but it's a fragile whisper of an exclamation.

No one can hear it, and anyone who does, doesn't understand the depth of it, because it just sounds like a little croak. It doesn't sound like someone urgently screaming for her life because something is about to destroy her. It sounds ignorable. It sounds minor. It doesn't sound like every cell of her being is crying out, like her chest is about to cleave in half with the effort.

And, as with the wave, there's nothing else to be done. I've done the one thing I can do in whatever the dire situation is—it's always a last resort in the dreams—and that fails too. No one can hear me, and those that can, don't get it.

I get what the dreams mean. I told you, I have the dream dictionaries XD I know I'm overwhelmed by life and feel like no one can support me. Conversely, I know that I can handle all things with God and the people who love me, and I know that there are DOZENS of people who love and support me. I get it.

There's really nothing left to say, and the things other people could or would say, are the reasons I'm hesitant to post this in the first place.

As always, do with all of this whatever you will.

So. Did you dream last night?

~Stephanie

Maybe We Don't "Do" Anything

"So, what do we do about that?" a friend said to me. We were talking about the clothing designer for Target who got fired because he was openly a Satanist. "Do we support Target for firing someone with beliefs like that? Or do we not support Target because they're firing someone based on their beliefs? Like, what if a Christian got fired because they were a Christian? What do we do?"

"Maybe we don't 'do' anything," I said, having this thought for the very first time. "Maybe we just...live our lives."

And if someone confronts us about our stance, we can say that: we don't know what our opinion is. We're still thinking about it, for XYZ reasons.

This was a brand new thought for me, and one that is very counter to how I've always thought and lived. In the era of social media especially, it feels like we have to take a side, post for or against, share some hot take. But we if we don't have to do that? What if we don't have to "do" anything?* What if the world needs and Jesus wants something more mundane than that?

The Jews were expecting a leader who would rescue them from the evil, corrupt government and restore Truth to the world via war and politics. What they got was the exact opposite of a political leader. Jesus largely ignored the politics of his day, not even taking the "right side." He spoke in riddles to force people to talk to each other, and loved children to highlight the importance of faith, and toyed with religious leaders to prove they didn't have all the answers, and ate with sinners to model doing the contemporarily unthinkable, and overturned temple tables to mourn the house of worship becoming something commercial and gross.

Jesus did do things, but not...not what I see a lot of Christians doing today. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think Jesus would be posting all over his social media—or even boycotting or not boycotting Target. I kind of think he'd be talking one-on-one to the person your Facebook post is mocking, and buying food at Target for the homeless guy.

Jesus never delighted in making fun of people—and in fact, the people he came closest to "making fun of" were actually the religious blowhards who saw the world as black and white and thought they knew everything.

Maybe when we see or hear things that outrage us, our reaction doesn't need to be to DO something, but to BE something? I wonder if Jesus is unimpressed with most of the actions we take, if he feels like we're missing the point. Like, posting Bible verses and labeling sinners is one thing, but have you tried loving your neighbor?

I'm tired of being told I need to be mad about something or DO something in response to every little thing. Maybe it's not that deep. Try your best to live like Jesus, and trust him to sort out the details.

~Stephanie

* This will need to be a longer post at some point, but I'm NOT saying I think Christians should stand by while atrocities and injustices happen. I think Christians are called to advocate for people who are abused or endangered, whether by systems or individuals. There are definitely times when we should "do" something; I just wonder if the something is more personal, less performative than what we've been doing.

Boundaries: Let Your Yes Be Yes

I've never considered myself to be a "yes" person. I've never considered myself to be someone who finds it difficult to say No.

But I think I've been considering myself wrong, for a while now.

Maybe I used to be a Non-Yes-Person, a person who found it easy to say No. I can imagine that part of my personality being so loud and so effective as a child that it was inconvenient for those around me. I can imagine being trained out of my easily accessible No.

To some extent, we all have to do things we don't want to do; that's part of life. But it's part of life; it's not all of life. Somewhere along the road, I completely lost that distinction. I began should-ing all over myself, 24/7.

I don't know if it's being a Christian, a southerner, or part of a pastor's family, but I internalized a ton of "shoulds." If people expect you to, you should. If no one else is going to, you should. If you can, you should. What you want doesn't matter. What you feel doesn't matter. You do the things anyway. I am strong enough to do what I don't want to do, all the time. My feelings don't matter. What I want doesn't matter. This is the way things are, and it is right and true.

(And then I married the King of Feelings, who not only acted on his feelings, but did not see the need to support them with anything else, like, I don't know, reasons. Ask us about the first several years of marriage sometime XD We have each walked about a billion miles just to meet in the middle.)

In this headspace, it became impossible to know what I wanted—ever. It's like a brand of overthinking. It became impossible to answer the question, "Do you even want to X?" I would sit and gape at the question, butting against firewalls of Shoulds and cringing against their blaring alarms. Do I want cake? I shouldn't eat cake; I've had enough sugar the past few days. Do I want to go to church? I should go to church; the Bible tells us fellowship is important, as is keeping one's commitments. Do I want to go to my friend's birthday party? I should go; the friend has always been supportive of me. Do I want to stay inside and read? I shouldn't; I should go walk outside instead so I don't waste the nice weather.

Do I even want to do X? The muscle that answers that question has well and truly atrophied.

For years, a very small percentage of my Yeses have been real, biblical Yeses. This isn't anyone's fault but my own. It wasn't that people were forcing me to say yes, it's that I didn't and don't have the neural pathway to say yes and mean it. Everything gets routed directly through Should Station and exits as whatever the "correct answer" is. Feelings and desires don't matter.

After therapy, reading Boundaries, and having lots of conversations with Gabe, he and I have decided that I basically need an Anti-Should Bootcamp for the next six months. For the next six months, I'm not going to do anything that I simply "should," unless I feel a seed of genuine desire toward the thing.

This sounds INSANELY privileged and indulgent to me, and I think long-term, it would be. However, I think healing from wounds and (very little T) trauma can only happen in a space of absolute safety. I need to practice saying No until I start to believe that I have the freedom to do that. Only when a person can freely say No can she also freely say Yes. I need to prune away the weeds of all the Shoulds in my heart and see what healthy interests, desires, and joys might be trying to grow. What do I actually want?

I don't think I'm a lazy person anymore. I don't think this six-month bootcamp is in danger of turning me into a spoiled, capricious prima donna who thinks the world revolves around her desires. I think this is something I need to do in order to grow and heal, and I think I'll "come back" in six months happier, healthier, and able to show up spiritually to all the things I decide to say Yes to.

Because it's not a Yes if you didn't believe you could say No.

~ Stephanie

"That Hurt My Feelings": Part 3

Disclaimer: There's a chance I'm just in a bad mood [June 24]. I may still decide to publish this, for tRAnsPaRenCY, but we'll see.

A minute ago, I was flipping through old posts on this blog and I found these: "That Hurt My Feelings": Part 1 and "That Hurt My Feelings": Part 2.

Those posts feel so far away*. I had forgotten that for twenty-five years I didn't know the difference between being "open" and being "vulnerable."

To be honest, I feel nostalgic for the person I was back then. Remember when nothing hurt my feelings? Remember when I was fine? Remember when I could handle whatever? Those were the damn DAYS, man.

And I could go back to them, easily. I can turn off my feelings. (Gabe compared this ability to a vampire's ability to "turn off their humanity" in The Vampire Diaries. Accurate.) When I'm watching something that might be heartstring-tugging, I can turn off the part of me that would feel it. I used to live like that 24/7 because...well, to be honest, I don't think I knew another way to be. I don't think I realized that there was a doe-eyed little crybaby lurking inside of me. I thought non-vulnerable me was me. And maybe she was/is, I don't know.

Ever since learning about the Enneagram, I've been making an effort to grow in this area. I've been trying to tell more people (and by "more" I mean like two, in addition to Gabe) when they hurt my feelings. I've been trying to feel more.

Telling People When They've Hurt My Feelings: A Review
"4/10, cannot recommend yet. More than half the time it ends with a 'Sounds like a You problem; you're too sensitive.' The other 40% of the time, when the person owns it and apologizes, it makes you feel instantly sheepish and embarrassed, like you were in the wrong for being hurt in the first place. I give the practice 4 and not 0 because I'm trying to trust the process. I trying to believe that one day it'll feel like progress instead of masochism."

Feeling More: A Review
"3/10, cannot recommend yet. I'm sadder more often. I have to be more careful about what I watch/read/listen to, if I'm gonna do it with my feelings turned on. Gabe appreciates my effort. I think his Four heart is encouraged to see me feel more. I'm sure he'd defend what he sees as progress. It doesn't feel like anything to me, except being weaker."

So far, trying to become a more vulnerable person does not make me feel stronger. It makes me feel weaker. I don't know if I'm not doing it right, or if it's a process that takes—apparently—longer than three and a half years. I can't think of ANYTHING I've tried to do for that long and felt no progress on. I feel like I'm touchier, moodier, and less fun to be around. Regular life feels like a battle I've decided to walk into without armor.

I think maybe I'm just in a bad mood right now. I told someone [not Gabe, obviously] that he hurt my feelings today and he responded by saying I was being a "brat" and a "baby." Most of me agrees with him. The temptation to "turn off my humanity" is so strong. I could absolutely stop feeling. It's difficult for me to remember why that's not the best option for everyone.

On an intellectual level, I understand that broadening my capacity for sadness should also broaden my capacity for joy, but I was pretty joyful before all this junk. I would not say that I experience more joy now than I did then. I definitely experience more sadness.

Is this normal? How long is it supposed to take before vulnerability and feeling things pays off? Or maybe this just isn't for me?

I'll try to come back to this when I'm not feeling...like this.

~ Stephanie

* Oh jeez, I just realized that that's the time I said I'd been struggling ever since. Have I been struggling because of this openness/vulnerability revelation? Did I accidentally break myself in 2019? XD

Boundaries: You Own Your Emotions

So, this topic is embarrassing. I'm gonna sneak up to it by talking about something parallel in a kind of clinical manner and then LAUNCHING myself sideways into the actual topic.

Years ago I discovered that I was an Eight on the enneagram, which means that I tend toward black-and-white thinking, crave intensity, like to challenge people and ideas, and want to be strong. Eights also prefer to avoid weakness/vulnerability.

I always had a little bit of an...atypical Eight streak though, which confused me and made me question if I really was an Eight. I also didn't think that "avoiding vulnerability" was THAT big of a deal to me. I did avoid being vulnerable, but it wasn't, like, MY NUMBER ONE PRIORITY or anything.

Then I started therapy, and *steeples fingers together and peers at you over eyeglasses* it turns out it IS my number one priority. Turns out Gabe and Cassidy were right. Turns out virtually all of my other priorities are anti-vulnerability in disguise. I was actually uncomfortable with how obvious this seemed to my therapist. She began saying things like "...your favorite word, 'vulnerable'" or "Do you think this stems from your struggle with vulnerability?"

Miraculously, I still really love my therapist.

*LAUNCHES SELF SIDEWAYS*

So when I read Boundaries and found that I had been outsourcing my emotional regulation, I was, in a word, mortified.

On an average week, pre-Boundaries, I would lie on the couch at least four out of seven evenings being on my phone, and waiting for Gabe or Aaron or Cassidy to rescue me from the sadness that swallowed me the moment I wasn't engaged with another person. I literally just existed in a gray fog of lonely boredom or bored loneliness and waited for someone to notice and save me. If they didn't notice, it was because they didn't care about me or they'd finally gotten sick of me or they were happier without me or I was unloveable.

How f*#$%&@ embarrassing.

Boundaries makes the point that other peoples' emotions are not your responsibility—and the other side of that coin is that your emotions are not their responsibility. Other people cannot MAKE you angry, or sad, or happy unless you give them permission—no matter what the professional guilt-trippers say you're doing to them. Eleanor Roosevelt was right: "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."

The day after reading that truth-bomb, I was lying on the couch as usual, and felt the lonely sadness lay itself over me.

My emotions are my responsibility. It is not anyone else's JOB to notice and fix me.

No one need to be coming to save me. If I was going to become happier, I had to do something.

And you know what? Weight. Lifted. Off.

How can it possibly be FREEING to be saddled with more responsibility? And yet, it didn't feel like being saddled with responsibility, it felt like EMPOWERMENT.

First of all, how stupid is this. Second of all, it felt so NICE not to be stuck waiting for someone else to move. (Not that I was ever stuck; that was a lie I don't even remember telling myself.) It felt so nice for my emotions to be in my own hands. It felt like getting your driver's license or moving out or breaking up with someone terrible.

You know what I did? I got off the couch, made myself a snack, and settled in to watch TV on my laptop. I looked myself in the face and said, "Stop it. No one needs to save you."

I can't even describe how freeing this revelation was. One moment I was feeling like a weak little bitch, and the next I was feeling like Wonder Woman.

Now, I struggle with depression, and some people REALLY struggle with depression. I'm absolutely not arguing that you can cure depression if you "just stop being sad." But those lonely-couch-save-me moments were not depression. Actually, I was struggling with boundary issues. I had drawn my boundary lines in a place that made me powerless and others responsible for something that fell on my own property.

If my husband or friends notice that I'm sad, is it kind for them to try to cheer me up? Sure. But it's a kindness, not a responsibility.

It is no one's job but mine to make me happy.

And damn, does that feel good.

~ Stephanie

Boundaries: The Laziness Breakthrough

(Honestly, I don't even know how I plan to make this a whole post, because it was literally one moment of thought, but here we go.)

I've blogged before about how in my childhood I internalized a lie about myself: that I am lazy.

Gabe, bless him, has been trying for years to convince me that I'm not, but that false belief about myself has been welded onto my soul. It didn't seem to matter how many times Gabe told me I wasn't lazy, or got other people to corroborate the fact that I wasn't, or had me say out loud that I am not lazy. All of it was just water off a duck's back. None of sank in.

That's a weird human quirk, isn't it? That we can know something isn't true, but still...believe it. Still not be able to shake it. It makes me feel kind of crazy. Why are there parts of my mind that I can't access? How can part of me be so independent of my thoughts and intentions? Therapy has been great, but even that hadn't managed to get a meeting with the part of my brain that "knew" I was lazy.

A few weeks ago, I read the book Boundaries. One of my favorite things about the book is that it gives a list of things that are within your boundaries. If you're going to draw boundaries to keep other people from encroaching on your business, that necessarily implies that some things are your business. I plan to blog specifically about that later, but today, it's that simple fact that I want to highlight.

Some things are not your responsibility; some things are. You decide what to say yes to. You decide how you want to spend your time and energy. You decide what you can take on in a healthy manner.

So. The laziness breakthrough.

I was watching a YouTube video, and the creator talked about turning your passions into a business.

"Although you can't do that," my brain grumbled at itself. "Because you're too lazy."

Out of nowhere, this neutral, unemotional head voice said, "You're not lazy. That's just not within your boundaries right now."

Dismissed. No anger. No judgment. No nothing, really, just a wave of a mental hand that said, "No. Not true" and left it there.

I physically froze.

There was no guilt. The crushing sense of judgement I usually feel when confronted with something I "could" (which my brain automatically translates to "should") do was utterly absent.

I felt no weight. It was a giant mental shrug. It was the acknowledgement that yes, I could turn my passions into a business—if I assessed my boundaries and decided that that was within my healthy limits. It currently wasn't, and that was perfectly fine.

I wasn't lazy. I'm NOT lazy. Some things are within my healthy boundaries right now, and some things aren't. As I grow and seasons change, I'll examine my boundaries and see if they should be shifted. There is no glory in doing something I can't do healthily.

And that's it. THAT'S the truth. THAT'S what truth feels like.

I'm not lazy. And do you know what's WILD?

It feels like part of me has known that all along, and it's smiling, glad that the rest of me has finally caught up. I'm gonna guess that that part of me is the Holy Spirit, who will not violate our boundaries, but allows us to do the good work that is ours to do.

(Would you look a that. I did make a post out of one moment of thought XD)

~ Stephanie