Recovery

{ January 28, 2014 @ 10:39 pm } · { Life Issues }
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It’s been a while since I’ve been here, but I needed to have an outlet for all of my feelings and frustrations following my recent bilateral, multiple pulmonary emboli. Looking so normal on the outside, going to the ER with nothing but pain, I feel like I should feel normal. After all, I didn’t collapse, I didn’t have any other symptoms other than the extreme pain. But it doesn’t matter. PE recovery is going to be long and a struggle.

Today I am really frustrated with the fatigue. I have a lot of interests that don’t require a lot of energy: reading, writing, Cricuting, learning, baking, but even those activities are too much. For over a week I’ve been wanting to bake the same cookies, and everyday it’s just too much. I slept until 11 today and have been exhausted all day. I didn’t even have the energy to blow dry my hair, so I’m resting, hoping to have the energy to at least get that done. And I think out of sheer stubbornness, I will at least Cricut so I can feel like I’ve done something today.

From everything I’ve read, fatigue is very normal, even if it is frustrating. There’s nothing that can be done about it. The body is healing. And since I have multiple clots in both lungs, my body has a lot of healing to do. My oxygen saturation is low, my heart rate is up, as is my blood pressure. All of this is normal in the recovery and healing process, but it’s taxing as well.

I’ve also been frustrated with my mom. I’ve known how she is, self-centered, not really a mom, but this has been a new low for her. She missed a planned trip out here, even though I’d had the PE’s. I would think normally a mom would want to see her daughter after surviving a life-threatening ailment. Not mine. And last week I was back in the ER with the same pain and some new findings on the CT scan. My mom didn’t find out until much later, and she texted. I told her everything…and didn’t hear back from her. She finally called Saturday and talked for 4 minutes. She gave me all the usual excuses: “I HAVE been very worried about you. I’m sorry I haven’t called. I just have friends in the hospital and I’ve been busy.” She’s retired and wintering in Florida. Her friends are 85 and have not been lifelong friends. They’re not recovering from a life-threatening ailment. And, I’m pretty sure she can break away for 5 minutes to call me and see how I’m doing. I think the only reason she called is because my aunt had called her to get information and my nom couldn’t answer her questions. I think my aunt was appalled. In addition, my mom’s friends were asking questions that she couldn’t answer, and that’s embarrassing to her. So she called, and she wanted an update after my appointment with the lung doctor.

So I texted her the update from my lung doctor. I have lung damage that looks “peculiar”. I’m following up with him in a month. And, I haven’t heard from her. I get frustrated trying to deal with her, deal with her excuses, her constant excuses. The rest of my family has been calling and texting and are very worried. Even my in-laws! But she can’t be bothered. I don’t want to be a bitter person, but I’m tired of her antics, her games. I’m tired of letting her get away with her excuses. It’s pure bullshit that she cares. We all know what caring looks like and that ain’t it. So we’ll see how I handle her if I hear from her again.

So that’s my rant for today!

Limitations

{ February 20, 2013 @ 4:25 am } · { Life Issues }
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It can be humbling accepting our limitations. But I’m beginning to wonder if it can also be freeing. It’s easy to fall into a trap of what I “should” be or “could” be. And what I experience is frustration. I see this ideal of what today’s modern woman “should” be, and I know I don’t measure up. I don’t even know how to measure up. And I’m slowly beginning to accept my limitations.

Society praises the extroverts and over scheduled. I’m an introvert in need of down time. If my day is packed with people and their needs, I need time alone to decompress; I can’t go run off to activities that will further sap my energy. When I begin to accept that I am introverted and that I don’t need to fight my nature, I feel freedom. It still takes effort to shut out the noise of our extroverted society, but it’s a relief to begin to give up some of the pressure to be an extrovert when I’m an introvert.

I’m still sorting out how to accept my other limitations and still function in society. I’m slowly realizing that some of my aspirations I had for myself are not realistic within the limitations I have. When I think about making adjustments to fit with my limitations, I begin to feel some relief. But then the noise starts. I should be this, I should be that, what will people think, am I proving myself to be the loser that some always thought I was? I have to prove them wrong! All the noise.

So limitations are on my mind these days. It’s easy to look at others and say they need to accept their limitation, whatever it may be: illness, personality style, finances, etc., but when it comes to getting real with our own limitations, it can be a blind side. It can require us to humble ourselves when we don’t want to. But I am beginning to believe there is freedom in accepting our limitations.

Step Aside, I Need Your Money

{ September 18, 2012 @ 2:40 am } · { Christianity }
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This will probably not be one of my more popular posts, but, I’m going to put it out there. How much do our relationships matter in the Christian community? Are we to be so focused on our own agenda that we don’t see the need and hurting in front of us?

I grew up going to church on Sunday, and hearing the rest of the week what a screw-up I was. If that doesn’t distort your idea of God and Christians. I desperately needed to be shown God’s love, but, I often found myself rejected within the Christian community. Fortunately God didn’t let me go through all of those years, but I did learn a lot and have a lot of questions arise as I’ve reflected back on my experiences in the Christian community.

I went on a trip with my Christian group my senior year of college. I’d raised money just like everyone else, but my resources were limited, so I was on a tight budget for the week. One of the girls on the trip, let’s call her Amy (not even close to her real name), had raised a lot of money. She was eating well, buying souvenirs, having a luxurious trip. My trip was different. I’d made muffins before the trip to have every morning for breakfast because I couldn’t afford to go out. I’d bought a box of Little Debbies to provide me a daily snack. Amy never offered anything to me, and really, I didn’t mind at the time. I was used to a tight budget.

Amy was never overly warm to me and never concerned with my home issues, never concerned with ME. Until, fast-forward about 6 years after college graduation, when somehow she was able to track me down in the 3rd state I’d moved to after graduation, and she called me to ask me for monthly support for her as she joined the staff of a Christian ministry. Maybe I shouldn’t have been, but I was stunned. Is this acceptable practice? We barely give each other the time of day but then pursue them earnestly when we want monetary support from them? Because pursue me she did!

It was at that moment that I felt bitterness enter my heart. Why didn’t she share with me on that trip? Why didn’t she ever ask why going home was not a joy for me? Why wasn’t she ever interested in me? None of these things bothered me until her letters and calls for financial support. I couldn’t find an explanation that made this acceptable.

I do believe in spreading God’s word. I do believe in ministries and missions. But when we’re going back to people that we overlooked and actually overlooking THEM again and just looking to their wallet, I really, really have a problem with that.

And it’s not the last time it’s happened to us, either, so on some level there is something I am not getting. I’ve had people that have seen us go through extreme debilitating sickness and they didn’t call or write to check in on us, yet they sent us letters for financial support for their mission trip in the heart of that trial. With every fiber of my being I feel this is wrong.

And I must be in the minority in feeling this way, because so many people in the Christian community do it. I just wish I understood it…

What’s Your Number?

{ September 13, 2012 @ 4:27 am } · { Life Issues }
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“You have 307 friends!” my husband exclaimed one night after logging onto Facebook. “True, but how many of them are my 2:00 in the morning friends?” I responded sadly.

Sometimes I feel our American life is just this fastly spinning carousel that I can’t jump on, or, once on, impossible to jump off. Forget finding a place to rest and settle; you’re just hanging on for dear life. I’m just a Midwestern bred small-town girl who is used to a slower pace of life and a community of people that you know you can call at 2:00 in the morning.

And maybe it still is that way in my home state; maybe I’ve been gone too long and living in places that are too fast to really see that it still exists. What I see culturally, and this is generally speaking, is that we are a sick culture. We demand to be instantly gratified. We try to outdo each other in punch-lines so we can be the life of the party. We add every last person we can think of on Facebook to get some semblance of satisfaction that we have significance. But really, it’s just empty significance.

I long for deeper, more meaningful relationships. I would love to have 7 Facebook friends, but to know that I can count on them when the going gets tough.

Contradictions

{ September 4, 2012 @ 3:48 am } · { adventure, Life }
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Tonight I’m revisiting a theme that I visit often: contradictions. I have two very strong, competing sides to my personality. There’s the side that desperately wants a place to belong, a place to plant some roots. Since I graduated from college I hadn’t lived in one place for more than 3 years for 14 years. My insatiable wanderlust combined with marrying an Air Force pilot led us to have such a transient lifestyle.

And thus, the contradictory side of me that has always wanted to go, to experience, to see. I was always fascinated by the thought of so many different places and so many different ways of life to experience. I couldn’t imagine staying in my home state after graduation. Not long ago, one of my old college boyfriend’s friends added me on Facebook. They’d never left my home state, and my old boyfriend never left our college town. The thought of that sucks the life out of me. It’s a life that wouldn’t have suited me.

But. The powers of Facebook, while great for reconnecting and staying in touch, can also bring up some feelings. One of my old college friends recently posted some pictures of her birthday outing, that included a few other friends from college. There was a longing I felt, a life that I’d given up but I was faced with the consequences of my wanderlust. My sole focus back in those days was going, moving forward, seeing, experiencing. But at the expense of maintaining relationships.

And thus the longing to feel like I have a place to belong. We’ve now been in our current city for 3 1/2 years; long enough to make connections but not long enough to feel planted, to feel a sense of belonging. And still, there is the wanderlust. I long for my current job to lead to international work. To be in the far reaches of the earth.

So that’s where I’m at tonight. Fully feeling the contradictions in my personality. No answers tonight, just recognizing the constant theme.

Disposable

{ August 29, 2012 @ 3:27 am } · { Life }
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Working in a truly multi-cultural environment, I talk often with my co-workers about family, relationships, how life in their home country differed from life here. One consistent thing that comes up is how different relationships are here. One of my friends at work told me he had started to shut down from making friends at work because it was too hard when they left. Another one of my friends said he doesn’t call many Americans friends because the word doesn’t mean the same here as it does in his home country.

Recently one of my American friends and I were having a conversation with this co-worker about friendships. My American friend was bitter about about a co-worker friend that had moved and dropped all communication. This led our co-worker to talk about how friendships in the US are different.

As we were talking about this, it occurred to me that in our disposable society we’ve done just that with our relationships: made them disposable. We seek relationships that are good for us in the here and now and dispose of our old ones. I know that life is much more complicated these days; we’re moving for our jobs, our friends move, life is complicated. But in that complexity we have so many ways to keep in touch. My co-worker was obviously hurt by the loss of her friendship with what she had thought was a good friend. She was disposable.

I’ve also talked with childhood friends of mine about loneliness, even when we have friendships where we live. And I think it’s because we don’t have the luxury of time to build a foundation for those friendships like we did in school and college, and we also don’t invest the time that we should to foster those relationships. So we don’t have deep friendships that we are committed to and we dispose of them like a car that no longer serves our purpose.

Being in this multi-cultural environment has caused me to pause and examine if I have treated anyone as disposable. When our disposable society has gone so far that we now view relationships as disposable, it’s time to take a step back.

Highlight Reel

{ August 18, 2012 @ 7:59 pm } · { Uncategorized }
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Do you sometimes wish you were someone else? Looking at the highlight reels of other people’s lives, it’s easy to come to a mythical conclusion. Life is great, there are very few hardships, they are beloved and handle every situation with grace. I struggle with these thoughts when I take on responsibility that does not belong to me.

My boss recently came under fire for few things. There was a client crisis situation that I presented to her. She did not handle it according to company policy, nor according to mandatory law, nor according to ethics. I tried my best to get her to do the right thing but to no avail. That situation spiraled downwards, by her own actions, and landed her in some hot water. She also had some other issues that she was under fire for; other responsibilities that she wasn’t meeting that had nothing to do with more or the crisis situation.

But I still felt responsible. Over the course of these situations she withdrew. I’d tried talking to her and supposedly we “were good”, but it didn’t change our relationship. She continued to withdraw to the point of not being a responsive boss at all, leaving me out of meetings, important team e-mails, etc. As I was seeking advice on how to handle this, she put in her 2 weeks notice. I’d hoped she would come to me and tell me exactly what was bothering her, but she never did.

I recognized it was her own actions that brought her under fire, but it never feels good to have a broken relationship. I’ve found myself wishing I were someone else, someone who handled every situation with grace and never had broken relationships. But is that realistic? No, I don’t believe it is. But it doesn’t ease the hurt in your heart…

Introspection

{ July 23, 2012 @ 4:45 am } · { Life, Uncategorized }
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It’s hard not to be introspective after something like the Colorado tragedy. Those victims were doing something so ordinary, so innocent, that it hits you how fragile life is, and it leads me to be introspective. Not that I need much urging to be introspective, but it makes the introspection deeper.

I think our lives since October have been pinging from one issue to the next, without any real intentional living. I had sinus surgery in October, got a job in December, my husband had surgery two weeks later, then early February my dad suffered a major heart attack, then April my grandfather passed away, then early June my husband had back surgery, remained in pain since then, had another surgery recently where they discovered a spinal infection, and now he is homebound with a PICC line and 3 bags, 4 hours of IV antibiotics daily. And throughout the duration I’ve been exhausted, and doing everything I can just to get through each day, perform my job well, support my family. But that has been my life for the last 8 months, bouncing from one crisis to another, giving my all to work, and collapsing in my down time. And I don’t want to live that way.

The Colorado tragedy drove home the importance of intentional living. I was texting a friend and asking my friend not to be too nice to me at work because I needed to hold it together. Then it hit me, I don’t allow myself to be vulnerable in front of most my friends and therefore they don’t reach a level of compassion, kindness and understanding that would make me break down, but I probably need to lean on them. And maybe if I leaned on them I would sleep peacefully and be less exhausted, who knows? But for sure I’d be more connected to them instead of being stoic.

I have so many other aspects of myself that I miss and that I let go and that I’m realizing I need to get back. I don’t want a job to get the best parts of me. I want to be good at my job, but I want to push through my exhaustion, push through the trials and the stress and force myself to do things that make me feel intentional again.

Counter-Culture

{ May 31, 2012 @ 3:12 am } · { Christianity, Life }
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Do you ever feel counter-culture? I don’t mean in an activist sort of way, but deep down in your bones, at the heart of your being, counter-culture. I do, and I admit this to few people. As I live my American life I ask so many ‘why’s’. Why is our work-week a minimum of 40 hours? Why is it admirable to be busy? Why do we devalue relationships? Why is the American dream defined by material wealth? Why do we women fall for marketing campaigns that tell us what the ideal woman should look like? Especially when that ideal eats into our budgets? Why is our culture so superficial?

I don’t want to live the rat-race. I am confident that should I be on my death-bed, I will not say, “I wish I’d been busier” or “I wish I’d gotten a little more done at work.” Many of us say these kinds of platitudes but do we really mean it? I really don’t see a lot of people living this example; not in our culture. I hear a lot of excuses or a lot of “I wishes”, as though being busy were out of their control. They’re succumbing to culture, whether they admit it or not.

I had to great job opportunities laid out before me last fall. One was at a very prominent Christian organization and the other was at a secular international agency. I asked friends at both places about the work culture. Friends at the Christian agency said that the work/home life boundaries were blurred and that work often encroached on home life. In the secular agency, there was more of a European model with clearly defined work/home life boundaries. As much as I wanted to work at the prominent Christian agency, I chose the secular agency. I have to have a home life. I have to be available to my husband. My husband deserves me at my best, and that can’t happen when a job encroaches on my home life.

Why is it that even a Christian organization has blurred those boundaries? Has it succumbed to the American culture?

I remember being in Kenya and being on “Kenya time”. At first it was hard to get used to; waiting for a bus that was supposed to arrive at 8 and it finally showed up at 11. But since then I have really grown to value “Kenya time”. How wonderful to have the freedom to be late if it meant giving a loved one some time and attention that they desperately needed. What peace of mind that would give you. The bus driver would have peace knowing they gave their friend valuable time and attention, instead of a hurried, “I can’t talk to you know; I have this other more pressing engagement.” Gosh would I love that freedom.

And why do we admire busyness? I think I will go to my grave not understanding this value. The more activities someone is involved with the more we admire them. Aren’t they great? Look how much they can accomplish! But do we examine their relationships? Do we even care? How great they are for how busy they are! I firmly believe that when we don’t have time to give others our best, we’re sending a message about their worth. Although I feel as though I’m in the American minority with this attitude.

So needless to say, I feel very counter-culture living this “American Dream”. I don’t see joy around me. In Malawi there was a lack of material wealth but I saw joy. As women we are spending more and more on our outward appearance but I believe our insecurities are growing. This current “American Dream” doesn’t really seem to be working. But few will admit that.

So I find myself struggling to live a life true to my values in the system that I was born into. I recently had an Afghani friend give me quite a different perspective: we’re all a slave to something. In America, we are a slave to our system. Even though we are the land of the free, how much freedom do we really have? We highlight the benefits of our capitalist society: advances in technology and medicine, but at what cost? Our families? Our relationships? In terms of valuing people and relationships, I think we’re falling far behind.

I want Utopia, which I know will not be found on this earth, but I still want it anyway. I want a culture that values relationships, devalues materialism, creates things that last, values time and not busyness, values people over accomplishments, even better, accomplishment is measured by your relationships. I want a counter-culture.

Safety

{ May 30, 2012 @ 12:49 am } · { Christianity }
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Safe. What pictures does that word conjure up? Does it bring to mind any particular memories? In my adult life, I’ve happily embraced safe. I really never knew what it felt like. As a child, I didn’t feel safe at home and often hid in my room or the basement, hoping out of sight meant out of mind. For a period of time at school I didn’t feel safe, being the target of some junior high bullies. At that time in my life safe was probably defined at its most basic, elementary meaning.

As an adult, I began to feel a different kind of safe. I had a comforting husband at home whose shoulder I could always lean on and count on. Home was happy and comfortable and warm. I had no fears, no anxieties. I could shut the world out in my home. No matter what I encountered during the day, I knew I had a welcoming retreat waiting for me.

And I felt blessed. I thought surely God was blessing me in the second part of my life for having endured a turbulent childhood. I openly welcomed and embraced this newfound safety. I didn’t feel the need to upset that apple cart. I felt completely self-righteous in seeking to maintain this feeling of safety. After all, I rationalized, most of my friends had these great childhoods with happy memories and their home was their rock and safe place. I didn’t have that, so I felt fully justified in finally taking what I thought was mine to take. Safety.

But are we called to live safe lives? As I continue to read through this book about the Christian faith in today’s American society, I’m beginning to be challenged about the idea of this safe life as God’s will. Doesn’t the Bible almost guarantee our persecution as Christians? And I don’t think the Bible meant broad, sweeping persecution where we see the Christian faith mocked on TV, but real, personal persecution that carries with it a personal sacrifice. If I’m not feeling persecuted, am I displaying my faith enough? Am I basking in the warmth of my safe place too much? Have I sought safety and comfort at the expense of my faith?

In my quest for safety I’ve also highly desired peace. Granted, peace is very Biblical. But I think having so much conflict and anger during my formative years has really made me desire peace, which has turned into peace at all cost, it would seem. Whether I realized it or not, I am always sizing people up: are you safe to share my faith with? Will you challenge me with questions I can’t answer? Will you point out numerous ways I’m a hypocrite? What about if I just shared a little? Would that be safe?

If I’m seeking safety then surely I am not seeking to be one of God’s workers on the ground. By focusing on the temporal false sense of safety I overlook the safety that God has planned for me for eternity, and I’m overlooking the eternal safety God would like others to have as well.

I don’t think it will be easy to transition from a temporal safety focus to an eternal safety focus, but God is opening my eyes to many blind spots…

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