Orienting

It's funny to me how a year can reshape your mental routines. Every time I glance out the window and see that it's sunny, I start planning how to make the most of the fine weather while it lasts, forgetting that tomorrow's going to be sunny too. And the next day. And the next. And the next, with a chance of thunderstorms in the afternoon. My body's surprised too-- I look down at the blisters on my toes and heels from wearing sandals and flats instead of boots and wonder at them, tiny little painful reminders that what I used to be used to is not what I am currently accustomed to.

For three years, I was paid to drive for sometimes five hours at a time. Why am I antsy after two and a half? I grew up driving on the right side of the road and following the traffic patterns for vehicles and pedestrians that go along with that. Why does my body shy away from imaginary traffic coming from the opposite side of the road when I go through a crosswalk? I've always had an answer for every question the instructor poses to the class. Why are my answers now questions?

I had thought that I could pick up the person I was, the one I left in America last September, with little or no problem, as easy as pulling my glassware out of storage and putting it in a new cabinet. (It is, by the way, the world's biggest comfort to be able to drink water out of my glasses and coffee out of my mugs, to eat food off of my plates and out of my bowls, to be reminded of the permanence my life had before and will have again.) I mean, I don't know that I'm in love with that version of myself, but I figured I could borrow back her habits, at least, her patterns of speech and cultural acumen. Heck, the first thing I did when I got into DC was find the NPR station with the best reception in my car. I should be settled and sorted. I'm home.

Orientation was a great comfort when that idea proved to be wrong. "You have to understand that you're not where you were three months ago." "Starting seminary is a big change and you have to acknowledge that. Change is stressful." From introductory lectures to student panels, there was an through-line of understanding and acceptance. "We know you want to look like you've got it all together, to be the one who's got it together so that you can care for someone else. You don't have to pretend like you've got it all together. You won't have it together." Beyond acknowledgement of the stress of transformation that this whole experience would induce, they pushed self-care. Find your sabbath and keep it holy. Talk to people when you feel overwhelmed. You don't have to do this alone; in fact, you can't.

You know the thing I noticed about pastors-in-training? We all read responsive readings with verve. The first worship service we had together, I was stunned by how loud the voices were around me. I felt like the chapel rang with our sound. You know, I know how hard it can be to teach teachers. I've led a couple educator workshops in my day and teachers make for interesting students. But I think if we can preserve that sound, that boldness and unity, even for just a few minutes over the course of a service, I feel like we'll get through this. It's a journey to be shared, apparently, no matter where we've come from.

I missed church on Sunday but I was preached at on Friday and again on Tuesday by people of faith who care deeply about this country and its ideals and its problems. I nodded as I listened, felt a shiver every once in a while when something that felt like, sounded like, must be truth hit my ears. There's an urgency to the questions we ask. There is a world for which we are being prepared and it needs us. It needs our voices and our thoughts, our actions and our hearts. This conviction, this burden of care, this is what stops the sharp points of my mind from slicing into others. I'm called to bring grace into the world. This burden of care is acted out in love, which I feel like I'm daily rediscovering in conversations with friends, in words of support, in surprisingly still-frequent hugs, and in the thousand tiny ways those surrounding me pay attention to me, serve me, bless me, carry me.

In the National Cathedral, there's a statue of Lincoln and an inscription which reads, "Abraham Lincoln whose lonely soul God kindled, is here remembered by a people, their conflict healed by the truth that marches on." On Tuesday, I waved at the moon rock in the stained glass window, I leaned into the quiet a cathedral brings into my soul and mind, I sat in a chapel and prayed, but it was this inscription that sank down into my heart. Whose lonely soul God kindled. Whose lonely soul God kindled.

This feeling here, down in my gut, the one that promises me that we will make the world better, that we will together go forward in love and truth and freedom and beauty and all those other words that put labels on entities that we are privileged to try to understand, this feeling is home. This is where my heart rests. And when the melancholy hits, when I forget or doubt or wander or worry, I really do think I'll have people to bring me back here. God knows I'll need it.

Transition Train of Thought

Why does my back hurt so much? Oh, because I packed half my worldly possessions into a backpack that I lugged around three countries, then flew on a plane and slept on a less-than-ideal bed, then flew on a couple of planes and slept on a real bed but unpacked and re-packed the other half of my worldly possessions, then drove for seven hours, then moved all my worldly possessions into their new home and then rearranged furniture. Also, I have bad posture and carry my stress in my lower back. Mystery solved.

This'll be fine. It's fine.

I'm not overwhelmed. I'm not nervous. I've done this before. I've done this before in the last year. I can do this. I've done this. I'm fine. It's fine. Everything's fine. I'll just update my bullet journal for the next couple of weeks and...

Why is there nothing after August 27th?

WHY IS THERE NOTHING AFTER AUGUST 27TH???

Okay, calm down. We planned out this journal in June, so of course September seemed too far away to think about. We'll just update it and put all the things we need to do down in a list and then we'll do them and then we'll be sorted for the future. Before you know it, it'll be October and we'll have a routine that's much more substantial than a podcast feed and we'll forget that this whole transition period happened. One step at a time. One day at a time. That's how you build a life. Just stop for a second and breathe and we'll be fine.

I don't have a ruler.

How am I supposed to update my journal without a ruler? My edges won't be straight. I'll look back on these pages and all I'll see is the fact that I couldn't even draw a straight line and you learn how to do that as a child and that means that children are better than me at everything and what's the use of the past TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE if I CAN'T EVEN DRAW A STRAIGHT LINE?

If I run my hands through my hair one more time, I think I'm going to go bald.

At least my nails are short so I can't tear my scalp to pieces or nervously scratch my eyebrows off.

Okay, clearly I'm a little overly jittery. No more caffeine today. Lesson learned. Box checked. We're going to be fine.

This would be so much easier with someone else.

Nope, not gonna go down that mental rabbit hole right now. One step at a time. Breathe in. Breathe out. Make a list.

Books. DMV. Job search. Church search. Budget. Plan weekends out of town. Tick through this all today and tomorrow because you've got orientation on Friday and--

What am I going to wear to orientation? It's going to be so hot. We're going to walk around. Do I have anything appropriate? Where did all my fancy clothes go? Can I wear a dress? Would that be weird? All my dresses are wrinkled. Where is my iron? I didn't pack my iron, did I? Does the laundry room have an iron? Why do all my clothes smell like this? Why don't I smell like me anymore? And it's not like I can just open up a window-- I'm not paying to air condition the outdoors. Maybe just some air movement? I don't have a ceiling fan. I DON'T HAVE A CEILING FAN. DC, YOU'RE BUILT ON A *^&%$#** SWAMP. WHY DON'T YOU HAVE CEILING FANS?

I'm doing so well.

I'll just go over to Facebook for a hot second, say hello to some people, get a little social distraction in. And I can do some research while I talk. It'll be good. It'll ground me. It'll remind me of... of good things, right? Connections. Friends. Funny things. It'll be good.

Books. DMV. Jobs. Church. Weekend plans. Conversations. Articles. Articles. Election thinkpiece.  Buzzfeed penguin "article". Parking map.

If I open another tab, I'm going to scream.

You know what? Let's take half an hour and just not be fine. No one's home. We'll just turn up the music and come back to the list in thirty minutes. Have a bit of a singalong. Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in...

"I'M TAKING THIS HORSE BY THE REINS MAKING RED COATS REDDER WITH BLOODSTAINS AND I'M NEVER GONNA STOP UNTIL I MAKE 'EM DROP AND BURN 'EM UP AND SCATTER THE REMAINS YEAH"

Lafayette, you never let me down.

Oh, hey, lunchtime! Ham and cheese, here I come!

This is going to be fine. I'm fine.

I got this.

Reverse Culture Shock

I always rolled my eyes at people who "picked up an accent" after some time abroad. No, my friend, a year is not enough time to change the vowel structure of your speech patterns. You know how you sound. Stop it. 

But then I went and picked up some oddities in my behavioral patterns that come out as I tell stories or try to refer to everyday objects. So, in order to avoid sounding like a pretentious braggart, I'm going to collect all my thoughts on the British-American cultural divide here. From the first couple of days back, at least.

-Flip-flops. Praise be. Boots, you can sit the next couple months out. 

-I don’t worry about taking my passport with me anytime I leave town. I am a citizen. I do not need a visa. I can work for whoever I want, however much I want. 

-I no longer check the currency exchange daily. 

-I just paid $5 for lunch. This is the cheapest meal I’ve had eating out in over a year.

-Tax is included in the prices. I find myself fishing for change whenever I use cash now.

-Waitstaff checks up on you over the course of the meal and tips are suddenly expected again. (Not that I’ll be doing a ton of that as I am a poor student again.)

-Do I bus my own table? I probably bus my own table. No one else is leaving their food trash. Better look for the bin, then. 

-FREE REFILLS. Not confused, really, just pleasantly surprised every time they happen. 

-Oh, you don’t want to see my signature and compare it to my card? That’s fine. That’s normal. That’s what we do. 

-Guilt-free Starbucks.

-Guilt-free McDonalds. 

-I need health insurance now. 

-Why am I awake at 4am? Oh. Because my body does not know what time it is. 

-Light switches INSIDE bathrooms. 

-Ceiling fans. 

-Outlets. 
-The paper is the right size again.

-It’s DARK by 9pm. I knew this would have happened eventually anyway, but I’m thrown off guard by it. 

-I know this is just an Edinburgh problem, but I get distracted by the stars nightly.

-The crickets are so loud. 

-The people are so loud. 

-American flags are everywhere. EVERYWHERE. EVERY. WHERE. 

-Political attack ads. 

-Someone just asked me if I was registered to vote and if I’d moved in the last year. I… yes? and yes? Should I…? Do I…? Listen, I’m just going to go google this.

-Or get distracted by ALL THE SHOWS on American Netflix. 

-“This content is not available in your region.” NOT TODAY, SATAN. 

-No, Safari, I no longer want to use maps.google.uk. Stop suggesting it. 

-“I’ll have a Tennets—Stella—Carlsberg—Uh, do you have Yeungling? Perfect.” 

-It’s 8pm. Why am I so tired? Oh, because my body thinks it’s after midnight. 

-“I’ll have a Coke, please.” *Takes a sip* WHY DOESN’T THIS TASTE LIKE COKE?

-Chips? Crisps? Fries? I don’t know anymore. I just don’t know.

-Salt. I think there’s a layer of salt on everything in America. 

-Butter. 

-ABC stores. 

-Concealed carry notices.

-I’m very aware of my gender when trying to find the restroom in a restaurant. 

-Edinburgh. Pittsburgh. Pittsboro. Carrboro. Greensboro. Edinburgh. 

-I sent that message like three hours ago. Surely they’ve seen it. Why are they not responding? Are they dropping me from their life that quickly? WHY IS THIS HAPPENING TO ME? Oh. Wait. It’s 2am there. 

-“You wanna FaceTime or…? OR I COULD CALL YOU.”

-“Wanna have a pub day over Skype?”

-I keep on asking for the bin, partially out of habit, partially because I am now aware of how painfully nasal the a’s in “trash can” are. 

-“My new flat— roommates…”

-“I’ll just pop to the loo before we go, shall I?” No, self, you’re going to run to the bathroom. You’re in America now. 

-PANTS. PANTS PANTS PANTS PANTS PANTS PAAAAAAANTS. Fanny. Pants. 

-I don’t want to call it soccer but I can’t call it football… better to not talk about sports at all. 

-OH GOD EVERYONE’S TALKING ABOUT SPORTS. 

-Huh, that word does look better with a u. 

-Why is that word misspelled? Oh. Z. 

-Lord Almighty, everyone here sounds like me. 

-I swear the sun is brighter over here. Squinting all over the place.

-I got sunburnt from driving.

-“Better bring a jacket and a brolly,” I think, grabbing the items on the way out the door fifteen seconds before walking back into the house to drop the items back off again. 

-Seriously, excepting June, it’s been a year since I’ve seen this many elbows and knees out in public. 

-Also, been a year since I’ve seen this wide a variety of skin tones. 

-It's so hot.

-It's SO hot.

-It's like 90 degrees in the shade. (Yeah I used Fahrenheit. SUCK IT, CELSIUS.)

-I think I’m dehydrated literally just from sweating. 

-There’s so much space. 

-Driving in the car on a sunny summer afternoon with the windows down and the Avetts turned up is a familiar kind of heaven, but there’s another kind that involves a pub with friends on a cold and rainy night, listening to the words and sounds of the past year bubble up around me. 

-I have my mountains back, at least for a few days. Explain to me why there’s a near-perfect ache for the Highlands in my gut. 

Leaving

I’m sure the hostel bed isn’t helping, but my neck is still sore from the flight. I turned my head to look out the window as soon as we started to pull back from the gate and I didn’t turn back until Edinburgh was buried under a bank of clouds. Even then, I kept my head angled away from everyone else on the plane because tears are for pansies and my face was covered in them. I have never wanted to stay somewhere so badly. Still, conceal, don’t feel. Get it together. Stiff upper lip. Projecting strength is of primary importance when you’re traveling alone through life. Don’t let them see you cry.

Except…

Except that’s not what I learned this year. I didn’t learn how to shut people out, to fend them off with a show of force, be that force sass or intellect or silence. I already knew that. And I already knew how to handle the situation if strength didn’t keep people at arm’s length. Kindness does the trick there—you take care of yourself by taking care of others, building a layer of consideration and selfless acts around you so that when the barbs don’t scare people off, the sweetness makes them forget to pry. As long as you have your ish together, you can reject or deflect and stay safe for a very long time. This I know.

No, this year I learned what an ineffective strategy that is for building anything worth having. Great things are not achieved by a safe preservation of self and we all have the ability to achieve something great in our lives.

Okay, that’s maybe more grandiose of a point than I want to make. What I want to say is that you get the things in life really worth having by letting the world in, not by keeping it out. 

I’m a fan of considering how lessons fit into the larger picture of life. I’m big on overarching themes. You may have noticed. I like to contextualize a thought and then generalize it, to place ideas within theoretical frameworks and push them. Consider, for example, the question, “Can you hug a whale?” I maintain that you cannot, but that really depends on what kind of whale and, more importantly, how you define a hug, and maybe how well language can describe what a hug is. Is a hug two sets of arms encircling two torsos? Do the arms have to completely close? Is a slight curvature of the forearms enough? Are arms or torsos crucial to the idea of a hug? What about intent and reciprocity? Do both people have to consciously consider it a hug for it to be a hug? I mean, none of that really matters because we all know what a hug feels like and hugging a whale would not feel like a hug. But you can’t really answer a question just based off feelings because (1) we could all just be brains in jars in a storehouse somewhere and (2) feelings and sensations are inherently problematic because there’s not a guarantee of perfect translation of information from your senses to your brain. You can’t really know what’s real unless someone else is there beside you saying, “Yeah, no, I can see/smell/hear/feel that too.” Then again, does something have to be externally verifiable to be true? History has shown that groups of people can be very wrong about the reality or plausibility or verity of objects or ideas. Even if you have a statistical majority of people who agree that you can in theory hug a whale, there are so many ways your sampling could be biased and anyway, are we really willing to hang the answer to this question on the opinions of a bunch of people who’ve never hugged a whale? To properly answer this, we’d need to consult a representative sample of people who have actually hugged a whale, but who’s going to fund that study? At the end of the day, it’d probably just be the anecdotal evidence of a dozen or so whale huggers and that’s hardly conclusive. It’s rather hopeless. This may remain one of the great unanswered questions of our time. And, since it has no answer, I wish to put forward my now plausible hypothesis that you can’t hug a whale, and even if you could, it wouldn’t be a hug worthy of the name. Snuggling, though, is a different matter entirely. 

And that’s how you write a dissertation (or at least outline a collaborative paper).

There are piles of ideas you can have an academic discussion about. As a species, we decided a while ago that it’d be impossible for any one person to know everything, so we let people specialize their knowledge and report it back to the rest of us. In the best of all worlds, they’d find something they’re passionate about, research it, and then share what they’ve learned with everyone else. They get to experience the joy of discovery, we get the benefits of knowledge, and we all go on about our lives. There’s so much to be explored, so many questions we want to answer, so many we need to answer. Sometimes the scientific method is the best way to investigate something. Sometimes the storehouse of knowledge was built elsewhere. And therein lies the problem: who are the people who get to decide what the best way to study something is? How do we know who’s right?

The answers are we are and we don’t, but that’s maybe not nuanced enough to make anyone happy. It’s blunt enough to be argued with, simple enough to be questioned. But at the end of the day, we humans have to decide how we want to move forward in this world and if we are going to go forward in wisdom, that movement has to be done firmly holding the knowledge that we could be wrong in our heads, our hands, and our hearts.

That brings me back to letting the world in. New ideas, a better understanding of the world, they all come about by looking around you, seeing what’s there, listening to others, taking their points of view to heart, going through the hard work of stepping outside yourself to understand something that you never would have thought of on your own. I genuinely believe that we all learn better together. 

At the beginning of the year, in September or October, we had our the first of many dinners together as a science and religion cohort at Don and Jan’s flat. The conversation ranged far and wide, I’m sure, but what I remember most is how I loudly stated that people are the worst and I hate them. (I’m still waiting on my plaque for Best First Impression Ever— the British post can be so slow sometimes!) I’m sure you’ve heard me say something similar if you’ve had a conversation with me in the past couple years. It was always such a relief to say, to affirm that my hope for humanity had been dashed to pieces by the depth of my life experience in my several years on the globe. Being jaded means you’re mature, I do believe. I wanted desperately to be mature, wanted my experience to count for something. I had not enjoyed being naively trusting. 

Humans can be terrible and I do hate that. We tear holes in each other and the world, great ugly gashes that life fights against, builds defenses against. But we don’t have to be that. We never have to be that. We can be present in our lives, we can listen, we can strive to understand. We can watch someone like there’s no one else in the world for a few minutes. We can hug them with all the support and protection and affection they need in that moment. We can give and receive and rest, but I don’t think we can do any one thing for too long—life is that which struggles against and staying still means stagnation. 

I wasn’t ready to go. I mean, you can overstay your welcome anywhere, be it a house or a city or a stage of life, but I was not—am not—ready to close out the Scottish chapter of my life. I did not want to leave those people or that place. It seems unfair that such a good thing could walk out of my life. But if nothing else, this year has taught me how to think and live and love better and I suppose that balances out the pain of leaving before the story feels done. Rounding the corners with overuse would have taken away the punch, I think. I hope. I’m sure.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to take my newfound knowledge, go sit in a corner, and sob while humming Auld Lang Syne to myself.

We’ll call it rest. For the moment.

And Now For Something Completely Different

Goodbyes are hard, but chaotic moves out of the country shortly after submitting your final project for grad school inter stitched with international travel make goodbyes even more complex. So in case I don't get around to reflecting on the year that was, here's a video where I traipse around Edinburgh in search of unicorns. We all need a little whimsy in our days.

Letter to My Future Self on One of Her Best Days

You will not be good at everything. 

No, don’t smile that condescending, knowing smile. I hate it when we do that. Listen to me right now because I know you’ve forgotten because it’s what we do, what any human does, when things are going super well: Remember that you will not be good at everything. 

I am telling you this because you dream dreams beyond your means and you think you can just breeze in through the door of life’s goodness and count on blessings offered to you on bronzed platters at the very least and that is not always true. 

I’m telling you this because when the way is obstructed, when it’s hard to walk forward, when the hoops you need to jump through to get to the front porch of life’s goodness are tight and tiny and unending, when all this and more happens, you will blame yourself and tear yourself down and spend hours pondering which of your moral deficiencies it was that caused your problems and that is not the way forward. 

I’m telling you this because you’ve forgotten your participation awards in favor of memories of your trophies and that won’t do either. You will not be good at everything. 

The most instructive exercise you ever undertook in your adult life was not living in another country for a year, because once you’re past the bureaucracy and have figured out how to work around the time difference, it’s not so different from moving to a new city. You’d have the same culture shock and thinned support network if you moved to LA or Seattle. The main differences between Scotland and the US west coast are haggis and how expensive it is to come home. Nor was it enrolling in a masters program in a different field and education system from what you’re used to, though we’re going to circle around on that. Nah, the most instructive thing you’ve done (so far) is to train for a half marathon because you are bad at running and you can’t pretend to be otherwise. 

You are patently aware of the myriad ways you can talk your way through most things you’re not great at. When you’ve bitten off more than you can chew in terms of academic commitments or social engagements, you know how to fuzz the borders on what’s expected so that you can get everything in at an acceptable level of quality. But running… with running there’s nothing for it but to run, to get out there day after day and get in the routine of pushing past the panic, to start every run with the knowledge that you will panic, somewhere around a mile or a mile and a half, and that you have to get through that in order to achieve anything else. You do this again and again until the gasping demand of your lungs for more oxygen and your adjustment to meet it becomes routine. There’s no amount of charm and grace that’ll help you breeze past the panic. Just breathing exercises and routine. Maybe more protein in your diet and better stretching. 

From here on out, there are no unmitigated successes. There are no victories without asterisks. Every win you chalk up on the board will be made of compromises and stumbles and 3am edits, in addition to the skill and hard work and grit you will have contributed to it. Your dissertation was written on planes and trains and buses, in airports and coffeeshops, and during several long nights when you watched both the sunset and the sunrise on the other side of a thin hand-sewn curtain. No matter how many hours you set aside for the library and dedicated study spaces, no matter how many schedules you drew up to manage your time, the work got done in the in-between and it was not perfect. It’s debatable if it was even as close to perfect as it could be. 

Now, I’m hoping you’ve come to an understanding about all of this. I’m hoping that you’ve settled into a cheerfully busy routine, keeping the wolves at bay with positive feedback and the meeting of achievable goals. You must have, otherwise the smile would have been regretful rather than smug. If there’s one thing we know how to do, it’s to process regret until it doesn’t have even a hint of sadness anymore, to sally forward and pretend that shows your strength of character rather than the momentary tenability of your circumstances. Don’t get me wrong— you’re skilled and driven and all those other resume words, but like everyone else, that skill is best utilized and that drive is most apparent when things are going your way. You do have a knack for stumbling into those circumstances, so that’s good, at least.

Listen, your world is going well now. Add to that. Be the person we want to be. 

I want your goal to be to live honestly. I want you to be able to dispassionately assess the world’s contribution to your success alongside your own, to be neither proud nor pathetic, but honest. I think humility is best worn as honesty about your ability and effort. Be humble. You will not be good at everything.

But you can try at anything. I believe that, at least. At least, I believe that. 

19:19

So for the past little bit, I've been taking a picture at 7:19pm and putting it on instagram for kicks and giggles. And because I don't have anything to say today, I present to you most of those pictures. It's interesting! Probably!