When I was 10 years old, a darkness seized my life and broke my heart, mind and spirit. A darkness that made me feel alone, unloved, unworthy, ugly, selfish, stupid and like a complete mistake. I spent 8 years completely alone in my darkness – I didn’t even let my parents in. 8 years of hiding my heart, my true self, and spending the last years of my childhood in a cloud of loneliness. Depression started in my middle school years and by 9th grade, I was pretty deeply into a secret, angry solitary state of unhappiness. I found ways of dealing with the depression that weren’t as awful as they could have been I guess… I wrote poetry constantly, but not the kind of pretty stuff that you want to read. I wrote in a cryptic verse that no one could possibly understand unless I told them the true meaning behind it – and so long as they didn’t know what it all meant, I knew it sounded absolutely beautiful and intriguing. I seriously felt like no one in the world truly loved me since they didn’t truly know me – and that if they did get to know me and know about this darkness that they would go from not loving me to actually hating me, and I couldn’t have that either. At least the limbo wasn’t so bad, right?
Fare Thee Well, Lonesome Dove
A Time for Thanks (Seriously)
I’ve done it again – gone and not posted for over a month. *Shameful*. Nevertheless, I have plenty of fantastic and wonderful things to update you all on!
At the end of the day on September 15th of this year I lost my very stable, comfortable and local job in Nashua. It was so completely unexpected and I was worried about finances and all that jazz. I began collecting unemployment and did everything I could to be ridiculously frugal so that I could still pay my student loans, rent and other bills. From time to time at my church we take time together to declare certain things over our lives – we have a set of PowerPoint slides that we go through and say aloud together which includes things such as thanking the Lord and declaring with Him for jobs and better jobs, benefits, sales, commissions, bills to decrease, blessings and financial increase to name a few. I remember one Sunday we did this and I was nearly in tears. Then that night my ever so wonderful boyfriend, Derek, had me put one hand on my wallet and the other on some of my bills. He asked me to simply pray “Lord, increase this (my wallet hand) and decrease these (my bills hand).” It seemed so silly, but I did it. Over the next month, I was noticing that some of my student loan payments were less than they used to be and I was actually having more money left over in my account each week than I had working full-time previously! It was unbelievable! And God wasn’t finished yet…
Don’t Give Up – Give Back
Photo from W2W Soul
Ever have those days where you’re just not happy with your life. Out of nowhere, you start picking apart every little thing and trying to figure out why it just wasn’t as good as you want it to be. You know exactly the type of day/mood I’m talking about – you don’t like your job because you don’t find it fun or because you don’t feel like you’re doing enough; you don’t like your house because it doesn’t look the way you want or isn’t in a location you really want; you don’t like your car because it doesn’t have a CD player or because it’s not as new as you want; you don’t like yourself because you don’t feel you’re good enough at anything to consider it your “true talent” or you just feel lonely… The list can go on and on. And thinking about all these things that are “not good enough” for you on those days makes you start thinking about how on earth you can fix it all and it quickly becomes completely overwhelming. The only way to fix your life is to get a better job, make more money, buy a house in the country, buy a new car, and completely change who you are by next week because you simply cannot go on living the way you are any longer. And since that’s practically impossible, you just shut down and want to give up. It’s not worth fighting through all these obstacles, so you might as well just surrender and try to keep on living.
Don’t Build Your Own Yellow Brick Road
We all have our own paces in life. Some people just take things as they come, figuring out the next step as they make it. Others plan things far in advance and know each step they are going to take 5 steps before they even take it. Some people keep their calendar free and clear to do a little of this and that here and there while others just fill up every available space they have with something to do. If you haven’t figured it out already, I’m one of those girls that likes to stay busy. I have a full-time job, run my own wedding photography/planning business, sing with the worship team at my church, work with the management team for a multi-day music festival in the summer, spend time working on a book that I plan to publish in the next year and still find time to have a social life (which includes awesome get-togethers like the now annual Christmas party that is coming up – so excited). I just came out of my first official wedding season in which I had a wedding every weekend from May 31-July 16 and then went straight from a one week vacation in the south to a week running a music festival. I keep busy. And I love it – I love always having some project to work on and accomplish.
We all have these journeys we go on – whether it’s something as simple as heading out to work/school, hunting for a job, starting a business or getting married and buying a house. We all have our quests like that of Dorothy and her misfit friends making their way down the yellow brick road to their endpoint – the Emerald City. I typically have multiple quests going on at the same time so my road is rather multicolored, but what happens when you run out of road? Sometimes you get to a place where there doesn’t seem to be anywhere to go, nothing more to be done and you feel lost and stuck…
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