a look back

"Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself" -Carl Jung

the new year has passed, along with a birthday, and it seems altogether too fitting to look back and reflect and wonder and account for the last three-hundred-some-odd-days i've spent breathing.

california has taken a very sensational turn from oasis to vast dessert landmarked only by fear.

it seems to me that by the time a person turns twenty-four they should have some idea what they hell they are doing or who the hell they are becoming or be able, at the very least, to rattle off a satisfactory account for themselves that, if lucky, placates the listener and inspires no further questions.

so far, however, this is not my fate.

what has been my fate in this past year were the unpleasant experiences including, but not limited to, being fired for my condescending face, subsequently living off unemployment, chronic back pain, breaking my best friend's heart, the recurring feeling that every sentence i manage to stutter does not quite make sense to those listening, and that familiar seventh-grade feeling of displacement when my pants were too short for my long legs and my breasts were the same size as my teacher's, and my hair was shorter than my ears - only this time it is my emotions, values, and upbringing that's awkwardly ill-fitted to my california-assimilated appearance. that is to say, i don't fit here in a way i haven't fit in a long time.

that is to say, for the first time in a long time, i feel Alone and Scared; paralyzed by those feelings of aloneness and scaredness and the desperate yearning for someone to recognize these thoughts and mental ramblings and embarrassingly sincere emotions and painfully sensitive nerve endings and give me the okay (validation, or love, or understanding, or at the very least, the withholding of condemnation and judgement until further notice).

instead, i have found that since my perception of self does not match my perception of the cultural ideal i have a strong tendency to shout all of the very things that exclude me from making the cut. this is why those whom i attend church with know that i strongly prefer gin martinis, moved here for the wine, smoke through anxiety, and have a propensity make jokes at my purity's expense, while in reality i often go to bed before 10, have never used my martini glasses, refuse to buy more than one bottle of wine per week, can't smoke because it limits my aerobic activity and have guarded my virginity with a fierceness that i myself do not understand.

but if there is not space for the worst of me, then it is not worth risking the best.

those things that are good, noble, or pure feel so vulnerable, those things in me untainted feel so few, that i cannot gather the courage to lay them before someone who cannot first love me for my dirt.

and this, of course, brings me back to the ache in my heart that i've only begun to say outloud. the insatiable hunger for love. the static, continual begging for grace. the terrifying need for a salvation that runs deep enough to not only cradle me but fix what feels so fundamentally, irrevocably broken in me.

it was not lazarus' faith that raised him from the dead. this has been a hopeful realization. in fact, lazarus, being dead, had really nothing to do with it.