A Year of Failure: 5 Ways I failed in 2015

When I entered 2015, I knew it would be radically different than 2014. I wouldn’t be graduating with my Bachelors degree. I wouldn’t be spending my summer in Amman, Jordan, soaking up the culture and sun like a thirsty sponge. I wouldn’t be finishing a thesis, or finishing my essay to enter into the Persona.

2014 felt like a year of successes, and of reached goals; I thought that 2015 would look vastly different. It felt only appropriate to expect the opposite from 2015 that I had received from 2014: failures.

Failure is one of the most terrifying words for me. I don’t deal well with it, and I was scared of confronting it, and also excited because I knew I would grow from my further acquaintance with it.

See, I’m the kind of person who won’t do something if I know I’ll fail (with few exceptions). I’m the kind of person who lets fear of failure keep her from trying things, who keeps her fear of the unknown outcome closer to her heart than the fear of the missed opportunity.

I can safely say I failed a lot this year. Failed writing jobs, failed queries, failed friendships, failed relationships, failed attempts at half marathons, failed attempts at writing on a blog every week (ha!) and many, many failed attempts at trying to keep everything together.

In honor of the new year, I’ve decided to write about my favorite failures of the year.

1. I failed to sustain my misguided belief that I have to be perfect.

This one is the failure that I am probably most proud of, and has also been the most difficult failure to deal with. I went through some very dark weeks, fighting this false ideology at its core. I still struggle with perfectionism… a LOT. But, thanks to some special people (you know who you are; or maybe not), I have come to the realization that imperfection is… wonderful. freeing. exhilarating. And to be honest, I cringe a little speaking so highly of imperfection still. But perfection is a stingy, cold, unforgiving, merciless, unfeeling, vituperative master. But the God of Grace is kind, loving, forgiving, and loves even when we are nothing but a fetal ball of tears and mess-ups. Perfectionism still calls my name daily, but now… I’ve started to ignore its beckoning.

2. I failed in my attempts to keep God’s love at bay

Despite my best efforts. Folks, I am freer and more alive in Christ now than I have ever been. Let me tell you, that is super exciting stuff. God will only stay away if you force him to. If you open up your heart a crack– He will slip right in like afternoon sunlight and warm your soul from its gelid status.

3. I failed to become a freelance writer

This one hurts to say, partially because I tried very hard to become this, and partially because I don’t think I tried hard enough (again, because of fear). I did get a lot of writing done, however, but most of it will probably never see the light of day. Baby steps.

4. I failed in relationships.

But, at the same time, I’ve succeeded. Because even in failure you learn something. I’ve learned a lot about people. I’ve learned that sometimes people you love dearly will hurt you, and that people I love will be hurt by me. I learned quite a bit about myself,  and how things should and should not be. And that has been invaluable, albeit painful.  I also learned that puppies are always a good bet when you’re low on snuggles.

5. I failed to become completely free of shame and guilt.

This is a hard one to admit. While I’ve made much progress in personal development in 2015, I’m very much a work in progress still [I’m painfully conscious of this right at this moment). I’m starting to discover that whenever I think I can take a day off from everything– including passionately pursuing Christ– that’s when I start sliding back into the old patterns including dark clouds of shame and guilt and reliance on my own performance rather than God’s grace.

If there is one thing that God has been speaking to me in the last few months, it is that his strength is made great in our weaknesses. He has placed people in my path  when I am weakest to guide me along the way, and God has been present in my life, heart, and mind like never before. This is why I share these failures with you today; because I know God will use them better than any post I could write about how 2015 went well for me, or how I succeeded this year.

 

 

 

 

 

A New Year, a New Mind

This wasn’t the first post for 2016 that I was intending to put up; the other one is still in my drafts folder.

I just arrived home after a New Year’s spent visiting with family; on the way home, I finished Francis Chan’s book, Crazy Love.

Coming home, seeing our shriveled Christmas tree, realizing that I must go back to work and wait a whole year before Christmastime again… well, call me a kid but it made me really sad. I had such an amazing Christmas this year; if I were being honest, I’d say it was the best. And the thought of leaving that behind made me a little misty-eyed. I only get to see my whole family (siblings, niece, nephew, uncles, aunts,  cousins, grandma) together once a year (if I’m lucky), and I loved our time together. It is a huge delight to spend time with them and I feel so blessed and privileged to call them Family.

Me being sad about leaving my family time behind… actually makes me super happy. Because not everyone has family that they love to be around, or loves them. Not everybody has family, period. And that makes me very sad. Which is probably why I started bawling as  I thought of my own family.

It is so strange being so happy that something makes you so sad, but that was the state I found myself in.

It’s been a crazy past couple of days– okay, month– okay, semester– Alright. Year. [let’s be honest: I carry the crazy with me all throughout life.] But the last four months I can say have been some of the best and worst months of my life. They’ve been the best because the situations I’ve found myself in and my (lack of) health and various relationships have pushed me to pursue God and become closer to him more than ever before in my life, and the worst because a lot of those situations that brought said closeness with God have been downright hellish.

I’ve had to come to terms with some very unhealthy mental habits of mine, which have brought sickness and anxiety attacks and all sorts of issues to my life. I’ve had to be brutally honest with my family and my friends in ways I’ve never been before… brutally honest about how weak I really am and how much a struggle appearing normal is for me sometimes.

But tonight, I am happy. No, I am joyful. I am joyful like I have rarely experienced in large quantities before this past August. I am joyful because I can feel both my joy and sadness with an alacrity and sharpness that would have been dull and shriveled, even a year ago. There is a cloud that has been over my soul for years, one that has greyed even the most vibrant of colors in my life. This cloud has only begun to shift in the past year, and if the last few months are any indication, the stormy deluge it brings at its passing is fierce but it will only serve to wash away the grime that has encased my soul.

I am so, so grateful that God has finally gotten into my head the beauty of vulnerability. For so long I saw it as a sign of weakness; and it is.

It is in our weaknesses that Christ is strongest, and it is our weaknesses that he uses as an avenue for his glory. His ways are not our ways; his thoughts are not our thoughts.

I’ve experienced unfettered joy in the last two weeks like I haven’t… ever. I’ve been so happy, and enjoying time with my family and relaxation when considering all circumstances I shouldn’t be. I’m amazed at this gift of joy, and love, and family, that seems newly washed and beautiful and satisfying like never before. And my heart aches for those whose Christmas season has been the exact opposite of that.

Even though I am filled with trepidation for returning to work and the myriad uncertainties of the future, I also am so happy, and excited to see God work in ways I’ve never before seen in my life in 2016.

I pray he:

Clarifies my vision for how I can best serve him and bring glory to his name.

Keeps my mind in the present and my heart near his, so I can walk in his Grace daily and share it daily.

Shows me more of his beauty, both through his creation and his heart.

Gives me more of his courage, to do and say and be who he is and who he wants me to be.

Shows me how to love more fully, live more deeply, and walk more closely with him.

Shows me how to fail more gracefully, say no more often (and more tactfully), and how to manage my resources (both time, health, and money) more in alignment with his laws.

 

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Galloping Along the Fence

Some nights are not for speaking of…

Some nights are beyond speech.

And yet I am motivated to put some words around them– not as a faithful rendering of the actual events, but to conjure up the evanescence of memory later on… memory made more clear by the recording of words.

My to-do list is screaming at me, but I am learning… or rather, trying to learn that I must tune it out to do what really matters. Sometimes. Other times, I really ought to tend to it more.

Lately I have been subconsciously dealing with a lot of “sufficiency” issues. I say subconsciously, not because I haven’t had these issues smack me in the batooky before, but because I didn’t recognize them in their insidious form this time. I merely recognized their manifestation as a deep, pervasive dread and fear of going to work.

I’m not afraid of hard work. I actually tend to enjoy it, once the initial hump of torpor is passed over. But the stresses, challenges, and sheer enormity of what awaited me at work after fall break made me tremble. I was so terrified that I couldn’t look through my fear to actually analyze what was making me so afraid.

So professional, right?

I managed to muscle my way through my first day back, thinking a mixture of “this isn’t so bad” and “this is so bad!” and, more prominently, “what am I missing and doing wrong?”

Thank(God)fully, I decided to stop by and talk with a much older (and wiser, and more experienced) teacher. I shared the more professional version of what I had been experiencing, and she told me something that I had apparently forgotten:

It’s okay to say no.

It’s okay to make mistakes. It’s okay to not be superwoman. And please, stop being so hard on yourself.

The only person being that hard on you is yourself.

It was a wet slap to a numb face.

I had unknowingly, almost arrogantly, allowed my perfectionism to creep up, and had placed before myself ever-mounting goals and ideals that I, in my wilted, rookie, imperfect state have no chance of attaining. And so, naturally, I despaired. And so, naturally, I grew afraid of facing the fierce giant armed with a nuclear missile and a cute puppy (both of which are disarming, but in completely different ways).

Sometimes (okay, a lot of times) I forget that perfectionism is not a good thing. It is the stubborn malfeasance that gives you the audacity to think that you, of all people, know exactly what’s best— in every circumstance, and even more than God.

Yeeah.

Oops.

After work today, I decided to take a walk around my neighborhood. (My sedentary life lately has been, well, too sedentary.)

There’s a dirt road I walk down that has several families that own horses. At the end of the road is a small ranch with stables, and along the road there is a large corral which is usually empty. But tonight it wasn’t.

My heartbeat quickened when I felt the staccato thump-thump-thumpthump of hooves before I could see into the pen– I knew that a horse was cantering around the corral. I walked down the road, to where there were no bushes obscuring my view, and sure enough– a beautiful thoroughbred-quarter-horse mix was gamboling up and down the corral, having a wonderful time. A woman in a pink shirt walked towards the horse, and I thought she was trying to get close enough to the horse to bring her in.  Then she started  backing away while whistling, clapping, and talking to the horse– and the horse listened.

I watched in awe as the mare started galloping (okay, somewhere between a gallop and a canter) along the edge of the fence– dangerously close, especially when rounding the corners and turning around. It was amazing to see how the horse responded to her master’s cues– claps, “good, good!” and “easy on the turns.”  Then there was the horse itself– pounding the dust into the air, breathing in quick snorts  (longer ones as the exercise continued), gleaming in the fading light, proud of her strength and glorying in the activity and her prowess.

I was amazed at all the horse was able to do under the tutelage of her owner– and yet, as I watched, I realized that what she did was not too much of a stretch from her natural proclivities and propensities. Yes, the mare was diving and turning with far more finesse than she would in the wild; there were just inches between her and the fence.  But she was still diving and turning like a horse ought, not growing hands and changing the tire on a car.

The thought rushed on me as she rounded the pen once more, thundering towards me: I am quite a bit like this horse.

God gave us natural proclivities and propensities, and natural aversions to other things, and while he may very well stretch us and grow us– tell us to gallop very close to the fence– he is not going to tell us to jump the fence and start a mariachi band. I think I have very much been trying to be something I am not– I have been leaping over fences, and expecting myself to suddenly possess the knowledge and know-how to take an engine apart and re-build it for street racing. Which doesn’t seem that realistic to me (even if I wasn’t a proverbial horse in this scenario).

And back to my original dilemma– Work. Teaching. Learning how to teach.

I can’t expect myself to become a world-famous mariachi musician when I’m barely learning how to round the corners. So instead of feeling like a failure because I can’t jump the fence and join a band with really swirly dresses, I’m going to listen better to the One who is telling me to take the corners a little easier, and to make those turns a little sharper. And who knows– He may eventually teach me how to stomp in time with mariachi music.

Coffee and Christ. And philosophy. And writing. Must needs I say more?

What is Linguistics?

Or, more accurately, what is linguistics not?

Enjoy this picture of stunning unusual rain-bow-sunset event. Because this has something to do with the study of language.

[Warning: this is one of my more free-thought-association blogs, so if you are looking for a well-crafted blog post, look at some of my other ones. Well, okay.. maybe you ought to look for another blog entirely. But look at the pretty picture!]

A few years ago, right before I started at the University of Arizona, I attended a linguistics symposium by the name of Multilingual, 2.0 ? (Yeah, I was confused by the name too. They had some sort of elaborate explanation relating to the transcendent nature of change and and whether the changes occurring in the world’s simultaneously shrinking and expanding linguistic realms were really changes at all… or something like that).

At said symposium, there was a speaker/guest who gave a talk on a paper he’d written on constructed languages, specifically in one sci-fi book (series) where the alien race had an interesting linguistic capacity: they had two mouths or speech organs, and utilized them simultaneously in the production of speech. Which, made for an interesting dilemma for the humans who came into contact with them.

That talk on conlangs and that alien race has been stuck in my memory for a long time. I have long-lost the brochure for the symposium, and I couldn’t for the life of me remember the name of the speaker nor the book. I have been a life-long fan of Tolkien (let’s be honest, fan is too tame a word) and his constructed languages, so this wasn’t the first time I’d fallen in love with fake languages. Tolkien is the primary reason why I decided to study linguistics in the first place– he was always an eminent philologist in my mind, despite the face that he isn’t well known for it nowadays.

I just now have taken the trouble to hunt down that book after three years– searching for graduate research topics was the primary motivation. Anyway, I found out that the book I was searching for is Embassytown, by China Miéville. I have now procured it from the library, and I am super excited to read it.

Linguistics is a strange field. When people ask me, “what is linguistics?” I’m always at a loss as how to define it. Linguistics is the study of language, but we’re not quite sure what “language” actually means, or entails, or where the definition of “language” begins, or ends. People define it differently, and vary the definition even at different times. Perhaps one of the most alluring attributes of linguistics is it is as varied and undulating in its studies and applications as your attention and desire to probe language for its eccentricities and secrets.

Language, to me, is right up there with the mysteries of ontology, soteriology, and the infinite grace of God. We can define these things, we can discover concrete identifiers that prove specific data about its existence and necessity, but there always remains outliers and indefinable features, something wild and greater and more mysterious than we can imagine, no matter how many studies or papers or thought experiments we engage in. That’s why I like language and linguistics. It is a glimpse into the mystery, and incredible complexity of being, and the One who created existence as we know it.

An Inside Out World

My previous post was on why Inside Out made me cry; this post is about what happened when I cried.

I tried to pretend I wasn’t crying.

I mentally berated myself for taking so seriously the death of a furry, pink imaginary friend who chatters like a dolphin and cries candy.

After the movie, my sister, niece and I were walking out of the theater when I heard my sister say, “Man, I can’t believe I cried!” I was quick to assent that “I cried too!” and my niece softly chimed in “Me too…”

I was so relieved to find out that my niece had cried at the same time as I had in the movie. But I had tried to avoid and hide the fact that I’d cried; so did my family. But what was the big deal? Why did I feel such a pressing need to hide my emotions? And perhaps more disturbingly, why did my 11-year-old niece already have a similar compulsion in place?

There is a huge societal stricture in place that tells us we must not show our (true) emotions in public (or even at all). There is this obsession with appearing happy, even when we may not be. This may seem an extreme statement to link with shedding a few tears over a kid’s movie, but if I don’t feel comfortable showing my emotions in such an environment, why would I be at ease showing emotions in more “adultish” situations? I think we in the western culture are consumed with the idea that everything must look at least alright, good, or preferably, perfect.  If someone peels away the false nacre of superficial happiness, we immediately scatter. We call it depression. We avoid “those poor people.” We call it a “phase.”

We are scared to admit that our lives are not perfect when our lives are comically, Michael-Bay-is-helming-the-next-Oscar-winning-drama- far from perfection. We refuse to abandon the hallucination that the world is okay, that things are fine. Things are not fine. This world is f—ed up. There are more mass murderings, more slavery than ever before in history, more human trafficking, more wars, diseases spreading every day, and it doesn’t stop. It has never stopped. This world has always been messed up. And only when we abandon our false idea that the world is ‘okay,’ and only when we acknowledge the sheer, quivering morass of depravity of our world can we maybe turn from our delusions of ‘rightness’ to the real solution.

The solution isn’t more government; there have been good governments and bad governments, but they all fail. The solution isn’t a redistributed social or economic structure. It isn’t religion; religion has been used and tried and found as empty as ever.

There is only one thing that I have ever found to still my trembling heart, to take the weight off my soul of a million sins. And that thing is a relationship with Jesus, the Christ, God’s son. I don’t mean Jesus as some paint him—the harbinger of hatred and doom. I don’t mean Jesus as some milquetoast man who preached a vague sermon on acceptance and love that accepts everything, even things that will kill the soul. I’m talking about the Jesus who loved fiercely, extravagantly, and who hated sin and death, those things that would dare steal away his beloved, messed up humans who he died for.

It says in Corinthians that the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are dying, but to those who are being saved it is the power of God. So maybe it is foolishness (or seems like foolishness to some) to place my trust in Christ, but when compared to the choice of trusting in a world that has always let us down, is always broken and decaying… Well. I don’t think I’m the foolish one.