I've been working on my Middle Child Syndrome

So, dear readers, you know how we bloggers are notoriously bad at keeping secrets?

Well, I just kept something from all of you for a year and a half.

I call her the Little Princess. She was born about three years ago, ended up in foster care for reasons we won't go into here, and eventually ended up at my family's house.

On November 6, she legally became a member of our family.

And...yeah. There are no words.

Repost: Stream of Consciousness Blogging

Originally posted March 4, 2008; reposted now because this is how I've been feeling lately.

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him... a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create -- so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.
—Pearl S. Buck, novelist, Nobel laureate (1892-1973)

I collect quotes, and this one is one of my favorites. I think I like it because it shows that if I'm not normal at least I have companions in my abnormality.

Sometimes I feel like the Man from Mars in Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. Whenever something important happens, I have to withdraw for a little while so I can grok it. It's one of the reasons class participation always makes me feel a little like I'm going down a steep hill on a roller coaster. I like to have time to pause and ponder and decide what the best response is going to be, not just fire off the first thing that pops into my head. How other people manage sponaneity I don't know. One theory I have, that ties in with that quote above, is they simply don't have the problem where the minute someone suggests something their mind immediately goes into frantic activity, offering all possible obstacles to the course of action, proposing solutions, weighing alternatives--until it's easier to just say No, I can't do it, so that I can shut off my hyperactive brain and have a few seconds of mental silence before something else comes up.

It works like this in relationships too--I have a hard time with casual conversation because I have this idea that everything ought to mean something. So afterwards I'll go back and analyze every word and think about how I would have responded if I'd had a little more time to reflect.

All this is a somewhat rambling way of saying that I spend every waking moment of every day processing an enormous amount of information. Maybe other people do this too, but it seems sometimes like I'm the only one who has to think so hard about everything, who can't just make a simple decision without having to see how this course of action might tie into everything else.

It's why I don't have a lot of friends. I can remember names pretty well but I don't consider somebody my friend just because I know their name. I really don't think I know them well enough to call them my friend until I have an idea of what makes them tick. My idea of my best friend is not just the name Emily and what she looks like. My mental image of her includes her brothers and parents, my relationships with them, her relationships with our mutual friends, her relationships with people I don't know, what she wants to do with her life...etc, etc. When I have conversations with my friends I'm not just chatting, I'm collecting random bits of information to add to my mental picture of them. I've creeped people out once or twice by remembering some small random detail they mentioned once a long time ago. Maybe this is one of the reasons I'm called to marriage--I can't imagine anything more fulfulling than spending the rest of my life learning and cherishing every detail, no matter how seemingly insignificant, about another human soul.

There are times when I want to shut off my perceptions, shut out the world. A few weeks ago I was heartbroken over some small disappointment--I can't even remember what it was now, but it seemed then like the world was going to end--and I remember crying about it and asking God why He made me feel things so much. Why do I have to be so fantasically sensitive? Why can't I just take the little ups and downs in stride like other people?

In the end, though, I decided that I didn't really want to be different. Sure, small crises can ruin my day; but when a big crisis hits one of my friends my ability to feel it so intensely is an advantage. I spent the whole summer of 2006 crying alongside one of my friends and it hurt horribly, but I wouldn't trade that summer for anything. It felt like I'd been broken and put back together again; but in my new shape I realized that it was one of the most important things I'd ever done. In 50 years my friend and I won't remember what we got on the SAT but we'll remember that summer.

I hate to sound like a broken record, but it says right over there on the sidebar that this is about my journey towards Heaven and as I've been saying for a while now, if I get to Heaven it will be because of other people. I could draw into myself and try to find salvation by pondering the mysteries of the universe, but I've tried that and I barely made it out sane. So then I tried giving myself permission to be broken, to be imperfect, and I found out that people will let you do that. There are some incredible people in the world who mend broken souls. Then there's me, with my abnormally sensitive soul, my ability to see hurts that nobody else sees and to cry with the person who's hurting. I'll consider it worth all the difficulty of going through daily life with a soul that sees every misfortunate as tragedy and every joy ecstasy, if I can mend one broken soul that way.

In Memory of Vivian

I'm finally posting again, dear readers, because this can't go in Twitter--partly because it's more than 140 characters and partly because even a blog post is not adequate--but it's the best thing I have at my disposal.

krazyglue Vivian Marie died at 5:10 am in her parents arms. So brief her life; so beautiful their love; so exquisite the grief of all who love them.

I can't add anything to that, except to ask those of you who aren't already to pray for Kyle and his family. (He posts here and here.)

Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon her. May her soul and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.

The Enchanted 15: Writing for Others

Part 5 in an ongoing series based on Jen's Enchanted 15 workshop.

There isn't necessarily a contradiction between writing for yourself and writing for others, but there is a difference. And you need others in order to be a good writer.

One day, the summer after I turned 14, I sat at a picnic table in a park eating a sandwich and told a 16-year-old girl that I liked to write stories.

"Really?" she replied. "I do too, but usually when I tell people that they think I'm weird."

Five years later Dernhelm and I are very close, despite the fact that she left for college 3 years ago and I left a year after that. I don't think I'm off the mark to say that it was writing that brought us together. There was a year or two of my life when I spent just about every second of free time either writing or emailing Dernhelm about what I was writing. (Once I told the Cobbler that Dernhelm and I used to email each other sometimes 2 or 3 times a day and he said that we abused email by forcing it to be what the telephone is for most teenage girls.) If you looked you could probably still see Dernhelm's fingerprints all over my works-in-progress. And in turn I sent her pages and pages of suggestions for her novels. (Seriously. She once said that I was more enthusiastic about her work than she was.) And despite our admiration for each other we can both be frank when it happens that a particular passage is not quite up to par and needs rewritten or scrapped entirely.

Now I also have a few other good writerly friends, and the Cobbler is among them. One of the first conversations we ever had was about writing, and he listens to me chatter about my novels as patiently as Dernhelm does. He sent me the first chapter of one of his novels once, and I obligingly laid into it. Then one day he read the beginning of one of my novels and said, "Would it be better if you did this?" and I said, "Oooohhh, now I'm going to have to rewrite the whole thing!" Because of course he was right. A few months later I'm still working on rewriting the whole thing. The Cobbler has this uncanny knack of finding exactly what dissatisfies me most about my work and pointing it out so that I can no longer pretend that the reader won't care and I can just ignore the flaws.

Friends who write are amazing. Find them. And the ones who irritate you the most are probably going to be the ones who do you the most good.

[here I pause in thought]

Now that I think about it, Writing for Others is really the reason I'm doing this whole Enchanted 15 thing. Because one of my favorite bloggers suddenly started saying, "Hey, you should write every day." And I fail epicly at that, but I do at least come back here every week or two or three and say, "Here I am, writing about writing, at least that's a start, right?" And one of these days the knowledge that you all know about my novels is going to motivate me to do something with them, lest all five of you start harassing me no end. (That's how my sister got me to finish my first novel; she asked me if I was done yet Every. Single. Day.)

Nobody missed me, apparently

Nonetheless, I am a girl of my word.

So.

I am still more-or-less alive. Our regular irregular posting will resume shortly.

As if I post regularly anyway

You probably won't even miss me, dear readers, but I wanted to let you know that I'm going to be offline for the next week (until the 10th). I'll post on the 11th even if it's just to let you know that I'm still more-or-less alive.

Comment moderation will be on. Comment all you like but it won't show up for a while.

Have a lovely week, all of you, and pray for me and my associates if you get the chance.

It always comes back to this

Note: I wrote this 2 weeks ago (as you might notice reading the post) but haven't gotten around to publishing it until now. Kind of apt, isn't it?

People are forever. One day when this stay of ours is done schoolwork and deadlines and alarm clocks and everything else that looms so large right now won't matter anymore. People will always matter. I dare to think that in Heaven my mother will still be my mother, my father will still be my father, my sister still my sister...I won't have my courseload or my GPA or the Dean's List but I will have the people who sat next to me in class whose lives I touched in ways I might not even know. I think we will know then; we will see how it was that God put exactly these people in our lives to help us become who He meant us to be.

I wrote that on February 22, 2008, in a post entitled On Being a Sojourner, which was reposted on this blog June 27, 2008.

As I write this it's July 16, 2009, and I'm publishing that paragraph for the third time because God just keeps pulling me back to that truth.

Since I started this blog I've been struggling to publish regularly; my self-imposed requirement of something resembling Deep Content means that my post ideas are sometimes few and far between. But in the last few weeks I've been managing to get my thoughts out there a bit more regularly. Between June 30 and July 8 I published three posts. (I think the June 30 one may have actually been published July 1, but I don't remember now.) Meanwhile I was doing a really good job actually sitting down and writing things relating to my novels; I was even doing a pretty good job of fitting in prayer time.

It would be eight days before I posted again, and I can't say that I was writing profound fiction or praying or working on any of those goals I had. Starting Thursday a situation came up with my family that meant my help was needed a lot more around the house (we're all fine, just crazy-busy), and the weekend slipped by without me managing to put up a post. So on Tuesday I was absolutely determined to write a post...but then my future roommate called, and we talked for an hour and a half, and the time I might have spent writing went just like that.

Very well, I thought to myself, But I will be sure of writing a post tomorrow.

At 8:06 p.m. the Cobbler sent an IM over Skype: Can you come over tomorrow?

Now, we had been trying to arrange a visit for a couple of weeks at that point so it wasn't entirely unexpected, but at the same time...I just don't do visits on less-than-24-hour notice.

And yet, somehow, at 10:00 a.m. the next day I was calling him to make sure my "between 11:30 and noon" arrival time was acceptable (he hadn't been able to check with his parents the night before; they'd just given general permission for sometime Wednesday). It was. I left a few minutes later, and arrived at about 11:45.

People, I just do not do that. I am not the sort of person who in a million years would even think about confirming ETA as I was headed out the door.

My spiritual life thus far seems to consist of letting God redefine my notions of what sort of person I am. And it almost always seems to involve stretching myself a little farther outside my comfort zone for the sake of someone else; of letting my schedule go for the sake of being present.

It's hard. I'd be lying if I said that I'm always happy with God's insistence on people. I'd rather have rules. I like rules. Rules are tidy. I love people, but people are so very messy. Does my salvation really have to depend on dealing with them?

I think it does. And I also think (for the record) that people are ultimately a lot more rewarding than rules. (Rules never hug you and tell you that you're wonderful, for starters.)