The Last Minute

Dear God, I don't know if you are there, but these last few weeks have not gone well. A week and a half ago I made a momentary poor choice that destroyed my not very old and very expensive laptop. Two days after I did that, I was nervous and upset and scratched the bumper of my brand new car backing out of a parking space. A few days after that I learned a medical test did not come back with good results and I had to start taking a higher dose of medication and add a second one. Today the passenger side mirror on that brand new the car I just made the very first payment on was shattered. Tonight my mouth is vacillating between medicated tingling and throbbing nerve pain from dental work I have finally have the insurance and money and time to have done. I feel like I'm watching the money I make every day float out of my bank account before I even see it, and there's some difficult transitions at work, and I have had a lingering cough for a few weeks that is making it harde

A few days ago I stepped on a dip in the sidewalk and my ankle started to cave. I knew this feeling well and I waited for the inevitable collapse and meeting with the pavement. Instead of finding myself sprawled on the ground, my ankle wobbled back into its space. It didn't give in to the ground. When I caught my balance and began to walk again I could feel the soreness creep in, the tendons slightly stretched and weakened. I originally tore those tendons jumping on a trampoline at night, leaping around with too many other barely teenagers in the dark, giggles and laughter marking our rebellion at doing something slightly dangerous. For years after that first fall, painful sprains and and discomfort plagued me. Sometimes in the summer that foot still gets puffy and swells up around the spot of the initial injury and the ones that came after. Finally, after spending enough time limping around and enough trips to the emergency room with swelling and pain I saw a Dr. who prescribed

This bout of insomnia, nearly three days in now, is triggered by a particular cause. Three years ago I was bursting into my second trimester of pregnancy. I'd spent the majority of September and October sick. Really sick. All the time. I'd just had a bad scare -- bleeding so horrible I thought I was miscarrying -- and was still on modified bed rest. On this day I would make the decision to drop most of my graduate school classes because I could barely get out of bed. My gall bladder symptoms would start just two weeks later and I'd be spending nearly every time I ate in pain so bad that the first time it happened I thought I was having a heart attack. The stress and hormones would soon elevate my blood pressure to a point that I'd have to start medication. All told I'd lose 45 pounds by the time my child was born. I love my child every second of every day and I would choose to do it all over again. I'd suffer through worse, even. I'd pony up double, tri

For better or for worse I finished seminary today.  And, true confessions, right now I'm not feeling very good about it. Not in the "Oh, I'll really miss all of this" but more like "Why did I do that?" "What was I thinking when I thought I was called to this?" "Next time I say I really feel called to something, someone smack me upside the head." I'm leaving seminary at this moment with some pretty chronic imposter syndrome. By the time I realized I was not a good fit for seminary, or at least this seminary, it was too late. I'd invested too deeply. My relationship with it is also mired and muddled in the complicated feelings of really caring for some of the other parts of my life and people, and things I have done during that time. It's tangled in the notion that I am a totally different person because of every struggle and frustration and how those same things simultaneously made me feel sad and lonely. I don't th

Maybe I'm just over-tired and wrecked from this completely insane semester, or I'm fizzling out, or perhaps it's something about being an over-emotional woman, or perhaps even something about being a sappy parent changed me but I just can't engage in rational or unemotional discussion about privilege or status or anything remotely social justice when it comes to kids lately. I just (as the white girls say) can't even. This most recently reared it's head surrounding the Spring Valley incident, but it has come up before in the unaccompanied minor immigration crisis, in Tamir Rice, in Jordan Miles, and truly when any child who is caught in the violence of adults (and their language). I am seeing a line as thick as the one in the dirt marking a game of tug-of-war. And I know, rationally, there is nuance. Culture, climate, bias...all of these things are at play. I know because I've studied it. I know because the thing that I am called to is the educated dis

While I was sitting in class today simultaneously taking notes on the lecture, answering e-mails for my internship, and organizing my notes for an event on Friday, panic blew up like a fifth grader huffing into a wad of double bubble in my stomach. It was accompanied by the ever familiar feeling of a pulled plug in my mouth, drying it out like the mojave desert. I've been having a lot of these physical manifestations of nerves and panic lately. It never really happened to me until I was well into adult-hood, and then it was rarely. Recently it's been worse. Maybe because I'm nearing the end of a lot of years of schooling and finally feeling at peace with my calling. Maybe it's because I've matured enough (unlikely) to see the consequences of my failings. Maybe I am developing a panic disorder. Maybe it's a new symptom of my ADHD. Maybe it's a parent thing (oy vey the world we live in!) I am also really really terrible at self-care. So today, when I