GRAPPLING

One of the best pieces of advice ever given to me was by my roommate in college who said, " Grace, when you're having a bad day, just have a bad day and let yourself be." I always had trouble following her advice. Now, as I juggle the stages of adulthood-sticking to official and unofficial appointments, keeping up with external and internal schedules, and satiating the need to feel and be productive while also allowing myself room to breath, I find it difficult to take time out to accept certain things and even more difficult to wallow in it. Nevertheless, as I make the small steps needed to be better at this thing we all do called "living", I try my best to hold to her advice.

Generally,I find that when I grapple, I grapple not with having to correct the inconsistencies around the cold facts, but with having to accept the hard truths. My first year out of college, it was the truth that this place I thought existed, this place called "there" was never actually in existence. I had clung to the fabricated idea of "there" while I was in high school thinking college would give this "there" an actual name. Unfortunately, it did not. Regardless, I continued to believe in it ...until I finally felt the absolute freedom of making my own choices. I moved to the city I most wanted to live in and all of a sudden, I felt as though the world was forcing me to drink water from a fire hose. That, or it was going to swallow me up. I realized then that I was never going to make it "there" because "there" does not exist.

Then it was the ominous transitional phase, the one that serves as a catalyst for what we call 'the quarter life crisis'. My own quarter life crisis just happened to occur six months early. I experienced extreme awareness of everything and anything going on within myself, but had no idea how to fix or solve anything and just felt altogether lost within myself. I shared the observations and realizations of my self-awareness and got responses of, "it's great that you're so aware" and "that's so insightful". To be honest, I really wasn't trying to be insightful. I was more trying to express that I'd rather not have anymore epiphanies from being aware because I didn't really know what to do with the plethora of "great" insight. I guess I was hoping for a course of action, a solution, or something of that sort.

I'm not completely past the quarter life crisis stage though I expect for mine to end six months before the actual expected time. These days, I'm doing my best to just accept that we're all trying to figure this thing called life out. That there's no specified path to walk or course of action. That the rules I stuck to and applied in the past don't necessarily work and that sometimes it's better to just abandon them altogether. That there's no miracle drug to get rid of the symptoms when the symptoms are merely a reflection of what you know and how you deal. That, as humans we always go back to what we know because despite the fact that it may not be good for us, it's just what we know and what we know is what makes us feel safe and secure. But even still, grace remains at our feet and continues to look at us, backwards and forwards.

And maybe I don't really understand grace completely, but I'm seeing that the thing with grace is that it always meets you where you're at and never leaves you where it finds you. It knows you can't leap across the abyss of doubt on your own, so it lifts you up in all your fear and trembling and carries you across. You never know for sure exactly what happened or how you got there, but you know you're not where you were or who you were when you took that first step. So here's to grace, for always meeting me where I am and never leaving me where it found me.

With each day, I find myself wanting to know more in hopes that the next time I go back, I'll be standing somewhere different. Surely, we have not been left here tongue tied, forlorn, perplexed, and drinking water from the world's fire hose. God is quietly whispering to us and inviting us to foster and discipline a consistent time and place where He can meet with us. And it is in this place that our true nature comes to surface and that He gently speaks truth. Truth that replaces the cold facts by revealing our pride, anxieties, and insecurities. This is one of the exact places where He works, where deep inner change occurs.

And if standing somewhere different requires changing what I know, then I guess on those bad days it does me best to just sit and let myself be. To just wallow and grapple with what I find. And in transition and awareness, to just accept the truth of how and what things really are. And at the end of the day, I'll know that even on a so-called bad day, I've come out a lot stronger and better.