Intentional Living: Less Aesthetic, and More Mess

#1: A fun, special weekend breakfast at home. Fun brunch vibes!

(Sharing this post along with some more fun ways I've been trying to "live intentionally" this summer).

A perpetual theme in my thinking, Youtube watching, journaling, and existential crisis-ing is my deep desire to be living an intentional life. 

So much of life feels completely chaotic, and this year for me personally has been the most chaotic yet. In many ways, though, I'm incredibly grateful that this string of unfortunate events took place this year. For the first time in my entire life, I feel more equipped to handle it. Chris and I are stable, and good. We have strong friendships. We're both relatively comfortable at work, and have control over our work lives. We've started to feel like real adults, and with that our capacity to deal with challenges has grown larger. 

Moving in with Chris was a milestone in my life for many reasons, but one of the most challenging aspects of it at the time was what a strong break it marked between me living my life the way I wanted to, and me living in a way that my upbringing expected. Growing up in not just a conservative Christian household, but also a fundamentalist-leaning homeschooling community, moving in with a boyfriend carried the weight of not just a life change but of moral failure. At the time, I was still doing my best to be a good Christian and form my life in that way. While I didn't believe moving in together was wrong, I also spent a lot of my emotional energy coming up with ways to defend myself. 

#2: Always having fresh flowers (once a bouquet starts to die, I pull the ones that still look good and make these mini bouquets).

While we hadn't tried to hide it (and actually, had explicitly told our close church friends before we moved in together), a pandemic meant that it took six months before most of the people in my home church "knew." A lot of people were upset. We received heartbroken texts, and went to dinner with one couple who told us everything we were doing wrong. Fast forward a year, and we were engaged and starting to plan a wedding. We reached out to a church I had been to get married, and received a double sided pdf in response. The letter held many bullet points (and interestingly, only one bible verse) and demanded an apology from me. It stung. I felt abandoned and alone by a church family I had tried for a really long time to please. 

These scenarios, which all occurred within a year and a half of each other, were monumental shifts for me. They marked the first time in my life where I chose myself--my needs, wants, and desires--over the life that has being handed to me and expected of me. I grew up with a lot of expectations around me, as well as a lot of black and white thinking over what the "right" way to be was. Even when these expectations didn't seem to fit me (and to be honest, they often didn't), I tried my best to change myself for them rather than finding a different way. I did this as a kid of course, but I also did it as an adult...for way too long. 

#3: Cooking with both smaller portions of meat, as well as less days where we eat meat. This veggie stir fry has been a go-to this summer! Cheap, cleans out the fridge, and doesn't heat up the apartment. :)

The past few years have felt like crash-landing into an adult life where I actually have options. It's been exhausting, and to be honest, a little traumatizing. But while the last two years haven't exactly looked like a That Girl video waxing poetic abut the importance of routines, I can't imagine a way I could have lived these years more intentionally. In all the mess, this season of life meant me finally getting real about what kind of future I wanted. It was about me challenging old beliefs, and standing up to people and systems I had previously believed it a sin to question. For the first time in life, this season I embraced change and discovering new ways of looking at the world. We don't talk to talk about the mess, but I think the mess has way more to do with "living authentically" then we care to admit. 

Perhaps our views on living intentionally need to shift. Perhaps it's less morning routines and fruit infused water and more hard conversations, setting boundaries, and challenging yourself in therapy. Maybe living intentionally is making scary, annoying, and even mundane choices. I love an aesthetic "Sunday Reset" vlog as much as the next person (and honestly, maybe more), but we all must realize deep down that changing your sheets don't actually change your life. The most important stuff isn't the pretty stuff. 

As we've worked through everything the past few years, I have felt a lot of grief, a lot of anger, and a lot of disappointment. I've realized my self-esteem was based largely on what others think of me (a pretty unstable foundation). I have felt the inclination to hide from family, to hide from the world, just to avoid getting rejected. Carrying all of this has felt so heavy. 

#4: Taking a second to CHILL. I've been trying to be very aware about my energy lately, and turns out, after running around out in public for a few hours I am STRESSED and need to sit on the bed or the couch, have a fun drink, and just zone out or else my brain becomes mush. 

As the waves seem to settle, and a new season emerges, I'm preparing to feel a lot more satisfaction in this life we are living. We are only two months away from getting married! We are all moved in to our new apartment. Bear is behaving significantly better than he used to. We have fantastic friends that have stuck by us through all the sticky parts. And we're ready to live with a lot more JOY. 

Because it's a huge gift to get the chance to build a life. Though it feels like I'm starting from scratch, it's a gift to have a fresh start and to get to explore all the ways I could be. The world is truly brand new: are we sleeping in on Sundays or going for a run? Happy hours with friends or brunches at home? Beer or wine on a Friday night? Trash tv or curled up with a book? Where do we get the news? When do we read the news? How do we budget? Who are our friends? What are we valuing in the world, when we aren't told what to value? How are we showing up for our communities, when we aren't told who to show up for? What do I think and want, when I finally get to tune out decades of other voices?

#5: Going on way more fun, little adventures that remind us we are ALIVE and DOING THINGS! Bonus points if they include friends, and double bonus points if they include something local we haven't done before (this was a Portland Sea Dogs game!).

I'm excited to find out. I suppose if I had to have a quarter life crisis, I'm grateful for where this one led me. Here's to continued question asking, intention setting, deep thinking, and a lot more spontaneous fun in the next 3/4 of my life. 

big thoughts about community and living a real life (& photos from Burlington, VT)

 

Jesus. This spring. 

Work has been great but literally so busy. I am only beginning to pull myself out of a very intense feeling of overwhelm...the kind of overwhelm where you have 300 unread emails and have to write down "text so and so back" to force yourself to do so. I have a ridiculous stack of random sticky notes and long lists that I've been carrying around with me from room to room, just attempting to make some sense of everything. It's not really worked! But we're getting there. And then....all the mess of the world this week. I don't have words for tragedy like this, but I also know not acknowledging it is worse. I don't know what to do about it, but I do know that we as a community must be less stagnant and passive about every important issue we face. Plenty of people who know more than me have pulled together great resource lists; Cup of Jo is a good one. 

In our own families and households and friend groups and neighborhoods, we must all be more engaged and more human. More supportive. More caring. More discerning. More ready to take on the work of large changes, and more consistent with our practice of small changes. In this moment, I want to work on: being a better family member, specifically an "aunt" to Chris' very little cousin and a supporter of my own younger cousins; a more generous community member with my time and attention; being a more empathetic observer of my neighbor's lives; and more willing to sit with the news, research, and develop opinions about changes. 

Even before this week, I've been thinking a lot about how I want to be careful not to disconnect from the world. Even the grief, even the pain: I want to bear witness to all, to feel the range of the human experience. One of the parts of our upcoming move we are most excited about is being back in town. Our current apartment is a perfectly nice, white-walled unit in a duplex. There is a neatly paved driveway filled with cars. There are fine, quiet neighbors. Someone cuts the grass every Friday. The whole town uses the exact same trash and recycling bins. We live in a cul-de-sac, with many nice, quiet houses. We don't know the neighbors...sometimes we pass someone when we walk the dog, but no one knows (or cares) who we are. When we first moved here, we were excited for more space. Isn't that what we're always searching for? The picket fence? The privacy? But as our move approaches, I am most excited for getting back to the messiness of buildings crammed together. I want to wake up to slammed doors late at night and loud, happy drunk voices in the street. I want to walk by people smoking on their front steps and past piles of free junk on the side of the road. I want to notice people working odd hours, and staying up too late on Tuesdays. I want to to see people existing outside of the apathetic suburbia molds. I want to feel the energy of the first really warm weekend and the quiet of misty Monday mornings. I want the hustle of digging everyone out after a snow storm and the ability to say "let's grab a drink" without grabbing the car keys. 

The truth is as much as I'd love a yard for kids and the ability to plant gardens wherever I pleased, the joy and community I really want to belong to doesn't seem to be here. I want to be throwing elbows with the people fighting for parking spaces and not taking tomorrow for granted. My people are the baristas and bartenders and artists that still hold onto their 9-5's, not the guy who's sat at the same desk for 30 years and thinks we could buy a house if only we stopped spending all our money on coffee.

My childhood was isolated. At times I loved it, and at times it felt wrong. There's a lot of gray area to be found between the good and the bad of a homeschooled, conservative Christian upbringing, and I was certainly firmly rooted in the gray. The one thing I always felt, though, was utterly disconnected to the world around me. My lack of trend following and pop culture knowledge was praised by adults, and scorned by peers. I took a lot of pride in not liking what everybody else seemed to. But I also felt a lot of shame for having no grasp on what "real life" felt like. Real life is what everyone else was living; I was caught aloof and uninvolved, like I was watching a goofy sitcom where the outcome didn't matter to me. Whatever my childhood was, it wasn't living. 

As an adult, I often still feel behind. The difference now, though, is that I can choose to be more connected instead of continuing to hide away. I can choose to not just talk about compassion, joy, being thoughtful, being neighborly, but to really act in that way. To shape my own life into the way I want the world to feel. There is much to be done on a macro level enable us to live as more whole communities. But the pieces we can really control are the small things, that take place inside our own kitchens and churches and bars and front steps. I want to take this move as a chance to be putting that work first.

All of these pictures are from our quick trip up to Burlington, VT in mid-May. Chris drove up from NJ, and I came up from NH. We got an Air Bnb downtown for two nights. It was a ridiculously hot weekend--in the 90's!--but we had so much fun walking around, going to our favorite used bookstore, and trying new sandwich and coffee places. We got to see my best friend and her boyfriend for a quick visit, and tried a very cool new-to-us restaurant called Poco which was so small, intimate, beautiful, and delicious. Our main reason for coming up was actually to get to see Sal Vulcano's show! I had bought Chris tickets back at Christmas and it ended up getting postponed, but we finally got to see him! So fun. This was our first time being in Burlington when it wasn't freezing cold, and we loved it. 

One Year of Shacking Up

This past Sunday, January 10th, marked  the one year anniversary of Chris and I moving in together. I can't believe that it's been that long, but I also can't imagine it being any other way. 

December of 2019, I was skating at Sea World's WWOI. I had left for Florida in November with a rough plan that we would most likely move in together after I came home. Over the next two months, we decided for sure. 

December 2019, we talked a lot about living together, and what it would mean. That conversation, though, had really started over a year earlier, and became a serious topic over that summer. We talked about every side of it, from timelines and expectations about marriage, to how we'd split finances, to how we'd make time to do things without each other. For me, though, the number one topic I kept coming back to was a little less helpful: how would we handle people's reactions?

I was worried about what my parents would think. What my grandmother would think. I was worried about the thoughts of people at church, and especially worried about my closest friends at church. I was worried I would disappoint someone. I was worried that people would think I was some kind of fake Christian, or just a terribly weak one. I was worried that somehow I was failing. And all that worry made me obsess, and attempt to prepare for, so many worst case scenarios. I was prepared to be openly ridiculed, excluded from people I loved, and get the cold shoulder from family. 

But, I also knew that I really wanted to live with Chris. I knew that after all the time I'd spent staying over at his apartment, I was happiest there. Going through normal, daily rhythms with him made me feel the most grounded, the most whole, and the most like myself. Our time together made me want to keep growing as a person. A year and a half into our relationship, I found our love the most exciting, and most nourishing, part of my life. 

We also knew that this was just really good for us. We wanted more space, more time, a routine. We wanted to live with less of an audience. We felt like the next step of our growth as a couple was to act like a proper, partnered couple. 

And while I worried a lot about the opinions of my church, I also didn't believe this was wrong. Maybe those reasons will be their own post some day, but suffice it to say, deciding not to move in together would have been a decision made out of fear of resentment, not fear of actually doing something wrong. Even on my most people-pleasing days, I couldn't live with the idea of that fear shaping my life. 

This year, perhaps, wasn't the easiest one to start our lives together: there was that pandemic, bouts of unemployment, disappointments, actual criticisms my church members, and coming to terms with some deeply rooted anxiety. But on the flip side, every single good thing that did come out of 2020 for me, is somehow linked to the happy little life we've made together. Without Chris vacuuming dog hair and doing home workouts beside me, this year really would have been unbearable. 

A year later, I am proud of us. I'm proud of the life and the cozy little  home we've built. I'm proud that in the face of knowingly opening ourselves up to criticism, we stuck together and focused our actual decisions on what we needed as a couple. I'm proud that we've both been open and eager communicators, to make figuring out what we need doable. 

We have so many more ways to grow, but the growth we did experience is something I'm very proud of. Happy one year of shacking up, Chris. I am so beyond grateful to get to be delinquent with you. 

For anyone thinking through this transition: listen to your gut, not everyone else's reactions. You absolutely know what the right decision for this moment is. 

Don't Call Me A Good Little Church Girl

Because when you have no other photos to post, post a selfie.

I am on such a high right now after Lady's Day at church. Seriously.

We had am absolutely incredible woman come speak to us today, named Stephanie. She used to run a shelter for homeless women and children in Memphis, and she talked to us about her process, faith, and the important difference individuals can make.

While listening to her speak, it was like every sentence out of her mouth connected dots for me. She echoed some random things I've been thinking about lately, and tied them together in a logical way I hadn't yet.

A theme she kept coming back to was the difference just a small, committed group of people can make. That size and resources don't matter as much in comparison to commitment. That the smallest things we do can sometimes have the biggest impact.

This is actually something my economics class (of all things!) touched on. It talked about how we are all leaders, because there is always someone watching us. Okay, so maybe it's just your little brother or the kid next door....but they might grow up to be a judge, or a cop, or a business owner. And they're watching you.

We all have influence. The only questions is whether it is positive or negative.

And I don't mean this in a 'someone is watching so you better behave!!!!' way. I think it's the difference between being polite, and going out of your way to help someone. Being smart, and being innovative. Being honest, and putting yourself out for someone else.

For the past six months or so, I've been in a fit over the term 'good little church girl'. A guy called me that a couple months ago, and I hated it, although I didn't know why. He meant it to be cute, but it bugged me.

And I've finally hit on why. The world tends to view Christians as those that have chosen to live a boring, low-risk existence. That they avoid 'fun' because they're scared of life. And that thinking is so flawed. To so many people--the apostles, Paul, modern Christians in Egypt--being Christian has meant living a life full of danger, daring, and risk. I bet they all wish their faith was more 'boring'.

But even for Christians living today in parts of the world without persecution, faith isn't (or shouldn't be) boring. There are still so many ways we must live bigger because of it. So many ways we could help. And even if you aren't persecuted for your faith, it still takes guts to live it out despite the people around you.

I don't like being called a 'good little church girl' because that makes me sound naive. And innocent. And dumb.

And my faith isn't naive, it's informed.
I'm not innocent, I'm intuitive.
And my faith isn't dumb, it's wise.

Looking at Stephanie, you would never call her a 'good little church girl'. She has too much depth for that. Her aura is smart, and strong, and fierce, and full of heart. Which, really, is what true Christianity looks like.

The world has it wrong.

Happy Saturday! xoxo

Finding Focus

Lately, I've found myself just craving focus.

About a month ago, I honestly thought I was going crazy. My head was constantly buzzing. I made lists and then never accomplished anything on them. New thoughts and ideas were fluttering around in my head...but I couldn't do anything with them. I couldn't articulate them, or act on them. I couldn't settle in and work.

It's not the first time it's happened, either. I usually get like that when we're really busy, or I'm coming off of being lazy with no real 'routine'. It's just a result of being bored and being overwhelmed at the same time. While definitely annoying, it's the kind of thing you have to learn to work through. Yes, it might be easier to just curl up and do absolutely nothing....but that's not really going to help. Learning how to deal with this is a constant struggle, but I think I've finally hit on what works for me.

one // Pray. This one's a game changer to me. I sit still and just focus on telling God exactly what the problem is. I talk it out forever, and by the end, I feel such a release. It's not my problem any more. Praying never fails to give me some perspective so I can be okay with what happens next, and just focus on making the most of the situation at hand.

two // Take a walk. I love walks (especially in the fall and winter!). The fresh air and exercise is a great mood booster anyway, but for me, it always seems to stimulate a better attitude in terms of what work I have to do. Walks are a great time to talk yourself through problems, or simply let your mind wander and stop feeling so 'cluttered'.

three // Drive (with no radio). I once heard Glenn Beck say that one of the largest problems in our society is that people are afraid of silence. Our society is over-stimulated...we've got our phones, emails, playlists, texting, all the time. While there's something to be said for multi-tasking, sometimes just turning off the noise and letting our brains think is the better solution. After a twenty minute drive of quiet contemplation, I show up at the rink with a clear mind that's ready to go!

four // Journal. Just write it out!! Getting anything on paper, at the very least, gets it out of your head. Plus, you're more likely to end up with a plan or a new idea, which will let you get back to work even better than you were before.

five // Clean and organize. Most of the time, my mental clutter is the direct result of my physical clutter. Folding laundry, making my bed, or (gasp!!) cleaning off my desk is a gateway for inspiration and motivation. Plus who doesn't love a productive break?!

So there we have it! My five favorite ways to clear my mind and find focus.  As the school year approaches, I know I'll be putting these into play pretty often (and let's be honest, I've really needed them this summer, too!).