Loose Receipts and Anxious Thoughts
I think I have been difficult to live with lately. I say this because as of late, I have found myself with so much more to comment on than usual: the dirty clothes left on the floor, the loose receipts disregarded on the table for days, the coffee mugs cementing in the office.
It has been easy to blame these comments on the offender of the above catastrophes. And for a while, I really believed myself when I said the disregard of my other half was the problem at hand. This was very easy to believe, except there was the tiny problem of my annoyance being continually stoked to the boiling point by inconsequential things, such as a bit of loose change on the table. My short fuse seemed to be pointing me to dig deeper at what was beneath the surface of my soul.
I find it highly annoying to be inconvenienced by the truth. The small voice pushing me to dig deeper is really a pain in the butt. It used to be extremely easy to drown out, until I went about this obnoxious project of weeding out the din drowning out the small voice (by, say, getting rid of my tv, or implementing time limits on my socials). Now this voice is rather difficult to ignore.
As a highly evolved person, I can sense when the voice needs to be addressed and I need to examine what is going on beneath the surface in my soul. The signs become clear — obsessive cleanliness, need for control, dissatisfaction when anything is not done to my standards, rigidity, pulling my relationships back to surface level topics. But, um, I usually ignore these tiny signs right up until I feel a nervous breakdown is possible in my future.
To answer your question, yes, this does make me a delightful person to be married to. Thank you for asking.
I realized my genuine struggle is that it’s just difficult when so much is out of your control. I brought a beautiful human into this world that is being wrecked by climate change, doomsday politics, a global pandemic, and one tragedy after another. I can’t prevent terrible things like sickness or grief from happening to her. Heck, I can’t even stop myself from rolling my eyes at my husband, which I know is a very rude and demeaning thing to do.
If God could just assure me that we will go through this life with only minor catastrophe hitting our lives, I would find it very helpful.
I know, I know. Find peace in Jesus. It’s a wonderful solution. Except sometimes if I’m being honest, this doesn’t always seem to work for me. A lot of times, my life feels like that time in the Bible where Jesus and his friends were on a boat and the boat was sinking in a storm while Jesus was taking a nap. Does Jesus see I am about to drown?
So I don’t know. I keep going to church, because my family there buoys me and reminds me that Jesus will someday bring peace to this world, once and for all. I try to love my people well, to celebrate their wins and show up in the small ways when I’m not too busy being self-absorbed. I remind myself that the activism I do in real life outweighs any Instagram post by a factor of one million. Also maybe I will try not to comment rudely on the shoes left right in the doorway, primed for tripping over. Some days, these things don’t feel like enough to calm the storm raging in my mind. But they are good things and they help.
I don’t usually like to write and put words out into the world when there is no resolution or word of wisdom at the end. But trying scrounge together a bow on top wouldn’t feel true to the season of life I’m in. And if nothing else, maybe someone else is in this season of weird discomfort and needed to know they aren’t alone. It’s a season and it won’t last forever. Let’s tread water together.
