2016 Reading Challenge

If you know me well, you know I love to read. That’s why when I found out about the Goodreads app, I was all over it. One of its features is the ability to set annual challenges for yourself to read a certain number of books. While I wouldn’t say I read large amounts at a time, I do try to be consistent in taking time to read regularly. This year I resolved to read 15 books. Here is some of what I’ve read so far:

The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories
A collection of writings by a woman who died young, it was both thought-provoking and entertaining. Since the essays and stories were relatively short, it made for a quick, easy read. Sometimes I would have to pause at the end of a story to process what I had just read, and I pondered with awe how this girl came up with so many creative ideas and put them onto paper so beautifully.

Released from Shame: Moving Beyond the Pain of the Past
I bought this book for under a dollar, and I loved it. Right now I’m going through a phase of being fascinated by nonfiction that focuses on psychology, emotional health, personal growth, etc. This definitely beckons you to face the darkness of your past, or it teaches you how to better relate to those who have had a challenging past. While full of sadness, it also offers hope and healing to weary souls.

Women Who Run with the Wolves
This one took me months to read. I started it sometime last year and didn’t finish it until just a couple months ago. But I mean that in a good way. This was a long, dense, but amazing read. It explores ancient folklore and reveals psychological lessons we can learn from various stories. Written primarily for a female audience, it challenges women to embrace their femininity to the fullest. If you decide to read this book, take your time and savor it. Don’t pressure yourself to rush through it or it may become overwhelming.

Sunny Side Up
I guess this is technically a graphic novel. I haven’t read much in this genre, but I really enjoyed it. I was able to breeze through it in a day, and it provided somewhat of a mental break after the other longer books I had been reading. I actually was able to get a galley free from a library sale. Set in the ’70s, the story follows a girl who travels to Florida for summer vacation. It was seemingly light-hearted at first, but I soon realized it included a more somber twist. Thought-provoking, yet tender as well.

Dreamtreaders
The first book in the Dreamtreaders’ series, this adventure novel explores the world beyond waking reality. It brings the dream world to life in a way I hadn’t thought about before. This was a great book to read before my bedtime to help me wind down at the end of the day. It was exciting and fun, and I can’t wait to read the next book in the series.

Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
Spirituality is another subject I love reading about. The author is irreverent but genuine, and he brings up some excellent points and questions about the Christian faith. The book follows his journey between his fundamentalist Christian upbringing and his explorations of less conservative, more “worldly” lifestyles. The author’s relatability and honesty about his doubts makes the Christian faith seem less intimidating. An enjoyable read that made me think.

I have other books that I’m reading or have read, but the above list is a handful of the ones that have really stuck with me. Share in the comments what you’re reading this year!

Why Chasing Your Dream Job Isn’t the Ultimate Goal

The lifestyle pastors of professional America will tell you to find a job that fulfills you. Find your passion. Don’t worry about the money. As long as you’re doing what you love, that’s what matters.

I don’t find that to be helpful advice. For those of us who don’t really have a passion, the subway of indecision carries us along with no convenient stops. Sure, we stare out the windows at the beautiful scenery and consider the possibilities of our various interests, but none of them seem quite right. We get bored in the brevity of our attention span while the thing we thought we loved so much loses its luster. Perhaps the problem lies not in the imperfections of an average job, but the imperfections in us.

If you choose a job based on whether it makes you feel happy, you may find yourself wandering aimlessly for the rest of your life. Granted, your ideal job is probably one in which you take pride, which embodies your values. And if you can find said job, that’s great. However, if you spend our whole life trying to find meaning in the work you get paid for, you will easily miss the meaning outside your profession.

If I depended on my jobs to give me meaning, I would lead a depressing life. But I find meaning outside my jobs: in taking care of my body through yoga, in building relationships with others, in reading and finding new things to learn. I find meaning in drinking in the golden sunlight, in delirious dancing during an all-nighter, in wrapping myself in blankets. In some ways, it doesn’t matter what I get paid to do because I find fulfillment in other ways.

Yes, there are such things as bad jobs. There are toxic environments and disrespectful people. It is important to find a healthy workplace, and to do something you deem worthwhile. But you don’t need to make your job an ultimate goal, because there is so much richness in life outside the workplace.

Emptying the Inbox

In the past couple years I have developed my own style of minimalism for my life. I possess a distaste for clutter, and have improved my ability to detach sentimentality from objects that no longer add value to my life.

Since graduating college, I created a goal to empty my email inboxes, because digital minimalism is just as important to me as physical minimalism. Deleting and archiving most of my college emails was easy. The other challenge was cleaning up my personal inbox.

While I deleted many emails, there were many that I kept, but not in my inbox. I created enough folders to keep everything organized, but not enough to constitute another level of clutter. Creating categories such as bills versus family emails, or specific locations I’ve lived in, have been incredibly helpful in this process. I can now proudly say that my personal inbox has under ten emails in it, as I have learned to sort my mail as it comes in.

I understand that not everyone can do this because some receive hundreds of emails per day. I cannot say I know what that experience is like. However, I have discussed with some friends how useful “digital housekeeping” can be these days, and how it would be an interesting adventure to pursue that service as a line of work to clients.

I do not know exactly everything that that service would entail, but it is an area that interests me, and I would love to hear readers’ thoughts on it. Whenever I learn something that is useful in my life, I become excited to share it with others in hopes their lives can improve as well.

Theatre and the Internal Battle

Recently I have attended live theatre and loved it. Straight plays especially I am seeing these days contain challenging subject matter that beckons the audience to ask difficult questions. I love it when the art of live theatre serves a purpose in enriching people’s lives. However, recently I have discovered the changes in my taste for entertainment.

As many who know me are aware, I am passionate about emotional and mental health, especially my own. I have spent hours analyzing my emotions, habits, lifestyle, and childhood to determine why I think and feel certain ways, and how to improve those parts of my life that are unhealthy.

How does this affect my tastes for live theatre? I am realizing that the reason many shows are challenging is because the characters are not healthy. It is easy to see the unhealthy decisions of someone on a stage, but it is more difficult to identify those same issues in real life, which is what makes theatre so beautiful. An awareness or a call to attention of a character’s flaws creates a deeper awareness of our own flaws or the flaws of the world. This awareness in turn elicits a response from us, be it a call to action, or at least developing a unique perspective of an area in which one was previously oblivious.

The problem I have is that often I see elements of myself on stage played out in ways that do not allow for a resolution. At the conclusion of a given play, the audience is left to create their own resolution, their own determination to not turn out the way the characters might have. This can be a positive thing, especially if it motivates the audience to live healthier lives. Where I am in my own life, however, seeing dangerous life decisions played out onstage brings me pain because I am trying as hard as I can to avoid a similar fate.

In the midst of my daily anxieties, stressors, and irritants, during which I like to imagine the worst case scenario, I have thought that perhaps one day I will create short dramas to put on a stage to get them out of my head and out of my way in life. I think many people before me have already done that, as we hear stories of artists who lived tortured lives and wrote from dark places. It makes for great drama, because no one wants to watch a story in which everyone is perfectly happy the entire time. My hope is that the events I see onstage will not become a reality in my own life.

And so while I may need to take a break from live dramas to work on my own life, I hope one day I will learn to maintain a certain disconnect from people I watch in stories so as to enjoy them more.

The Intricacy of Intimacy

“Had a great talk with a friend of mine last night. We conversed until well past midnight about life, relationships, and our personalities. We got to talking about Myers-Briggs personality types, and how my friend’s personality is complimentary to mine, mine being INFJ, and hers being ENFP. With our two middle letters being the same and the outside letters being different, our personalities work well together. We joked about how it was a shame one of us wasn’t a guy so we could marry each other.

Later that night something clicked while I was lying in bed: I almost began feeling less lonely. Yes, I still longed for intimacy with a guy as well as sarcastic banter, but I realized that I found it really refreshing to be with someone whose personality complemented mine and who was aware of her mental health. I realized that while my loneliness didn’t go away, she is someone I would feel comfortable being lonely with. Not in a weird, romantic way, but such that we’ve been able to develop a friendship over the years that has allowed us to share personal things with each other. And that realization makes me happy.”

That was a journal entry of mine from back in April of this year. I was visiting a friend whom I hadn’t seen for awhile, and I loved how we could pick back up from where we left off despite not having talked in who knows how long. We have been friends for several years, and if the saying is true that says if you’re friends with someone for longer than seven years you’re friends for life, I guess that means that she and I are pretty much stuck with each other, no matter how many miles are between us.

I share this to express my reflections on the human desire to bond, and how that desire has affected me. Often I would describe myself as being lonely, no matter how often I spend time with people. I have realized that loneliness cannot be cured by another person, and while socialization does help to remedy it, becoming dependent on other people for our own happiness is unhealthy. This is why I say that I don’t want someone to take away my loneliness, but rather I want someone to be lonely with.

A few months ago when I visited my friend, I realized that she was someone I enjoyed feeling lonely with. We were able to share with each other things we struggled with, things we dreamed about, things we thought were funny. While we couldn’t solve each other’s problems, we could offer our friendship to each other, and that has been an incredible gift.

Our personalities are not the same, but that allows us to learn from each other. It is through my friendship with her that I realized that intimacy comes in many different forms. When I hear the word intimacy I automatically think of physical closeness, but it is so much more than that. When conversing with this friend, I have felt somewhat of an intellectual intimacy, if you will, because we would explore philosophical topics and life issues in a way that people don’t normally do in everyday interactions. Other times I have felt an emotional intimacy because I would share with her a personal battle that I was facing.

My realization of the complexity of intimacy is important because it has helped me to understand that loneliness is often very complicated, but that does not necessarily make it a bad thing. Sometimes I crave emotional or intellectual intimacy in the form of something mentally stimulating, while at other times I just flat out want to cuddle with someone. Knowing this helps me to better understand how to take care of myself, and hopefully will help me be able to better care for others.

Where You Find Refuge

I love the part in stories when the characters meet in cafes. There is something intimate about a cafe that elicits honesty among those who go there. It is a warm and safe place where people take off their masks, and often where they go to work out their problems. On the other hand, we often see people putting on masks when they go to an expensive restaurant. Do you ever notice how characters meet their friends in a cafe, but they meet their enemies in the white tablecloth-, crystal glass-type atmosphere? In the movie Thor, for example, the people Thor runs into when he visits earth take him to a homely diner. This builds a sense of comfortability among those in the group. In Paranoia, on the other hand, the rivaling companies meet in fine-dining settings, creating tension and competition between each other. [Sidebar: Yes, I realize I just named movies that feature the Hemsworth brothers. What can I say, they’re rather nice-looking and they have accents] I can’t recall how many times I’ve wanted to write a story that includes a scene in a cafe or coffee shop. The worn chairs, the smooth jazz playing in the background, the hot mug warming my hands. A pause in everyday life as I contemplate the adventures awaiting me. But as I’ve heard from many artists, people don’t want to hear a story in which there is no conflict. What does work in a story is when the character has a refuge, a place to escape in the midst of trouble. In novels it may be a hidden cave or an attic. In many movies, it is a coffee shop or cafe. Often I am so distracted by everyday stresses that I don’t want to focus on creating a fictional conflict. But perhaps the escape isn’t so much the location I write about as it is in the actual writing. Hence why it’s taken me three hundred words to say I love coffee shops.

The Adult Cult

I joined a cult called “Adult”:
Ditching the dramas for the documentaries
And embracing the boring which many call life.
Scheduled into a system
Formed by the few for the many
Leaving little room for spontaneity.
Where is the creativity, the craziness,
The charisma from our youth?
We have traded the marvelous
For the mundane mediocrity
Of daily life. In the name of
Making money,
We have drowned our dreams
In the depths of human sorrow.
I have come to realize
That what troubles me are not
The traumas of a lifetime – those
I can handle – but rather
The pesky flies of petty problems.
The daily disturbances and annoyances
Coupled with the crippling hopelessness
That comes with realizing
That that’s just the way it is.

My Journey to Minimalism

I follow a blog called The Minimalists, which has inspired me to want to live a simpler life. In general I try to be frugal, because having too much stuff overwhelms me, especially when that stuff accumulates into a disorganized mess.

I want to work even more toward living a minimalistic life – getting rid of unnecessary things, working toward living more purposefully and meaningfully. The Minimalists wrote a series of posts about their 21-day journey to minimalism, so I want to create my own series of posts documenting my journey to minimalism this summer. This will also force me to write more, which is something I’ve been wanting to do as well.

For a long time I’ve had a dream of one day being able to fit all my belongings – or at least all my clothes – in a single suitcase so that I could pack up and go anywhere at a moment’s notice if need be. I do not intend to reach that goal this summer, but I do intend to downsize. Downsize the stuff, downsize the stress. I hope that by coming with me on my journey, maybe you will be inspired to work toward a more meaningful life as well, whatever that may look like for you.