Change

This week has been one of the strangest weeks in my memory, so full of contrasting events and emotions that I'm almost not sure how to process it.

This week has left me feeling both affirmed and cut down. Elated and deflated.

Some of you know what's up, and some of you don't. And that will just have to do. I can't really talk about it on an open forum like this. All I can say is that there are big changes coming my way. I know that in the long run, I'll be better off than I was before, but change has never been easy for me.

This week has also left me feeling so incredibly grateful for my family, especially my mom who always lets me call her on the phone when I'm crying and inconsolable, and to my friends. I'm grateful for my wonderful internet friends who have been sending me good thoughts and internet hugs all week. And I'm perhaps most grateful for my super cool roommates-my best friends and sisters.

I wish I could tell all, friends, because I desperately need that catharsis. I hate feeling so mixed up. I hate not knowing if I should be happy or sad, even though I know that most of life is not one or the other. Life is not made up of black and white, but grey, and it is that grey area I have such trouble living in.

Life is change and grey areas and disappointments and happiness, and I feel like I'm finally learning how to let it all go and not worry so much about everything all the time. It's so noticeable a change, that I hardly recognize myself sometimes. I'm finally starting to like the person I am.

Morning Ritual

It's no secret that I love coffee. I work at Starbucks. Coffee is my life. One of my favorite coffee-related things is the french press.

It's so relaxing for me to make one on my day off. It's almost a ritual.

Measuring out and grinding the beans. Waiting for the kettle to boil, listening for the scream that tells me I'm one step closer to my cup of coffee. Slowly pouring the hot water over the grounds. Waiting again, four agonizing minutes while the timer tick-tick-ticks away until it finally rings and my heart leaps. Pressing the filter down, taking care not to rush. Pouring the coffee into my favorite cup. Taking that first sip, letting it warm me from the inside out, and relaxing into my morning.

I don't feel like entertaining you.

I'm on an honesty kick. I'm busy with work lately, and I've started working out more too, so I don't really have the energy to be fun and entertaining, which is, sometimes, what I imagine blogging is for. Entertaining the masses. Being funny and engaging so that people will like you, you'll be popular, and feel better about yourself. If this is getting to angsty for you, I understand. But sometimes you just have to get your issues out, put them out into internetland where someone might read it and understand and for a moment you might not feel so alone.

My boss asked me today if I thought I deserved success, and I nearly started crying because I didn't want to tell her "no." I almost didn't want to admit it to myself. From a Christian standpoint, we don't deserve anything, but that's another conversation entirely. But everyone should want themselves to do well, to exceed at whatever they've chosen to do with their life. Right?

It's not so much that I believe I deserve to fail, so much as I'm not sure I believe I deserve to succeed. The main problem is that I remember all the bad things I've done, every mistake I've made, everyone I've hurt, every time I made a fool out of myself, and my brain collects them and plays them like a movie reel in my head to make me feel the scum of the earth.

If you're Christian like me, you're going to say to me that no one deserves success, no one deserves anything, which is what makes Grace so powerful. If I actually got what I deserved, my life would be very different.

But this seems a little different. Success is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you believe you're going to fail, then you probably will. If I keep waiting for the bottom to drop out at work, waiting for it to start getting horrible for me again, then it will. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next week, but eventually it will.

So how do I start believing I deserve to succeed at anything? How to I go from a glass-half-empty to a glass-half-full type? At this point it seems like a genuine personality change. I'm mostly faking it right now. I have this struggle between my emotional heart and my logical brain, and I'm at that point where success is the struggle. As long as my logic and my emotions are still at war with each other then I still have a chance, I haven't given up on myself yet. But is this success at all, even a little bit? Or is it just treading water?

Now I will be honest.

I have believed lies. Present tense, believe. I believe lies. In my head, I know them to be false, but my heart has latched onto them. They are poisoning me from the inside out.

While people, my friends, tell me otherwise, it seems as though it is still expected that I get up each morning and put on my "happy face," that I'm not allowed to answer "I feel pretty shitty" when people ask me how I am, mostly because I'm supposed to care that they feel uncomfortable when confronted with honesty.

I've also believed the lies that the culture has fed me. Lies that say I need to be thin, have fabulous clothes, perfect skin and hair, be bubbly and outgoing, laid-back (and not the Type A that I am), and happy all the damn time, that I'm not supposed to be 27 and working at Starbucks unless I'm in school.

I'll confess to you that one of the reasons I want to start exercising more (other than the obvious of being healthy) is that I stepped on the scale last week and didn't like the number staring back at me and because I feel like a whale. I'll confess to you that I'm one of those women who doesn't like to leave the house without makeup on because of her blemishes and acne scars, and when I get complimented on my beautiful skin it takes every ounce of will power to just bite my tongue and say "thank you."

I know that other people feel this way, that they open their eyes in the morning and would give anything to not have to get out of bed. That sometimes they're just sad or angry for no decent reason other than that life is hard and unfair and that sometimes they feel like they're being crushed under the weight of simply existing. I know other people feel this way, and I also know that they don't talk about it.

I feel as though I'm supposed to have undergone some sort of personal change in all this confessing, that now I'm supposed to go forth and not give two shits about what anyone says or thinks. But that's not what's going to happen.

Well, I lived.

"Polar Vortex." That sounds appropriately daunting, doesn't it?

On Saturday, in preparation for the impending doom, I wrote that this could be the apocalypse. But I lived.

In all seriousness, this was one of the craziest winter storms I've ever seen. When I woke up yesterday morning at 4am, it was -8 degrees Fahrenheit. It was the kind of cold where you feel like you'll never be warm again. There's so much snow still on the streets, that St. Louis Public Schools has cancelled school for the third day in a row. The city announced there's no parking enforcement until January 13th. When I went to work on Monday, I passed car after car that had been abandoned after getting stranded in the snow.

I did have some fun, though. On Sunday, when the snow was falling, my roommates and I dug our cars out so we wouldn't have to do it in sub-zero temperatures. Afterwards, we played in the snow and had an awesome time.

Adults like snow days as much as kids.

In Which I Lament My Impending Demise

Snowpocalypse. Snowmageddon.

Source

At some point, every winter, these words are bandied about, joking about the various amounts of snow that happen to have fallen at that particular point in the season.

While St. Louis is forecasted to receive between 6-10 inches of snow tonight through Sunday, it's not the snow I'm worried about. It's this forecast, (Source is on the above link.) regarding the temperatures early next week:

"COLDEST TEMPERATURES IN 15-25 YEARS ARE ANTICIPATED ON MONDAY AND TUESDAY MORNINGS. BELOW 0 WITH WIND CHILLS OF 20 TO 30 BELOW."

Those temperatures are in Fahrenheit. Weather.com's forecast for Monday is 2 degrees Fahrenheit.

2. That's all. Just...2. 

If you're in Celsius, that's -16.

I am convinced this is the apocalypse and nothing you say will be able to convince me otherwise.

Someone get me the Winchesters.

Source

 

 

 

 

 If they can't stop the impending doom, they'll at least be able to keep me warm while I die.

In other news, I'm doing my first Photo-a-Day challenge over on my Instagram!

This is a challenge I found on Pinterest. It's from a blog I don't follow, but is listed on the image.

Go and follow along!

Friends, if you haven't heard from me by about Wednesday or so, send help. I may be frozen in my bed.