Introspection

I'm an introvert. As if anyone didn't know.

Sometimes I can't function in an out-loud fashion. I have these bouncing, fleeting, swirling thoughts that I need complete quiet to assess. I have to hole up and retreat inside myself and connect the bigger picture in my head. I'm always searching for profundity in all things, big and small. (There are actually a bunch of cool words for this phenomenon.) It's just my thing. I have been this way for as long as I can remember.

I holed up on Saturday.

When I go into myself like this, I just stop talking to my peeps for days on end. I avoid small talk at all costs (but let's be honest: I do this all the time because if I have nothing worthwhile to say or think that I'm responding to something that has no depth, I would rather not talk at all). It's like I can't come back out of my shell until I'm defragmented on the inside.

Until recently, I couldn't even put words to what this process is like, but here's my crack at a semi-articulate version. It's kind of like the 5 stages of grief as I weave back and forth through the different steps until I'm at resolution.

Step 1: Self-analysis. I like to see if I can boil traits and characteristics and flaws I have down to the events or people in my life that may have caused or shaped them. Basically I try to figure out why I am the way I am...why I do things, think things, and interpret things as I do.

Step 2: Complete radio silence. As little speaking as possible. Lots of reading. Lots of sleeping (well, as much as my hectic schedule will allow). Lots of calm and quiet surrounding my in-process thoughts.

Step 3: Synthesis. I start to think in essay-like structure about the dots I've been connecting, and then I write in my journal a lot. Though last night I couldn't find my journal ANYWHERE. I tore my house apart. I am so bummed. But I absolutely had to write in that moment to get clarity on a few things, so I made due with another notebook. It's amazing how cathartic it is to purge onto the page.

Step 4: Music. I go on a total music binge. I will stay awake hours past my bedtime to soak in as many tunes as possible in this phase. Last night I was up until 2:30am listening to Wild + Free on Spotify.

Step 5: Revamp. When I'm almost done cleaning up my insides, I start to goal-set and focus on a handful of very particular things. This week I've been hyper-focused on homework, clean eating, and drinking tons of water. My goal has been 1 gallon of water per day, and today will be the 3rd day in a row I've hit it. I tend to be kind of chronically dehydrated all the time (a bizarre holdover from my aversion to drinking water when I was pregnant with Kimmy), so it's good to feel hydrated and refreshed!

Once I'm revamped and in a groove, I re-join society.

Kinda weird, right? But it's me. Introvert through and through.

Peace,
-Kels

Music, inspiration, wandering

I love music so much. I would have already died a thousand times over without music in my life.

I hope to never stop searching for inspiration and wonder everywhere I go. I hope my eyes stay forever wild and never glaze over.

Give me a wanderer whose heart will stay.

Beautifully flawed. Inherently happy.

Unafraid of the free fall.

[Just some thoughts.]

-Kels

Things I wish I had known (part 2 of more to come eventually)

I wish I had known years ago how to recognize my own unhappiness, and when I did recognize it, I wish I had taken myself seriously and not been so afraid to change the things that caused it.

I spent years in a loveless, lifeless relationship, feeling underappreciated, unloved, unheard, unliked, and utterly alone. Sure, it started out great. Why else would I have stayed, right? But it morphed into something I hated, but blindly tolerated because it was one of the only "stable" things in my life at that point in time.

Most of 2013 consisted of me being unemployed and caring for an infant alone. I never slept, or I always slept--you could take your pick on any given day. My daughter was the only thing that made me truly happy. I watched a lot of TV. I sat through many "you may have depression if..." commercials that listed off symptom after symptom, most of which I had, but swiftly swept under the nearest rug.

Do you know how scary it is to lose your passion for basically every single thing you ever loved to do? Because I do. It leaves you in a constant state of questioning: Who am I, really? How did I become so uninteresting? Why don't I like doing things anymore? What am I going to do with this endless stretch of time in front of me? Why can't I feel anything? Nothing feels right, and nothing feels real. I'd rather feel everything than feel nothing. They're two completely different states of "raw," but I'd much rather be the bleeding kind of raw than the cauterized kind of raw.

If I had known how happy and free my life could become, I would have struck out on my own much sooner than I did.

Now, let's flip.

Do you know how amazing it is to re-discover old passions and completely new and different ones? It's mindblowingly awesome!

I love to cook. I love traveling. Music--I love music again! I joke. I talk on the phone. I laugh my ass off! I love to run (even if I'm terrible at it and really should call it jogging with some walking mixed in). I love nature: hiking, all types of birds and trees, thunderstorms, lightning bugs, twinkling stars, sitting by a campfire and just listening to everything out in the dark. I love to be by myself and just think. I love to be in a room full of people and observe their every move--it's stunning to watch people's eyes as they think and comprehend what's around them or what they're going through. I love trying new beer. I love gardening, even if I have no clue what I'm doing. I love, love, love art. I love to paint...watercolor or acrylic, canvas or paper. I'm even starting to sing again.

Healing is a pretty cool phenomenon.

I hope to never get stuck in unhappiness again and miss the beauty that's all around me. It's a good, good life.

Peace,
Kels

Pulling up the weeds

There's just something so deeply rewarding and richly symbolic about pulling up weeds. As I was working in my garden this afternoon, the thought occurred to me that the work I was doing with my hands had more real-life applications than I'd ever before dared notice. Amazing how getting lost in a physical action so rote, routine, and familiar can take your mind to somewhere completely new that draws you to such profound conclusions. There's an art to slowly pulling up those little plants that grow against all odds, disrupting the perfectness of a well-organized garden variety. The gentle tug and lift of some; the necessary act of digging and roughly pulling with others. So, too, exist the tugs and pulls of life.

Musings on Weeds

If you don't get rid of problems fully and opportunistically, they'll come back over and over until you're forced to deal with them head-on. Removal of weeds from a garden bed requires care and attention. You want to get rid of the whole plant. If you pull too hard, you'll have a handful of greenery, and you may not even see a visible weed remaining in the ground. But, carelessly leave the roots behind, and you'll inadvertently re-establish the cycle of pesky growth--just like problems and problem-people (like those toxic, negative people that you eventually have to truly unfriend) in your life.

When you spend time trudging through the weeds, you notice things you never would have noticed otherwise. Life's not all sunshine and rainbows. There are bad times. There are things you won't want to do or surround yourself with. But when you accept it and rest there...just be there in those less-than-ideal places, you'll still find beauty. Like the dozens of itty bitty buds on my vegetable vines that will be zucchini and squash in the coming weeks. Like the pinky-gray-brown earthworms that live under the earth, silently nurturing my plants' roots. Like the teeny tiny purpley-green clover that so delicately hide among the leaves of other plants. A bird's feather resting gently against a stem. A stone so perfectly round and smooth. Had I spent 2 hours even sitting still in nature on my bum, I wouldn't have noticed these things. It took getting on hands and knees, fingers covered in dirt, spade and cultivator in hand, to have my eyes opened to these little wonders. Beyond the sweat and labor was beauty in its purest form.

Sometimes things that appear to be a certain way are, in reality, something vastly deeper and more complex. Let's take dandelions as an example. They look harmless enough on the surface. They're known to be edible, even, and appear on 5-star menus in dandelion green salads across the country. Zig-zaggy-edged leaves, yellow flowers, and the fun gray puffs that you blow to pollenate the dandelion weed that much further. But have you ever tried manually removing them from your garden? Those plants are a beast! No kidding, I've pulled out roots 1 foot long from my garden. There's more than meets the eye with those suckers! And it's the same in life. Things are rarely merely what they seem to be. Never evaluate something only at face value--you'll be deceived.

Value is subjective. Do I assign value and worth to the weeds in my garden? Nope. The vegetables I've planted, though, are a vision of organic nirvana in my mind. Fresh squash, tomatoes, green beans, and more that I've cultivated from seed to mature plant, that I've watched and inspected after each summer storm and sunny day, that I will pluck straight from the vine and eat in their still-warm form ripened just so from the sun's rays? Bliss. Meanwhile, bees happily dine on the blossoms of the dandelion and clover plants. Birds snatch up any old leaf or twig for a nest accoutrement. Rabbits, who love carrots and other vegetables, will just as easily munch on a fresh patch of regular green grass. Why do we waste so much time stating who or what is so much more important that this or that? We humans are all just trying to get by. There are no weeds, no less-thans. God's grace makes us all equal. The only real value is our value in him, not some false valuing system that exists in our minds and in our culture. Human is human.

Doing the rough stuff gets easier. This was my 4th time doing an in-depth de-weeding of my garden this summer. The first time, there were so many weeds that I didn't dare spend the necessary amount of time to get them all. Had I done so, I could have filled a whole trash bag. I filled 3 Kroger bags to the brim and called it a day. The next time, I filled 2 bags. The 3rd time, 1. Today, half of a bag. I find that this is true with any rough thing in life that I choose to tackle head-on. Budgeting, assessing my debt ratio, having a hard conversation with someone, deep cleaning my house, sticking up for myself, whatever. The more I give it a valiant effort and keep at it on a regular basis, the easier it becomes.

You don't know something/someone's limits until you've seen them weather a storm. This summer has been so rainy. I actually haven't been complaining because the days have been so mild, and my power bill has been so low. There's also almost nothing more refreshing than summer rain--(I do love the dog days, though, and wish it would heat up at least a little)--but it's been torturous to some of my vegetable plants. Peas? What few weren't consumed by chipmunks and made it to the seedling phase were uprooted and overturn in the muddy soil after a single summer storm. Tomatoes? One plant snapped clear in half (though I did manage to tie it to the stake in a way that made the stem graft back onto itself, and it's still alive and even has a handful of blooms). Watermelon? The shrimpy growth would make you think I planted them a week ago, instead of a month ago. Eggplant? Very few even sprouted, the soil was so wet. Herbs? Surviving, not thriving. (You catch my drift.) My dandelions and other weeds whose names I haven't even bothered to learn? Sturdy and sprightly as I don't even know what. There are no words to describe how well they've flourished in the near-flooded conditions of this summer. Certain things and people crumble under pressure; others thrive. You often don't know which it'll be until the water gets hot. Why label people? Let them be. Let their reactions to their circumstances show you who they are. It might just save you from eating your foot!

I love that I've found an activity that helps me think with such clarity. I actually can't wait until it's time to weed my garden again! (See? Rough stuff = easier.) I think I'll use that time to also pull up the weeds in my head and clear my mind.

More later,
-Kels

Where I stand

Once again, I'm back to my old love: writing. So much has changed. So much is uncertain. So much is scary. So much is happy.

What I want this blog to be is a place to clear my head. It's about mental health, expressions of all things abstract from my brain, and clarity. I can also tell you what this blog is not meant to be; it's not about attention, comparison, or judgment. If you don't like it, please move on.

--

With that being said, here's a summary of my current self.

I'm 24. Jarrell and I are going strong on our 5th year of togetherness. My life dream of becoming a mother has been fulfilled. Kimberly Jarae was born August 7, 2012, and she's the absolute love of my life!

Speaking of love, I love Jesus. Prayer, Bible verses, and faith have brought me through so much, especially over the last year or so. My faith isn't perfect. My words and actions aren't perfect. But God's forgiveness and love couldn't be more perfect.

I kinda-sorta dropped out of grad school, in part because of childcare issues, in part because I lost my financial aid (I had to withdraw from several classes while pregnant, and I didn't do so hot once I was back in school non-pregnant), and in part because I lost all motivation to be a student when I had a lovely daughter at home demanding my attention as her mother. C'est la vie, I suppose.

I often wonder if the anxiety and crazy emotions I experienced during pregnancy carried over and have permanently affected my sense of self. I also often wonder if I have real, diagnosable postpartum anxiety. I grapple with feelings of failure and ineptitude. I struggle to make new friends here in Bloomington, where, for the first time in my adult life, I am a resident of a city where I am not also a student. I am unemployed and flat broke. I have a bachelor's degree and no job to show for it, and I can't seem to find a good fit for me, exacerbating my feelings of personal chaos.

I am actively searching for myself. If you find me first, please let me know.

-Kels