Discomfort

The tattoo on my back is a symbol for wisdom. The wisdom books in the Bible are my favorite books (along with 1 John). It’s a quality that I hope to possess, but one that I am realizing is the product of tougher and tougher lessons. I am much better at dispensing wisdom for others than listening to it for myself. Because listening to such wise words usually means that I am in the process of doing the opposite of whatever I should be doing.

“Baby, don’t spend your whole life waiting to be happy in the future.”
I typed these words to Brandon today. Though his dedication and faithfulness are things I admire and cherish in him, sometimes I worry that he puts up with too much sorrow now because he hopes to be happy later. In this, he and I are two peas in a pod. A former friend used to joke that I am the Queen of Delayed Gratification, suffering through an endless sea of garbage because I have this absurd notion that it will pay off, that some day, I will be able to enjoy the product of such hard work and misery.

I’ll spare you the details, but lately, life has sucked and I have lost sight of the good things. I’ve let myself get caught up in all that isn’t going right that I have a hard time seeing what is good. So much so that I haven’t taken much time to do the things that make me happy.

Right now, I have to trust that all this crap is temporary and is going to pay off. But I don’t have to wait until someday to figure out some measure of happiness, as impossible as it seems right now.

“I’m trying to find the line between hope and foolishness, and I’m not so sure there is one. Hope, by its very nature, is foolish.”
I tweeted this earlier today when I was thinking about relationships, but the more I think about it, the more it seems true. I’m (usually) a rational person. I like evidence, statistics, probability, and facts. At the same time, I’m a romantic, and cannot help but believe in the long shots. For every 98 times something happens, the opposite happens twice, and I hold out hope that someday, I’ll benefit from the 2%. I sent my resume in response to a job posting that, in many ways, sounds like the best possible combination of my education and experience. I don’t think I’m fantastically likely to even get an interview, but still: there is hope.

Not that a job would make me happy, specifically, but a different one would make happiness a little easier. Stupid Face is back, and when I saw him a few Fridays ago, he said something about how if he could have really spent time in “the mission” (meaning serving people, helping them grow, that kind of altruistic crap that suckers like us can’t help but buy into), he would be happy. It’s what he does now, in a different setting, and it’s what I desperately miss. I miss having a real purpose to my work. As it is now, I work in a place with little purpose, in a schedule that makes outside work kind of impossible. It also keeps me from being able to attend church, and it is really hard to miss out on church week after week after week.

So I hope. Foolishly. And I am trying to figure out how I can manage to be happy even in the midst of hating some parts of my life.