That Time When Graduation Was A Year Ago

Yesterday was graduation day for the class of 2014 at Gettysburg. Even before my newsfeed was awash with orange and blue and sentimental statuses, I was feeling nostalgic. Today marks exactly one year since I graduated, and it feels like it was only yesterday, just a world away. How could a year possibly have passed? How could it have not?

I confess that my overwhelming feeling upon realizing that it had been a year since graduation was a sense of disappointment. Shouldn't I have accomplished more a year out of college? I can't say "I just graduated in May" anymore, so shouldn't I have done more? Shouldn't I have made a bunch of friends with people where I live? Shouldn't I have completed things? Shouldn't I miss Gettysburg less? But here I am, living at home, mostly hanging out with my family when I'm not working. I don't have a high powered, exciting job where I am changing the world and/or making lots of money. I haven't fallen in love and I am not substantially closer to being a clinical psychologist or a mom.

And that thinking is so easy to fall into, because I have been trained so well. Make goals. Execute them. Do at least as well as your peers, preferably better. Do great work. I loved the Gettysburg atmosphere, and I thrived in that performance driven, high octane setting (if you consider the level of stress I could sustain for weeks at a time thriving). But the dark side of that is that I can instinctinvely think critically without acting compassionately. My mind twists the truth and throws in some half-truths and little lies until I look at the last year and feel like I have failed.

That is probably stupid and definitely inaccurate. My plan was to move home, find a research position to get the experience I need to get into grad school, and pay off student loans as quickly as possible. I did, in fact, find a research position that I can commute to from home... thanks, God! And its not high powered or a high salary, but someone is paying me to do research, which is exactly what I was looking for. I am paying off my student loans while admittedly mooching some groceries, wifi, and below market rent from my mother. But since I am rather fond of my mother, this is kind of a win-win situation. And why should I feel lame about having out with my family? I love them, and I won't always get to spend time with them like this. My baby cousins (read: every cousin who is younger than me, even if they are 6'2'') will grow up and move away one day. When I go to grad school, I will not be able to take my Mam-maw shopping on Sunday afternoons, and will she be around to take shopping when I am finished grad school? Speaking of school, if I were to hypothetically be either a clinical psychologist or a mom before I finished grad school, that would be absolutely terrifying (in the first scenario) or mildly terrifying and poor planning (in the second scenario). Seeing patients before getting the education/licensing to practice or having a baby while attaining said licensing are so not high on my list of things to do, and thus if I were substantially closer to these things one year out of college, it might actually not be a great sign.

Melissa and this kitten were both at
Focus this year... don't you wish you
were there, too? I know I do.

And yes, I do miss Gettysburg. I wish that I still had shenanigans every Wednesday at 10, that I still lived with 5 of my best friends, and that anytime I wanted to hang out with someone we could just get a meal together because we ate at all the same places. I wish that I had just gotten home from Focus, and that I was energized and sleep deprived and so excited about being on mission with the church. I wish the friends I have here (because I do have some, my heart just believes lies sometimes) knew me as deeply, encouraged and challenged me as frequently, and pointed me to Christ as well as my friends from Gettysburg. But this is what its like to have good friends. You miss them when you haven't seen them for a day, and you miss them when you haven't seen them for months and months. It takes a long time to build new friendships that are as strong.

I think it is okay to miss college, even though it makes me feel a bit like I am doing something wrong. I don't want college to be the best years of my life. But it would be okay if college accounted for some of the best years of my life. I think that is the tension I am feeling as I compare this first year out of college to the four years that came before. Its true that this past year was hard in different ways than before and that it was lacking some things that my heart tells me it wants again in future years. But it was another year of life, and I enjoy having those :) It was filled with blessings and things to be thankful for, and it was not a waste of time.

So here are a few highlights from my first year as a post-bacc:
-Seven of my friends got married, and every wedding was a delight. I loved each individual wedding ceremony, and getting to share in their joy, and also all those built-in reunions.
-For months I got as much sleep as my body actually needed (talk about seasons of life... this one is definitely fleeting). It was glorious. And now I might get up earlier every morning than I have in my life, but at least I don't do homework till at least midnight every night.
-I got a job offer totally out of the blue months after I had submitted an application and pursued other institutes and researchers with no success. Yep, it was totally not my fault that I got this job.

"I am not afraid.
I was born to do this."
-Jeanne d'Arc

-I found a church that I absolutely love. I get to live in a place with a bible-preaching church that loves to worship God with a gospel-centered community who want to grow and become more like Jesus? Is this real life?
-When my brain isn't consumed with exams, papers, and research reports, there is room for creativity to come out and play. I've been playing the piano again and making artwork and creating things. And none of them are masterpieces (although I am quite proud of the sweater and the quilt), but it feels good to create just because I can.
-God has used this time to soften my heart to the idea of adoption, to help me see the value of intervention at every stage for every person, and to understand how attachment (you know, that field of psychology I would be happy spending my whole life in) relates to God's character and redemptive plan. It was so good (and wise, probably) of him to do this when I am exactly where I am now. If He had done this later in life when I wasn't young, broke, and single, I probably would have freaked out about life and thought that He was telling me to do something I didn't want to do. Instead I see little hints of changing desires and and awareness of how much more growing I have to do. And how much more I need Jesus than I realized.
-I've been growing. Slowly. Sometimes it feels agonizingly slow, and I am not content with the pace. But the lessons I am being taught seem to take a lot of time. Perhaps it is the nature of these lessons, perhaps I'm a slow learner. But God is at work in my life, and I am grateful for it.

The View From Seven Months

I have been, admittedly, rather sparse with the life details. Part of that was that there was nothing exciting to tell. Part of that was that there was too much to tell. Although I am a sharer, I like to develop some trust before I spill my guts, and there is no way to do that with the entire interwebs. So rather than a blow-by-blow of life, which would be aptly titled “Four Weddings and A Funeral,” I will give you a current update:

What does seven months out of school look like?

1. It looks like paying student loans. Those pesky things come due six months out of school, and by the grace of God, I can pay mine. This is seriously worth being happy about, and I look forward to owing a little less money each month when I successfully make a payment.

2. It looks like working part time jobs to pay said loans. I am working at a wedding venue, which has prepared me fairly well for this recent wedding season (my friends are odd and mostly got married in the winter instead of the summer). I have been working at Bath & Body Works for the holidays, and something about good-smelling things being perfectly arranged in rows makes it a rather enjoyable place to work. I also have been working for a medical billing company dealing with insurance companies. This has been instructional, and also cemented the fact that I never want to work for an insurance company.

Earlier in life, I wanted to be a cat farmer
...but seriously.

3. It looks like endless (and perseverant! I am an optimist!) job searches. I have a few leads in this area that I am really hoping to hear back from in the next few weeks. Hopefully, someone in the near future will pay me to do science! I’m keeping the dream alive. When things are not going according to plan, it is a good opportunity to re-examine your calling and decide if you’re sure that’s where you are being called. If I didn’t feel led to pursue this whole PhD clinical psych thing, it would be stupid of me not to do something more reasonable. But, after some thought, I am still being called to unreasonableness :)

4. It looks like slow and sometimes faltering efforts to settle here and make friends. I have found it difficult to commit to—and succeed at—the effort of making post-grad friends, but I am not the only one. From friends with set timelines (“My grad program is half over and I’m only here for a year total”) to others who really want to make new friends but find the process slow compared to making friends in college, it seems to be a struggle shared by most of my friends who graduated with me or the year before. Its hard to get lunch with people when you both work different jobs, its hard to get together regularly when you live twenty minutes apart by car instead of three minutes on foot, and its hard to be new in town without an incoming class of people who are in the same boat.  But I did have coffee (figuratively speaking) with a girl this week, and it was delightful to have life chats. Yes, I had life chats this week with someone that I met since graduation. It was magical.

I’m not necessarily telling you to prepare for these things if you will be graduating in 2014, nor do I expect the graduated among you to have had the exact same experience as I am having (although if you are, you and I should definitely have life chats sometime). This is just where I am right now. Sometimes I am content, other times I am not. Sometimes I am happy, other times I am not. Sometimes I am busy, other times I wear my ugly sweater all day and no one is around to judge me. Sometimes I snuggle with cats, other times my cats refuse to snuggle. I am trying to “give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.” (1 Thessalonians 5:18)

(This was a snuggle time)

P.S. Also, after reading this blog written by a pretty wise man I know, I decided to read the bible as fast as I can starting January 1^st. I have never read straight through from Genesis to Revelation in order before,  so this should be an adventure. Thus, technically, seven months out of school also looks like Genesis… but hopefully Exodus soon. I’ll let you know.

P.P.S. For those of you who also feel like your attempts to accomplish something are like this little lizard hunter's, here are some cats who didn't make it through 2013 quite the way they planned... 

The In-Between Life

Last night, I watched the movie Julie & Julia. Besides making me want to cook and eat everything that has butter in the recipe (isn’t everything better with butter?) it reminded me of how long it had been since I had worked on my blog and posted real updates about my real life. But the thing is, I don’t want to update you about my real life.  I feel like my life is frustrating, inconsequential, and not going as planned. As I consider updating you, I feel quite a bit like Julie did while having lunch with her friends. 

(Except that I love cob salad. And I am not 30.)

Like Julie, I don’t feel particularly keen to tell you about my life. I can give the peppy, chirpy, 5 second sound bite I give people either to convey that I am quite happy with the way life is going or to make my life seem as impressive as possible (and imply that I am succeeding more than I am failing). But it’s more propaganda than news. Talking about my real life causes that squirmy, shame-y feeling.

The truth is, I haven’t found the job I have been looking for. I am past the deadline I set myself, and its time for me to look for more ‘in-between’ jobs to pay the bills and those approaching student loans. I don’t want to give you that update, because I don’t like it one bit. Truthfully, I want to be in grad school, and the research job I need to get me there was already supposed to be my in-between job. I don’t want an in-between-in-between job. So I feel frustrated and edgy, and I’m probably not very nice to the people around me most of the time. It feels as if I am a rough chunk of rock (maybe sandstone?), and whatever layers of fabric I normally have wrapped around to make me look all pretty and cuddly have mostly disappeared, so now anyone who gets close ends up with scrapes. Its not a very pretty picture, is it? Life isn’t going the way I would like, and I am not responding in the way I would like.

So yes, I don’t like telling you about my life when its not going smoothly the way I want towards clear success at an appropriate pace (according to my assessment). However, no one else likes talking about their life when it’s like that, either, so we all just feel alone and isolated when actually we’re not. I have found that when I talk about how things really are and how I really feel, people often encourage me by talking about a time when the same thing happened to them, or they open up and actually tell me about the current struggles in their lives that leave them with feelings similar to mine. This may come as a shock (I feel like it shocks me over and over), but frustration and shame are not uniquely mine. Who knew?

So take heart. Things aren’t amazing and awesome in my life at the moment. My unsuccessful job search leaves me fighting frequent feelings of guilt, shame, and failure. My grandma is really sick—she had to have her second leg amputated a few weeks ago, and her recovery is slow—leaving us (particularly Mom) worried about Mam-maw’s health and care.

Catnip mice. Absolutely hilarious.

Most of my friends are far away and I miss Gettysburg. But there are good things, too. I am knitting a sweater and its going really well. I gave my cats toy mice rolled in catnip yesterday, and it was hilarious. My car has been getting an extra mpg every time I check it, which means my gas is going further (yay!).

Most of life is lived in-between the highs and lows. And that’s where I am. It’s okay to be there. 

My Epic (Unsuccessful! Discontent!) Adventure

Yesterday, I began “The Great Job Search.” In your mind, I hope this has an epic level that parallels some adventure on the Oregon Trail. I also hope that this particular adventure is not like the Donner Party’s. My goals are to (metaphorically) not get trapped in snowy impassible mountains, run out of supplies, or resort to eating questionably deceased relatives (to be fair, at least some of the Donner party died of natural causes like starvation and sickness). But enough of this morbid talk, on to something uplifting like… oh wait, job searching. 

To be fair, I didn’t actually start job searching yesterday. I had been working on things on and off during the semester until around April, when I decided that I really needed to focus on the research that I was doing and get the work done before I graduated. So I put the job search on hold until three days after graduation. Honestly, this wasn’t too difficult because (1) my research was way more fun and (2) as much fun as research is, I don’t actually want a research job right now. I love research and totally want to be doing it, but my real desire was to go to grad school and do research there. There are advantages and disadvantages to going straight from undergrad to grad school, which I will not list here for the sake of brevity. Regardless, the truth is that I want to be in grad school now, not here at all.

Oh, that feels like some forbidden secret, just out there on the page for all to see. Attention! Christiana does not have her stuff together, and she has not succeeded in all of her endeavors! Yes, that is real life. There are two things that you and I may or may not choose to learn from this:

1: Success. I tend to functionally operate as if success works the same way that sinlessness or a good reputation does. One strike and you are out. In my head, I know that success does not work this way, and that you have to fail many times before to you do something great. However, I often live as if one failure will reveal to the world that I am actually a failure. Not only is this not true from a worldly perspective^{geek footnote 1}but it also assumes a second lie that my worth is determined by what I do and not who I am^{geek footnote 2}. Basically, this mindset is wrong and generally unhelpful no matter what perspective you choose. So, this job search is an (uninvited) opportunity for me to work on functionally acting as if I believe what I know is true: I already have worth, and I am going to grow as I experience challenges and rejection.

Unlike me, my old kitten Magnolia (we called her Maggie) had
obviously learned contentment at an early stage of life.

2: Contentment. I am not exactly sure why God has me at this stage of life. But I have been seeing more and more that it is at least partially to teach me about contentment. If you had asked me right around the time last semester when I was getting rejections from the grad schools I had applied to, I would have told you that I was honestly excited about learning contentment. That was because I was silly and forgot that learning contentment is about as much fun as learning patience. When you ask to learn patience you suddenly find yourself in a million and one situations that naturally make you impatient until you learn how to find patience independently of your situation. Similarly, it’s not that I have suddenly become content (“Oh, look at that girl, life circumstances should have gotten her down but she is just so content!”) but instead find that all of the circumstances that should make me discontent DO make me discontent. Great. So I would now describe myself as not exactly excited but still looking forward to learning this thing that I obviously have not learned yet: contentment.

And with that thought, I am back to the job search.

*Geek Footnote 1. Carol Dweck is a psychologist who has done research in a variety of settings exploring what she has defined "fixed mindset" versus "growth mindset." Essentially, the difference between the two is whether people view personality/core qualities as 'fixed' by nature, or changeable over time. Not only has Dweck demonstrated that learning can change characteristics we would consider to be 'core', but she has demonstrated over and over the benefits of having a growth mindset over a fixed mindset. Her research has tested these ideas in varied environments including the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, aggression in both bullies and victims, prejudice and cross-race relations, and more. For an awesome review, I would suggest her 2012 article "Mindsets and Human Nature: Promoting Change in the Middle East, the Schoolyard, the Racial Divide, and Willpower." (Unfortunately, I can't link you to the full article here... I will have to learn what non-institutionally affiliated people do to access full text articles because this scientist has been incredibly privileged and sheltered for the past 4 years.) 

*Geek Footnote 2. 

“…yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified.” (Galatians 2:16) 

 “But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God," (John 1:12)

We are not defined by what we do. In fact, we are not defined by ourselves, but by Christ. Our worth in him makes any worth we could dredge up for ourselves pale in comparison.