My Best Friend, My Husband

[From Donald Miller's A Million Miles in a Thousand Years.]

As I've said before, I write my blogs as way to purge myself of things, or convince myself of things, or help myself realize things...and the only constant in that is MYSELF. The above quote was one I've had saved on my laptop for quite a while. It's from a book that my husband (before he was my husband) encouraged me to read. I took a photo of this paragraph because it spoke to me...I rediscovered it today when I was cleaning out a few folders of random photos I'd saved, and it made me think.

All I do is write about me. 

Before I go any further, let me just say that I think it's healthy to write about yourself. It's healthy to analyze yourself, and really be open, honest, and passionate about something (whether it be the drive to find out what causes your insecurities and nip it in the bud, or about the color red). But, I also think it's healthy to push away from that and explore other things. That being said...

This is going to be a blog about my best friend, Vince.

Never in my life have I known anyone as loving as Vince, and I don't just mean that he hugs me and kisses me all the time...I mean the nature of his heart. I think that's what made me want to be his friend in the first place.

When we first became friends (and I don't mean when we met, because that was years ago. I mean when we first really got to know each other, roughly two Thanksgivings ago when he started giving me guitar lessons) there was something about Vince that drew me to him. He was funny, smart, fun to be around, but more than those things, he was real. He never put up a wall or showed me any kind of pretense. He was always just Vince, and being around him was as easy as breathing.

I could say that I'm writing this because he cleaned our apartment the other day, and scrubbed our kitchen last night (which he did, and which I'm so thankful for), but that's not it...I'm writing this because, as horrible as this is, I often let myself forget to be amazed by the person that he is.

Vince loves people,
and he loves God.
He is selfless,
and caring,
and considerate,
and kind.
He's passionate about love,
about our marriage,
about music,
about his relationships with others.
He encourages me,
pushes me,
holds me up when I feel like I can't stand.
He works hard at whatever he's doing.
He holds me accountable.
He loves harder than anyone I've ever known...
hard enough that he's the first person in my whole life that I believe, without reservation, loves me.

If you've read my past blogs, you'll understand how huge that is. If you know me at all, you'll understand how huge that is. And the really amazing thing is I believed he loved me before we got married, before we were dating, before we knew what we were. He would look at me and tell me he loved me, and I knew without a doubt exactly what he meant. It wasn't because he gave me googly eyes, or gifts, or any of that...it wasn't even necessary in a romantic way...it was the way he treated me, the way he talked to me, the way we were together. There has always been love with us.

We've been married now just over eight months, and there isn't  day that goes by that I don't think about how crazy it is that something as wonderful as Vince decided to be with me...not because I'm devaluing my self worth (because I know he doesn't want me to do that, and I know that I don't want to do that anymore), but because of how genuinely wonderful he is.

I write this as a way of saying thank you to the man who turned my world upside down, and helped me glue together the pieces of me that were broken. With him, I see the love of God just in the way he interacts with me, with our friends, with strangers, even with our dog, Juno. He's my husband, and my best friend in the whole world. I'm thankful that I get to spend the rest of my life learning to love and appreciate him more and more.

The Thief of Joy

It's in the moment of quiet when it comes after me, this need, this compulsion, to compare myself...In these moments of quiet, these moments in the dark, I fall short. I compare myself to those I see as more lovely than me...the ones I see as having more talent, more beauty, more perks. 

I have a list on my computer that I keep...a list of all the ways I could be better, a list of all the things that I'm not. I've deleted this list a few times...But, over and over again, I rewrite it. I add things, I forget things, I change things, but there's always a list.

Last month I took a step...I kept this journal hidden in the drawer beside my bed. I say "hidden" because only my husband knew where it was, and he wouldn't ever read it without asking me first. I have a few journals, but this was the journal where I wrote all the negative things about myself...both real and perceived. I wrote them in reaction to my internal comparison to others...Last month, I ripped out those pages--the pages with comparison and negativity streaming off them. I ripped them out, and then I ripped them up. Vince even made a note of it on our calendar...It was a powerful moment for me.

But still...I keep my list. I compare. I fall short. It's a cycle that I travel around, beat, have a day of rest, and begin again. I want to break that cycle...but I'm not sure how. At least not yet...

As Theodore Roosevelt said, "Comparison is the thief of joy." This is truth. This is what we should remember.

Obsessed

Blogs are for exorcising our demons. I don't literally mean demons, nor do I literally mean exorcism. But we...(I really should say I. Saying we is like using second person 'you.' It's the ashamed I. It's a way for me to make what I'm about to say less personal by making it communal)...But I use my blog as a way to purge myself of all the things in my head that dance around and threaten to drive me crazy. My hope is that by writing these blogs, I'll figure something out about myself that might help me iron out the kinks...And maybe, by doing that, I might also be able to help someone else who struggles with someone similar.

Today's demon to be exorcised: Obsession. I've touched on it before, and like most things, I'll probably talk it into the ground before I purge myself of it. But, here we go again.

ob·ses·sion/əbˈseSHən/

Noun:	The state of being obsessed with someone or something. An idea or thought that continually preoccupies or intrudes on a person's mind.
Synonyms:	mania

In writing, the best thing you can do for your protagonist is to give them an obsession. If they have an obsession, then they have something that drives them. If they have something driving them, then you, as the writer, have a plot and a character worth reading. 

This isn't the best way to look at real life, though. In real life, if your character...(again, a distancing mechanism)...if you have an obsession, that obsession will drive your actions and thoughts, just like it would a character, but unlike in fiction, (where the plot is interesting but safe because it's distant, because it isn't real) in real life obsession can destroy us.

My obsession, as scary as it is to lay it out here in black and white, is the past. 

The past is a silly thing to be obsessed with:

-It's already happened.

-It can't really be revisited, except in memory. 

-It can't be changed.

-It can't actually effect the present.., unless you react to it in the present. 

Yet, despite all of these facts, I easily get obsessed with things that have happened. Things in my life, in my husband's life, in our past together, in my friends' lives, in my families' lives...it's a wide range thing.

My husband tells me that I have the most active imagination of any adult he knows. I take this is as a huge compliment (even if he says this after he jumps around a corner to scare me, and I scream and cower in the bathroom floor because we watched a movie the night before that had terrible CGI zombies in it, and I assume they've broken into our house). Having a vivid imagination, for a writer, is vital. 

Having a vivid imagination is wonderful...until you start imagining things that happened, or may have happened, or could've happened, in the past that hurt you in some way...needless to say, these are generally things that I hope didn't happen, or things that, if I know they did happen, I don't want to think about.

This is where my obsession really doesn't make sense. I think about the past a lot...I hyper-focus on characters (not people, because the people that I'm thinking of probably aren't anything like how I imagine them) from the past until that imagined scenario becomes real. I hyper-focus on scenarios, on plots, so much that they become what really happened. All of these things are things I would rather choose not to think about, yet I think about them more than almost anything. A synonym for obsession is mania...I focus on these things in a manic way that doesn't make sense. I have an amazing husband, a wonderful family, awesome friends, and I focus on kind of crummy real and imagined past events instead of living in the now and appreciating these beautiful things...

I'm sorry to say I don't have a big conclusion or moral for this blog...rather, I just needed to get it OUT. I needed to purge this secret (or maybe it's not so secret?) from my mind. What better place than online, where anyone could read it and judge me for it. I don't really care if people judge me for it...but maybe, if I get it out there where people can see it, I'll be able to distance myself from it a little. 

Maybe I can let myself heal from all of these real and imagined wounds from the past. 

Maybe I can let myself forget the characters that regularly show up in my manic-brain and make the version of me that lives in my imagination feel like she's worth nothing. 

Maybe, by laying all this out there, I can exorcize this demon and, for a whole day, or week, or for the rest of my life, be able to live without these characters, these plots, these past ghosts, haunting me like shadows.