The Emotions In Our Stories

Hello beautiful readers, I might be stating the obvious here, but we all come from places of different stories. Each one of us bring our own stories, our own emotions, and our own insights of the world. All of them diverse from one another, and yet all of them connect to one another. The beautiful part about our stories is that they are always changing. The way we interpret our stories, our emotions, our world is always changing. In a way we can never fully reconcile what the absolute truth is in our stories because our stories are not static. Yet despite those changes, wisdom is granted to us in the midst of the reconciliation (can you tell I'm a seminarian?) Originally, I didn't know if I should write this blog because I knew my insights on this story would change six months from now. I decided to go ahead and tell this story knowing that grace gives me the wisdom to know that this isn't my entire YAV story, but rather fragments of it. Fragments where I give myself permission to not piece them all together all at once. 

I wake up for breakfast feeling the Colorado cold from the mountains on my face. The elevation is several thousand feet high, I want to call a friend to process all my emotions, but I can’t with the nonexistent cell single. I see my friend sitting on a boulder overlooking the mountains as if he is on another universe up there. I climb the rocks hoping to surprise my friend as he is playing the ukulele. I haven’t seen him in over a year and want to hear more about his year in Zambia. He tells me about the Zambian culture, his experience, and his struggles. I respect them and try to listen with an open heart, but rarely is it possible to listen openly to someone when we are carrying our own baggage.

Allenspark, Colorado

We cannot listen to each other’s stories because the baggage that prevents us from listening to our own story blinds us to that of others. So when my friend asked me how my year in LA was that morning, I didn't know what to say. In order to understand the beginning of my YAV year, I must first start at the end of my YAV year. I am at the Denver airport where I am waiting with several other YAVAs as we wait for the bus to depart to the retreat center/camp at 3pm. I landed around late morning so I had plenty of time in the airport: plenty of time to wait, plenty of time to observe and plenty of time to feel.

I was covered in a blanket of insecurity as I listened to the emotions that were bubbling up inside me, I was jealous. I have no reason to be insecure or jealous because I can sense the love in these individuals. I haven’t been jealous in a very long time, it’s not worth the energy to get jealous, but I was jealous. I knew that I would be the only returning YAV from their service site, and that would make me feel a bit lonely. I knew that several of the YAVAs would be all affectionate with other YAVAs from their site. Yet despite my knowledge of this, I couldn't help but become jealous and I hated myself for it. I knew that I should be happy for my friends, but I couldn't be happy for them. I knew I was being selfish and wallowing in my self-pity, but I wanted to wallow in it anyways. I couldn't focus on my friends because I needed to focus on myself.

Only I didn't know what I needed to focus on myself. These feelings are not me, I am more than this blanket of insecurity. Upon further reflection, I discovered that I wasn't actually jealous of my YAVA friends like I thought, I felt jealous and insecure because I missed one of the former YAVs in the LA site who could not complete the program. This was hard to reconcile with because I did not feel comfortable around this individual. As hard as it for me not to call this person out, or give details of the situation, I still recognize that this person is a person and that they deserve respect. I don't want to give them respect because I don't feel like they deserve respect but I need to give this person grace because I am above what happened between us.

For several months I have been reconciling with how I am not comfortable around this individual, yet that person was my friend and I miss my friend. I don't miss who this person is now, but I miss the person they used to be; I miss our friendship. The hardest part about my year was not what unraveled between us (although that was a major part) it was loosing a friendship. I felt so conflicted with  reconciling this for several months, where it is pass the point of me being tired about talking about it. I am tired of trying to reconcile this because my YAV is more than that which needs to be reconciled. My YAV year consisted of many things; it consisted of the friends I made at City Lights, volunteering doing street outreach, living in a neighborhood experiencing gentrification, using public transit, adapting to a new culture, learning about social justice phenomenons, and it was about seeing God in the midst of all the chaos. My YAV year was more than what happened between that individual and myself. 

I still have to admit that a huge chunk of my YAV year involved grieving, and while I honor and name those emotions, I should not be consumed by those emotions. Our emotions are our guides, but that doesn't mean they dictate us. If I dwell on what happened between the individual and myself, then I am giving that individual too much power. My Being is not defined by anyone’s power; I forgot that over transition retreat. I gave way too much power to that individual as well as other entities that weekend. Impactful relationships should not be based on the need to overpower one another. My weekend should not have been about power, but about being courageously vulnerable. Being courageously vulnerable means that the strength I have to name my feelings and to name my emotions is guided, not dictated, by my relationships with others and myself.

When I told another friend during transition retreat that I felt filthy for my ill feelings in the airport, my friend told me that it’s ok to recognize those feelings because if I don't then I am just perpetuating my initial feelings. That helped to give me some clarity for what I needed to process. Through many small actions with the YAVAs there, I was reminded that I am more than my emotions. I am not defined my emotions or the events that happen in my life. My emotions should not tell me who I can and cannot be; the only thing my emotions should tell me about who I am is that I am enough. I am who I am supposed to be, and that is enough.