thoughts + ideas

2021 has been a wild year, friends. i began the year in a new state with my husband and only hopes for the best. my mental health had been improving, i was starting a new job for the first time in a year, and i was feeling a lot more at peace with myself. sadly, as i started work it became evident that being a nanny was no longer a good line of work for me. i deal with chronic mental illness as well as a chronic physical illness. i was dealing with a lot of physical and emotional pain during my short time as a nanny this spring. i was not thriving. but God.  i got scheduled for a covid vaccination in April in Alexandria, Virginia, because i was considered an essential worker. on my way home from the first appointment, i saw a sign pointing towards "Virginia Theological Seminary," and my interest was immediately piqued. i drove the rest of the way home and googled more information about the seminary, becoming more excited with each new fact i learned.  it was a small school; 

i'm nonbinary. how does this reconcile with the verse, "male and female he created them," you may ask? the variety in God's creation emphasizes God's creativity as an artist. Genesis gives us several examples of this. God made "day and night." this sounds like a binary, similar to "male and female," right? but that isn't quite all we experience in 24 hours. sunrises and sunsets do not fit into the binary of day or night. yet God paints the skies with these too. On the second day God separated the sky from water. seems like another binary. yet the clouds hold water for us in the sky, the condensation and rain cycle refreshing our earth constantly. the sky, separate from water, contains and releases water. God also said "Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear."   that isn't the full story, either. consider marshes, swamps, bogs, and fens. not fully land, not fully waters. th

i can't remember ever feeling "settled." i always look to the future. some days it's genuinely because my life is in transition, but most days it's because i want to get out of my present situation in some way. right now i'm feeling that again with my work circumstances, despite it literally being a dream job - or at least a dream job for a version of me. my trauma still haunts me in whispers these days. what do you do when you chronically long for change? my current attempt at an antidote is the opposite of it - a rhythm. a ritual. finding daily or weekly things i can do that can ground me or refresh me. things like a good sleep schedule, a grounding mantra, a book club with friends. i think these things help pull me back to the reminder that life is always a cycle, and yet, always new. some days i wonder if i have become my trauma, if i will ever escape. of course, i still do my best to add spontaneity to my days. i might pull out the sewing machine or write

several months ago, mitchell and i packed up our camry with only what could fit and drove back to arizona. and to my ptsd-ridden, suicidal brain, it felt like defeat. we had taken a risk for a job of mine, and i got sick and couldn't keep working. we lost a lot of money and a lot of things, that while replaceable, we still miss. since our dating days, we had both known we didn't want to live in arizona forever. moving back here this summer augmented the feeling, but this time around we wanted a bit more stability and to go to a place that we didn't mind settling down for a while. most big cities were on our list, but we preferred the ones where we had connections. (in seattle, that was a huge challenge because we knew literally no one before moving there. we really struggled to get connected to a community, partly due to my mental health struggles and partly due to the pandemic.) i started a medicine that changed my life and began to feel a lot better. i started feeling mo

i was waiting for the shower water to heat up tonight and i opened my phone to this photo of myself. this was taken in July 2019. looking at it, i was just struck by how pretty i am. that's not normal for me! i usually dislike my body/photos of my body and feel generally insecure. but today, i was struck by how pretty i am and was inspired to go look at other photos of myself in my instagram archives. and while there, i was caught by this caption from the beginning of 2019 . this part specifically: " I was in the car talking with God and asking how I could stop feeling distant and stuck in my head. His response was this: 'you need to believe the truth about yourself when people say it to you.'" that just blew my mind a little. the lightbulb went on. my new giving key necklace has the word "believe" engraved on it. if you're not familiar with the giving keys organization, the idea is you get a word to embrace for yourself. once you've embraced

07/13/2020 i like thinking about things a lot, so i figure i should try writing them down again. being queer is a beautiful experience. through the last 15ish months that i've been out to myself i can tell a huge difference in my embodiment. by that i mean my level of connection, conversation with, and peace with my body. embodiment isn't necessarily body positivity, but it can include such. i grew up in evangelical church so i remember always being mentally aware of my body as an object to be covered appropriately and treated as the source of our sin ("flesh" in most of our translations of paul these days). but despite the teachings of i was never really taught anything specific about homosexuality/queerness/gender and if i had i think i would've probably come out to myself sooner. this experience led to a very strong dissociation from my body most of my life and i kind of just let my body carry me around from place to place. i felt chronic pain, but tha