I've got the feeling again
that all too familiar running feeling
the one that pushes me and makes me drive up and down I-75 as I do from time to time
Chatanooga sounds nice right now, Tenessee really.
Everyday at work I meet people from all over the country, all over the world
and I ask them questions while I pretend to thoroughly inspect their driver's license.
Kindy or Maria, depending on who and if someone is holding down the fortress that is the zoo with me,
asks me where my head is, often, lately.
I don't want this responsibility I feel.
Why do I have to have Tucker for Young Life? Why can't I have a normal high school?
Or a trendy one like Decatur? Why do the teacher's have to be so detached?
Why is my team so hard to get to commit to anything?
How the hell did I become team leader of a ship I have no idea how to steer?
Why must I be the reconciler? Why am I the only one that washes the dishes?
Does anyone believe washing dishes is important?
And my friends have no idea about Young Life or what it is or why I love it so much.
And the friends that do live two hours away.
I could get new friends. I could find something that better suits me. I could leave again...
If I did I know the ones that loved me and that I loved in return would stay in my heart anyways. So I'm not scared.
I want to be a brave confident girl that knows what she wants
that shoos away the boys with a flick of the hand and a flip of the hair
who can confidently believe in herself
who isn't tied down to the responsibility of where she is. It's not my responsibility.
who shares, not for love but because she knows she is loved.
But then. Here's the other part of this.
My friend nia and I were driving around the other day
and I asked her if she thought it was selfish to pursue dreams no one else has.
And she said it wasn't selfish, it just looked selfish.
Maybe that is true. Maybe we have to follow the push, the pull
to hoist our sails upon our mast and trust that God makes the seed grow.
We'll always be ourselves. No matter what.
We find our identity so much in who we are involved with and what are friends like
but at the end of the day, you are you.
Ha. It's like...
One time, when I moved from Augusta to Atlanta
Ogden wrote to me this note in yellow sharpie marker-
Lauren,
You are Lauren.
There will never be another
Lauren. Only you are Lauren.
-Ogden
And beautiful Emmylou Harris says the same thing, sort of. The more things change, the more we are still just ourselves.
And maybe we want to attach ourselves to people so as to not be sad when they change?
Or...the other part of that, is we'd like other people to tell us who we are, like a reflection.
Nia said we don't know what that seed is going to grow into. We can hope for a budding ethnographer or a musician or a mother but, we just. don't. know.
It's funny, too- how identity is humanity's biggest plight.
Novels and novels have been created to depict the endless struggle of everyone's identity. All of the Greats - Harry Potter, Frodo....those are all I can think of from the Greats, but you know what I'm saying here. Who am I? What do I stand on?
We all want to sit at the dinner table, and know we belong, know our place is in that chair with
that glass of sweet tea. And there are the shallow things. We want to know our hair is right and our clothes define us well enough. We want to say the things we know and we want everyone to know how unique we are.
Yes. Well. All of that to say, relevant or not - it's here again, that feeling that comes from time to time. That voice that incessantly whispers run, go, get on your bike, fill up your gas tank, buy that ticket to colorado. And I want to be that. The girl that belongs to nobody.
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