Relationships

Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can’t Lose

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Even if you’ve never watched an episode of Friday Night Lights, you’re probably familiar with the chant clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose. It’s the rallying cry of the football heroes before they take the field, and while I’d heard it many times, and it certainly sounded nice, I’d never given the phrase much thought until last week.

Clear Eyes_Full Hearts_Can't Lose

You see, last week I hit a wall – like a football team up against stronger rivals, I felt like I was being beaten down by familiar enemies named Control, Worry, and Stress. I’d been stressing about a situation in my life that I want to “figure out.” I felt like I couldn’t make sense of what was in front of me, and my heart felt both empty and clogged up with worry at the same time.

Then, all that stress found its way into my body, and I came down with a bug – both a head cold and a stomach virus. Super fun. Instead of giving myself grace and making space to rest, my first inclination was to stress and try to “fix” my way to being healthy – not the smartest approach – before my trip to Miami at the end of the week. I did ultimately stay home to rest, but my struggle was less with the state of my body and more with the state of my heart. I was downing water, sipping on ginger ale, and taking it easy at home. But I don’t think I would have improved as quickly as I did if I didn’t rest my mind and heart as well as my body. Continue reading →

Everything I Know About Dating

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Yesterday one of my favorite authors, Anne Lamott, shared “all that she knows at 61.” There were so many gems in her post…

Laughter really is carbonated holiness.

Everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, and scared, even the people who seem to have it more or less together…So try not to compare your insides to their outsides.

Earth is Forgiveness School.

Yes. Yes. And YES.

Inspired by Anne’s honesty and spot-on humanness, I thought I’d share “all I know about dating.” By no means am I an expert on this topic. I am simply another late-20s, verging on her 30s, city-dwelling girl trying to date well. Which, to me, means treating others with respect, enjoying the process, and learning a lot along the way.

People have asked me to write about this topic for a while, so rather than keeping it all to myself, I’m sharing it with you. Continue reading →

An Exciting Announcement

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Recently, I shared how my occasional insomnia has taught me to listen to what my body, mind, and spirit are telling me…am I anxious, excited, or just plain rundown? And this weekend I was able to put that into practice.

While I didn’t have much trouble falling asleep, I did find myself awake before 7am on both Saturday and Sunday, unable to lull myself back into unconsciousness. As I lay awake at 6:30am on a day when I supposedly “should” be getting more sleep, I realized I didn’t feel frustrated by my wide eyes and alert mind – I felt invigorated and excited for the day ahead.

You see, on Saturday, I woke up full of ideas: ideas for books and blog posts, stories I want to share with you – with others. Later that day, I was to meet up with a friend in the publishing business, and I felt like a kid on Christmas morning. I couldn’t sleep; I was just too excited to unwrap the presents that the day had in store. In that moment, I realized that my inability to sleep is not always a negative effect of anxiousness or worry. Sometimes it’s just part of the unique way God has made me: imaginative, thoughtful, action-oriented. A writer.

Living into that identity as a writer means embracing even the inconvenient parts of it, including sometimes getting less sleep or getting stuck in my head until I can get the words out on a page. It requires persistence and being observant of what’s happening around me and within me. Continue reading →

Time Does Not Heal All Wounds

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2015 and I got off to a rough start. I feel like we kind of got off on the wrong foot. I mean, when your relationship comes crashing down around you on New Year’s Day, that can’t be a good sign of things to come, right?

Well, it certainly was a sign of singleness to come. New Year’s marked the very sudden beginning of the end of a relationship that held so much promise and hope. A few days before New Year’s – heck, even on New Year’s Day – we were learning to do yoga together, planning little trips, and talking about grateful we were for each other. A few days later, the relationship was just done – it simply vanished – but so many questions remained. What had gone wrong in the matter of a day? How did we go from brunch and a long walk in Golden Gate park on New Year’s morning to tears and confusion in the Potrero Hill Safeway parking lot that same evening? To make matters worse, I was caught so unprepared for that conversation – “I’m not feeling like we’re connecting” – that I was tissue-less. Tears, no tissues. Not a pretty picture. And none of it made any sense.

For a while, I held onto my frustration and a subtle sense of bitterness. It felt like I had to maintain my grip on those feelings in order to make some sense of the situation. If the relationship had to end suddenly with no real answers and no real closure, then I’d make my own. I’d do the relationship justice by holding it up to the judgment of my own sadness and hurt. I’d wrestle meaning out of it by concluding that God just had something better for me. Continue reading →

Not Paper-Thin or Pain-Free: Embracing Pain in a Healthy Way

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Peach Flower

I am thin-skinned. An easily-bruising peach with a low tolerance for pain. As my family would say, I am a “delicate flower” – small things can upset the fragile ecosystem that is me. I wish I could say my paper-thin nature is limited to my literal dermatology, but it goes deeper than that – down into my heart and soul. An unkind word, a bad piece of news, or an unmet expectation has the potential to shake me more than I’d like to admit.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve developed a bit of a thicker skin – figuratively speaking, of course. I no longer cry when I get a wrinkle in my socks; although, if I’m being honest, that still bugs me. Like most people, my M.O. is to avoid pain and seek out comfort whenever possible. As a highly sensitive person, I experience my circumstances acutely. My surroundings, my feelings, and other people’s feelings affect me deeply. This is why I don’t watch the news, why I’m more prone to anxiety, and why you’ll never catch me watching a violent movie. Continue reading →

It’s Like You’re My Mirror

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FriendshipLife is funny. Just when you think you’ve understood something, it slips through your grasp, and you’ve lost the essence of the thing. You think you’ve come to understand the reason for your anxiety, your sadness, your compulsion to perform…but then you realize it’s even deeper than what you thought, and you still have so much to learn. There remains so much of God to know, so much he wants to reveal in you, so much to explore about others and how to love them well.

It’s like walking through a hall lined with mirrors when all you can see is the mirrors themselves, never the reality outside. The farther you get along the hallway, the more of the picture you can see. But it’s always a reflection, never quite real enough to touch, never the full picture. Continue reading →

Summer in the City Sangria

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Get excited, people.

Get excited, people.

In celebration of summer, I thought it only appropriate to share a truly fabulous sangria recipe that’s guaranteed to make your day supremely sunny. Even if it’s not. Like here in SF. Yesterday the wind was howling, the sun never broke through the fog, and it was probably just barely above 60 degrees. That’s our summer.

But I digress. We’re talking about sangria. Not just any old sangria, mind you, this is watermelon-strawberry sangria. Made from fresh from juicy watermelon and ripe strawberries. This is the good stuff, people. Guaranteed to brighten even the gloomiest of days.

The recipe is incredibly simple and, as Joy the Baker notes, as long as the concoction stays pink, you can pretty much use any combination of fruits you like. Pink is a requirement here. When I made this with my wonderful family over Father’s Day weekend (thanks for appreciating our pink concoction, Daddy!), we used watermelon, strawberry, orange and lime. So, that’s what I’ve noted in the recipe below. Continue reading →

Pictures of Us: How God Is Writing My Story

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IMG_9501It’s amazing what can change in a matter of two years.

In March of 2012, I wrote a piece with my writing group about pictures of old boyfriends. I realized that with some of these guys, we only took photos standing next to each other. As I wrote back then: “We made sense together, standing side-by-side. But failing to turn around and look at each other face-to-face, to really look at each other directly in the eyes, we never saw who we were in the deep, dark parts – the blackness of our pupils, the cloudy irises never captured on film.” Continue reading →

A Cord of Three Strands

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IMG_3275“A cord of three strands is not easily broken” (Ecclesiastes 4:12).

Tonight we are a cord of three strands, sitting, eating, talking, writing – three friends, three women blessed by the words, “Me, too.” Those two wonderful words that say, “You are not alone. You are not the only one who feels crazy, lost and confused much of the time.”

But we three cords are not just wallowing in our burdens, instead we’re intertwining our experiences, strengthening each other by the sharing of truth. Like iron sharpens iron. The three strands of our lives weave together to form a cord that reaches up to Heaven. And we’re leaning on that cord, clinging to it, pulling on it with all our weight. We’re reaching out for understanding, asking for wisdom. Continue reading →