I’m not ready to live without you…hold fast, love lasts…

(Without You – King and Country)

 

This is still how I feel about my dad. I’m not ready to not have him. I used to communicate with him pretty much every day and it still feels so empty to not be able to text him or call him or email him or anything else anymore.

 

The calendar says it has been almost a year. But it still feels so incredibly recent. An at the same time it feels like it has been forever since I had my daddy.

 

And honestly, there is also kind of a second loss going on…because I am trying to figure out if in heaven my daddy will still be my daddy or if the loss really is forever and I can’t have him back…and that kind of took away my hope for someday.

 

These thoughts came from a discussion of Matthew 22:23-33 and Mark 12:18-27. In these passages is when people kinda tested God about re-marriage, asking if a woman marries all the brothers who is she married to in heaven? The answer is none of them because God is the God of the living, not the dead. So I’m no ordained pastor or anything, but it seems to me that extrapolating from there if people don’t have their marriage relationships in heaven then they probably don’t have other family relationships either. Will my dad even know me when we go to heaven? I know it is a dumb place to be stuck because God makes it really clear that heaven is going to be awesome and perfect so obviously whether we know each other or not we won’t care about that whatsoever…but it is really hard on this side losing the someday getting daddy back.

 

…I looked and looked but I really didn’t find any actual bible that pointed towards any other conclusion…the only kind of exception being the comment about seeing the sinner on the cross in paradise but since the speaker was Jesus and Jesus is God that doesn’t really count because I know God will know me and I will know God in heaven. There are some Christian songs that suggest otherwise…but there isn’t any rule that every Christian song must be 100% theologically accurate and some very obviously are not accurate so I know I can’t determine my theology solely from lyrics that make a prettier picture…but I really like the picture the song Real Dad by Stephanie Pauline paints with “and Jen’s dad holds her again when she is 80.”

 

And because while it feels good to admit what I’ve been thinking about, it also has me crying right now because admitting it made it more real…so I think it is time to write about something totally different and surface level to pull myself back into normal life.

 

So yeah, I was reading today that we all trend towards introversion as we age, but extraverts will never cross the midpoint between extraversion and introversion. That made me think.

 

Sure, a lot of kids want you to “look at me” wen they are younger and grow out of that…but there are also kids who are incredibly reserved and would rather play unbothered alone. And I’m sure there *are* older adults who don’t want to be around people, but I feel like the majority are looking for someone, anyone to be with them and listen to them.

 

And then I thought about myself. I had basically zero need for other people when I was in middle/high school. Did I like occasionally being around other people, sure, but I was also totally content going about life on my own…but then in college I started learning about the world of social. The more I learned, the more that was the world I wanted. I was no longer satisfied with my world being population me. Hello inner extravert. All I wanted was to be with other people all day every day. I basically lived in the success center so I could be with people all day…and when that was taken away I tried the cafeteria (fail – it was super uncomfortable when the first few days of the semester all it took was me sitting down for Certain Someone to come sit at the table next to me so I swore off the cafeteria unless I had enough people around me to feel safe and was facing the middle of the room and the entrance to hopefully see in advance if Certain Someone was coming near me)…so I found that the lobby seating area was the best place for me – outlets and chairs and usually a microwave made it the perfect place to be around as many people as possible while avoiding Certain Someone…until she figured it out and decided to use the microwave right next to me even if it had a line rather than one of the ones away from me that were both closer to her office and had no line…but at least she wasn’t dumb enough to try to invite herself to sit at my table there, so I knew she’d be gone soon-ish even if it was not a safe feeling having her in the same room as me…but anyway, all that to say I definitely went the opposite direction from happily alone to thriving on together time.

 

Well, then I continued reading because I ain’t no quitter…another sentence said “shyness and social anxiety are about fear, introversion is about how we are wired.” I could take that apart and point out that shyness and social anxiety are also about how we are wired…but I mean, I do like the thought that even if you so desperately *want* to be with people you might still be alone because of fear…and there was definitely some transition time for me between wanting to be with people and actually leaving my room to even have an opportunity to be with people…

 

…so yeah…

 

Speaking of extraversion and my need to be with people…I think that is why I get so annoyed with Covid rules…the first rules that came out were solely about separating people. That is so incredibly harmful to everyone’s mental health and it really showed in our ED and admissions at the hospital pretty d*rn quick. I would rather die of Covid than suicide. I don’t think cloth masks and the way people tend to wear their masks is actually all that effective…but…if masks had been plan A I wouldn’t have been nearly as opposed to them…but I have two problems with masks ignoring the whole people making decisions seem to think that masks just magically appear on people when they need them thing…first, with a mask, if germs get into/onto your mask they will be up against your face for an extended period of time, thus increasing your risk of actually becoming infected vs those germs just being able to continue on their journey (which is why masks were originally discouraged unless you were already sick or caring for someone sick). Second, and possibly at this point more importantly, masks seemed to be a physical representation and extension of the social issues that had already been imposed…so instead of being just another moderately inconvenient rule to follow they became the One Evil Thing I really hated… Masks became an extension of the social isolation of never ever seeing people in real life and therefore masks were the enemy. I mean, at this point I can even wear a mask all day without taking antihistamines and I don’t like wearing it but I’m not about to scream by the end of my shift…so really it isn’t the mask itself making me angry…

 

And I really don’t know where I was going with that beyond just away from the previous topic…so I think it is time to stop writing and maybe come up with something more useful to do…

I searched the world but it couldn’t fill me

(Graves into Gardens – elevation worship)

 

This evening (Sunday) I did a quick rollerblade ride up and down the street I live on while finishing up the rest of the book North of Normal by Cea Sunrise Person. It was a really good book though heartbreaking at times (for example, she hasn’t seen her grandfather whom she loved like a dad in years and doesn’t know if she will again, but in her craving an escape from the abuse at home she flies to see her bio dad whom she can’t remember ever seeing though picture evidence shows she had been there when she was tiny. At the airport, the reminder of her grandfather she has been carrying since she was tiny is taken away as potential drug paraphernalia…and the trip to see her dad isn’t some awesome experience in exchange…and my heart broke for her). One quote from the ending that I really loved: don’t mistake silence for lack of compassion. I am definitely firmly in camp it is better to be the one who said the wrong thing than to be the one who said nothing at all…(even though my social struggles mean that if I don’t have an opportunity to use writing to convey my message I probably will end up the one who says nothing at all). But the words sounded so affirming.

 

The context of those words was Cea learning (at approximately my current age) that her bio dad wrote a book about raising kids – yet had mostly been absent from her life. The woman giving her these words suggested that perhaps once he realized what he’d done he felt regret and shame for his actions every day and reaching out would have compounded those feelings so his silence wasn’t about not caring, but rather was the way he was dealing with the way he was caring…but as I thought about it, those words also were so helpful in remembering that a lot of people who blocked me out of their lives when I was in school it might not have been solely that they felt like they had to choose a side to have acceptance and didn’t choose mine, but maybe that they realized their part in not protecting me and letting things happen or just not realizing what was happening behind closed doors…maybe I’m seeing too much good in people and it really was all about choosing sides, but it gave me some hope that maybe these people who were supposed to be there weren’t intentionally not there out of lack of care but out of not knowing what to do with the way they felt the care. It feels weird looking at it from that angle, but even if it isn’t true, I feel like it is still is a healing thought to look at it as if I weren’t intentionally being blocked out.

 

I was about to post this and then this one other quote from near the end of the book kept wiggling in my mind…but I can’t remember the exact wording…but it was something like ‘I felt like I had always been defined by what I survived and wasn’t sure I liked it.’ I think why this struck a chord is that while my life was circumstantially very different than hers, I, too, have survived many things and am not sure if I really want than to define me. I can definitely see that a lot of the really hard things in life changed me and changed the path of my life, but I’m not sure which pieces if any are things I want to be defined by. Things to think about I guess…

the pressure of approval is a heavy weight to bear but so is living with regret

(Uncool – Leanna Crawford)

 

Okay, so this has been on my mind for a little while…and a lot of it I have probably already said before…but…

 

Infectious disease was a thing pre-COVID-19 and will continue to be a thing once media attention leaves this particular disease…

 

Y’all probably are somewhat aware of my opinion, so you know I am obviously not advocating to suggest media and politicians were right to choose one health issue to focus on at the exclusion and detriment of others…but…if we’re gonna pick a health issue to focus on for 2021, I’m getting my nomination in early. I nominate suicide.

 

Just like this year, we can have statistics that are updated with extreme regularity for a couple months before it gets old and frequency decreases. We can track age, geographic location, careers that may carry higher risk, medical factors potentially carrying higher risk, social factors potentially carrying higher risk. These risk categories can be changed and modified regularly. Hey, maybe we can even ostracize people who do end up struggling with this particular problem until we are absolutely sure they are healed or dead and then make them our heroes…

 

And politicians can make inconvenient rules that are supposed to make people feel like they are being safe while mostly just inconveniencing nearly everyone and definitely hurting certain segments of the population while fueling division among people who don’t agree on what the rules should really be. Like we can mandate the number of people you must be around at certain times and the maximum amount of space between people…

 

…okay, while I say this tongue in cheek, I am still very serious that after the devastation in this area that social distancing and closures have brought, mental health needs attention. Humans are social beings. God specifically says that it is not good for man (aka people, not just males) to be alone. Separating us, particularly doing so during an already stressful season (aka during a pandemic) is damaging. Some people have the resilience that they are still doing okay, but when I was working at my previous job it was very obvious that there was a major influx of people pushed over the brink. What was typically maybe one person a week boarding in the ED for mental health related safety concerns for a few days became multiple people daily. What was typically a handful of CIWA (drug overuse and/or withdrawal) patients a week became a handful of them every day. Before you think that I was just hypersensitive to this issue and noticed it more because of how difficult I knew isolation was for me, the number of people I was aware of outside of my professional live dying of suicide also increased, so clearly it wasn’t just my overactive imagination.

 

Also, this is hardly even tangentially related, but someone in a video I was watching today said “we are all just one mistake away from doing something really stupid” and that really struck a chord with me to help me give myself more grace for the times I feel like the worst person in the world for a mistake that I made.