for now

              The story I am about to tell focuses on the past five years, but truly begins much earlier.  In class, after we had drawn our circles, I made an admission to Randy that I had never made to anyone else before.  When I was younger, maybe four or five, I remember standing in our church, Christ Church Cranbrook, and staring up at the hundred or so foot ceilings.  With my head tilted back and my eyes wide open, I gazed upon the light fixtures above me, and saw two small balls of gold circling around them.  It happened every time I looked up, and I thought they were angels.  Maybe there were.

            I have tried to look for the angels again, but since I have grown, they have been elusive.  Despite their absence, there still is, and always has been, a certain gravity within the walls of the church.  The air feels thicker and more charged, as if it is simply fuller than the air outside.  It is hard for me to say whether it is loaded with the prayers of others or just a lingering holiness.  When I leave, I wonder if it clings to my skin and clothes.

            Because I have been at my particular church for the entirety of my life, it feels like a second home.  It may even be the location I know second best; from an early age, I have actively explored its every crevice and chosen my favorite spots.  These spaces unconsciously and automatically induce a reverence within me that is seen little elsewhere in my interactions with the world.  When I am in them, it is almost as if my heartbeat and breathing become superfluous. 

            When I tell the story of my spiritual development, it seems as though I had a period of years when I didn’t believe in anything, but the aforementioned spaces always held their mysterious sway over me.  We will get to that later.  This is a story about getting lost and being found.  This is a story about the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world I had no idea was coming.

            I did not realize I was lost until I was found.  The veils I had placed over my own eyes were so ingrained in whom I had made myself to be that I became unable to distinguish who I really was.  It would be dishonest for me to say that I do not struggle with the same issue today; I have tried to write this story before, and I have always been held back by an inner unwillingness to abandon the troublesome parts of myself.  Even when I have complained about my unhappiness and desire to change, there has been a lingering desire to heap suffering upon myself.

            Someone once told that humans are not happy because they do not allow themselves to be.  It sounds so absurd because of course everyone claims to want to be happy, but I know it holds truth because I have lived it.  I think part of the problem is that we rarely really, truly know which routes will manifest lasting happiness, and so we spend a lot of time metaphorically flailing around. 

            Contentment is difficult to wholly experience, let alone sustain.  What I find fascinating is that by definition, to be content is to be in a state of peaceful happiness and not wanting more, but when used as a verb, to content oneself with, becomes accepting something as adequate despite wanting more.  The diametrical nature of this word’s various significances is apt for the way that I have experienced it in my life.  A change of state, a change of tense can mean everything, it seems.  

            Despite attempting at times to feign contentment for the sake of appearances, I have quite honestly spent a majority of the past five years contenting myself with its utter absence from my life.  It is not hard to lie to others, but I have never been able to deceive myself into accepting contrived happiness.  There is always that moment when the fake smile drops and suddenly I am alone with myself and the rawness of my discontent. 

            Perhaps we hold individual laws of gravity within ourselves.  In my internal field, I feel definite shifts when things become real, sometimes inescapably so. 

            Right after I got to Red Rock, I was IQ tested.  Someone made the mistake of telling me my score, which fell in a percentile that marked me as having very superior intelligence.  Once I had concrete evidence to support my pervasive belief that I was smarter than most everyone I encountered, I was in trouble.  Two hours of testing and the three digits resulting from its analysis had justified my inner intellectual bully.

            In a session about a week ago, I speculated to my therapist that “I probably wouldn’t be as much of an asshole if I wasn’t so tall.”  We both laughed, mostly because I was serious.  At five foot eleven and one half inches and age twenty, I am above the ninety-seventh height percentile for females, and have been nearly my entire life.  Given both my younger sibling’s recent growth spurts, I am now the shrimp of all six grandchildren.  Even my sixteen-year old sister stands an inch above me.

            Obviously my stature gives me an esoteric experience of the world, and I cannot imagine what it would be like to be shorter.  At a rally, my similarly tall friend Dan and I held up our significantly shorter friend so that she was at our height.  She was amazed at how different everything looked from six inches higher.  I have always said that I would rather be remarkably tall than remarkably short; I can see things and I can reach things.  There is something else, though, that is less practical and less explicable. 

            If I was asked to describe myself in five words, I might choose “whip smart and freak tall.”  My siblings and I have received the abundant genetic blessings of height, intelligence, and attractiveness.  Each of us has responded completely differently to these qualities.  My particular reaction has been inarguably the most exploitative, oftentimes dangerously so. 

Although I have never been the type of girl to bat my eyelashes, somewhere along the line, I realized how easily I could manipulate people. 

            My interactions with the world and its occupants are driven by rationality.  This is to say that my critical thinking skills are acutely developed and largely automatic.  When I encounter a situation, whether a math problem or a discussion with a friend, I quickly and clearly see my options and the corresponding outcomes.  In my head, nearly everything is linear, neat, and binary; there is a sort of internal intrinsic organization that directly corresponds with external action. 

            I sometimes become frustrated with others for seeming not to function similarly.  It is never a question of what they were thinking, but why they were thinking in that particular way.  At my worst here, I can be unforgiving and judgmental, placing myself as superior to the other person and taking that to my advantage.  In predicting what I deem to be illogical behavior, I have been able to successfully manipulate any number of situations, which is a bragging right my intellectual bully relishes. 

            All of this is just perpetuating my claim that I am an asshole.  The truth is, I am not an asshole, but I can act like one.  

            Nearly five years ago, when I was sixteen, I underwent drastic personal changes.  I went from being a sweet, loving honors student to a cigarette smoking, alcohol drinking, cocaine sniffing asshole.  Although it seems an objective statement, I can only make it with the powers of hindsight.  At the time, the phase did not seem like a phase, and its effects have continued to linger.      

              In this paper, when I talk about spirituality, I am largely speaking about God as far as the Episcopalian faith is concerned.  From my viewpoint, other aspects of spirituality can be reconciled within this realm, which is to say I see no problem with seeming like I’m visiting the lunch line of a spiritual cafeteria.  I take what I like and leave what I don’t, all while grounding myself in Christianity.