rebelling against low expectations
Cowering behind a register in my dull teal Food Lion uniform, I feel like I’m failing pretty miserably at changing the world. I see a dad telling his five-year-old daughter it’s okay to be sad, then he starts crying as he explains their dog died that day and my own eyes start to burn. I see white-haired ladies struggling to lift their groceries out of the cart and some of them tell me about the...
Sometimes I just feel like everything I do is pointless. No point in writing, if I had anything to say in the first place; my words will be forgotten by tomorrow. No point in school work, that persistent obligation; it’s all just a scheme to keep me busy with information that has no application to my existence. We humans are determined to assign some sort of significance to this thing called life...
My flight was scheduled for mid-afternoon at the Miami airport. I spent the morning in a coffee shop, where I ordered a large latte, full of that dark magic called caffeine. Bad decision. Twenty minutes later, I felt like I was going to lose my breakfast, I was so tense even breathing hurt, and the only way I could think of to cope was curling up in my seat and closing my eyes, just as the lunch...
From blue crayon sketches to squeaky violin recitals to Disney murder mystery novels, hobbies have long been a part of my life. I’ve hated the hours of practice, hated the pieces that went in the trash, hated the wasted time. But if I could reclaim that time for another purpose, I wouldn’t. In fact, I’d probably invest still more into my hobbies. My sketches may not be featured in some New York...
I wasn’t prepared for the pictures. Girls who had forgotten my name posed in prom dresses with guys I hadn’t allowed myself to like. To them, I was nothing more than some kid in chemistry class. Even the girls who went without dates wouldn’t bother to invite me. So I imagined the evening they must have had. I wondered what it would be like to wear that flowing ball gown, to go out to...
Write your plans in pencil; prepare for God to edit them. If I could even begin to tell you the number of plans I’ve stenciled over the past five years, you would start to feel very overwhelmed. I’m not much of a planner when it comes to daily schedules or, say, writing a novel, but I like to have a rather tidy control over the grand scheme of my existence. Unfortunately, that hasn’t played out...
Teenagers. We’re a bunch of kid-adults who often have no idea who we are or who we ought to be. We grasp at all kinds of things to find identity, things like beauty, sports, and intelligence. And for so long, I’ve prided myself in being above those things. Maybe all the rest of the world cares about beauty and sports and intelligence, but in the words of the Little Red Hen’s friends when she...
I can not people today. Pushing past twenty-three faces in the hallway of the B building, staring out the window in English class, retreating in the corners of the garden under a cloud of misty rain… There are some days I just want to hide from the world, forget about humanity. Peopling is hard. It’s hard to put yourself out there, to be vulnerable, to invest in a friendship with another human...
If I had to use one word to describe this semester, it would not be the word “fun.” As if a full load of college classes wasn’t enough, high school algebra and chemistry are killing my GPA. I don’t know anyone taking the same classes as me, classes I didn’t want to take in the first place. And no one wants to get me started about the complete lack of decent places to sit and study...
In the book of Deuteronomy, God commands his people to remember. In fact, he commands this thirteen times. Remember who God is. Remember what he did for you. Remember his promise. The Israelites weren’t particularly good at remembering. Hiking through the desert, they were more focused on the present concerns of hunger, thirst, and exhaustion than the heritage of their people. If anything, they...
rebelling against low expectations
