On Memory, Inevitability, and Healing from Wounds You Didn't Know You Had

(Consider this a warning, both for the length of this post, and for triggering material)

If I could go back in time, there are not many things I'd change.  Mostly because you can't know how little changes might affect you, and in making changes to my past, I'd be killing myself.  Which is all nonsense, as every time I see sci-fi shows where someone is faced with helping the heroes put back the past, they struggle with the knowledge that they will kill themselves in the process, and I think, "Well that's dumb.  Don't they know it's better this way?"  But that's not the point.  Better or not, at the end, you become a new person, and whoever you would have become down that alternate timeline, whether they liked themselves or not, whether they were a good person or not, they are dead.  Chances are, it was not so straightforward - everyone is a mix of good and bad, everyone likes and dislikes themselves or part of themselves at times.  Maybe weathering this battle made them better and stronger, and although the whole world is better because the battle never happened, something will be missing from this version of that one person.  They are dead.
If I could go back in time, I've said before that there were things about my wedding I would change.  Certain things that I had fixed in my head that were unnecessary, because at the time, I was a staunch traditionalist.  I still am, in my way.  I debated for a long time whether to have my mom or my step-dad walk me down the aisle.  My mom has been there for me forever.  She's always been my primary parent.  At the same time, my step-dad and I had formed a close bond, and he had been my dad for 20 years.  I chose him, in my own way symbolically adopting him.  I chose him.
When he walked me down the aisle, he was already cheating on my mom.  He was already in the process of ruining everything.  When it all came out, the world fell down around my ears - the narratives I'd built up about second chances, about religious conversion, about all kinds of things.  For those reasons, I would go back and not choose him.  For a while, I thought I should have chosen my mom.  Now, I think, I would choose no one.

Can We All Just Calm Down for a Second?

I'm really happy right now.  I've been feeling good for a couple weeks. Good enough, in fact, that my brain is trying to find ways to sabotage my happiness, because it knows that for every happy moment I steal, there's hell to pay later.  The devil gets his due.

SHUT UP, BRAIN and let me be happy.  So that's something I'm working on.  (I'm now going to update y'all on my life now, but the real meat of the post is farther down, in case you want to skip it.  Or whatever.  I don't tell you what to do.)

I'm really enjoying my job.  It's only-just-above-minimum-wage at Starbucks, but I'm getting 2 raises in the coming months (one for being there 6 months and one because everybody at Starbucks is getting a raise in January - people are rumbling about raising the minimum wage, so I imagine they're trying to get ahead of that so it's not such a blow when it does happen.  Good for them.  Good for me).  I think that some of the enjoyment comes from just being an employee again - I know exactly what is expected of me at all times, there are no ambiguous social situations to navigate, and I don't have to be in charge of anyone.  It's much less stressful.  

My last job pretty much required a codependent attitude in order to survive.  I was basically on-call every day - if they needed help, I was the only person who could come in.  It's kind of nice to be so desperately needed, but you can never really relax when you know that a call could come in at any hour and you'd be needed - and you can't really say no.  Part of this is because we were such a small unit that we couldn't really afford to hire any more people, part of it was some issues with "upper management."  But seriously - I'm not an EMT, I was working in a college cafeteria.  Ain't nobody got time to cut years off their life with the stress from that bull.  Beyond that, I feel like there was so much time there when I wasn't sure what was expected of me moment to moment, and we didn't get regular reviews, so it was hard to tell if you were doing good, bad, or indifferent.  You were fine until suddenly everything you did was terrible, then you'd get ignored for another 5 months.  It was weird, and stressful, again, to never know when the hammer would come down.  So between that and being "on-call," just every minute of on and off time was filled with anxiety.  Yuck.

Starbucks is working out great so far.  I can ask for days off!  I work with only nice people (who can ever say that?  Me!  Right now!)  I am good at this stuff.  I can relax when I'm home - be home at home and work at work.  Plus, free lattes ;)  And tips!  And healthcare!  

But anyway, the point of this post right now is to talk about my "biological clock" and how it needs to shut itself right the hell up.  (Not a Sparrow Falls...you might not want to proceed).

Backlash! Part Deux:Your husband doesn’t have to earn your respect

Your husband doesn’t have to earn your respect - This is a blog post by Matt Walsh, which you should read before you read this, as I'm going to just jump right in.  All in all, I don't think I disagree with Walsh, just that we're coming at this thing from two different perspectives, with two different agendas.  He sees a chicken, and I see and egg, and it's anyone's guess how either one got there in the first place...let me explain:

The "all men are fat, witless, oafs sitcoms" are often panned by feminists, because these same sitcoms tend to:
a) Show an unattractive man with a smoking hot wife (demonstrating the gulf between the requirements for physical attractiveness between men and women), and
b) Perpetuate outdated gender roles, because now not only is the wife responsible for taking care of the children and the house, she is now also expected to take care of her husband, who does nothing but bring home money (and occasionally do some yard-work).
So she's not an alpha-bride, but an overworked subservient bride who has minimal control over her own life and exercises it.  The media's (and, chicken/egg-ly, general culture's) shift toward portraying men as children that must be cared for is just another part of the ongoing backlash against feminism.  For all it seems like this attitude is elevating women, it's really just as degrading to the women as it is to the men - it's hardly different from the Victorian notion of the "Angel in the Household."
(Also, there are an increasing number of people arguing that childhood is a social construction designed to keep women from attaining equal status, because the care of our youth is Just Too Important.  I'm really skeptical of this one, since how you raise your kids is important, but then again, I also recognize that in other times and cultures, children are/have been given more responsibility [including jobs of their own], left to their own devices, raised by professional strangers, etc, and generally grown up to be normal, reasonable adults - and then again, today's kids have seen a 20 pt increase in IQ in just the past few years, probably due to the way we're paying more attention to them.  BUT ANYWAY...)

Oh, It's You Again...

I titled this post and started writing in ages ago, then never came back.  Here I am again, deleting what was and starting over.  Same topic.
I had kind of a relapse a bit ago with my depression.  It made a lot of sense, what with the newlywededness and the thesis writing and the work stress and so forth.  My psych increased my meds a bit, which scared me.  I don't want to have to keep increasing them, you know?  But she said that it was temporary, and that if my illness is exacerbated by stress (just like my eczema), there's no shame in boosting the meds for just a bit.  I suppose she's right, and I needed the pep talk.
The newlyweddedness is much more stressful than I'd thought it would be.  My mom and my friend Jenny warned me that the first 2 years of marriage are the worst, because while you're getting used to each other, you fight all the time.  I can understand that with my mom, she has a very strong personality, and clear notions of how things ought to be.
Our problem hasn't been that.  We haven't fought at all, yet.  I think the trouble is that I'm an introvert sharing a 500-sq ft house with another person (and 2 cats).  Husband's presence is never irritating to me, I never consciously want him to go away, but my body recharges by being alone.  Since I'm rarely alone now, I feel like I can never quite catch up, as it were.  Like everything that would have stressed me out this much now stresses me out THIS much, because it builds up.  I feel like I have no control, because there is no place in the house (besides my side of the bed) to be alone.

Wedding Weirdness

Funny story:

I got married.  It's weird.
Or at least, it's weird in that it's not weird.  Yeah?  People keep asking, "Soooo, what's married life like?  >wink, wink, nudge<  Is it different?"  And no, it's pretty much the same.  I mean, we live together, and there's sex now, which is pretty great, and About Freaking Time, but otherwise, things just is.  Not that it's not good.  It's just not that different.  Which is good.  I don't know.
Anyway, people said my wedding was cool, which is cool.  I mean, I guess they're supposed to say that, but I think it went pretty well.  I've been to some flop weddings before, and I was thinking, "How do I know if that's me?"  The main thing I hate at weddings is the massive wait between the wedding and the reception, where the party goes off and takes pictures, and everyone else sits around forever not allowed to eat.  I went to a wedding recently where the time and place of the reception weren't listed, only to find out after the ceremony that the reception was at the same place, so we all sat down and waited 3 Freaking Hours for the party to show up.  Then the food was bad and there was no dance.  Hell, just don't have a reception then.  But anyway, I think I did ok, so here's some things I did.  You can do them too, if you want to be as cool as me or whatever.

Living the Life

This here.  This is a good article:

“Radical,” “missional” Christianity as the new legalism

 Basically, it's saying that you don't have to go out and save the world, but that you can live as a Christian in a normal suburban life.  This is something I've been thinking about a lot lately.  I'm nearing the end of my schooling, I'm about to get married, and hopefully I'll go out and find a job.  We just bought a tiny house in West Allis.  We're so...normal.
Beyond that, I have...a past.  As does everyone, I suppose.  I consider the years between 19 and 22 to have been just a strange detour in my life.  As does everyone, I suppose.  In any event, I'm back on the path of faith and starting to become a grown-up, and I'm wondering how all of "This" fits together. 
When it comes to the church, I think that the world-changers and driven missionaries are important, vital, to the church, but that not everyone can do that.  1 Corinthians 12 talks about different gifts of the spirit, and how we are all united by God's purpose into a single body.  Missionaries and world-changers aren't the end of the story.  I also think it's a bit easier to go out an do extraordinary things for God than it is to live every day for Him. Not, obviously, that the world-changers are lazy.  If someone is called and gifted to be world-changers, then it is commendable for them to do that.  However, if we put pressure on others to also be like that, we are likely to get people who are more worried about how they can dramatically show their faith than they are about actually having or living it.  God created us as individuals, with unique personalities and talents.  The best way to honor and glorify him is by being yourself, by being the best "you" you can be.  Trying to be somebody else only leads to problems.