Change and Peace and Joy

I'm beginning to feel inspired again.

It's been a long time coming, and as I notice it more and more, I start to realize it's been arriving little by little for quite some time.

For the past several months I made a conscious effort to pursue peace. Suggested to me by a friend, I sought out, chased after a sense of peace. This seeking, of course, was born out of a lack of, and need for, peace. Circumstances shook my sense of peace, deeper still my sense of faith. There is much left to journey through, and like any true psychologist I acknowledge that I may forever be "processing" and "reframing" the events of the last year of my life, figuring out what they mean for me and how they have impacted and shaped me into who I am now, altering me by their occurrence and my subsequent reactions to them. I started out looking for peace, intentionally trying to find it, from that lack and that need. And over time, through prayer, and searching in all the right and all the wrong places, my sense of peace has grown considerably. Though I wander, He is faithful. I feel I am still rebuilding, better yet, being rebuilt, spiritually. But I feel so much more peaceful than I did just a few "short" months ago. So much can change in a few months. I can't lay claim to an ever-present sense of peace, but most days I am more peaceful than not, a radical difference from where I was just five months ago, and for that I am thankful. The peace I have now is more a divine gift in spite of, rather than the result of, my having sought after it, but I believe God has blessed and used my struggles just the same.

Over perhaps the past month or even two (hey, time flies in your senior year of college), I've noticed more and more peace within me. Further still, I've noticed joy rekindling. Not just fleeting moments of happiness, not the kind I last blogged about that burst across the sky and quickly fade. No, this joy that I am starting to feel more and more often once again is the kind that slowly builds and then lingers there. The kind I hadn't felt in a while, and forgot how wonderful it is to feel. The kind of joy that makes me crinkle my nose and wave my arms and dance around like a little kid. The kind of joy that spills over and makes me smile to myself. A deep, true, joy that makes the sun shine brighter once again. It's addictive, in a good way. And so I'm deciding now to pursue joy.

It's a good time of the year to chase after joy, when everyone is wishing it upon you. It's a hopeful, generous, joyous time of year, Christmas. I suppose joy is not so radically different from peace, really. When I am finally resting, content and at peace, it is then that my eyes and my heart can be open to looking for and feeling joy. So pursuing joy will mean also continuing my pursuit of peace, building on the peace I've found/been given over the past few months.

There is much journeying left to be done. The next year of my life is full of uncertainty. Undoubtedly it will push me and pull me to grow and change in ways impossible to foresee. And I'm looking forward to it, not only with a sense of peace, but also with a sense of joy. :)

This post is probably a bit cryptic and riddled with writing errors, but I'm really not sure how to put these thoughts into words, so I finally decided to just go for it. It would have been pretty sad to have only one blog post for the entire year, and sadder still to have that one blog post reflect the hardest part of the year, and not the journey I've been living since then. So I have no grand conclusion or call-to-action for readers. But here's an update, my thoughts and experience shared, for whatever it is worth: at the very least, a helpful reminder for me when I look back five months or more from now. :)

Living the "Uninspired" Life

I've considered posting on here a few times over the last several months, but usually felt I was lacking the inspiration to write a worthwhile post. However, I recently read two blog posts that talked about feeling uninspired, which, ironically, inspired me to write about my own currently uninspiring life.

One post was written by a woman with a popular Instagram account*. She explained how her Instagram posts only show the highlights of her life, that her pictures are often staged, and the fact that they don't reflect her day-to-day, hour-to-hour reality. If people are jealous of her life, it is because they don't really know what it's like. Her blog post reminded me of a quote which says something to the effect of: "It isn't fair to compare your everyday life to someone else's highlights reel."

Another post ( http://abovealllovedeeply.blogspot.com/2014/07/an-altar-transformed.html ) was written by someone I know. In her post she shared how her summer had been full of working on mundane, unexciting tasks, which were draining her physically and emotionally. She was realizing that if she did not start focusing on finding joy, she was going to get burned out. I admire her for finding a positive message to share, but also for being honest about the parts of her life that just aren't what she wants them to be right now. As I read her post I felt myself relaxing, knowing that someone else was feeling a general lack of inspiration just like I was.

All of this isn't to say that I have lived the past several months without ever experiencing inspiration, because that would be both sad and untrue. There are little things that inspire me daily, and I am as thankful as ever for my proclivity for being easily amused by the littlest details. But I haven't felt an overall sense of being on fire for life, supercharged and overflowing with inspiration (sometimes I really have felt that way in the past). Rather, my moments of inspiration that stem from interactions with other people, a song, a paragraph, a sunset, have been just that--moments. Moments that burst like a flash of light but then fade away into the gray as quickly as they appeared.
This summer has been much different than what I anticipated it would be like. There have been times of great joy, and of growth, but also times of unexpected confusion and pain. In those latter times, there have been moments, hours, and days when "inspired" is the farthest thing from what I am feeling.

So maybe I owe the world a glimpse of my currently uninspired life. You should know that if your daily life doesn't look like my Instagram posts, neither does mine. I don't lie through my Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter accounts. The happy snapshots and statuses (stati?) are all real and true. But naturally, I don't post about my disappointments, failures, heartbreaks, bad hair days, stress, or broken relationships. That might be strange if I did, and I likely won't be posting about them anytime soon. But I do believe it is worth mentioning that although all of the lovely things I post about are in fact real, happy parts of my life, they do not tell the whole story. I strive to use any social media outlets I have to be a positive and inspirational presence to others who may be checking my profile, and I believe that is an okay, even right, position to take. I am (usually) an optimist, a hopeless romantic (I love love), and a happy person. But I'm not always. And there is much more going on in my life than what I choose to post about online.

It's easy to look around on Facebook and feel like you are the only one sitting at home on a Friday night, wondering which one of your siblings you can bug to hang out with you because you've already watched every decent movie on Netflix and none of your friends are available or interested in hanging out. It's easy to look at your newsfeed and, as you like your friends engagement and wedding pictures in genuine happiness, think that you must be the only one trying to move on from a broken relationship. The list of examples goes on and on, but the truth is that those friends who are out having fun with other friends, or those friends who are getting engaged and married, all have their own moments every day that they decide not to share. And that's okay, we all do that and it's probably a good thing that we don't all know everything about each other's lives. But don't forget that just like you share your highlights, they are sharing theirs.

I have been updating an album on my Facebook page called 100 Days of Happy. It's a really neat challenge that I have seen going around for the past few months--find something happy in every day for 100 days, and post a picture of it. The goal, I think, is to encourage yourself to be more aware of the happiness in your life, and by sharing the photos on social media, encourage others to do the same for their own lives. After a difficult start to my summer I decided to take this challenge, hoping it would help me to look for the happy parts of each day. It has helped me, and I've so enjoyed looking back after each couple of weeks at the fun times I've documented with my photos. Recently, as I've struggled through a somewhat unexpected end to a relationship that was very important to me, I've felt like posting pictures to my hundred happy days album would be hypocritical. Yes, of course there is still some piece of happiness in my life every day. I am not so much affected that I can't see any happiness at all, in fact some days I feel happy for most of the day. But it seems misleading to fill an album with my happy moments when in fact many hours of many days I am struggling to find joy, peace, contentment, and direction. (I finally decided to update the album anyway, in keeping with my original intentions for creating it in the first place. I could use a reason to look for the happy moments.)

Many people in my life know that lately my days are filled with lots of ups and downs. I share (somewhat) freely with a small circle of friends and family who I love and trust. And with a few very close friends I share nearly all of my thoughts, happy or not so happy. But this post is my declaration to the rest of the world, I suppose, in the interest of promoting general honesty among people, and in the interest of reassuring someone else the way that I was reassured. My days are filled with happy moments, but also with not-so-happy moments. And that's okay, because it is my current reality. And it's probably everyone's reality, to some degree or another. So don't feel alone, and don't compare the whole of your real life to someone else's highlights of their real life.

*I can no longer find the post, otherwise I would have included a link to it.