The End of the Beginning

I realized that my camera phone was able to take ok-enough pictures that I wasn't waiting for us to get a scanner anymore.

From my sister's senior year graduation photo shoot, which I had no intention of being a part of:




This photo of the four of us I always remembered as expressive of my personality. It's a good body-language picture that says a lot about who I am. I look at this photo and I think "determination." No one was going to stop me from finding out what I was meant for, even if it was right to be patient and faithful in finding it. I see all my idealism, in this picture. Notice how everyone was smiling, and I wasn't treating the moment as casual as they. I was consumed and fueled by idealism almost exclusively. My sister also suffered under intensely negative circumstances, but her way of processing it was generally different than mine. Hers was denial. Mine was defiance.

I remember the events during this moment of my life.

It was taken eight years ago when I was 20 in that tenuous time right before I moved out. My schedule had monotonously been the same every day of my life for the two last years.... Commute to college, attend classes all day, go home, work for my father. As for time spent at school, I was surrounded by people my age who were living life. They were all having fun, growing together, exploring life's potential. But for some reason I never became a participant with them. No one ever talked to me, man and woman alike. It was like some mysterious forcefield kept me and everyone else separate. I resented that, even though I didn't know who to blame. So, I quit talking, pretty much altogether. I even made it a mission to let no man rub shoulders against me no matter where I was, and if a man swore in my presence I scowled at them for his lack of respect for me.

Try to see it through my eyes: I had all the feelings and desires as those who shared space with me did. I was just as mature and adult as they. I was just as capable of laughing and loving but... it somehow wasn't for me? Why not, I wondered.

The only logic I could make out of it was that I was being held separate by some principle, or devotion, or obligation. Maybe it was all my father's fault. Maybe it was God's plan. Maybe there was something wrong with me. I was made absolutely loyal to a confusing purpose, one I didn't see very much good for. If you asked me how I felt about being lonely and isolated, I would have shown you my anger. However I was always willing to reserve final judgment in the hope that some good was going to result out of it that I just didn't grasp at this time.

At home I had learned to endure in a holding pattern, by my ideals. I was being told in half-day long angry lectures that no one would ever want to marry me because of my average grades, and interrogated as to why I would sink to such an aspiration. I was related to criminals who cycle through the jails because I couldn't seem to anticipate that it was damaging to the fabric of the couch when I temporarily left the freshly washed clothes there, while doing other chores at the same time. I talked to my one friend (who put up with my weird situation) on the phone once every four months, and saw her even less frequently, because I had not "earned it." When I wasn't at school I was doing housework, and being punished by being spanked, standing in the corner, difficult yard work, reading news articles and giving reports on their content, and then it was also my job to read my dad's novel on a daily basis and give feedback on it.

But in those same two years there was this thing I had learned about believing in Jesus that when a person had faith they became something called "a new creation." I didn't understand it very well but I sensed that forgiveness was probably closely tied into the concept. So these new truths contradicted the "plan" and the purpose of the pattern I was holding. This contradiction said to me "Go... when the timing is right."

So, I turned in my money and an application to live in university housing starting in March. My grandma had given me money as a Christmas present because otherwise I had no way of getting any since my dad controlled all the finances. I would secretly thumb through that brochure for on-campus living, every once in awhile, completely scared that I maybe never would get to do it.

I lacked confidence. I really wished someone would walk into my life and give me assurance that I was going to be supported by them in this transition. But since for two straight years no man talked to me, I figured out that I first had to change my circumstances before anyone would be able to have that chance to care for me like that. As a test I got this idea around January of that year to make an entry in an online dating thing. I didn't post a picture, but just wrote a brief bit, and here is something like what I wrote:

-name, age, my interests are anthropology, blah blah blah.- "Even though I am interested in these things I love to learn about that which I don't know very much of. I especially think that I am rather naive about many things, but I want that to change. I am looking for someone who wants to show me what their world is like. Teach me."

The next morning I popped quickly into the university computer lab almost forgetting about the ad, and noticed I had 150 emails in my inbox. By the end of the week I had 1400. Almost every one of them started off saying, "Wow! You sound...." I can't really remember their different opinions to finish that quote. But I decided to print off the first email from every individual, most of them were early or mid twenties. I had a pile of printed emails that were about an inch and a half-thick, and I alphabetized and highlighted in yellow key concepts for them so that I could remember them to reply. I was going to reply to each and every one, I thought, to be fair. So for about three weeks that's what I did in my spare time at school. I told some of them eventually about my dad and how I wanted to move out. They liked me. They wanted to get to know me. I was pretty stunned. They thought that moving out was a good idea, and that I could do it and not die.

Okay, so my latest assessment was probably the most correct. This forcefield of inexperience required nothing more than my initiative to break out of.

And it was at this point that the photo was taken. I was ready to go; I finally had my determination. I didn't do anything to let my behavior worsen for my father to provoke him. Just magically, one day I confessed that I had turned in my application to housing and a room was waiting for me there, and after 24 hours of him being angry, hitting me and giving me the ultimatum that I was no longer his daughter, that I could never come home again and I had swallowed the hurt and overcame my doubt and found the most logical and respectful and meek way to accept those conditions, I shook all over as I packed the car up with my room's belongings in about 45 minutes and drove away without being allowed to say goodbye.

:)

It took about four years for me to gain a full and balanced view of the difference my own initiative and passions could make for my life. And after that was accomplished I began to learn the newer lesson of what my passions could do perhaps for the good of others.