I'd Hide Myself In A Hole If I Weren't Such A People Person

With every compliment, my self-esteem is lowered a little bit.
I’d like to attract a friend who doesn’t develop feelings for me; someone who isn’t a “friend with other intentions”, or at least someone who respects me as a person enough to still be my friend after I turn him down.

I’d like a boy to look at my mouth when I talk, not what I honestly try to cover.

I’d like a boy to hang out with me because he thinks I’m clever/funny/sweet/interesting, not attractive.

I’d like a boy to give me more compliments on my personality than my body.

I’d also like a car.  Perhaps a Ferrari? 

My relationships with boys matter to me, because most of my friends are boys.  I relate more to girls but boys are funnier, relaxed, and more open to my sense of humor, so I connect with them better.  It doesn’t help that I’m a social butterfly and crave interaction with other human beings at all times.  But boys, you are getting hard to put up with!

Maybe I bring it upon myself.
Do I draw attention to myself?  I admit, I wear makeup.  I wear pretty cute clothes.  I wear more tank tops than t-shirts, but my cleavage rarely shows.  I wear jewelry and spend more than five minutes picking out an outfit each day but in all honesty, it’s like a hobby for me.  Like most girls, I like coordinating clothes with makeup and jewelry.  It’s another creative outlet. 

Maybe the Muslims have a point.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we all dressed alike and every woman had to cover every inch of her body except her makeup-less eyes?  They would have to treat us like individuals.  They couldn’t tell how big our boobs are or how cute our faces are.  It’d be nearly impossible for them to hit on us, because they’d have to know us first.  They’d have to be turned on by our sweetness and our smarts, not how low our shirts are.  We wouldn’t have to try to impress them with our looks.  We’d all look the same but different heights and widths.  Wouldn’t it be great to be treated like an intellectual and not an object all the time?

But we can’t do that.  To demand that every woman respect herself enough to cover everything up would be an invasion of our personal rights.

Damn you, freedom!  Damn you!

Maybe I should stop complaining and make a change.

I’ve thought about not wearing makeup and only wearing t-shirts all the time, but I don’t want to be considered unattractive.  I just want to look nice.  I don’t want to cringe every time I look in the mirror—I’d rather be confident that I am a good looking person.  I just want to know that I am able to charm a boy, not turn multiple boys on.  Maybe there’s a switch for my femininity? 

Maybe these silly physical things shouldn’t matter to me so much.

If someone treats me differently because of the way I look, I shouldn’t want their company.  It’s as simple as that, and as hard to accept as rocks are to chew.  People make their first impressions within the first fifteen seconds of meeting someone and the rest of their time is spent subconsciously finding evidence to support his or her judgment.  By wearing makeup to please and dressing to impress, I’m playing that game.  I’m recognizing the way girls are treated differently because of their external qualities, not their internal ones, and I am allowing myself to be put above some of them. 

So I’ll blame you.

I hate this generation’s priorities and how they’ve influenced me.

The Black Seems Less Vast This Time

I am writing this on a bus. It’s a Megabus that you order tickets from online and the sooner you get them, the cheaper they are, prices starting at $1.  Megabuses attract foreign people and college kids like myself; much different from Greyhound buses that are twice as expensive but more popular, and attract old people and business people. I’m travelling from Philly to Pittsburgh, and then getting a ride back to campus from a friend. 

I have an Asian girl sitting next to me. She’s quiet and is content with staring straight in front of her. 

I remember the last time I rode this bus.  I wasn’t able to sleep, so I stared out the window at the complete blackness.  313 miles of the world passed before my eyes, but it was just the abyss to them.  The road stretched on forever as I was cooped up in a bus for six hours, and I wondered how long it took the tired men to pave it. 

You’d think that since I can’t see anything, I’d feel like there is less matter surrounding me, but the black makes the entire world bigger as I feel smaller.  The thought of travelling never scares me since my life is lived in a suitcase, but I took a mental step out of my life to look at it in third person.  There I was, an eighteen year old child, travelling to another city by herself.  She was leaving a campus filled with hundreds of peers but she didn’t feel as if she were in a community.  More lost in a crowd of other faces not looking to make new friends.  I was leaving a dorm where I lived, with a hometown with no home.  I felt extremely alone right then…but I don’t remember feeling lonely at school…maybe since I was surrounded by people at school, I felt especially alone doing something by myself for the first time in a while.

Less lonely and more afraid.  Like imagining all of the universe’s planets, suns, black holes, and meteors that could strike at any moment; and here is our tiny Earth, seemingly huge to us, just suspended in midair-there is no air in space-mid-nothing, only orbiting the sun.  The rotation around the sun…the very foundation of normalcy that connects us all, but isn’t completely reliable.  Does this frighten anyone else?  It does for me, which is why I hate astronomy.

Now imagine you, a tiny person floating around Earth’s surface, with only your money and connections suspending you in normalcy and recognition as a person, which essentially makes you who you are; your relatives, where you’re from, where you live, who you know, what your job is if you have one.  Am I right?

I realized what little I have of that.  I realized how much my fate relies on chance and who knows me and is willing to not take advantage of me or give me a break. 

“God is everywhere,” said that Sunday school teacher.  She was so sure of herself, but I felt as if humanity is alone on this Earth and God only touches us from where He is in His otherworld haven.  Why would he want to dwell here more than how long He made Jesus live here already?

Because He is in me.  The Holy Spirit tells me what place I should travel to next, what I should do with this life and its gifts, and sometimes gives me the perfect things to say. 

God is in me, and I’m here.  God is here, and I’m never alone.

The sun takes its time setting, leaving the sky a violet that’s more colorful than what’s below it.  Then it disappears completely.

The black seems less vast this time around.

Whether You Believe It Or Not, We're Standing On Common Ground

You and I, Dee, we’re years apart, but our lives are going through the same turmoil.  Telling people a bit of information about our personal lives-our families, our childhoods, our pasts-is terrifying.  Letting them in is playing the lottery that has only wasted our time and emotion in the past.  It’s like God is telling us to only trust Him and not to put faith in humans at all.  Everyone we’ve come to trust started out with a perfect friendship, but then betrayed us in some completely unpredictable way.  Is God telling us that we’re only supposed to reply on Him?  That our trust is a gift and shouldn’t be given to anyone but Him?  I thought so, but my doubting eyes were looking at it the wrong way.


God is trying to tell us something, but not through hurting us.  He’s always telling us to rely on Him more and to let only Him be our strength, not them.  
2 Corinthians 12:9-“Each time He said, ‘My grace is all you need. My power works best in weakness.’”  
We are weak.  We succumb to strong, close relationships, that have the tendency to have power over us.  When they fail us, we curl up in fetal positions under our covers like children hiding from monsters who’ve deceived us by looking like elfin fairies, believing that we understand the grime of the world and why it needed Jesus.


Psalm 56:11-”In God I have put my trust; I will not be afraid. What can man do to me?”
What can they do to us if God is our strength, the foundation in our very cores? They can beat us and steal from us, but these bodies are only shells and these material possessions will not last anyways.  Humans cannot damage God, and if God is at the heart of everything we do and feel, they cannot touch us.


It is ok to get close to people.  They can’t break us.  He designed us to be sociable beings and to form bonds through fellowship with other believers (1 John 1:7). We need to grow close to people who fear the same God, especially those who only want to help us.  The Bible says to store up treasures in Heaven (Matthew 6:19); one way to understand this is to look at what we have on Earth that will also be in Heaven.  NOTHING, besides fellow Christians.  Those people, in all their flaws and beauty, are our treasures.  Your roommate, me, my dad, and your other believing friends are your treasures.  The connections you have with us sparkle like gems, even if they look uncertain now--not because we fear the same God and are walking the same path, but because these connections are miracles in themselves.  Though sometimes painful, they are gifts from God Himself.  It’s not right to ignore what He has done in our tiny lives with His own, almighty hands.  We shouldn’t trust and rely on each other completely but value, listen to, and share with each other with complete acceptance and honesty. 


We want you.  We Love you.  We are here for you.  Please forgive us our sins of our pasts and those against you recently.  If we could live our lives in which our words and actions only helped you, we would.  But we are human.  Just like you.

So let’s be friends.

I Am An Individual Who Is Not Mean To Be Individual

Hi. I love you. I want to marry you.

I want to build a house with you.  A home made with our own two hands, where we can sleep all we want, laugh without being told we’re too loud, have old friends visit us, cry without being worried about, throw up without being heard, make Love in privacy, and exhale deeply when we walk into it saying “It‘s so good to be home!”.  It will be all ours and it will hold our possessions and holiday decorations and pictures and book of all our adventures we’ve had together.

I want to have a bed with you where we’ll fall asleep holding each other, wake up next to each other’s smiling faces in the morning-or afternoon-and make thunder under the covers.  
I want to have meals with you where I’ll learn what you hate and never make it for dinner and learn what you love and surprise you with it after a hard day.  

I want to live a life with you.

I want to take care of you in the special way that I’ll only care for you in, just as you’ll take care of me because my life will be spent serving others.  But you’ll be in my life, the one good thing in my life, that keeps me strong and keeps me patient.  I want to be there during the bad times.  When someone close to you dies and you feel like there’s nothing left to live for, I’ll remind you of your purpose.  When you experience a traumatic event, the kind that creeps up on good people and no one ever finds out why it happened to you, of all people!  I want to give you security.  When you’re feeling low and hating yourself, I want to show you Love.  When you’re tempted with the sins of your past, I want to remind you of who you have strived so hard to become.  When you forget me, I want to forgive you, because you’ll be worth it.  When you mess up, big time, I want you to chase after me because I know I’ll be waiting for you if you just show me that it was a mistake and you still care for me the most.  We all do unbelievably stupid things, don’t we?


I want us to have jobs that we can support each other with, but we’ll be passionate about so we can come home to tell each other about them.  I want you to take me to your work parties and you can visit my school to meet my students.  We can go to friends’ holiday parties and socialize with other people, but sit by each other and be “that couple” that everyone envies.  I want to sit together in church and talk about the sermon on the drive home.  I want to hear every stupid detail about your day and I’ll listen as if it’s the best story ever told, because it will be just as exciting coming from your mouth.


I want to grow old together.

I want to compare teeth and take bets on who gets denchers first.  I want to look at you the same way I did when we were young and find you just as attractive, because you’ll be the only attractive man in my eyes, even with your bald head and wrinkly sagging skin.  We’ll be together so long that we won’t notice we’ve gotten old.  I want you to only stare at me when my cellulite is obvious in my bathing suit, when there are young women in bikinis everywhere.  I want us to have countless inside jokes from years of being together, and as many dreams and goals as memories that we reminisce over while we’re laying in bed at night.  I want us to hold hands while we’re reading on our couch together, and I want to read Psalms together when we both can’t sleep.  
I want our grave stones to be side-by-side, and we’ll have a double funeral because as soon as you die, I’ll die too.  I won’t kill myself, or die of starvation or bulimia.  But once you leave this world, I won’t have the will to stay in it.  My immune system will shut down, along with the rest of my organs, one by one, until I am too thin to stay on the ground and too tired to get up, all the while praying I’ll shut down faster. 

He's All I've Ever Had

Butterfly—that’s what my heart turns into when he speaks to me, fluttering around, weightless.  My stomach turns into a bullfrog that jumps up and down and tries to escape from my abdomen.  The same compliments I’ve always heard from other boys actually mean something coming from his mouth.  When people ask about him, I can’t tell them anything because I don’t know where to begin; and having people associate him with me steals my breath with excitement.

Falling in Love is a funny thing.

Unlocking the twenty padlocks and bolted door to my closet and having him see the cemetery full of skeletons I’ve done so well with hiding…feeling forgiveness.  Telling him all about what is bothering me when I said I don’t want to talk about it five minutes ago, without having to be interrogated.  Telling him things about me that no one else knows, and feeling completely accepted for it.  Dialing the first number on my speed dial every time something horrible or exciting happens, like a nightmare or a new job.   Singing and dancing like a drunkard around the room and seeing his grin every time I twirl in his direction; my silliness is appreciated, not judged.  Feeling special when reading beautiful poems he wrote for me.  Laying under the sheets, our legs and arms tangled in each other, his body radiating heat and his chest as my pillow, feeling completely comfortable.  Feeling safe when getting lost in downtown Pittsburgh at 1 AM with him, because you have to want to be somewhere else to be lost.  Listening to his heartbeat and thinking that as long as it’s still there, so am I.  Making plans for times we’re decades away from, and believing we might carry them through.  Cracking one of our thousand inside jokes and feeling the closeness I never thought I could achieve with another person.

Feeling in Love is a funny thing.

Yelling over the phone until my voice cracks.  Crying until I’m dehydrated.  Staying up until no one else is awake, even on weekend nights, to keep myself unhappy with arguing because I think it can make me happy in the long run.  Not being able to pay attention to any homework, especially the paper in which I’m writing about a poem that compares love to suicide.  Feeling ashamed when my friends know the exact and only reason I’m feeling down; snapping at them when they tell me I deserve “better”.  Swallowing my pride and ignoring faults I think are disgusting, because I care more about him and our relationship’s outcome—also known as “compromising”.  Wondering what life would be like with complete independence, but knowing I wouldn’t have it any other way than this.

Being in Love is a funny thing.

Staying out with whoever I want and wherever I want, with no one to be angry at me when I get home at the wee hours of the morning.  Getting my belly button pierced, because I can.  Not caring if guys hit on me, because I have no loyalty to uphold.  Making plans to go to other states, possibly other countries.  Not dreading the possibility of having a male friend develop feelings for me.  Not feeling the need to impress anyone.  Feeling freedom, for the first time in ages.

Falling out of Love is a funny thing.

Sleeping in a bed, alone.  Sleeping on other peoples’ floors, couches, and beds so I don’t have to sleep alone.  Making plans to go places by myself.  Turning boys down because they’ll never compare, not because I’m taken.  Listening to only screamo music, that numbs my thoughts.  Sleeping with the light on.  Not being able to be alone, ever.  Responding with “fine” when people ask me how I’m doing, and feeling like a total liar.  Crying spontaneously in classes.  Wanting to sleep all the time, without feeling tired. 

Brokenness is a funny thing.

Butterfly-that’s what I feel like when I dance around my room to praise music, leaping and spinning, light-footed and lithe.  Reading my Bible multiple times a day, as if it is medication. Crying out to unseen ears.  Sobbing for hope and the supernatural peace that I’ve been missing.  Putting my life in invisible hands.    Praying as if I am conversing with a friend.  Feeling offended by things I used to indulge in.  Saying things I thought were only said by prudes.  Feeling like a nun when I refrain from doing things with my friends because they’re against my morals.  Forgetting “priorities” I thought were so important.  Asking for approval before every step I want to take is taken.

Falling in Love with God is a funny thing.

“You never know God is all you need until God is all you have.” Frederick Warren