A letter to myself, from the future.

Ok, does anyone here remember Xanga? For those of you who were born before 1987 and after 1992, it was this blog website that people used to use where junior high kids (and other people, who didn't take Xanga up on the offer) would be given blogs for free and not given any real sense of direction about what to write except to say "white what's on your heart!" 

This is fine, in concept, but it becomes problematic when you consider that the heart of the average junior high kid is a torrent of raw emotional gasoline. I myself have one of those up somewhere, and it's maybe the only writing of mine that I'm truly ashamed of. There are papers I've written that I'm not proud of, but that I can at least say "well, I can see how this paper made me grow as a writer." but Xanga was different. Xanga was where you went to when the fellow junior-high-kids in your life hurt you, either real or in your imagination, and you wanted a lonely mountaintop to cry at using words. It was also used for self-promotion, but we use everything for that.

And the thing is, just because we're not in middle school anymore doesn't mean that life suddenly or miraculously less easy; in fact my current problems in life are much bigger than the ones in middle school that seemed so earth-shattering and large. To give a little contextual background to explain where I'm going with this, living life like we're supposed to can be hard. really hard. Whenever it's really necessary, God really encourages me in it, but that doesn't mean that it will ever come naturally or ever be painless. And none of this isn't to say it isn't great; in fact the last week of my life has been filled with elements that are sweet and precious. encouragement from friends, celebrations, endings, beginnings, mountains, bus rides, sunrises, rice-harvests, good friends, flannel weather, and above all the assurance that I'm doing what God called me to do and that whatever pains that come up will soon get caught up in the refiner's fire and leave only the sweeter memories that make it all worth it. But none of that is really helpful at all when you're dealing with the spiritual equivalent of getting kicked in the gut, which will happen from time to time when you're a very imperfect person striving after a perfect God. And when it happens, don't be surprised when you get to the end of it and all of your logic has fallen apart and you see the shards of pride all around you and you were never as humble as you thought you were all along. It's kind of a lovely humility mechanism built into humanity, I think, that we're designed to every once in a while get shattered by our own fallen selves. But that does not change the fact that the junior-high method of dealing with our problems is not healthy and can really hurt the people around us. so I'm proposing a new method, which is to right now write this letter to myself which I can refer back to. It's a work in progress, so bear with it. It's to work sort of like a doctor's prescription, to be prescribed whenever I feel emotionally horrible.

Dear Austin,

first of all, your problems are very small. you don't have a right to expect others to feel as hurt or as bad as you about whatever small problems that you think are big right now. You've gotten this far, so the important thing to concern yourself with isn't how you got to where you are now, but how you're going to get to where you need to be. You have this tendancy to croc-pot your emotions and only come around to dealing with them when you're no longer emotionally stable to be able to, so if you feel horrible, and then a half an hour later you haven't dealt with anything and you still feel horrible, you've gone too far without dealing with your problems. If your problem is with a person, talk to them. If your problem is with God talk to him. At any rate talk to someone, because the way you act when you are alone and angry is the saddest most pathetic thing ever. I know you have your limits, so a good rule of thumb is that if you've listened to 4 angry songs by the mountain goats or watched a season of a television show, or spent 3 hours bottling up your feelings, you've gone too far and you need to stop it and deal with your problems. if it's a person, humble yourself and fix it. if it's where you are in life, change where you are in life or else allow yourself to be content with the season you're in. you're a lot more fun when you're happy, so stop being sad or angry or depressed or lonely or despondent or bored or overcome and deal with your problems so we can move on to the important stuff that you won't just want to forget. Oh, and most important, stay off the internet until this is all over.

Your buddy,

Austin

Sorry I'm not actually talking about my life among the mountains and plains of northern Thailand yet. I'll get to it at some point. It's really hard for me to write about that stuff in this setting because I paid a state university thousands of dollars to beat into my skull the idea that anything I write needs to have a thesis statement. and it's hard to do that when the thesis statement is "hey look, neat!" but I'll think of something better soon.

Hi, Mom.