Being Neat

Whenever I feel out of control, I make up my bed. It's this one little thing that gets totally disregarded when things are fine and fun and hectic and exciting and is just a thorn in my side when things are slow and sluggish and hardly bearable, but it's an easily removable thorn so when things feel out of control, I remove it. I make up my bed and I feel like, out of all the things I've done wrong, at least I have done this one thing right. It might not give me a star in my crown, but at least it's something.

I had to make up my bed when I got back home today because I yelled at a dear friend yesterday. She told me that I had a tone of defeat and I snapped and said that of course I did, because she had been attacking me all night, which was absolutely true to me at the time. I went on a lovely little rant listing off the wrongs she had done me and how hurt I was and how I really just needed to go away and think about things like this and then I left and went to bed hours earlier than I planned. I lay there for probably an hour, seething at the laughter coming up the stairs and listing the reasons why I was right and she was wrong.

I can't get over how childish it was. I can't get over how defensive I was being. But maybe it'll turn out to be a good thing that I was childish and defensive, because looking back at it has turned this into a tipping point. There have been a lot of tipping points in my life lately, or opportunities for tipping points. I feel like the guy on his roof during the flood, you know, the guy who ignores the weather forecast, the storm warning, the emergency warning, the guy in the row boat and the emergency helicopter because he says God will save him and then when he dies, asks God why he never sent anyone to help. I might have missed the warnings, but, after yesterday, I think it's about time I jumped on a rowboat.

I'm in a weird place in life. Friends are getting engaged and married, they're starting careers, they're working and living these lives that I'm consistently amazed at. I wonder who stopped watching us and started letting us play adults. Doesn't the world know that we don't have it figured out, that we've never filed our own taxes before, that we barely know how to live our lives, much less combine our lives with someone else's or even make another life? I don't know what I want to be when I grow up. Am I grown up? Because it sure as hell doesn't feel like it.

It feels like I'm going through being a teenager again, you know, rocking out that angsty, independent, finding-yourself phase. Did I never have opinions before? Because I'm defending them now like a mama bear defending her cubs. Have I never looked in a mirror before? I'm noticing all sorts of flaws and features I never considered until now. And someone needs to pull me aside and explain to me that while animal crackers and icing may seem like a great idea for a meal, it's not. Just because you can eat something doesn't mean that you should. I have a lot of thoughts that are all, "I'm an adult! I can make my own choices! Can't nobody tell me what to do!"

It's just that I've been making choices that haven't always reflected the person I should and want to be. Some of those choices have dug me down deep and deeper into a hole that I've been in long enough to question whether I even want to get out. Being in that hole makes it easier to listen to the lies that echo around in my head, and if you hear a lie enough, it begins to be absolutely true to you. And I don't think that there's an amount of afterschool specials or cheesy morals in movies that can overcome the lies-that-became-truths in your head. I think some people can think their way out of it, maybe. I think that sometimes people whom you respect have to remind you what's right and what's good and what's true, and they may have to remind you of that often, whether they're people who've written a book or people who've written a song or people who've made a movie or a TV show or people who see you on a daily basis and choose to see your potential for good as being greater than your existing bad. I think that sometimes you need to get help greater than what is readily available to you in your day-to-day life.

 I think it's time to turn a corner. It's time to move beyond making up my bed. Let's chose to be better today.

What about you? What are your turning points?