It happened.
After a consistent, 12-day streak, I missed a day of writing.
As I knelt on the bathroom floor, my head over the toilet, frightening, unspeakable things happening in my stomach, I thought to myself, I don't think I'll be writing tonight.
Yesterday was a great day. We spent the morning with our church family, went to lunch, and came home to an afternoon of lounging on the couch. Around four, I joined some girls in the dorm for a yoga class that a student was teaching. Yoga - not really my normal workout, but it sounded fun. Plus, if a bunch of girls were doing it, it was sure to be an entertaining time of trial and error.
So we did yoga. I contorted my body in weird ways, watched this tiny, poised student gracefully demonstrate how to breathe and bend, and had a good laugh with the other first-timers. I came back to my apartment to shower and discovered a strange, tight pain in the back of my head and neck. Gradually, the pain worsened. For the rest of the evening, I was scrounging for every pill and remedy I had available. But nothing helped. What made the night turn for the worse was the nausea that came with the headache. I spent the evening horizontal because lifting my head made me run to the bathroom. And the jostling of running to the bathroom made me even sicker. So yeah, horizontal was my best option.
I tried, pathetically, easing the pain with the Golden Globes and some good ole' fashioned live tweeting. For a while, it worked. I was laughing at my favorites, Amy Poehler and Tina Fey, and watching the Twitter feed fill with hilarious commentary. Of all the famous and not-so-famous people working to fill my head with something other than pounding, Jen Hatmaker made my night.
Jen Hatmaker is a person. I have to keep telling myself this in order to take her off the pedestal I've placed her on. She is a writer, speaker, mom, wife, challenger, encourager, and champion. You look at her and wonder how she does everything. How does she write and raise a family and speak and serve and advocate and study and live tweet? Like many female writers I admire, Jen models the way I desire to balance work and personal life. In a lot of ways, she mixes it all together and produces this honest, messy way of living that gives me hope.
Recently, Jen wrote about the pressure of New Year's resolutions and making ourselves better. Here's a bit from her:
But New Year’s feeds into my dark side, and I feel the pressure toward AWESOMENESS. Maybe this year I will live up to the hype. Maybe this year I will be THE MOST AWESOME author and THE MOST AWESOME mom and the MOST AWESOME WIFE AND PASTOR-TYPE AND FRIEND AND SCHOOL VOLUNTEER AND CULTURAL ANALYST AND RACIAL RECONCILER AND TV GIRL AND BOOK PROMOTER AND BLOGGER AND PERSON OF INTEREST AND INSTAGRAMER!
I will be awesome at all of these things and it will be stunning and I will finally rid myself of this icky guilt I carry around all the live long day for being not awesome enough in the area of ______ (all things fit this blank at one point or another). It’s a simple formula really: just be very, very good at everything. Is that so hard? The problem is that when I get quiet, when I listen to God’s very still small voice in my heart, when I pay attention to what makes me feel alive and joyful and in my place (as opposed to displaced), it almost never revolves around being awesome. (Read the whole blog here)
I see women like Jen or Nish Weiseth or Shauna Niequist, and I want to juggle all the things they have in their lives. I want the family, the writing career, the influence, the passion, the community, the everything. What I love, though, is this kind of honesty from Jen. Doing all these things, striving for awesomeness? It's not what God desires. As I've been learning and stated here before, God is asking us to be faithful. I trust that these women are doing just that - they are being faithful with what God has given them. Right now, I've not been given the same things, not exactly. I've been given a lot, though. I want to be faithful with that.
I want to be quiet and still enough to hear God. That's what I prayed this morning as I readied myself for a new semester. God, let me be quiet and aware of your words and your direction. Let me draw close to you so that I am with you.
Being sick and missing a day of writing is good for me. I wanted so badly to start these 30 days of writing and finish without any hiccups. I thought that accomplishing this would get me something big. Really, though, I am thankful for the interruption. I'm thankful that writing in real life and real time does not look easy and smooth. Some days it's pretty difficult and I'd rather do anything but sit here and type out words. And some days, I'm throwing up and no writing gets done.
But every day, and especially today, I'm reminded that being awesome is not that important. Being faithful and being close to God is the best thing. Nothing else quite feels as right.