Just Be: A Reflection of 2018 and A Resolution for 2019

Good morning, good day, good afternoon, good evening, good night – wherever you are, whatever you are doing, however you are feeling, take a moment to be grateful for all you have.

Christmas is three days away, and the New Year follows quickly after. The curtain is coming to a close on 2018, meaning that I’ve been reflecting a lot on what I have learned this year. Let’s take a moment to look over what I’ve done.

In April, I started to take medication for my anxiety and depression, which was a big step in humility for me. I try to do everything on my own, but in accepting the idea of medication and implementing it into my life, I learned a lot about what medication actually does, and how I can use it safely for my own good. In this month, I also visited my best friend who I hadn’t seen in two years. Though it only lasted for a few short days, I had so much more fun than I could ever describe.

In May, I had a dance recital, which truly taught me that something as difficult as performing can be the most enjoyable thing given the right environment. My technique wasn’t perfect, and I’m positive I messed up on essentially every dance I performed, but it was my best recital ever because I truly loved every moment.

In June, I visited Life Teen’s Camp Covecrest, a truly life changing week for me.

In July, I took my first plane ride alone to Florida to visit family and spend a week at the beach.

And in August, I started my senior year of high school, which is exciting and terrifying and oh so bittersweet.

Though I have had wonderful experiences this year, I would be lying if I said it has been an easy one. The everyday stresses of being an upperclassman coupled with my mental illnesses has really taken a toll on me. Despite my amazing experience at Camp Covecrest, my spiritual life has suffered a lot this year. A lot of things in my personal life have resulted in struggles for me. Thankfully, I’m blessed with amazing parents, a supportive sister, encouraging friends, and a loving community all around. While this year has been hard, these people are who have kept me afloat, even when they didn’t know I was sinking. For that, thank you. To everyone in my life.

With hardship, however, comes a life lesson that I would be foolish to overlook.

As I said in a previous blog post, I had an incredible encounter with God this summer, when He spoke these words to me: “just be.” These words became my mantra for 2018 in three main ways.

Just be with yourself: What do you do with your alone time? How do you talk to yourself when you’ve had a bad day? What expectations do you set for yourself? Self love is an extremely important form of love, and often we as broken humans don’t quite know how to choose this love. These questions are good ones to start with when wondering how to improve your relationship with yourself.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not proud of the answers to these questions. A lot of my down time is spent watching YouTube videos, scrolling through Instagram, or doing mindless activities. Often times when I have a bad day, I don’t even try to talk myself through it – I distract myself from whatever weight is resting on my shoulders by watching YouTube or scrolling through Instagram (are we sensing a theme, here?). And the expectations I’ve set for myself require me to jump through hoops, perform backflips, and are entirely unrealistic for a seventeen year old to meet. As frequently as I tell my friends to go easy on themselves and make fulfilling choices, I don’t really practice what I preach.

At the beginning of the year, I realized that I was engaging in some very unhealthy behavior. When someone or something would upset me, if I experienced stress or sadness or negative emotion of any kind, I would allow myself one to two days to feel it, then move on entirely. Something fundamentally upsetting would happen, like I would have a big argument with a friend in which they said some very unkind things to me, and I would make myself stop thinking about it after just a day or two. Any feelings that came up after that I would suppress, not letting myself feel them.

This is a great coping mechanism if you don’t care at all about your mental health and want to create unhealthy expectations for your emotions! I thought it was helping me to be more happy and carefree, but in reality, it created a heavier burden on my shoulders over time. Eventually, I got tired of doing this. I wanted to be able to wallow in sadness or anxiety. So I let myself just be with my emotions.

At first, it was painful. I wasn’t used to letting myself feel such intensely negative emotions. To be quite honest, I hated who I was when I was sad. All I saw was a self-absorbed, pitiful girl who needed to get a grip. But my exhaustion with bottling everything up outweighed this self-hatred, and I kept at it.

What I learned soon enough is that the best way to love yourself is to know who you are in all circumstances, good or bad. Don’t force yourself to feel a certain way just because you believe that’s what’s expected of you. Humans need to feel sadness in order to more deeply appreciate happiness; we need to feel anger in order to appreciate peace. When you let yourself feel whatever emotion is demanding to be felt, you will naturally overcome them in your own time.

I of course don’t recommend full-on wallowing in or dwelling on negative emotions, I just encourage you to let yourself feel them and move on in your own time.

Just be with God: In the same way that we set unreasonable expectations for ourselves, we often set expectations for God as well. We believe that He doesn’t want us at our worst, when we are so broken that we can hardly tell who we are anymore. Or we believe that He works only within the confines of our comprehension of Him.

Don’t put God in a box. God is bigger than what we can ever realize. He wants your brokenness, your helplessness, and your complete exhaustion. Just be with Him and understand that whatever you present Him will be a gift in His eyes. You don’t need to have a prayer agenda, a list of petitions that you want God to fix in your life. You don’t need to sit down and apologize for every sin you’ve ever committed. You don’t have to recite scripted prayers and hope for the best. God is with you right now and He is begging you to just be with Him.

Just be with others: As I explained in my previous post about Camp Covecrest, you should also learn how to be with others. You often have expectations for God, or don’t want to show Him the ugly parts of yourself, and it can be the same way with friends and family. Before, I touched on just being with others to learn more about them, which is so very important, but now I want to explore the subject under a different light.

When you let go of your expectations for your friends, you learn how they truly show their love for you. I’ve experienced so much joy in letting my friends show how they love me however they choose, and oftentimes it’s so much more beautiful than what I would have asked for.  A short text to brighten your day, a thoughtful gift, a phone call; these really do mean a lot, and sometimes I need them more than I realize. Let your friends love you.

Lastly, show your ugly side. I know, I know, this is a scary thing. I don’t mean that you should spend every moment with someone just crying about how hard your life is, but if you’re like me, you might often find yourself being too scared to say how you really feel. Whether that’s because you’re afraid of being rejected, you don’t want to “burden” those around you, or you just plain don’t know how to express yourself, it’s not something that a lot of people necessarily enjoy doing.

I’ve learned in these past few months, however, that in telling your trusted friends about your struggles, anxieties, and feelings, you can find a real peace and companionship. You may find that instead of rejection, your friend will totally get you and make an effort to encourage you in bettering yourself. It might be a relief to them that you’re struggling with the same things they are, or just to know that you trust them enough to come to them with your problems. A lot of amazing things can happen by just being open and vulnerable with your friends.

This is the lesson I learned in 2018 – to just be in all aspects of my life. And in 2019 I hope you will join me in implementing this phrase in your life.

Amanda

November 2018 Update

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, good night; wherever you are, whatever you are doing, whatever is on your mind, take a moment to be grateful for your life and whatever is in it.

Normally, I like to have some sort of theme to my posts, and often I try to have a lesson behind it. This time, however, I want it to be different. I haven’t written in a long time, and honestly I miss it! I’ve been very uninspired and lacking ideas, but I think it will be good for me to, for lack of better term, “word vomit” and just say what I’m thinking.

Being a senior in high school now, I’ve been swamped with a lot of responsibilities. I have to take the SAT in a little less than two weeks, I’m trying to fill out applications for college, compose a decent personal statement, tour colleges and ultimately decide on where I’m going to further my education next year. On top of that, I have to keep my GPA up this year so I can get into all the colleges I want, which means working extra hard to make sure I can get all A’s. Maybe I’m complaining too much, but anyone in my boat, or who has been recently, can understand that 12th grade is not an easy grade.

Of course, what is most important to me through this all, is my own wellbeing. I’m working on a post specifically talking about self love, but for now I’ll just say: Catholics need to practice self love as well! It’s very easy to get caught up in a servant’s attitude and neglect our own needs. Especially in my case, I tend to put others before me to a fault, which doesn’t exactly work out.

So this year, this is my project. How can I tend to my mental health needs while still meeting the expectations placed on me? How can I schedule time for work, friends, and leisure while still maintaining a healthy balance of the three? It hasn’t been easy. Struggling with anxiety and seasonal affective disorder has definitely made it even more difficult. But I sure am trying.

For example, I’m writing this right now. I could have been doing extra work for school, and granted that might have been a better use of my time, but I know that with Thanksgiving coming up, I’ll have plenty of time to catch up. I’m face timing with my best friend while she listens to new indie music and cleans her room. My own room is decorated for Christmas. I’m burning a vanilla scented candle. (I’m trying to paint a picture here.) Overall, it’s a very peaceful vibe, much needed after a long, stressful week.

I’m also trying to work on not holding myself to expectations that are too high. I have a tendency to expect only excellence from myself, even in situations in which its unreasonable. So even though I haven’t written anything fantastic and inspiring tonight, I’ve shared a piece of my life. Maybe in won’t get engagement, maybe no one will care to read it, but I’m writing this for me. I’m putting something out there to hopefully kickstart my inspiration again. So if you’ve made it this far, thank you!

I know this wasn’t like my usual posts, but hopefully those will be making a comeback sometime soon. Until then, God bless and Happy Thanksgiving!

 

Amanda

Two Words That Have Changed My Relationships With Others

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, good night – wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, however you’re feeling, take a moment to be grateful for everything you have.

When I went to a Catholic Youth Camp in Georgia at the end of June, I encountered Christ in a new, unexpected way – something that happens often in a good relationship with God. Each night, our keynote speaker would present the camp with a truth about God and a question to go along with it. She explained that questioning our faith doesn’t create separation between God and ourselves; it invites us to let Him into our hearts and answer the question for us.

On the fourth night of camp, Thursday, she asked, “If God is always present, why is He silent?” She explored the common feeling that God doesn’t speak to us at all, that our constant prayers are met with deafening silence. However, a lot of the time, our prayers are few and far between – drowned out by noise and distraction in our everyday lives. Some of these things are ultimate goods, such as school, friendships, or other responsibilities. Others can be negative, with a glaring example being social media. She invited the camp to engage in a full sixty minutes of silence. No talking, reading, singing, or anything of the sort. It gave us teens a chance to slow down and listen to God’s voice, and for many it offered an opportunity to finally receive in fullness a message He has been trying to relay to them.

I’ve been to many of these camps and retreats before, and I consider myself to have at least a semi-active prayer life. Of course, there is always room to grow and I am fully aware of the fact that I can still become closer to Christ than I am now. That being said, a lot of youth events are catered towards teenagers who don’t have an active prayer life and need to encounter Christ for the first time. I participate in the activities, but I obviously don’t have a very strong emotional response to everything.

Going into the hour of silence, I knew I wanted to ask God to speak to me. I expected a heavenly revelation, a shocking realization, and maybe even some tears. I should have known going into it that God works beyond my expectations.

I spent a good deal of the first thirty-five minutes getting distracted and then reeling myself back in and praying that God would speak to me. I was open to what He had to say, but I still had my expectations. The friend I was with quietly asked if I wanted to move to a different spot on campus: a bench swing overlooking the lake and the setting sun. I, of course, accepted, and as we made our way over, we saw a stray dog. We pet the dog, sat on the bench, and I closed my eyes, marveling at how peaceful it was. The sky was a brilliant blue, but the clouds were starting to turn golden. The lake sparkled and the wind floated around us.

I just started to doze off a bit when I heard a distinctly different voice than my own that whispered, “Just be with Me.”

“Just be with Me.”

It all made sense. At this point in my life, that’s all I needed – a reminder to soak in the glory of God and be at peace with my heart.

After getting home from camp, I made an effort to go back to that headspace as often as I could. I would replay His words in my mind over and over, praying on them and letting myself just be. It wasn’t until a month later that I realized the depth behind those words.

So often, when I spend time with a friend, I have an agenda. It seems a lot more comfortable to make plans down to the minute with a friend – we’ll meet here at 1:00, then at 2:15 we’ll drive here – but I find that it’s unfulfilling. Of course, it’s nice to have things to do, and I’m not going to just quit that entirely, but I find that with any relationship in my life, it’s so much more peaceful to “just be” with the person I’m choosing to spend my time with.

Some of my favorite memories with my best friends involve just walking around town, sitting in the drive thru for twenty minutes, staying up until 3:30am just talking about our lives. It’s fun to go to the mall, watch movies, play games, or have photoshoots, but I can get so focused on that that I forget to appreciate the person I’m with. Agendas can be distracting from the true reason why you’d want to hang out with a friend. Since I’ve decided to “just be”, I’ve learned more about my friends and family as humans. I’m slowly starting to see them for who they are, and not just for what they can offer me or how we fit together.

Here is my advice to you: learn how to just be with people in your life. God, your parents, your siblings, your friends. Make the time you spend together a gift to the other person. Forget about yourself and your agenda for a while and appreciate the good people in your life.

 

(P.S. Thank you for being patient with me while I took a break from uploading. I’m going to try to be more consistent.)

What it Means to be a Sinner

Good morning, good day, good afternoon, good evening, good night – wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, whatever you’re thinking, take a moment to think of one good thing in your life and be grateful for it.

If you’ve been to Mass before (and definitely in the past two weeks) you might have heard a recurring theme: sin, darkness, despair, regret. Admittedly not the cheeriest theme, and not a comfortable one at all. I used to hate Lent because it just made me feel bad about myself. It made me resent God, because who would want to sit there and have their flaws all pointed out? Definitely not me.

This time, I’m taking a different approach.

This past year I’ve spent a lot of time having anxiety attacks over things that I’ve done that I’m not proud of. I’ve cried a lot of tears, said a lot of apologetic prayers, and again and again broken my vow to never do that thing again, whether it be neglect of my faith, gossip, or anything really. Each time I break that promise, I find myself growing tired with myself, with being human, with having free will. It’s tiring to always feel like you’re doing something wrong. You just want to be doing something right for once.

And then I go to church and the readings are all talking about that same feeling, that same darkness that I just can’t seem to shake. Take the first reading from about four weeks ago, for example:

Do not human beings have a hard service on earth, and are not their days like the days of a laborer? Like a slave who longs for the shadow, and like laborers who look for their wages, so I am allotted months of emptiness, and nights of misery are appointed to me. When I lie down I say, “When shall I rise?” But the night is long, and I am full of tossing until dawn. My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and come to their end without hope. Remember that my life is like the wind; I shall not see happiness again. Job 7: 1-4, 6-7

No one reads that and thinks, “Wow, that made me feel really good.” It’s dark. It’s full of despair. It has no hope. With a reading like that when you first sit down in church, it’s almost enough to make you get up and leave. No one wants to think about that darkness. We want to push it to the side of our minds and ignore it.

Since I didn’t walk out after the first reading, I got to hear the psalm, which starts with “Praise the Lord, for he is good.” It’s quite a change from the sadness that I had just heard a few seconds earlier. But it’s there. Why the change? Why go so quickly from darkness to praise of the God who allegedly put us in that darkness?

In the Gospel, Jesus is seen again healing the sick and possessed. He goes off to pray alone and people find Him again, but He doesn’t get frustrated or tired or sad. He tells his apostles, “For this purpose I have come.” To heal and love and accept no matter the blemishes or wounds, physical or otherwise.

That is why the change is there. Because these people who acknowledged their darkness sought light, and God, in His goodness and His Love brought it to them. He transformed them.

The Church talks so much about sinners and darkness because they are some of the few things that everyone who has ever lived, lives now, and will live in the future can understand. There’s a darkness that lives inside of us, no matter if we acknowledge it or not. But outside of us, there is a light that is so intensely bright and beautiful that darkness cannot compete with it. Jesus.

A few weeks ago, I uploaded a post about being happy, and one of the steps was to choose to be happy. Likewise, we have to choose light in order to experience Him. He is always just a breath away, waiting for us, because that is what He is here for. He is here for our darkness and here to dispel it. But we have to acknowledge what is inside of us because otherwise we won’t see ourselves be transformed.

During Lent, we are called to give something up. Like me, you might do something like chocolate or makeup, or you might be entirely lost on what to do. If you’re the latter, here is my – Jesus’ – invitation to you:

Look at the darkness in you. Wherever it may come from, identify it and give it to Jesus. It may seem like a crappy exchange to give someone sin in exchange for unconditional love, but Jesus wants nothing more than to make that exchange. He has already given you unconditional love, you just have to accept it. And give Him something in return.

It’s difficult. I’ll be the first to admit it. It’s embarrassing to offer something so ugly and full of despair to anyone, let alone Love Himself. Often times, my pride stops me from doing that – “I need to learn to handle it on my own, anyway,” or, “I know I’m better than this, so I won’t own that part of me” are phrases that I think quite often. But you can’t handle it on your own. Why? Because darkness lives in you until you let someone else in. You will keep going back – I will keep going back – until I take that step towards Jesus and let Him transform me again and again and again and again.

Acknowledge, choose, and be transformed.

You are a sinner, but God extends His hand to you through the darkness. Choose to take it. Choose to be humble and vulnerable and scared for just a moment. Because in some time, you will find yourself filled with light and sunshine and goodness. And you won’t be able to contain in within yourself anymore. 

How amazing,

that Your existence

bubbles up inside me

like the river

on a summer day.

That each time

my knees bruise,

are streaked with mud,

You call me closer.

That the grass clippings

in my hair

would be the very reason

I smile so much more.

Each time we come together,

another chain breaks.

Through You,

like sunshine,

like laughter,

like hot breezes,

I am free.

 

-Amanda

Being Happy

Good morning, good day, good afternoon, good evening, good night – wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, whatever is on your mind, take a moment to think of one good thing in your life, and be grateful for it.

No matter your age, gender, race, or morals, I can 100% guarantee that deep in your heart, what you truly want is happiness. How happiness directly translates to each person is different – we all have different needs. And while I certainly am not perfectly, completely happy, I think I have found a good “recipe” for happiness.

Step 1: Gratitude

Being grateful is the most important part to being happy because it ensures that you don’t take anything in your life for granted. Some of my happiest moments have been those when I feel so thankful for what is happening in front of me – laughing with my best friend, hiking in a beautiful place, spending time with my family. To carry that happiness into your everyday life means to be grateful for everything, not just the especially good things. Food, housing, a nice hot shower – these are things that a lot of people don’t have. Be grateful! You will start to see the good in everything, and be happier overall.

Step 2: Choice

Let’s face it: sometimes, you don’t feel like being happy. Sometimes it’s nice to wallow in your sadness for a bit. What’s important to remember is that you can’t stay in that place forever, My therapist told me, “You can drive down Pity Lane, but don’t park on it.” What she means is recognize the time when it is time to let go of your sadness, frustration, or anxiety and start to choose happiness. Choose to look at the good. Choose to eliminate the negative people, situations, and thoughts from your life. Every morning take a moment to choose positivity. If you rely on your feelings to dictate your life, you will never be happy and you will never maintain a stable life. But that’s a discussion for another post. My point is: happiness is a choice.

Step 3: Giving

For as much as society talks about self-love and self-prioritizing, my third step to being happy is putting others first. Now hold up. I don’t mean neglecting yourself in order to make others happy. I mean do things for people that you love, or take time out of your day to do a random act of kindness. When you make other people happy, you will be happy, too.

Step 4: Acknowledgment

Happiness isn’t experienced by ignoring every bad thing in your life and acting like everything is perfect. It is experienced by acknowledging the parts of your life that are broken and in darkness but recognizing that there is so much more than that. It is seeing everything in your life and knowing that the good outweighs the bad.

While these four steps – gratitude, choice, giving, and acknowledgment – are certainly not easy, and certainly not fool-proof, I have found that when I implement each of these into my daily life, I am more at peace with myself and with others. I feel that with these I live in the very being of love and I can be the best version of myself possible.

Until next time!

-Amanda

A Short Autobiography

Good morning, good day, good afternoon, good evening, good night – wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, and whatever is on your mind, take a moment and think of one good thing in your life. Maybe it’s something as huge as your own wedding, a promotion at work, a great test grade. Or maybe it’s something as small as a nutritious meal you just ate, or a flattering selfie you just took, or a cute dog you saw on your way home. No matter how great or how little, think of that one thing and thank God for putting it in your life.

Now that you’re feeling grateful and relaxed, hello there! My name is Amanda, and I’m a sixteen year old Catholic. I like to think of myself as an emotionally mature girl, and passionate about a lot of things, including my faith, mental health, identity, the pro-life movement, feminism, and a ton more. Inspired by my lovely best friend and the innumerable conversations we have about those topics, I decided to start a blog to discuss these and learn more about other people’s views on these very things.

When first making this blog last night at about 10:30, I was running through possible names in my head and it was very difficult. I considered a few witty ones, a few casual ones, but none of them felt right. Upon pitching them to my best friend, she told me, “They’re not right because they’re not meaningful. Everything you do is meaningful.”

While I don’t want to brag, and I won’t lie and say that everything I do is meaningful (we all have our moments, and we all need to relax sometimes), in all honesty, that’s what I try to do. The words I speak to others, the actions I do every day – I try my best to give them meaning, and really analyze the meaning behind them. And thus Chasing Introspection was born! The dictionary definition of introspection is “the examination or observation of one’s own mental and emotional processes.” I think that being honest with yourself and exploring your own mind so that you can grow as a person every day is important.

This ideology is what this blog will be centered mostly around; my own journey in faith and through hardships, as well as analyzation of human behavior and my own reflections on it.

I’ve started twice before to run a blog, once in elementary school, and once in middle school. I think my middle school one was a step in the right direction for me, but very edited and forced from my part. I tried to make it anonymous and it didn’t work to well for me. I don’t think that I can be anyone but truly myself. So Chasing Introspection will be me, through and through, with no twisting the truth.

Now to get to the statistics. As much as I love to write and express myself, I am a junior in high school. I have dance class, adoration, choir, and copious amounts of schoolwork to complete every day. And I have a serious and consistent case of writer’s block. But as a start, I’m going to try to write a new post every other week. It’s important to me to get my thoughts out on paper (or a computer screen) before they get all jumbled together, and regular updates will ensure that that happens.

So, dear reader, we have reached the end of my short autobiography! I hope that you enjoyed, and for just a few moments could escape from your reality and into mine. Have a wonderful day!