Taking Risks

Please refrain from bad puns about stealing a pile of board games when you look at that title.  Or rather, feel free to make them but keep them elsewhere.

A while back when I was going through student teaching, there were a few spirit days during Homecoming Week.  For 80's day, I elected to wear a homemade Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle costume, Donatello to be specific.  

Turtle Power!

Driving there was a wee bit difficult because I had elected to drive with the backpack on under the rather large brown shirt (spray painted and drawn on).  I don't remember why I decided that was easier, but it took me at least four minutes to fix the seat so I could reach the peddles and steering wheel in a way that made sense.  The whole way to school that day, I was debating about turning around and changing.  Once I was far enough away from home, I switched instead to reminding myself that this was probably a terrible idea.  I wondered again and again if this was just too much, if my cooperating teacher was going to be upset with me, if this would affect my professional chances, etc.  This was your first spirit day as a teacher, and you have gone overboard, I told myself.  

Taking a deep breath, I put on a smile and nodded to people as I walked into the building.  The kids loved it.  

It was a risk.  It was definitely a risk.  But it paid off for me.  

I've felt that same anxiety giving a Christmas present or two, knowing that it was a bit of a gamble.  I've done it with jokes.  I've done it with surprises, once running a surprise intentionally so I could check to see if it was okay.  

Here's what I've found--the best Christmas gifts I've ever given had me churning inside.  The funniest jokes were all the better as that anxiety went with them.  The best surprises involved that bit of risk.  

That's not to say all Christmas presents I felt unsure about were amazing.  Some I thought were good ideas were probably re-gifted that same year.  It's okay.  I had to try.  

As another example, Andy sang at the Bloomington Edge game a little while back (listen to it here on the June 6th entry), and I swear we both thought he was actively dying.  He didn't want to eat anything, all kinds of aches and pains, scratchy throat, etc.  But once he got out there to do his thing, let his voice fill that space, a simultaneous peace and excitement took its place.  Yep, Andy's a performer.  

There are times when I sit down to write another piece of the blog, where I hover over the orange Publish button and just stare at it for a few seconds before going back to scan over everything again.  

I post a lot of intimate things on this blog.  I worry that I might inadvertently single someone out.  I post some things that I'm really thinking and open myself up for that scrutiny.  I worry that when I feel something is an epiphany or at least a strong point that someone is rolling their eyes and going "well, duh," to their screen.  That is a risk in putting that piece of myself out there, that it could then be rejected.  

But that was part of the whole purpose of writing a blog.  I don't want to have a fake presence up on Facebook, where I refrain from saying one thing or another because someone might see it and start an argument when I wasn't looking for discussion.  In the end, I'm not really fishing for sympathy, and I value myself more than the number of likes I can receive on something.  The views counter on my blog makes me feel good, but the distinction is that my self-esteem is not tied to them, such is the trap that many people seem to fall into.  

Each piece of myself I put out there is a risk, but I've found that the pieces I've been most afraid to publish have been the most worthwhile.  I've written about experiences with my own mental health, when to possibly give up on friendships, personal philosophies, political opinions, and church politics, none of which are light topics.  Truth be told I was most worried about the church politics pieces (and subsequently they are probably the most polished ones I have out here) because I had the capacity to offend the most people, talking about a delicate subject.  That it has been of such worth to others has affirmed to me that it was a situation that needed to be addressed and shared, regardless now of whether I see any personal fallout from that situation.  I've written other things that have resonated with people, and it took that initial courage to put it out there in the first place.  

Sometimes, fear is a very real thing that we need to pay attention to, fear being something that can keep us safe.  Sometimes, though, that fear can be an indicator that you're on the right path, like seeing more bad guys in a video game means you're going in the right direction.  

How can we tell these fears apart?  What kinds of fears are legitimately about your safety and what fears are those points in your life where you need to have courage against one demon or another?  

At least in this space, I want to find out by stepping forward.  That means I still will pull Andy over to proofread what I'm posting (particularly if it includes him), but I've never tossed out a subject I felt needed to express.  

I've wanted to publish a book for a long time.  Clearly I can carve out writing time, so what's really stopping me?  Fear, most definitely.  I have ideas, specifically two viable ones, but there is something in that process where I let the fear win.  Through this blog, I've continued to hit that publish button anyway.  It's time to take that leap and start really working on something.

An Anniversary of Sorts

While Andy and I celebrated our fourth wedding anniversary this year, we pulled out something that he had given me for our second anniversary:  the Peterson Family Scroll.  He made it himself, a place for us to document significant moments in our marriage and lives together on cloth between two wooden rods.  Some of the dates were easy--our birthdays, our wedding date, our engagement day--but some of them were a bit harder to pinpoint immediately, such as what days we officially started working at Skyward and then, well, when my surgeries happened for the first year of our marriage.  As we watched our wedding video, it hit me once again how we had absolutely no idea how hard the next year was going to be.

This scroll was a wonderfully thoughtful gift from Andy for many reasons, but the most significant reason for me was that it was evidence that he thought that we had a long future ahead of us, where all of that blank space would be filled with adventures and experiences.  At that particular moment in time, I had been grateful enough just to have survived to our second year.  I remember thinking that perhaps we could hopefully soon get past surviving and get to really living, still uncertain of what that timeline would actually be.  I ended up writing on the scroll "06/12" for the failed surgery and subsequent clean-up surgery as a combined entry.  

It made me a little uneasy to not pull the date up immediately--that was a pretty big life-event to misplace.  I could shrug it off to some extent at least because the whole timeline of that year blurred together in a mass of depression, fear, pain, and all else; who wouldn't want to forget at least some of it?  

My family had the layout etched in more cleanly than I did.  June 9th and June 10th, if I'm on the correct dates now.  We all went in to my first surgery expecting a quick turn around, a few days in the hospital and then on with the rest of our lives.  We maintained that optimism for the first few hours upon waking up.  

And then my pain slid quickly out of control.  Andy will tell you that I shake my head at the pain scale, that it's subjective in a lot of ways and people who have no pain tolerance will tell you with a straight face and calmly that they're at a level ten.  I will refer you to a better pain scale here than the one you'll normally see in doctor's office.  Recovering from surgery, I was sporting a solid five or six or sometimes seven, finding those momentary sharp pains when I moved further than the strictures would allow (and as we figured out that a particular pain medication just didn't work for me).  Then, as the tissue around the new internal stitches disintegrated, we ramped up to a steady ten, easily the worse pain I've ever felt in my life.  At that time, I certainly did not care what day it was.  

Here's what I do remember.  

• A feeling of relief when they told me we were going back to surgery, immediately followed by a deep weight.  I wouldn't call it fear exactly, because at that point being unconscious was where I wanted to be and this was the only way forward from here.  Fear was in that mindset, sure, but this is just what needed to be done at this point.  I could settle into a state of action.
• My surgeon going from cocky to contrite very quickly--the odds of these complications were slim, but still real.  I still don't blame him, though I wonder if he wishes he had played it safer and gone with the ostomy from the start.  
• Waking up three separate times from the impossibly heavy fatigue one feels when coming out of anesthesia and having someone inform me that I had an ostomy now.  Each time, I said something to the effect of "okay."  Two of those times, they checked to make sure that I understood what that really meant, and I confirmed in the same level tone.  The third time, I replied that I had already been informed and they seemed to leave it at that.  
• Hurting more waking up from this surgery than the first, about twenty-four hours before.  It was a little better than before going in, but as much infection as there was all through my abdominal cavity, there was no real rest.  

The whole subsequent month was a blurry mess.  The infection seemed better, the infection seemed worse, my kidneys were shutting down from all of the antibiotics pumped through my body, we needed more drains which had to be put in while I was conscious, we went back to ICU, we left ICU, I learned how to change my ostomy bag, we addressed how to move around again, and I watched a lot of Law & Order in the wee hours of the morning.  

For the most part, though, I took it with a relatively level acceptance at the time.  Somewhere, I made the decision that my overall strategy was to get through today and process it all later.  

To mark this anniversary of surviving through the most difficult two years of my life (because there were two more surgeries and a lot more recovery to be had), Andy gave me a symbol to track how far we had come and how much time we have left for new adventures.  Here now, two years from then and four years after the event itself, I'm still working through all of those emotions that I had put aside, when it was time to act instead of feel.  Hell, there are still physical ramifications that I'm working through.  

I feel like I have said the exact same thing before many, many times, that I still feel some kind of emotionally screwed up with everything that's happened, and yet I need to say it again and again still because I do not feel relief yet in saying it.  There is some relief, sure, but the words I have clearly not found yet still press against my throat, trying to force their way out without form, if need be.  I keep saying what I can in the hopes that this time I will find what it is I really need to say and finally let it out.  To be fair, there were a few times there where I actually could have died; that's still a hard thing to digest.  I'm tired of carrying it, yet I cannot figure out how to let it go.  I suspect that there will be some of it that to linger permanently, but I have yet to know how much.  I don't want to keep more than I have to, so I keep trying to find how I'm supposed to release it.    

This was a long-term traumatic experience, followed understandably by some very real depression.  I have been asked more than once if I was cured or if "that Crohn's thing" was "still a thing."  Somewhere I need emphasize that this is a permanent situation, that remission is possible but never indefinite.  I can feel people wanting to change the subject when I bring it up--some people have more stomach for the gore than they do the emotional, oddly enough, though I would agree the grieving components are easier for the average person to identify with, perhaps the answer unto itself.  And I still need that support sometimes.  It's still a thing.  I'm not sure how to ask for it without depressing my audience, and I do not usually cede that information without being directly prompted.  And most unfortunately, many times I don't even realize until later that I needed that support in that moment, until it catches up with me later when I'm finally alone where I can have a good cry or ask Andy just to hold on to me for a little while, without either of us saying a word.  

And I've said this all, too, that there are many cases besides myself where people are in the middle of an invisible battle.  Can we ask each other how we are and be earnestly interested in the answer?  Can we stop ourselves from internally rolling our eyes when someone struggling with any condition that they haven't just "gotten over it yet"?  I don't mean to infer that we should exhaust ourselves to tend to everyone's every little concern, but that we should act with compassion to all persons and be open when that special attention is required.  

I celebrate how far I have come and those who have helped me through those especially difficult moments.  I celebrate what adventures lay before me.  I still walk through this world a day at a time, trying to make what sense of it I can.

Andy's Favorite Childhood Movie

Andy and I were feeling pretty worn out one day and opted to put in one of his favorite, feel-good movies from his childhood.  Disney's Robin Hood looks great on Blu-Ray.  

Owned by Disney. used without permission

About fifteen minutes in, Andy made an observation--this particular movie was very formative to his thinking growing up.  The movie has still held up in a few ways, one of those things that resonates with you in such a way that you may not understand it at first, unless you take the time to sit down and dissect it.  I've outlined a few of these dissected pieces below.

• Social Justice:  The driving motion of the story comes back to the central point that it is not a good thing for some to have so much and others to have so little.  Prince John is arbitrarily taking more money for the sake of basking in it, with no indication as to what might then be done with those taxes to better communal services, before anyone gets caught in the trap of oversimplifying the lesson to "taxes are bad."  Greed is the real enemy that Robin Hood is fighting against, greed that states one person's wants are more important than the needs of others.  In today's world, we see a reflection of this situation in the kind of capitalism that does not look after its people, where profits are more important than the people that work for them, ultimately hurting the society around it.  Is it any surprise, then, that Andy supports the idea of a living wage?  Furthermore, the exploitation of other persons for the sake of one's own gain is a moral issue.  And there are many, many other examples of things that need to be corrected in our society that once you begin to see them you can never be blind to them again.  
• Equality:  This story is set under a monarchy, working in a simplified feudal system, I assume.  Yet, there is still an imbalance even in that setup, where we recognize that one end of the bargain is not being held up appropriately.  One could even argue that justice/fairness is a sense not counted in the five senses.  Even monkeys can tell when something isn't fair (and for those of you who don't want to hear some of the background and/or just want to see an indignant monkey, here's the short version).  This ties into the social justice component, in that one must first recognize there is a problem before we can do something about it.  Recognizing injustice requires a certain amount of empathy with the other party, and I can certainly tell you that Andy has a lot of empathy, if you have not encountered that yourself.  That empathy is the foundation for "fairness."  Though he may not know how to reconcile the situation, it weighs on him.
• Generosity:  Andy very much likes to give.  We both enjoy hosting and taking our turn to treat when we can.  In fact, once your Christmas present is either bought or arrives in the mail, he's so excited to give it to you that usually it ends up coming to you much earlier than Christmas, that very day, if possible.  I usually decline and wait a little longer, sometimes just to make him twitch.  Robin Hood perhaps had all the reason in the world to just take care of himself, make himself more marriageable for a noble lady, but I imagine that even as his hideout in Sherwood Forrest was modest, possibly for hiding ease but also because he had continued to give away what conveniences he could have had.  
• Fight for what's right, even if it's not easy:  I don't think we could necessarily call his actions civil disobedience, but he's clearly framed to have the moral high ground, particularly against Prince John's prime motivations of greed and power.  Ultimately, it requires the return of King Richard to set everything to rights (because Prince John would then need taxes to repair the castle and take back the money again, etc.).  Robin was among the people and Robin was part of the people.  He knew what the real problems were and fought against the symptoms.  Furthermore, he kept courage in the hearts of his people, recognizing that maintaining that hope was more important than even himself, even taking time to assume the risk of arriving at Skippy's birthday.  He does it all because it is something worth doing, as hopeless as it sometimes seems, and stands out as a strong leader.  Andy is looking for where he can be a kind of figure to work for good.  That inspiration comes from many places, including this childhood memory.
• Take Time out for Things that are Important:  So, confession here first--at the love song after the action-packed tournament sequence, I usually wanted to fast-forward when I watched it as a child.  Andy, though, he apparently loved the mushy love song, where the two foxes walked around the forest and made eyes at each other the whole time.  Even in the midst of all else, Robin Hood stops his crusade, if only for the evening, to celebrate his love.  His quest for justice and equality to return to Nottingham does not consume him to the point where he forgets who he really is.  Furthermore, he is also able to maintain his friendships, striking a balance between all things.  I think this is actually one of Robin Hood's most admirable qualities.  For Andy, he will absolutely drop what he's doing when it's something important and tends to be pretty good at pulling me back in when I've surrounded myself in the details.  It's a delicate balance, no matter who you are.  

Owned by Disney, used without permission

All of these different things, a strong sense of justice, equality, generosity, love, these are all things dear to Andy's heart, things that he considers in his decisions, though I've seen him falling into the trap more than once of caring too much (not that I'm any better at avoiding it myself).  I would certainly make the argument that there were many factors in his development that helped him to lean toward these values, but there was certainly a reason that this movie resonated with him so strongly.  What we expose our children to also matters, but that's a discussion for a different day.  

Interlude # ...12?

Given both the audience that I have had on the previous two posts and the severity of the subject matter, I've had a very hard time trying to decide what I should follow it up with.  As such, I have started four or five posts and have been working on them simultaneously, hoping that whatever piece should follow will follow.  

And then I told myself to calm the hell down.  

Clearly what I had written resonated with a lot of people, in our church and otherwise.  Many people were not aware of the problems in the church or certainly the depth of the problems.  I wanted to help others find words.  And now I have ultimately put a lot of pressure on myself, not writing because I wanted to make my next post another gesture and ultimately not marking anything as good enough and then getting so busy in various life requirements that I wasn't writing at all.  As such, I have come to two conclusions.  

1.  Not producing something is certainly not the answer.  I've given myself the freedom before to have small posts, ones that didn't need to have some great overarching purpose, and I need to reclaim that for myself.  
2.  I am working toward what I need to be doing on the individual level for our church, and I will continue to suggest very strongly that everyone else be doing their own part for the betterment of our community.  I cannot claim responsibility for where we all go from here.

And there we are.  I find that I will likely write more about our church's struggles as they are dear to my heart and particularly because I still feel that not talking about our problems was what allowed them to continue.  But I do not have to put that pressure on myself that everything I write be an epic.  Instead, I acknowledge again that I am free to write here whatever I want to or need to, simultaneously glad to share it with you all.