A Normal Life

Journal & Essays

“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.” – Albert Camus.

You know, I want to be a normal girl. I want to be involved in the ordinary, common things that the people around me enjoy. Watching sports, eating ice cream, going to the bar for a drink (even though, admittedly, I’d be drinking water rather than beer).

I want a normal life, grounded in everyday, relatable realities. I don’t want to live some obscure, tucked-away existence, like a mystic removed from the world, inhabiting another plane. I don’t want rarefied interests or a Bohemian lifestyle. I don’t want to be locked away in an ivory tower; nor do I want to wander the desert, pursuing the ascetical path of perfection. I want simple; I want normal; I want human.

I want to take my car to get an oil change and then string up Christmas lights – without all the while contemplating the metaphysical significance of what I’m doing. I want to invite people over for dinner and laugh with them about silly, unimportant things. I want to wash dishes afterward and stay up late learning how to play poker and swear in Italian. I want to get married and have kids and spend my afternoons going to little-league softball games and soccer matches and meetings of the PTA. I want to brew a cup of hot tea and make up a bed for someone who’s sick. I want to go to church without feeling panicked – and without worrying that I don’t know what’s True, or that I need to sort out the questions of existence before the hour is up, or that I have to join the convent (or do some other thing I really don’t want to do) in order to please God.

The things I desire are actually really simple. I just happen to be a complicated person, which makes the simplicity of my desires seem impossible sometimes.

But here I am, wanting to be simple – wanting to lead a simple life – and at the same time not wanting to renounce the things that make me, me.

It’s not impossible, right? But even if it is – well, I guess I will have to take refuge in the belief that, with God, “nothing shall be impossible.”

Current Thoughts (No. 2)

Journal & Essays

Today’s interesting little occurrence: I went to Mass tonight. During Mass, I was (in my usual, distracted way) thinking about how to make a living and I prayed: “God, please just answer this one question for me: can I make money by writing?” As soon as Mass was over, I looked at my phone and I saw I had a missed call from a friend and a text message that said: “Just called because I had an idea about a job you could do writing lyrics to music … and I would be able to pay you through my church.” Kinda funny, right?

Brief Thoughts (No. 1)

Brief Thoughts

  1. Suffering is useless if it doesn’t make us more compassionate.
  2. Romanticism vs. practicality: can’t they exist together? Who says we need to choose just one? The people who are trying to force a choice out of us are also the ones who can’t imagine holding two contradictory ideas in the mind – and the ones who are always coloring inside the lines.
Quotations

We were not created to lead drab, narrow, or constricted lives, but to live in the wide-open spaces. We find confinement unbearable, simply because we were created in the image of God, and we have within us an unquenchable need for the absolute and the infinite. That is our greatness and sometimes our misfortune.

Rev. Jacques Philippe, Interior Freedom

Health & Home

Laundry on Drying Rack

PSA: Try hang-drying some of your clothes next time you do the laundry. It’s gentler on your clothes (which allows them to last longer), gentler on your energy bill, and gentler on the planet.

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Tired

Journal & Essays

If I can be candid: this year has been rather miserable for me. I won’t describe my predicaments in detail here, but I’ve been struggling with many health problems that, most days, leave me feeling very sick and barely able to function. Week after week, month after month. It’s a ceaseless refrain. Occasionally I have a “good” day, and it seems like everything is perfectly normal, but those kinds of days are oddly unpredictable and few and far between.

What’s more, my relationship with God has been reduced to something scarcely recognizable. I still believe, but I’m holding on by a thread. I used to be so close to God. Even in the darkness (and there were years of darkness), He was always, at the end of the day, my most intimate Friend, the One I loved.

But now, who knows where in the hell I am? I’ve probably drifted far downstream, to a place where goodness is but a glimmer and the fruit on the vine is all shriveled up. In this place, dozens of existential confusions vie for my attention (as they were always wont to do), but these days I’m too tired to contend with them. I spent so much time, and so much yearning, seeking truth and love – only to end up in this crooked, lifeless place. The bleakness of my disappointment is hard to render.

I think to myself: “Maybe I’m just tired of trying to be good.” Indeed, sometimes, in my disillusionment at what life has revealed itself to be, I feel like abandoning the whole project of being a decent human being. “Wouldn’t it be easier,” I think, “to take my messed-up humanity and run with it?”

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