I've been checking up on the blog periodically, but I finally decided to actually sit down and write a post. I was avoiding it a little bit because I was like, this is the summer blog. Since I'm still at Penn until tomorrow night, I'm having a difficult time considering this period of my life summer. What I'm going to write about I was originally just going to leave as a post on my Xanga, and I may still copy this over there anyway, but I figured I could just as well post it over here so that you guys could hear a little bit about what's happening in my head right now. Something that I really struggle a lot with is acceptance. Not so much my acceptance of other people, because I tend to think that I'm all right at that, but rather whether or not I feel that other people are accepting me. On my Xanga I talked about this as well, and how a woman I met for like, two seconds prayed for me and asked God that I would learn that I am accepted by Him. Even though I really appreciated and saw the truth in her prayer, I've still been having difficulty applying that to my life. The past week and a half has been mad stressful for me. I had to wrap up the last of my five horrible finals, pack my entire room into a handful of boxes, and somehow get rid of all of my crap without paying with both arms, a leg, and the soul of my firstborn. That was all finally finished, but I couldn't even rest after all of that because I had to move on to College House Alumni Ambassadors, which wound up being a lot of fun but nevertheless required me to help out with various projects when I would rather have been chilling with friends, and in some cases forced me to wake up so that I could be at a specific place at a single-digit time, something that I do my best to avoid whenever possible. Then, on Friday, I got my grades. Let me tell you, my GPA took a direct hit this semester, and that, on top of everything else I felt like I'd had to deal with, finally got to me again in between Friday night and Saturday night. I began to feel like a complete and colossal failure. A stressed-out, washed-up complete and colossal failure. We'll get back to this later.
I've made a list of things that I want to accomplish by summer's end, designated the Self-Improvement-Summer List. Some of the stuff on the list is more private, but others are more public, like learning how to play guitar, whatever. The point is that I made this list in the interest of improving myself, but last night I was thinking about the list and linked it back to my constant problems with acceptance. I was in a bookshop perusing the aisles, trying to find something that both interested and challenged me. It was late and I was tired, and when that happens and nobody is around I tend to talk to myself. Sue me. I was in this bookshop and I was searching around muttering under my breath, I need to be better, I need to be better. I'll be honest, things started to get a little schizophrenic up in my head, as I alternated between trying to comfort myself ("You'll be just fine. You're an okay chick.") and berating myself ("You need to be good at something, you need to be better than this."). In the midst of my personality's argument with itself, the part of me that's been growing in Christ since I got to Penn kept butting into the conversation saying stuff like, "Who do you need to be better for? Other people, that's who. Who are those people to you? God accepts you the way you are, remember?" This part of me, my voice of reason, so to speak, was obviously right. That, however, did not keep the rest of me from continuing to complain about myself. I started to involve God in my internal dialogue: "I know that you accept me, but I need these other people in my life, too, and I'd really prefer if they could like me more rather than less." So here I am in this bookshop, wandering down the aisles with three different conversations happening in my head. What I learned from the end of it was that God is clearly not the most important person in my life yet, because I'm still terribly concerned about what other people think of me, despite the way I may act or even what I may claim in real life from time to time. Remember when, one paragraph ago, I was talking about how I felt like the world's biggest failed child? I swear to you, Asian parents have nothing on my mother, and when my dad decides to make a critical contribution, it's a wrap. I haven't talked to my mom in like, three days because I don't want to have to talk about my grades, and if I try to talk to my dad he'd just be thrilled that I only got a B+ in COMM because he'd rather have me major in rocket science anyway, which is far from being mad encouraging. I started comparing myself to everyone else I knew, knowing in my heart that there was no way that this one girl I knew had gotten as low a grade as I had in my least favorite class of the semester, Greek and Roman Mythology, and that getting a sucky grade in that class was worse than getting a sucky grade in STAT by far. This whole failure feeling also fueled my three-way conversation with myself and God, and though it was pretty much at the back of my mind by this morning it was brought to the fore again by Pastor Young's message. Very rarely do I feel as though a sermon was crafted through the will of God for my heart's current state, but today was one of those times, I think. Pastor Young just totally hit that part of my worries on the head in an attempt to completely obliterate the darn thing when he said, "You can't focus on your failures. Don't let yourself become your failures." He went on to say something like this (I'm just gonna paraphrase since I don't remember the exact wording): Stop comparing yourself to other people. You should compare yourself to yourself so that you become a better version of yourself. Good gosh that was a mouthful of 'yourself'.
I've decided to make this another public addition to my Self-Improvement-Summer--that I would learn to make Christ the most important person in my life, and that in the midst of everything that I hope to accomplish over the summer I should adjust my priorities so that I'm doing things for God and for His glory, not for anyone else, so that I can become closer to the version of myself that God intended. It's not something that I'm going to be able to fix in like, thirty seconds. I still get really irritated if people only give me like, five seconds of their time, and then I set off to become more interesting to them so that I can get more attention from them later. I'll probably still compare myself to people that are smarter than I am, prettier than I am, and more talented than I am, and I'll most definitely still be annoyed with myself when I consistently come up short. I suspect that this will continue for quite a while. Nonetheless, I hope to make a lot of progress over the summer, even if I can't get this problem eradicated completely. I'd appreciate if you guys would pray for me, and if you don't than it's okay because I won't know about it, hahaha. See you all in the fall (ooh, looky, an unintentional rhyme!).
Hearts,
Tavi
