I think I understand. I live inside of my head the majority of the time. What I mean is that I process, feel, think, look at life, look at myself, look at people, from inside. Introspection. Introversion. It is like I am never fully present in the outside moment. There is always at least a part of me disengaged. I don't yet know how to control this or how to make it a workable system.
The other part of it is that I am one of those timid types. Whether from childhood or from the way i'm wired, I have taken the one-down approach with myself in relation to everyone else and God for as long as I can remember. I am in my head all the time and in my head there is a critic. I want to be proud of myself. I want to be free. But this is not going to happen as long I let the critic remain.
In writing, I feel this desperate need to pull from the deepest place and produce something from there. This is the only honest way. I can never seem to do it, though. I think its because the honesty has to go through the filter of the critic before it comes out.
So as long as I let the critic remain, I will be unable to produce honest writing, I will never be proud of myself, never content with who I am or satisfied with where I am. Unless I change my default from timidity to something more in line with the truth, I will probably not see very much change in the way that I do life. I will not see much change in the way that I relate to people or God and certainly not in the way that I live and breathe in my own skin.
At the same time, I find myself in a bit of a predicament in a practical, tangible sort of way. I thought my life, at this point, would be about marriage and babies and the things that coincide with marriage and babies like house-cleaning and cooking and doctors appointments and visits to the in-laws. But, as it turns out, I was wrong. And I forgot to make a contingency plan. So here I am, wondering what to do now. Not proud of myself, except that I play the drums in a band. I am always in my head and I am always at war with myself in my head. These circumstances don't help. Its probably for the best that I'm not married with babies yet, because I would have assumed that they would have silenced the critic and they wouldn't have. This critic is in me. It is mine. And it is mine to send packing.
I don't know what to do next. There is the external what do I do and the internal what do I do. And unfortunately niether of them are flashing a solution to me in bright lights. I think sometimes its ok not to know. Sometimes not knowing can be what is best for us because it makes us dependent on the One who knows. But that dependence can turn into a cop-out in lazy hands, too.
This is what I know. Timidity is what makes me so anxious. Its what keeps me from trusting God. Whether or not I forget all about this five minutes from now or tomorrow or next week, this is the truth. Timidity keeps me in the confines of a child needing permission before love. It keeps me ever wrestling the giant that won't ever go away. Because the giant is me.
