Still walking on that long and creaky, unstable bridge between the two very different worlds of “young adulthood” and “real adulthood.”  Not fearing a fall from the bridge so much as worrying that when my feet reach the other side, they will unprepared for what they find.  Simply not being ready:  financially, mentally, emotionally.

Looking up to heaven, gazing into the sky that has changed its wardrobe every day as long as this earth has turned.  Pleading with God.

I lokoed at at the skies with heaviness in my heart.  I felt abandoned, cold, and sad.  I whispered a plea for God to walk with me in the downpour, half-expecting Him to ignore me.  Then, grasping my tiny, flimsy, pathetic umbrella of “courage,” I stepped out to brave the storm.

And just as I did, God stepped in.  He covered my hand with His and guided it to lower the umbrella.  With His other hand, He reached up to the sky and parted the clouds.

The soft glow of sun warmed my now-upturned face.  I smiled, relieved.

Then God pointed, again with His free hand (His other was still wrapped around mine) toward the rainbow He had set in the sky.  I gazed at the magical arc, and I laughed, humbled.

Every day, I get up at the same time, go (more of less) to the same places, see the same faces, and end my day by speaking to the same three people.  Sure, there are variations in the details, but the skeleton of each cycle from sunrise to sunrise is mostly unchanging.  I like it that way.

I wonder what — if anything — that says about me.  Maybe it says I’m not adventurous.  Maybe it suggests that I crave control.  Maybe it means that I find joy enough in the substance of life, such that I don’t need whimsical scheduling to bring excitement to my day.

Or maybe it’s because I have already learned that no news is often good news.

Some days, I sense my smallness in this world acutely, and truly comprehend on a very deep level the Bible verse that reminds us that we are “a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.”  On those days, I understand that my significance is like one grain of sand in the vast Saharan Desert.

On other days, I am struck with an awe that is quickly tempered with humility as I reflect on the evidence of God’s special and particular attention in my life.  In those moments, I am freshly aware that God chose me twice:  once, before I was born, He chose me to live.  Then again, when He claimed my soul, He chose me to Live.

So it is between these two poles that I vascillate, and wonder at the paradoxical truth therein.

One function I frequent in particular is the photo function.  I love seeing recently-updated albums featuring any of the 765 friends/acquaintances who are connected to me in that virtual space.

I’ve noticed recently, however, that I gravitate toward engagement, wedding, and occasionally pregnancy, photos.  Maybe it’s all the beautiful smiles and proud grins, the gathering of friends and family, the flow of love that pours out of each image so profoundly that you could almost swear you heard a contented sigh.

But even as my eyes feed on those images and snapshots of bliss, the pictures always seem to leave me feeling a bit empty, a little bit hollow.  My heart feels a slight frown, a perceptible sinking.  Deep down, I think I fear that the “happy girl who has it all” in the pictures will never be me, and that while God has blessed me greatly with manythings, He may just pass me by on those things.

I hate to admit it, but it’s a fact.

At the same time, the City has in the last nine months become another type of home.  It is the place where I sleep, work, see friends, and go to church as an “adultling,” my newly-coined term for someone who is in that nether-zone between student and “real grown-up.”  Adultlings like me may pull in bigger salaries than we’d ever imagined to pay off debt that is greater than what we’d ever wish on anyone — but we’re still playing pretend when it comes to being actual adults.  We’re not there yet; we are, and will for the near future remain, adultlings.

The City is my day-to-day home, the place where I maintain a small adultling nest as I wait to grow up into a real adult with real responsibilities, like a mortgage or children.  The City is like a set of training wheels.  I don’t know when I’ll be ready for a real two-wheeler.

What I realized most acutely during this visit home is that neither home is fully “home.”  The longer I am away from LittleTown, the harder it is to relate to the people there, especially at church.  I’m trying to figure out why that is true.  But when I hear them talk about “the Lord” and “the Word,” it sounds just as foreign to me as I probably sound to my co-workers when I talk about “going to church” and “reading the Bible.”

I guess it’s all relative.  But the people at LittleTown Church seem so holy, in one sense — so alike in that way — all speaking the same holy language and urging each other to clearly and courageously share the Gospel as Paul urged the Ephesians.  I definitely relate to that desire, but I guess living in the City just gives me a different starting point.  Especially since I work at a place like my law firm, where people face many barriers when it comes to meeting God:  time, realizing their need, cultural resistance, etc.  So it’s not so simple as just outright sharing the Gospel.  This is something I have trouble getting across to people back in LittleTown home.

Likewise, though, in the same way that the zeal of LittleTown people weirds me out a little, the utter indifference of City-dwellers is foreign to me too.  How can so many people live their lives without the love of GOd in their lives?  How can they survive even a day with the eternal uncertainties of their lives hanging there, unanswered?  This perplexes me greatly.

So neither place is home — or, more accurately, neither place is entirely home.  I keep telling myself that God-willing, when I cease to be an adultling, and have a family and kids of my own, then I will finally settle down and have a true home.  But I’m a little skeptical.  God is probably more complicated than that.  And maybe He is keeping me in this perpetual state of discomfort so I long for my eternal Home.

I am about to go to bed but pulled two things from the shelf in my bedroom just now as a challenge to myself.  First, I picked up “Black’s Law.”  I want to devote more of my free time to reading.  Second, I took this notebook.  I haven’t written in a while, and it’s high time I started again.

Lots of emotions are swimming around inside, and rightly so:  I’m in a period of great transition, uncertainty, and in some ways, instability.  Hopefully writing will help me sort through — or at least recognize — these feelings.

Lying beside me is my Bible.  I am grateful that once again I feel the great need to cling to God, and that deep down, I know His hand will be enough to sustain and carry me.

Wrapped around her hips and partially covering her legs is a fuzzy blue blanket, the one she bought down in Union Square when she realized — soon after starting work — that the office was way too cold, all the time.  She has since discovered that between the space heater and cups of hot tea, she can stay reasonably warm through the day — but at night, the blanket is key.  And the softness provides a sense of comfort.  She likes soft things.  And she likes cute things.  She keeps a koala bear, a ladybug professing love, and a stuffed animal on her desk every day — because she is a completely sucker for inanimate objects with cartoony-looking eyes.  They give her comfort too.

Her eyes wander to nowhere in particular, flitting around and resting on random objects, seeing but never really looking. Finally she focuses on the crane-mobile hanging from the ceiling in front of her.  It brings back good memories of the friend who passed it on to her, after he left.  The eight rainbow-colored paper cranes gently float through the air, drifting and turning ever-so-subtly — providing evidence that the ventilation system is actually working.

Then her eyes, as if by default, glance back to the two glowing rectangles upon which her attention is fixed for the majority of her waking hours, five to seven days a week.  The cursor blinks steadily, expectantly.  Blink.  Blink.  Blink.  Still leaning back against the chair, she takes in the silence of this not-so-late, but late-enough hour.  All she hears is the steady hum of white noise.

The world is silent, and she’s all by herself — and she can hear herself think:

This is it.

And she decides that when her world changes drastically in exactly two weeks, she will take that opportunity to discover this world for herself, to build an independent life, to create meaning to fill the gap.

I woke up around 10am, then lounged around in bed reading Samuel G. Freedman’s “Small Victories,” a third-person memoir of a teacher’s struggles to fight for her students’ futures in New York City’s blighted Lower East Side in the late 1980s and early 1990s.  I whiled away a couple hours, engrossed in the stories spun and woven in the paperback’s aged and ruffled pages.  It has been a long time since I’ve been able to read through, in a single day, 125 pages of something unrelated to work.  It’s a good feeling.

After munching on some Chicken-in-a-Biskit crackers (savory munchies reminiscent from my childhood), I went out for a walk along the river to the track as Rascal and our friend ran to the track to clock in a few laps in the summer sun.  Then we came back and Rascal made heavenly omelets with onions, tomatoes, avocadoes, garlic, and ham, and I made Belgian waffles.  We topped it off with berry-pineapple smoothies and freshly-cut watermelon before settling into a quiet afternoon lazing around in the living room.

And so it goes… this is the life of a homebody professional who happens to have a long weekend off.  It is, in many ways, the life I have often longed for: quiet, peaceful, steady, predictable, humble.  I take great joy in sitting on a blue beanbag, leaning against an open window, with the sun streaming onto my shoulders and hands.  I live so much of my life in a big blur, in a hurried rush to get from point A to point B to point C, to sleep, so that I can get up in the morning and get to point A once again.  This weekend is a chance to truly rest and relax and just be.  In many ways, I think this is how my life was meant to be lived.

But somewhere inside, I feel a silent nagging.  I’m not sure why.  Maybe it’s because I feel a little guilty for enjoying myself, since I’m not really serving anyone through this lazy afternoon.  Along those lines, maybe it’s because I fear that I’m sinking into a suburban mindset that basks in its own comforts without concern for the suffering in worlds not-so-far from here.  Maybe it’s because I feel nervous that days like this will be few and far between, and that the calm–however tinged with ambivalence–I feel today won’t revisit for a long while.  

Or maybe it’s a little of everything.

Sometimes, when I’m about to fall asleep, my leg twitches.  And these days, at random intervals, my memory twitches without warning, instigated only by a smell, a sight, or a sound.  Unlike the physical twitches, which last for but a brief moment and are inevitably followed by peaceful slumber, these mental twitches trigger a paralyzing response and transport me back to specific moments in the annals of my memory.

Earlier this week, as I walked to the gym, I suddenly thought of the Michelina’s microwave dinners we used to keep stocked in our freezer at home.  I remember the flat fettucini noodles sprinkled with specks of parsley, with a frozen mound of white alfredo sauce.  Nuking that flat box for four minutes produced a warm, semi-creamy/gooey pile of noodles, a 280-calorie snack to tide me over til dinner.  Or, more accurately, a 280-calorie snack to tide me over til my parents came home.  This had nothing to do with hunger.

Now over a decade later, I know what was really going on back then.  I didn’t eat because I had a physical need.  I ate to fill an emotional gap.  Food was my friend, my activity to soothe my emotionally-unfulfilled needs.  I was lonely as a child, without close and dependable friends, and although I always had steady love from my parents, my need for more attention was insatiable.  Getting perfect grades and filling my life with extracurricular activities did not fulfill me either, so I turned to something to which I always had ready access: food.

The habits started really early on — back to those summers as an eight-year-old left at home with my brother as our brave and diligent immigrant parents worked to make a way for our family.  I froze 7-up soda in a cup at 10am, and scraped the ice off as I watched afternoon television around 4pm.  That soda went really well with the daily installation of “Salute Your Shorts.”  Other times, I snacked on the little bags of Doritos or Cheetos that Mom bought at the grocery store for 25 cents each.  Whenever I got bored, or more likely lonely, I would go to the freezer, cupboards, or refrigerator to find something to fill my emotional needs.  Of course I was mismatching and confusing my needs with my wants with my solutions.  But I didn’t know it back then.  I was just self-medicating.

I’ve thought about these things many times during the last few years, when I finally came to understand that aspect of my childhood.  After years of talk therapy, the habits that influence my sometimes-irrational behavior as an adult began to make a lot more sense.  Understanding that was the beginning of a long road of healing for me.  That road has also brought me to and through a number of important milestones: learning more self-acceptance and self-awareness; developing close and lasting friendships; understanding my parents and their countless self-sacrifices for the sake of our family; acknowledging God’s acceptance and love for me as His creation and child; and finally overcoming (for the most part) my eating and food issues.

Even though my mind is very familiar with the rough terrain of loneliness and the means by which my younger self chose to ride over that terrain, it still jars me when I think about it now.  I lookat my younger self with a mix of pity, sorrow, and relief.  Pity, because I’m sorry that was my experience.  Sorrow, because of the lost opportunity for joy during those days.  And finally, relief, because I’m not that person anymore.

Except that I am.  The younger self grew up in one sense, and also grew up in the other sense.  But she’s still here somewhere — just because she grew doesn’t mean that she disappeared.  And sometimes even now I fall back into the same bad habits, the same insecurities, the same loneliness, and the same poor solutions.  On the whole, I’m doing better — much better.  But I’d be in denial if I tried to convince myself or anyone else that I’m completely past my past.