Writings from Vacation

I keep reading online that people thirty, forty and fifty decades younger than me demand that people and institutions, like the church, be authentic. I know how I think of myself - artist, painter, musician, writer, poet - and I know I rarely live into that self-image. Mostly because I'm afraid. Afraid what I do won't be good enough. So I don't write or draw or play the piano or scrawl out a poem hardly ever. And when I do, it's often that I force myself. Never mind that I feel most truly myself when I do, most authentic. I have no idea what the authentic "me" would look like.

I've been reading Kathleen Norris - The Cloister Walk - and Lauren f. Winner - Still - and find they too have lived with this sense of being other, of not fitting in, whether with themselves or in the culture or the society or company in which they live. It's nice to know I'm not alone.

Norris finds comfort in accepting that being "other" - not fitting in, always being a beat behind or on a different track from everyone else - is a calling. All three of us trace our sense of otherness back to our beginnings. I think I was born "other". I have struggled with this, worried over this, fought with myself and God because of this for my whole life, trying to fix those things about me that make me different so I won't feel so wrong about everything.

From my journal this morning, written on the deck as the sun broke over the top of the mountain in front of me: "I am other. I have always been other. Never fitting in.
      Kathleen accepts the necessity of being other
      She takes it up as a cross is taken up
      She embraces it
My angst-filled, self-questioning, self-justifying writings are symptoms of my own eternal other-ness.
The isolation of my life as a child - created by abuse and dysfunction> or me created as a necessary isolate? - is/may be in itself a call.
I have always been, tho without knowing it, free to accept it as a call, or not. The authenticity, then, is in living into my self-doubts and letting go of the need to seem to know-it-all. As Jeremiah [the prophet] challenged and questioned God, authenticity would be to know when to do so myself."

I end my journal entry with this question: Does everyone feel other, as I do? And does a calling to be other, then, once accepted, become a calling to point others to freedom?

In other words, a person who always feels out of step is authentically herself keeping on being out of step and embracing it as a calling. Jesus said, "Take up your cross and follow me." In this, he said, we will find life. Jesus is the number one "Other". He took up the cross of otherness and chose life.

Choose life.