When It Feels Like Life is Confusing

Hello loves!

It's been a while since I last posted (and I will try to be better at that oops), and life has certainly changed a bit! A few things that I have been working and waiting for have finally paid off-- like getting a job-- along with some other goals that I'm still hoping will come to fruition soon.

It's easy in the present moment to look back and see how everything was connected. The long moments of waiting had a purpose, the rejections or closed doors were protecting me from what I didn't need, and the times when it felt like I was alone and shouting into a void with no answer only made me stronger and learn to trust more.

Yes, I can say all that now, and can easily spot some of the positives from the negatives. But in the waiting room of life, oof, it's certainly hard to have that mindset.

I've talked about waiting a lot, partly because I was in a waiting period myself, but also because I think patience is something every single person on the planet struggles with. Especially in an "instant-gratification" world where we can find, buy, and have stuff arrive within 24 hours.

And when you're waiting for answers to big questions and problems, it's even harder to stay patient. It's hard to be hopeful when the light at the end of the tunnel is getting murkier with each passing day.

One thing I learned while I was in this period of waiting was that I (and probably a lot of people) view life as being inside one main story. There's a central plotline with the same cast of characters and everything is clearly pointing toward one goal. There's "waiting" but even that waiting is filled with some type of training montage or info-dump that lets the characters still keep moving forward.

It's appealing to think of life in that way because it means the delays in our plans have clear purposes and that once they end, we'll continue on the same path as before. But life isn't as simple as Hero Characters leave Point A, experience conflict, persevere, and reach their goal at Point B where they all live happily ever after.

Life is a lot more inter-connected and messy and exciting than that.

I'm a big fan of anthologies. Black Mirror, American Horror Story, and The Haunting (Hill House & Bly Manor) are some of my favorites. For those who don't know, "an anthology series is a series that runs for multiple seasons or episodes, with constantly changing settings, plots, and characters" that usually take place in the same world or timeline and have connecting threads between episodes or seasons.

While I love anthologies because it's an exciting, new story every episode or season, I also love seeing how the stories work together. People who have looked into it far more than me have created timelines for Black Mirror that show how all the episodes connect together to tell one complete story. Recurring characters pop up in American Horror Story to merge two wildly different seasons in an unexpected way. It's so creative and interesting for audiences to see how something that could have happened all the way back in S1 of a show is now resolving itself in S5 despite the different stories and main characters.

During my time of waiting and confusion, I realized that life is like that.

We experience mini-episodes or seasons around one conflict-- and sometimes they get resolved but other times they don't-- and we can feel stuck in limbo. We push on in the overarching story of our lives to the best of our ability and wonder why something happened or what that event has to do with us. Sometimes we find ourselves surrounded by new characters or locations and it's confusing.

But then something or someone from a different phase of life returns and suddenly everything connects. Unanswered questions from weeks or months ago are now answered in perfect clarity. We start looking toward the less murky future with a more established and reassured direction, despite the twists and turns we've experienced and will experience again.

For me, the roadblocks in life start to feel a lot less earth-shattering when I look at it with this mindset. This one storyline of my life may be put on pause at the moment, but I can breathe a bit easier when I know other paths in my life are still connecting and working on their own time.

The various conflicts we experience in one lifetime, whether they get resolved today, later, or possibly never, are not the end. It's easy to get hyper-focused on one "plot point" of our lives that we put all our value and worth into if it works out or not.

Sometimes a forcible "wait" from God can allow us to step back from our tunnel vision and view the multi-faceted lives we have.

Life is hard. Waiting is super hard. But you are strong and complex and full of so many good things.

Take a step back from the singular quest and look at the big, overarching picture. I bet you'll find there are so many more clear and connecting threads of goodness than you expected.

Love y'all!

"God gave us the ability to think about His world, but we can never completely understand everything He does. And yet, He does everything at just the right time. I learned that the best thing for people to do is to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live" -- Ecclesiastes 3:11-12