SortaCrunchy

the confessional: a peek behind the curtain

unedited/edited

On the morning that the book released, I ironed a shirt for Kyle to wear to work like I do most mornings. Later when Laura called to ask how the day had gone, I had to get off the phone quickly to pull the girls' dinner out of the oven. I laughed as I remembered that the very day I signed our book contract, I spent most of my time refereeing spats between my girls.

The truth is, I have no idea what I'm doing.

The truth is, not much has changed.

The truth is, I don't know how to be here.

Writing the book was a very intense process, but it was internally intense. Laura and I shared in our struggles together, and our editor Jonathan became a third curve in this tiny circle of three as we talked and wrote and worked our way through the pages.

Promoting the book is something altogether different. It is, I'm discovering, very externally intense.

For years, I've seen writers bemoaning the book promotion process, and I have to confess to you that I didn't have much sympathy for them. Oh, you wrote a book? And now you have to tell people about that book? Oh, poor you. Poor, poor published author. That must be so hard for you.

My utter (and now embarrassing) lack of grace has returned to me in full as I begin to fully understand what it is about the book promotion process that is so very difficult. It's not the work of it - the writing guest posts, the soliciting print media, the drawing upon every part of your network - that's so awful. I mean, it's hard, but it's doable.

No, what makes it so difficult is the blurring of the line between promoting the book and promoting oneself.

And I've spent the last few weeks completely dreading the coming months because I can barely talk about my blog with other people without flushing and blushing and stuttering and stumbling all over the place. But now I have to spend the next few months talking at length about something that is far more personal, far more intimate, and far more cherished by me than anything I've ever published here.

The anticipation of this part of the process has taken its toll.

My TMJ pain has returned full force. I've got a mouth full of canker sores, something I haven't suffered from in years. Suddenly, I can't sleep. My head hurts and my house is a wreck.

Thankfully, God in His mercy has spoken truth into my life, and I woke up this morning turning it all over in my head and it is grace to me.

The first dose of truth arrived to me in a conversation at Blissdom. It was, as the best part of conferences tend to be, totally unexpected and exactly what I needed. I had lingered after the opening reception to visit with friends, and eventually sat down with Robin while she ate dinner and I picked her brain about being an Arist.

Robin and I met through Laura at BlogHer last summer, and I have so enjoyed getting to know her. Through our conversation, I came to realize that promoting the Art and promoting the Artist are two different things. Robin helped me see that if I could hold the Art out in front of me, that if I could have razor sharp focus on our message and the passion I have for spreading that message, that publicity and promotion is not nearly as squirmy and uncomfortable as it is when I think I'm holding myself out for others to see.

The second dose of truth came to via my dear friend Kelly who shared this article from Don Miller on self-promotion. As I've mulled over his words, I've found renewed energy in remembering that I don't have the luxury of saying Golly Gee! Aw shucks. I've got this book but don't read it if you don't want to and kicking at rocks and basically bailing on the work in its moment of need.

I've written about the call to enflesh The Work that comes to you, but writers in our generation can't stop there. We have to introduce The Work to our friends and hold its hand and help it find its place.

Is it hard and uncomfortable? Yes. But I love this Work more than I hate talking about myself. And so I will not, I cannot, abandon it now.

Our official blog tour kicks off tomorrow and it's going to be two full weeks of online promotion. We have guest posts and other online appearances scheduled even after that, and of course, there's the real life book release party (please say you are coming, Oklahoma friends!).

Before it all begins in earnest, I just want you to know that behind the curtain, I'm trying so hard not to squirm. I'm still the girl who spelled her blog name wrong for two years without  knowing it. I'm still the one whose child has pooped on the floor of the public library. It's still me who misses deadlines and flakes out on promises and cries in public and watches too much TV.

And even now, someone is reading and rolling eyes and thinking oh pobrecita! you published a book and now you have to tell people about it? Poor, poor you. I know. I get it. But I just needed a moment of transparency with you.

To balance out all of the emphasis on our book, I'm planning to finally get to the stack of books I've been wanting to share with you - some that I've been planning to talk about since last year. It would make me feel so much better to be able to talk about the other incredible works that have been given flesh by someone that might be just what you are looking for right now.

Thanks for letting me confess. It is always, always so good for the soul.

the confessional: in the tank

feelings as big as the oklahoma skies

There's this great moment in Season One of Project Runway when Michael Kors looks at his judging card and says to a designer about her just awful sad mess of a design, "I wrote down farty."

 That pretty well describes the past few weeks for me.

But wait, that's not fair. There is some good stuff, but my overall vibe has been just farty. 

When Kyle was coaching, he used the phrase "in the tank" for years to describe an athlete who was just suddenly and inexplicably completely dejected. So much of athletic performance is mental, and sometimes the slightest bump just throws an otherwise outstanding athlete into the depths of despair.

Generally some kind of great public success could lure the athlete out of the tank, but more often than not, if things were going badly on the field, it was because of something off the field.

I can identify with that, though I am far from being an athlete. But every now and again, I find myself in the tank. The bump that caused me to stumble in is usually something petty and insignificant. Like, hypothetically speaking, after hearing over and over for several years that anyone can wear skinny jeans and ordering a pair and realizing that's one of the biggest lies ever told. I mean to say, that's just as an example that's how petty it could be. Or it could be the public recognition of someone else's success and facing the truest true truth that I'll never be what that person is. Or it could even be a brief illness, something as transient as a cold. And suddenly, everything is farty.

Especially me.

* * * * *

I get dozens of requests for Pinterest invites every day. Mostly people just say "Invite me" or some variation of that, but sometimes people write personal notes. A week or so ago, someone had come to SortaCrunchy for the first time to get a Pinterest invite and shared that we had so much in common, she couldn't believe I was real.

Oh.

I'm real.

And sometimes I think that's what pushes me into the tank - the realness of myself. The real is so heavy, so far from the floaty ideal I think I am. I feel clumsy and ache-y with the real. I feel so real, so impossibly, breath-catchingly real that I just can't stand to feel it anymore, and conjure some mystical numbness to cover myself in, and under that cover I slouch and hide.

* * * * *

But then, as quickly as the wind sweeps an Oklahoma sky free of clouds, I'm over it. I'm out and I'm buoyant and I'm back. I think I can say, right at this moment, that yes. The farty has lifted and things have re-centered and I shrug off the numbness.

And I carry on.

open to vulnerable

Being scheduled for the very first post of 2012 at A Deeper Story is a little bit daunting. What to write? What to share?

It is the new year and we are all thinking all things new right now, but there is part of me that struggles so hard with living into the newness of life that is mine in Christ. It makes my stomach hurt a little bit to share with such vulnerability, but along came open to nudge me along.

I would be honored if you would join me today over there as I confess to you that I wish I knew how to quit  me.

the confessional: i might be failing my daughters

I still see babies when they sleep

A few weeks back, Dacey was sick (again) and so after the doctor's office, I took her to the grocery store where she got to pick out canned soup. We never, ever buy canned soup unless someone is sick, and it's a bit of a treat/tradition for the ones who need healing.

I asked Dacey which kind she wanted. Regular chicken noodle? Alphabet chicken noodle?  Maybe Toy Story or Dora?

My almost-seven-year old, my girl child with the tender heart and the fierce love of animals, my child who has never played with a doll a day in her life, who has always eschewed all things Cinderella and much preferred backyard experiments and art table creating, that child said:

"I want the princesses," she said, "because I'm trying to be more like a normal girl."

Heart. Stop.

My eyebrows lurched toward my hairline and I leaned in really close and breathed my crazy right into her face:

What do you mean? Who told you that you have to like princesses to be normal? Who told you that?! I demanded.

"My own mind, I guess," she murmured. I think she was a little bit terrified of the maniac that had possessed her mother's body right there in the canned soup aisle.

I pulled our cart over to the side and sputtered in short, halting sentences that I don't like princesses and I'm (mostly) normal and it's okay to like what YOU like, even if no one else likes it and no one should ever make you feel like you have to like girly stuff to be normal and I think I ended by asking too loudly and perhaps a bit too incredulously:

Who wants to be normal anyway?!

* * * * *

And then there is A.J. That child changes her mind every five seconds about what she likes and what she wants, but one refrain was repeated for weeks: all she wanted for Christmas was a pink guitar and high-heeled shoes.

At first, we giggled about it. So Aliza Joy. But the more she repeated it, the more we realized she was serious. And so.

I bought them, y'all.

I bought my four year old daughter some sandals with little kitten heels on them. I found them on ebay and they had the word "pageant" in the tags because who buys heeled shoes in a child's size 11? Pageant moms, that's who! She has plenty of the clunky, plastic dress-up heels, but that is not what she wants. Those aren't real and she knows it. So on Christmas morning, she'll get her pink guitar and high-heeled shoes.

Happy Birthday, Jesus.

* * * * *

Over the weekend, we wandered through a department store and both girls squealed at once, "Mama! They're playing Baby, It's Cold Outside!"

It was not the somber and theologically poignant O Holy Night bringing them such delight in the crowded aisles, nor was it the ubiquitous and innocent Jingle Bells. No, no. It was the song decried by feminists everywhere as the "date rape anthem" (it so is not!) that I have every version ever recorded in my Spotify and that has played in heavy rotation since Thanksgiving. The one with pouring drinks and cigarettes? Yes, that one.

And they were delighted because they know I love that song, and they love what their mother loves.

* * * * *

I mean, I knew it would be complicated. Raising girls. Raising women. This isn't the first time I've written about it. It's just that my heart is breaking so much more than I thought it would, far earlier than I ever dreamed. When I asked Dacey last night to choose three stuffed animals to keep on her bed because the rest were going back to the playroom, she asked, "Which do you think are the three girliest?" My chest seized up again.

And when AJ changes clothes five times before we leave the house, huffing and grumbling about how "nothing is right!" I can't get too frustrated because don't I know it?

I guess I feel like I'm failing because I want for them what I'm only just now learning in my thirties. I want them to be confident and whole in who they are. I want them to fast-forward past the years of trying to live into what people expect of them and I want them to learn RIGHT NOW that all that they are is more than enough.

The Confessional: Confessions, Various and Sundry

I haven't done a confessional post in a long time!

Let's do some confessing one to another, want to? It's good for the soul, you know.

I'll go first:

1) I really hate eggnog. Every time I say this, I have beautiful well-meaning friends trying to convince it is because I haven't had REAL eggnog, only store-bought stuff. While I will be the very first to admit that store bought anything skews perception for most things, I just don't know. I don't have any desire to taste the real stuff.

2) Kyle makes dinner every night. He either does a big batch cooking on the weekend or he'll make something for us when he gets home. I find this to be immensely wonderful, even if it does step on the toes of biblical man and womanhood. (*big wink*)

3) I let my girls watch some shows on Cartoon Network, and we like to watch with them. I know exactly who Mordecai and Rigby are.

4) I don't drink enough water.

5) Related: I still drink too much diet coke. I know it's bad for me, yet ...

6) I am not sending Christmas cards this year.

7) I am going through a really, really hard parenting stage with Aliza. I love that child dearly, but some days I just want to hide from her. And when I do, she does things like get into my nail polish bag (that I thought was cleverly hidden) and decides to paint her toenails. In our room. On the carpet. OF COURSE she spilled it.

8) Related: she recently cut her bangs. Off. Completely chopped them off. I thought I was okay with it. I didn't freak out or anything. But I'm not okay with it after all. It looks terrible and it's really bothering me.

9) I haven't been taking my vitamins. It's stupid. I know I need them (and it's probably why I picked up strep so easily earlier this month), but I just. I don't know. I'm out of the kind I like and I don't have time/energy to drive to OKC to get more and so I haven't been taking any.

10) I miss LOST. I think about that show a lot. A lot, a lot.

11) I've never read a single Jane Austen book, nor have I seen any of the movies based on the books.

12) I am obsessive about bed-making. Even when I'm sick, I'll get up and straighten the sheets and comforter. And if the girls' beds don't get made before bedtime? I will make them right before they climb in. I feel like everyone should get into a made-up bed each night.

13) I am mildly-to-moderately obsessed with Once Upon a Time and spend way too much time that I don't have reading the discussion boards on it at Television Without Pity.

14) I used to be a big country music fan, but these days? I can't stand it.

15) I hate, hate, hate cleaning that bathroom and rarely do much in there other than the occasional wipe down unless company is coming over.

16) I make prolific and liberal use of the "unsubscribe" feature on Facebook.

17) I spend more time sending Pinterest invites than I do actually looking at Pinterest. (Oh, the things we do for Google rankings.)

18) Right now, at this moment in time, my toenails look like this:

I should probably stop here.

So now it's your turn! What do you want to confess today? Been overloading on processed food? Binging on reality TV? Food fetishes or aversions to own up to? Help me not feel so weird in my quirkiness today!

The Confessional: I Need a Warning Label

A few days after we started the Oasis project, I printed this out for my husband.

I needed for him to read this part especially:

Not a bit of that was a surprise for him. 

I think the reason I find such comfort in understanding my personality type is that I struggle with feeling like I am defective.  (Heads-up: transparency happening.)  As much as I have grown into my skin, grown into who I was created to be as my 30s have unfolded, I still can't shake a perpetual belief that deep, deep down, I am broken.

And so when I read assessments that pretty much perfectly describe how I function in this world, I can't help but to feel better.  It's not just me.

People with my personality type tend to live by a strict internal code.  When my outward actions don't match my inward idealistic standards, I am miserable.  And yet, because of that big old P at the end of my type, I am prone to just thinking about how I am unable to do what I know I need to do instead of acting on what I need to do.

I truly do feel like I need a warning label:

WARNING: The person you are meeting, speaking to, reading, or emailing is most often experienced by others as flaky.

She operates in the world of The Big Picture, and therefore details often fall off of her radar screen. 

She will most likely:

1) Read your email and need to think on a response.  She will then forget to email you the response, even though she has spent a good deal of time thinking about it.

2) Hear your prayer concern and feel a great deal of empathy for you and your situation.  She will probably think about you for days, praying for you often as you come to mind.  She will, however, neglect to tell you this.

3) Recognize that you are going through a difficult time and think of no less than a dozen elaborate and thoughtful ways to minister to you in your need.  She will probably act on none of these ideas, even though she has given them all a great deal of thought.

4) Be your biggest supporter and cheerleader at the beginning of a project.  Her enthusiasm will eventually fizzle.  She is distracted easily by shiny things.  Going the distance is not her strong suit.

5) Agree to read and review your newest book or project.  Weeks will pass before a review is finally published.  This does not mean that she did not love your project; on the contrary, she probably loved it so much that she feels her review of your work must be absolutely perfect before she can publish it.  She is often crushed by the weight of her own standards which propels her directly into inaction accompanied by guilt.

6) Interrupt you.  Her mind is constantly making connections, often at a speed which outpaces human speech and good manners.

7) Astound you with her incredible clumsiness.  This may or may not be related to her personality type, but you should have fair warning nonetheless.

8) Start a multitude of projects and finish few.

9) Not take criticism well.  She is keenly aware of her shortcomings and imperfections, always hyper-aware of the ways her outward actions don't meet her inner standards.  When those imperfections are recognized by others, it can be crippling.

10) Personify capriciousness, fickleness, moodiness, and procrastination.  She is also prone to being driven by her feeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeelings.  

If you have the great misfortune of partnering with her on a project or serving as her editor, please know that she will accomplish absolutely nothing without a deadline.  Be assured, however, that she rarely misses deadlines altogether as she is capable of intense micro-focus and dedicated energy as a deadline approaches. 

Finally, if you are counting on her to take an action of some sort, she will probably disappoint you.  And even if you aren't actually disappointed with her, she probably thinks that you are.

Do you think I could have that printed up on business cards to hand to people I meet? 

This is all very true about me, but I'm not telling you to garner any sympathy or to have you respond with warm fuzzies. In fact, I'm closing comments on this.  And I'm not sobbing at the keyboard as I write, either.  In fact, I amused myself quite a bit as I thought of all of the ways people should be warned about me.

These are just some things I thought you should know.  Tomorrow, I'll be sharing with you the other side of the shiny coin that is moi.

(Ohhhhhhh, shiny . . . )

The Confessional: Living in the Tension

photo by b_barbet

I haven't done a confessional in a while, but if I don't talk to someone about this, I think my head is going to burst.

I am increasingly beginning to understand what it means to live in the tension.

I didn't come up with that phrase and I've heard it so often that I honestly cannot pin down for you who originally coined it, but I can't find a better description of what is happening inside my heart and mind these days.  In fact, I can't even pin down for you when this tension really began to take shape. 

But here's what it comes down to - I don't know how much longer I can live life the way I've been living life.

It took me ten minutes and lots of delete button-ing to get that out, but there it is.

As you know, I've been reading David Platt's Radical and I'm preparing to teach Jen Hatmaker's Interrupted in my Sunday School class and I feel like everything I've believed to be true about following Christ and being a Christian is being stripped away and I'm all raw and bewildered and excited and depressed and in the meantime, it's completely business as usual in the place I go to to fellowship and worship with other believers.

And it makes me feel tense.  It makes me tired and cynical and, honestly, judgmental towards this "attractional model" of church, this Six Flags Over Jesus mentality that seeks to entice, bribe, or even guilt trip people into coming to us instead of challenging, equipping, and even demanding that we go to them.  It's overwhelming.  I don't know what to do.  I don't know where to start.  I don't know if I should buy copies of Radical and deliver them to each staff member or maybe even every deacon in our church body.  I just don't know how our local church or our denomination as a whole will respond to such a revolutionary message.

I've had a passion for sharing the gospel of the Good News of Christ in places around the world since I was a little girl delighted and inspired by what I learned in my Girls in Action meetings each week.  But I'm married to a man who is much, much more interested in what is being done locally.  I'm at a place where I would sell everything and move to India or start filling out paperwork to provide a home to a child through adoption but my husband . . . we are far from unity in this.  So there's that tension.

And Dacey needs new clothes for the fall and winter.  She is bursting out of last year's clothes.  And I almost spent $50 at The Children's Place online last night, but couldn't push the Submit button on my order because I can't verify that their clothing is ethically manufactured, that it's free of sweatshop labor.  And I love The Children's Place, y'all.  Love it.  But I can't continue to contribute to a system that fosters oppression so that my girls can wear cute clothes.  And the tension pulls tighter on my heart.

I can't even grab dinner at Sonic anymore without thinking about what that $20 I just dropped could do for one of the 24,000 children dying every day from hunger and preventable disease.

I'm all messed up. 

I'm all messed up.

It's almost paralyzing.

And it's a lot to carry around with me right now.

And I certainly didn't mean for this to be such a bummer of a confessional.  I just started writing and this is what spilled out.  You're probably not so much a fan of all the transparency now, right?  Thank you for hearing me out anyway.