Attempting to live and breathe for an audience of one
I’m done having kids, especially for the sake of my mental health. If I were to have an accident, I would have to terminate the pregnancy. It really, mentally, is life or death for me, and I have to choose my life.
What a turnaround from being “pro-life”! What happened that I’m now pro-choice?
Continue reading “An about-face”
June 29, 2019 marked 10 years of having This Journey Is My Own. I still haven’t bought the domain name. I probably should but I’m rather lazy and I don’t have that much readership.
Over a decade, I’ve blogged about God, Christianity, faith, employment (in general), career, infertility, parenting (after infertility), family, goals, books, Haiti, politics, LGBTQ+ issues, my identity, music, current events, race, and other thoughts. Everything is always random. Nothing makes sense. There is no structure to anything. My views are ever-evolving.
How far back can I go to blogging? Well, I have a LiveJournal that dates back to September 2, 2001 but that’s private and I haven’t touched it since 2012. Public blogging? Depression Introspection was begun on July 21, 2006. Technically, I have almost 20 years of blogging under my belt.
So where do I go from here? What topic is left to explore or re-explore? What pisses me off so much that I want to rant about it again? Nothing right now. I’m not passionate about much right now. I just want to survive. That’s all I’m trying to do these days. Is survive. Between work and my personal life (parenting, new house, commute), I’m just trying to survive. Self-care has gone to the wayside. Survival is my new hobby.
I’m a mother now. After nearly 5 years of waiting, a dream has come true. But I’m afraid. So many women become moms and their identity is swallowed up in their children. They forget they are individuals with likes and dislikes and revolve their worlds around their kids.
I don’t want that to be me. I want to continue being the Kass I was before I got pregnant without the incessant melancholy over infertility. However, I do want to pursue my own interests and take time to care for myself and feed my soul. I want to expand my interests and seek new horizons.
I don’t want my identity to revolve around my son (as cute as he is).
I know, I know, I’m a Christian so my identity should be based on Christ. Perhaps it’s better to say that I don’t want my personality to be swallowed up by motherhood. The following is a list of things I plan to do for me—to remind myself life isn’t just about my son:
I hope to enjoy life more. I want to blog more. A lot of people would add travel to that list. Nope, not me; I’m a happy homebody. I’ll see the Eiffel Tower on the Internet and not deal with turbulence on an airplane over the ATLANTIC OCEAN, kthxbai.
I want to see Justin Timberlake in concert again but not by myself. Alas, some dreams aren’t meant to be realized.
I suffered a personal failure recently and found God challenging me on how I would respond to it. To be honest, my first instinct was to check out on life. But through the failure, I learned that I do not know how to handle failure. As a child, I was never taught how to handle failure. I was always taught that if at first you don’t succeed, you don’t accept failure as an option, you try harder.
I recently learned that’s not the way to handle things. The chart below is helping me to accept that failure is
Remembering my identity, who I am in Christ, will help me to navigate the ups and frequent downs of life as I should. Thereby assisting in me in trying to take the easy way out of life.
A ramble/rant/possible form of incoherence.
I am trying to reconcile who I am with who God wants me to be as a married woman living in the Philadelphia area. More than that, I think, I struggle with trying to reconcile who I am with what I think Christianity expects or wants me to be.
I’ve written before about how I see differences between myself and other women. I am currently struggling with my role as a Christian woman within the church. I’m 28, married, and currently childless. I’m a minority at my church. Moreover, I’m suddenly starting to feel like a minority in my phase of life. I am having a difficult time accepting that I’m in the stage of life where many of my friends are married and having children and parenthood is not a place God has called me to yet.
I am also struggling with the idea of a glass ceiling in the church: how much can women serve and is that glass ceiling really ordained by God or by power-hungry, chauvinistic men hanging onto an archaic rule that served its purpose for that time and that culture? (My husband warned me that I sound all Brian McLaren with those thoughts, but I happen to think he’s a little biased considering he’s a guy and all.)
I spent the day crying (partially about what I don’t have but also) about what I like: social media; reformed theology; discussing mental health issues; writing fiction; blogging about topics that don’t include fashion, kids, or TV shows; pop music; and going to concerts. I am grieved by the superficial — apart from my faith, I share very little in common with the women of my church.
I whine about the days when I used to be able to call up a buddy and say, “Hey, want to go to a concert with me?” and she’d say, “Sure! Time and date, please!” and we’d just go. Perhaps it’s because I don’t have children that I still feel that kind of freedom. But even if I did, I’d hope that I’d still be able to go. (I attend concerts once or twice a year.)
I feel the need to live two different lives: a life with Christians where I act all Christian and do whatever Christian people do and a life with non-Christians where we share similar interests but nothing that unites as deeply as spiritual things do. Is it wrong for me to want the two worlds to collide? To want the crazy friend who dyes her hair pink and purple, loves music, literature, and Jesus just as much as I do (if not more), and would go to Hershey with me to see Justin Bieber? To want that friend who can say, “You wanna hang out on Saturday and find a place in Philly where a local band is playing?” or “I’m in a really dark place right now in my life. Could you come over, talk, and pray with me?” Perhaps it’s never too late to develop imaginary friends. Or, slightly less creepy, put an ad up on the Philadelphia craigslist. (Maybe imaginary friends are safer, though. Hmm…)
I have friends all over the United States who I connect with on different levels, but in suburban Philadelphia, an area I’ll likely call home for the rest of my life, I still feel lost. I still see myself as the freak loser even though I’ve never gone to school here and have never had anyone tease me here. I have lots of local friends, but when I’m depressed, upset, and hurting, I don’t have that “one” friend I feel comfortable calling. Mostly because I know they’ve all got their kids and their husbands, and hence their busy lives that have little room or space for me.
I keep wondering how to rectify the situation. How to find my crazy Christian friend who loves Jesus, loves pop music, lives within 20 minutes, and can educate me on the greatness of Proust and Faulkner.
Or maybe I’ll just stick to this solitary life of writing novels and keeping hoping and wishing that I had different so I didn’t feel so immature, so isolated, and so alone.
How is a Christian woman supposed to act? In the novel I’m currently working on, my protagonist gets a brief lesson on being a Titus 2/Proverbs 31 (Biblical) woman. I’m feeling about as flummoxed as my character. The Biblical woman is ever working, ever busy, ever faithful, ever diligent. Striving to be like the woman the Bible outlines is striving for perfection — a goal I’ll surely never attain. Why bother at all?
I struggle with ambition. I am an ambitious woman. I don’t know what I want to do but I want to do something. But all I can do is write. There’s not much of a need for that in my local church.
I could go on and on but the rest of my thoughts are a jumble, I’m feeling tired and depressed again about how I’m doomed to live with a 16-year-old mentality in a 28-year-old body and a New York mentality in suburban Philadelphia, and how I have no kids and probably too much time on my hands. I need to get involved in something in which I can utilize my talents regularly but I’m not sure what.
*Justin Bieber
**John Piper
I recently completed reading Joseph C. Phillips’s book, He Talk Like A White Boy. You may best remember Mr. Phillips as Lt. Martin Kendall, Denise’s husband, on The Cosby Show.
Now, I gotta be honest. I picked up the book for two reasons:
I don’t remember how I initially happened upon it but a few years back, I stumbled across the book, saw the title, and thought to myself, This is on my must-read list before I die. I’m glad to say I wasn’t disappointed.
The title of He Talk Like A White Boy juxtaposed with the image of a black man resonated a chord with me. I instantly thought, I have got to read this. Black people have told me all my life that I talk like a white person. I can identify with this.
And identify I did.
Although 20 years of age separate us, it’s amazing how he was able to relate his experiences from things that occurred in the 60s and 70s, only for me to identify with much of it having grown up in the 80s and 90s.
The book seems to be a collection of essays that he’s written in the last decade (the book was published in 2006) so it was divided up into five primary sections:
But before I even cracked open the book, I read the book jacket. Apart from acting, Phillips also works as a conservative commentator and was a heavy supporter of George W. Bush. Knowing that made me cringe. (If I’m honest, I still do.) But I determined that I would give Phillips a chance to speak to me on politics. Even though I’m not wholly a conservative, I feel that black conservatives are some of the most disdained members in the political arena. Keeping this in mind, I decided to be, you know, tolerant.
While I enjoyed reading the first three sections, I most enjoyed the latter two. (Although, admittedly, the book got progressively better going through each section.)
Once I stumbled upon the essay Black Conservatism, Black Pride at the beginning of the Idealism section, I took a deep breath before I began. Be tolerant and open-minded, I told myself. You never know what you might learn.
I indeed learned quite a bit. Despite the fact that I am not a Dubya fan, I am willing to give credit where credit is due. Phillips pointed out that Bush II had the most racially diverse presidential administration in the nation’s history up until the Obama administration. And despite all cries that Dubya was a committed racist, he consistently had a black Secretary of State during each term he held. (He could have easily replaced a white person in Colin Powell’s spot after Mr. Powell resigned.) So I’ll give Dubya credit for having the most diverse administration of his day.
Phillips also goes on to speak about Dubya’s journey to Africa and the money he pledged to fight HIV/AIDS and terrorism in the country. For a president who many cried were racist (especially as a result of Katrina), Bush II appeared to be more of a friend to black people than he is given credit for.
*Discuss Black Conservatism, Black Pride – how he could not be a Republican back in the civil rights era, how it’s okay for blacks to believe whatever they want on the political spectrum (my view)
*Discuss Reparations, Affirmative Action, how he attacks inherent racism in Hollywood and liberals
*Then speak of identity – how it impacted me and how I was able to relate to it: Black & White, especially.
I always compare myself to other people. It’s something I’ve been doing for as long as I can remember. However, I just recently became aware of it during the summer.
I was speaking to a friend about a topic—I don’t remember what it was; it doesn’t really matter—and she flat out said:
“Why do you keep comparing yourself to other people?”
I didn’t have a concrete answer then and I still don’t have a concrete answer now.
We all compare ourselves to others to some degree. As humans, we tend to look at those who are more monetarily well off than us with some envy and those who are less monetarily well off than us with either sympathy or contempt (usually not envy). But for some (like me), it’s quite the obsession.
Perhaps this is because I failed in the area of attracting friends at a young age so I always felt like I lacked the necessary quality to become the ultimate friend. I looked to others and thought, “They have a lot of friends. If I were just like them or if I had this one quality, people would like me more.” Since pre-school, the question “Why don’t people like me?” has plagued me. As a young child, it was a legitimate question, especially when I was double-crossed by the girl I considered to be my best friend. Now that I’m older, it’s more of an irrelevant question since the people who like me significantly outnumber those who do not but because I zeroed in on my foes (so to speak) as a child, it is a terrible habit I’ve retained into adulthood.
There was also the pressure to always be number one in school. When an intelligent rival knocked me off my top-of-the-class pedestal, I became competitive. And that is my first vivid memory of truly experiencing envy.
Now, envy is second nature to me. Continue reading “The identity of comparison”
What does it mean to be a woman in America? Continue reading “Rechecking my gender”
Am I still a New Yorker or can I legitimately call myself a Philadelphian now?
I was born and raised in New York for 23 years. However, I’ve lived in suburban Philadelphia for the past 3 years with no plans to move anytime soon. I wouldn’t even mind retiring here.
Am I displaced? Can I still call New York home even though I may never live there again? Can I claim myself as a transplanted Philadelphian even though I hate the Mummers and the Philly Phanatic scares me?
What does it mean to have pride from where you live? A waste of energy? A waste of time?
I always tied my identity to what I did for a living. Americans are notorious for doing this.
Stranger: So tell me a little bit about yourself.
Me: Well, I’m a freelancer. I edit, proofread, and write articles.
I need to break the notion that I am my job. Kass does not equal writer.
I have this bad tendency to equate my self-worth to my accomplishments and achievements. The ironic thing is that my worth does not come from what I’ve accomplished or achieved but what Christ has already accomplished and achieved for all of mankind (including me!).
“Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price.” — I Corinthians 6:19-20
After Michael Jackson’s sudden death, BET announced that it would feature a Michael Jackson tribute on its annual awards show. Curious to see how this tribute would turn out, I asked my husband to flip the TV channel to BET the night of the awards show.
I watched hoping to see a well-done opening act only to find Jamie Foxx, butchering the Moonwalk and doing a poor imitation of Michael Jackson’s dance moves. I smiled, assuming Foxx was being comedic and doing the best he could. When Foxx was done, he went on a mini-rant about how Michael Jackson was a “black man” and “he belonged to us.” My husband immediately flipped the channel and said, “I am not watching anymore of this racist garbage.” He subsequently went on to ban BET from our home.
The BET Awards just shed another light on an issue that I’ve been struggling with recently—the issue of race and how it relates to my identity.
I’ve always had issues with my racial identity but the problem reared its ugly head continuously during the 2008 presidential election in which I publicly chose not to support Democratic candidate Barack Obama’s bid. Ever since, I’ve struggled with what it means to a Black Christian female and how race plays into who I am.
One question I grapple with: Does race matter? And I think, yes, for the most part, it does.
Race matters:
But when it comes to my personality, does race matter? No, it does not.
In the black community, race is not just a color; it’s become a culture. Black or African American culture. (While the terms Black and African American have become interchangeable and most people seem to prefer African American, my immediate heritage is Caribbean so I’m more comfortable simply using Black.)
What comprises Black culture?
With the exception of music, race, food, and politics, I’ve never been exposed to much of Black culture. I’m an only child and grew up in a nice, suburban area of the New York metropolitan area. While the area around me was highly diverse, no one in particular influenced me; I gravitated toward whatever I thought was interesting.
I suppose in my parents’ attempt to assimilate into American culture, the culture they adopted was one influenced by whites. I went to Roman Catholic schools from K-12 and attended predominantly white parishes until I became a born again Christian at age 16. Even then, I had a white pastor.
I grew up around mostly white kids and played with the white Barbie dolls. Maybe I was reared to be who other black people call a “sellout.” Continue reading “In search of an identity… race.”
Who am I… as a Christian?
As a Bible-believing Christian, this topic could be endless.
Under the banner of Christianity, I am a number of things:
The list goes on. But what does that mean for me as an individual?
I read God’s Plans For You by J. I. Packer in the hopes that I’d get some kind of divine revelation as to who I’m supposed to be. Nothing of the sort happened. Although I did gain some further insight as to what kind of individual God wants me to be.
An erroneous thought circulating in Christian circles is that, above all things, God wants us all to be happy. Above all things, God wants Christians to be holy. Achieving that apart from the guidance of the Holy Spirit is no easy task. What does the pursuit of holiness mean? (Another good book for me to read.) It means going after the things that are pleasing to God and pursuing the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23).
Here’s where God has led me in my Christianity so far:
That’s about as individual as it gets right now. There’s nothing profound or earth-shattering in this post. It’s simply an attempt to get me to figure out who I am as a Christian.
I tend to be of the mindset that in order to be pleasing to God, I have to do something big, something that leaves an evident footprint in the world. I think deep down I know this isn’t a true philosophy, but when I just live everyday life, I feel useless.
I feel exactly that way. Check out this great post from my friend Sizzledowski.
Those two questions run through my mind at least once a day. (I’m probably providing a conservative estimate on that front.) Well, here are the basic answers to each question:1. Who am I?
First and foremost, a Christian female; an adopted child of God bought with a price and a joint-heir with Christ.2. What is my purpose?
To glorify God, and to enjoy him for ever. (Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q1)
Christianity: What does it mean to be a Christian?
Race: What does it mean to be black in America, especially since I am first-generation American and am also married to a white American male?
Career: What kind of a writer am I? How do I pursue this, namely in a dying profession such as print journalism?
Location: My heart longs to be in no other place than New York but I’ve become content to live in Philadelphia. Am I still a New Yorker? Can I call myself a Philadelphian too now?
A friend I have went to NYC recently and met up with a few friends. She explored the city, took lots of pictures, and seemed to have a blast.
Then I found myself thinking, “Why don’t I still live there, Lord? Why am I not there?”
Of all things, I wasn’t jealous because she was spending time with people she cared about nor was I jealous that she had a good time.
I was upset not because she was in New York but because I wasn’t.
How pathetic is that?
In recent months, I’ve been struggling with the issue of identity:
I thought I’d let the New York thing go. It was a big struggle when I moved to Kentucky considering how much I hated Kentucky but I’ve been content in Philadelphia. So why do pictures of Manhattan and Brooklyn get me nostalgic for the days of going to NYU and attending my old church in the quaint section of Brooklyn Heights? Why? Would I trade what I have now (a husband who loves and cares for me) for what I had back then (single, depressed, no one)?
I’m a fool so I struggle with this.
I suppose what makes things harder is that the prospect of living in New York ever again is about as likely as the prospect of living in Kentucky again. Zero. I never loved Kentucky, I never grew up in Kentucky, Kentucky was never my home.
Sara Groves talks about “Painting Pictures of Egypt” and “leaving out what it lacked.” Perhaps I’m doing that with New York. When I think of living at NYU, I don’t think of the time I wandered dark alleyways at 2 or 3 am in the morning, hoping I’d get raped or murdered. I don’t think of how I frequently walked the Manhattan streets alone and lonely, eyeing couples and friends with jealousy because I possessed neither of those things. I simply think of the exhilarating feeling I’d get when I walked to class near Washington Square in the winter while flurries dropped just because I lived in New York.
If you asked me which city was the best in the world, I’d tell you New York. I just love that place.
However, I feel terrible because my friend was having a wonderful time visiting places and friends and the main emotion I could muster was jealousy. And like the fool I am, I had no words for her other than “I’m jealous.” Those words started out as a figure of speech but then evolved into actual jealousy. She didn’t warrant that. My sin and identity issues shouldn’t be her problem.
So it’s back to the drawing board yet again. For all my nostalgia, I’m putting my primary identity in the wrong thing. My primary identity is not native New Yorker. My primary identity is Christian. And whenever anything or anyone dethrones Christ; it’s wrong and it’s sin. And I need to repent.
This Journey Is My Own 