God really takes care of me.....

So.... I went to the gynecologist for my follow up today. I'll spare you all the details, but she told me I have Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome, which you can read about at that website. Figure I'll save my male readers some potential embarrassment/TMI moments.

On that website (I forgot to ask the NP), it mentioned that infertility can sometimes be a potential complication. That being the case, I've been having thoughts lately. Due to the very strained/confusing relationship with my sensei, I have been considering giving up on romance for a while. I've always seemed to fail at relationships, whether it be because of myself or something else, I don't know, but lately I've just felt this foreboding as far as relationships go. And I even begun to think to myself after I noticed my physical irregularity that, if I am infertile, maybe it means that God doesn't want me to be in a romantic relationship. After all, being an infertile woman, would it be fair for me to marry a fertile man who could have children with someone else? Would I be robbing the world of a life, or even multiple lives by not remaining single?

But then a friend of mine pointed something out. There are many men in this world who either decisively do not want children or don't care either way. Also, if a man falls in love with me and sincerely wants to marry me, and I am in love with him, what right have I to refuse if he is aware of my possible infertility? Even if he does want kids, if he's so in love with me to be willing to sacrifice that desire in order to be with me, wouldn't it be more selfish of me to refuse? And adoption is always an available possibility. There are plenty of orphans in this world, and knowing from the start that I can't conceive would make it a much more desirable option, especially if my husband did want kids. And Genesis 2:18 says "'It is not good for the man to be alone.'" Surely God must mean woman as well.

I have always felt like God has had a fairly elaborately drawn out plan for my life (not to sound self-righteous. His plan in everyone's lives is elaborate.... Just seeing it from one's own perspective always makes it seem more s0.) And in a lot of cases, I didn't know what He wanted for me until it was right there in front of me (Lee, for example: I had hints in the background, but in the foreground, I had no idea where He wanted me to go to college.) And for someone for whom He created such an elaborate and (from my perspective) somewhat confusing plan, there must be someone very specific in mind to be my partner....the clay for whom I am a rib.....a very uniquely shaped rib that may only fit in one ribcage. And as Vivi pointed out, it may be best that I did find this out now while I am single, not even in a serious relationship, much less married. That website said that many women find out they have PCOS only after failed conception attempts. At least I don't have a husband to break this news to. At least we caught it fairly early before I could develop cancer, for example.

This is a very trying time for me, and some of the thoughts in my head are inexpressible through words right now, though I could write on this for hours. It's best not to dwell, and that's something I'm fairly well versed in, so perhaps it's time to leave it at this.

"Into Your hands, I commend my spirit." He's still good.

Cissy

"I love you more than I have ever found a way to say to you..."

I'm not really sure where to begin. Usually I try to have a slight emotional detachment from my post, but this one is coming directly from my heart.

Last night I was talking to a dear friend of mine, and I opened up to her about a lot of things. In my last post, I mentioned liking someone and using someone else as his kagemusha. I finally told that friend who it was. It was someone I consider my sensei.... not just a teacher, but a sensei. Those of you who are familiar with Japanese tradition know what I mean. A teacher is simply someone who teaches you skills to do something. A sensei is someone you can talk to. A close English translation is 'mentor', but there's something more fitting about sensei that I can't quite explain in translation. Anyway, I'd rather not say who this sensei is, but there was a sensei that very much moved me. I was able to talk to this friend honestly about that for the first time last night, and doing so caused a bit of healing within me. I was finally honest about my feelings and the whole situation.... both with her and with myself.

And for the first time, i was able to be angry with him! It's not a feeling I choose to dwell on, but I can honestly say that because he toyed with my emotions (whether intending to or not) he hurt me. He DID hurt me. And I've been running away from that. I always chose not to blame him, but I can honestly say it's OKAY to blame him for hurting me. Everyone hurts people who care about them. Whether intentional or unintentional, it's still inevitable. So I can admit that he hurt me and be angry with him and in turn forgive him. I think that's what I've been lacking in order to get over this!

Even still, I feel like it's time (at least for a short stent) to give up on romance. Unless sensei sees his folly and turns around to take me back (which there's a very, very slim chance of), it's time for me to, as I said last night, put my heart back in my chest where it belongs rather than letting it hang on my sleeve for anyone to snatch away. I think this is what God has been wanting for me for a long time now, but He knew He had to show me the hard way, and that being the case, I'm grateful that He didn't put me through anymore heartache than I had to go through.

It's funny though. In my own way, I still love sensei. (by love, I don't necessarily mean "in love" just that I love him.) It's unexplainable, and it's just sort of an emotion I can't describe using words.

But I've had a lot of health issues this year. I have another gynecologist appointment on Friday, and I'm a little worried. Things went how she expected them to for the most part, but I'm scared it might have only been a temporary fix for a potentially permanent problem. But that being the case, I still trust God to take care of me. In fact, a friend of mine said that she would be willing to provide a solution should I have the issues that I'm worried about.

I went with my parents and grandmother to Indiana this past weekend, and it's incredible how that helped clear my head. Being away really puts things into perspective. I think that's where I started thinking about this whole thing with my sensei.... knowing something had to change. While we were there, I was reading this book series called the Kiesha'ra (which I'm still working on.) It's sort of a sci-fi romanceish thing that definitely has nothing to do with Twilight (!) It kinda made me realize just how much of a "serpent" I really am.... and how many "avians" I've been drawn to in the past. I don't really know where I'm going with this, but I don't terribly want to erase what I just wrote.

I suppose that's all I have to say. I hope this all ties better together than I feel I've done.

Cissy

Discouragement

So as I lay here and struggle with what I still strongly believe is mononucleosis and fight exhaustion, soreness and a general level of weakness that goes beyond normal exhaustion and fatigue to a point of being something medically unreasonable, I also struggle with something that geos much deeper. My body is weak and weary right now, but so are my heart and mind. I don't know if it's because of my recent fatigue, or if it's all in my head, but I've been struggling with discouragement to the point of depression.

What do I need to be discouraged about? I'm going to the one school I've dreamt of going to for two years. I have quite possibly one of the best roommates I could have as far as compatibility, consideration and just in general. I don't have a great number of friends, but clearly the ones I have are ones I earned fair and square. I don't have much of a love life, but that's far from necessary for me to be happy. Yet despite all of these things, I still can say it's not entirely a chemical reaction in my brain causing me to be depressed either. I'm feeling discouraged. I feel like I'm in the wrong place. I feel like even though the people here like me, and although I like the people here, I still somehow don't belong. My heart still cries out for something different and someone on a different kind of level to talk to. I thought I had found someone like that, but because I came on too strongly and presented myself as a total idiot to him, he now despises me and refuses to talk to me. He tied all the confusing thoughts in my head together and made them make sense, though. For one fleeting moment I realized what it meant to think clearly. Ironically, I don't even blame him for not wanting to talk to me. the way I always presented myself to him made me sound stupid, and I acted less like I wanted to be his friend than I did his fangirl. If someone had acted to me the way I acted to him, i would avoid them too. But now I think he still expects me to be a fangirl now that he refuses to talk to me, too. He will see quite quickly that I don't function like that. If he can't see me as a friend, I'm not going to go around doing him favors all the time.

But that's not what I'm getting at. What I'm getting at is, for only a tiny singular moment has something felt right here. Only for that brief glimmer did I see something that made me see again why I'm here. And I pushed it away. Since then, though I've searched desperately in other things for a place where I fit in, a niche if you will, I've been unable. I find my studies falling behind. I find myself wanting to give up. I even find myself wanting to drop out of this college. Why, you ask, would I want to drop out of the one place you've wanted to go to school? Why would you leave the home God led you to? Why, when you've always kept walking before, do you suddenly feel the desire to stop and fall down and give up/

The answer is this:

I don't deserve Lee University.

I feel like I probably ought to provide reasoning for this statement, but that's all I feel I can say. My heart is at a point of unrest, and I can't help but feel I don't belong here. It's too good here. This isn't some false humility of me wanting to come up with an ecuse cause i'm fed up. I honestly feel that way... I don't deserve this place. I live here, but it can't be my home. Because it's too good to be. Is this what God led me here to see? Because I feel so undeserving of the goodness and sincerity that I've found here. I have no idea what to do...

Cecelia

NaNo Progress: 6,896/40,000

Introspection

Fact (according to Cissy): Ninety percent of people who say they will do something won't follow through. Most of them don't mean to let you down or fail you when you need them most. Humanity is just fickle. Hence why, if you do everything you say you will do and everything everyone asks you to do, you will rise above 90% of the competition.

I want to be a part of that ten percent. I want to literally do everything that is not morally wrong or self-detrimental that people need me to do. Even if it's mildly inconvenient, I want to do what people ask me to do. I want to do what I say I will do. If it's as simple as remembering to turn a light off when I'm done in a room or as difficult as walking halfway across town so that you don't have to walk alone. Or watch their child for a day so that they can just get some rest. I don't want to be unreliable. I want to be the solid foundation that holds people up.

The other day someone told me I was a self-contradiction a lot. They said I had so many sides to me that they couldn't even tell which one was the real me. When I responded that all of them are the real me, they told me that a lot of it contradicted itself. For me, most things are situational. Whether I'm the person who can laugh and joke about anything, talk objectively and intellectually about any subject or am hurting and struggling with feelings. Whether I am angry or happy, aloof or warm, quiet or loud, uninterested or passionate, even about the same subject, it is still me. Very seldom do I show any side of myself that is fake.

But if that person is reading this, I do want to say that after some introspection, I realized that the side of me you saw the day that you were so concerned when we had this conversation was a different person. I was trying too hard to get someone else's attention without jeopardizing giving myself away. I forget sometimes that people actually like me for me, so that the sides that I typically hide from others and the sides that I typically show from others kind of reversed themselves that day. My gravitation probably would have remained the same, but it probably would have manifested itself in a different manner. I'm just afraid of being too clingy and driving people away. And yet, that seems to be exactly what I'm doing anyway. Frankly, I hate the side of me that I showed that day probably more than anyone else ever could. Because I know exactly what it is.

My request is this: Pray that I may learn, not only how to determine and control outwardly what it is that I'm feeling, but that I may also learn how to relax and be less afraid to show whatever is the "real" me in cases such as these. My mind is unable to rest at ease right now, and ever since we had this discussion, it has plagued my thoughts, while I've tried to determine what my real issue is. Because most of the time, with me, what you see is what you get. How I show myself to be is how I generally am. Sure, sometimes I pretend to be happier than I am or more excited about something than I really am, but I don't manifest it any differently than I really would.

I don't know. I feel like I'm trying to understand something that goes much deeper than what within my range of comprehension. I need to stop thinking.

M. Cecelia Swick

Irony

So today's topic is irony. Don't you just love how society has altered its definition so that it's a synonym for coincidence? Okay, so you're talking about your favorite song with me, and then it comes on the radio. Your immediate response is "Wow, that's so ironic!" My response is to restrain myself from raving on and on about how society nowadays misuses the word. Above I posted a link to the definition, but in case you were too lazy to click on it, here it is:

Main Entry: iro·ny

Pronunciation: \ˈī-rə-nē also ˈī(-ə)r-nē\

Function: noun

Inflected Form(s): plural iro·nies

Etymology: Latin ironia, from Greek eirōnia, from eirōn dissembler

Date: 1502

1 : a pretense of ignorance and of willingness to learn from another assumed in order to make the other's false conceptions conspicuous by adroit questioning —called also Socratic irony
2 a : the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning b : a usually humorous or sardonic literary style or form characterized by irony c : an ironic expression or utterance
3 a (1) : incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result (2) : an event or result marked by such incongruity b : incongruity between a situation developed in a drama and the accompanying words or actions that is understood by the audience but not by the characters in the play —called also dramatic irony, tragic irony

synonyms see wit

Can I now make it any clearer that irony =/= coincidence. If anything, irony might be more easily confused with sarcasm.

Irony would be me trying to come up with an example to explain it, and then using a coincidence instead. Irony is how my dad and I joke about how "Ironic" it is that we both have pet peeves about people using irony to mean coincidence.

I'm not sure what the purpose of this is. Perhaps because I currently have friends who love to use/overuse/misuse this word.

And that aside, have you ever had a song that you heard and thought "Wow, that's so me right now!"? Well, basically all of MAE's music has done that to me lately. Particularly "The Sun and The Moon." (this is one song. The first link is lyrics. Second link is a video with the song.) To be more specific, the first stanza really applies to me right now. "The words seem to flow, and the thoughts they keep running..." I can't possibly express how incredible that is to me!

Anyway, I feel like this entry is becoming a bit unproductive. As for my last entry, I still find myself struggling with what I want to believe as Truth. But I seek Truth, not convenience. Whatever that may be.

Celia