Found an old mustard seed hiding in a corner

Hey, I'm back. It's been.... over a decade?!?? I would say I don't know what's crazier, the fact it's been 10 years or the fact I write you from the middle of a pandemic and social uprising, except I totally know what's crazier, or actually maybe I don't, I'm not sure. Uncertainty is the name of the game these days -- what a far cry from young college Melissa, sooooo sure about things, and so vocal about it, yikes. Also, the interface is different on blogger now, which cracks me up, thinking about all the changes and phases the Internet has been through since I last opened up this thing, mega lol. Honestly surprised Blogspot, er Blogger now I guess, is still going!

I have a tiny little corner of a tiny little San Francisco rent-controlled apartment that I'll be plugged into for the foreseeable future, plus or minus dog walks. I have had a weird thing happening lately where I don't feel a lot of emotions, which for someone who's usually crying or yelling or being excited and romantic about something or another is pretty alarming. This might be depression, or just overwhelm, our the current state of the nation/world, or a loss of innocence or some form of maturity, or the fact I cried nonstop for like 3 months straight when my dog died last September and now have no tears left to give, but I also think I'm out of touch with some parts of myself, and one of them is faith. The reason I think this is because some of the strong feelings I've found myself having in the past few years -- and increasingly over the past few months and now weeks -- have been about faith. I have so many questions, thoughts, points of confusion, and feelings. For a few years there I didn't want to identify as Christian because it wasn't like.... cool.... but these days I don't want to identify as Christian because of the way I see our Christian nation treating its people, people I thought we were called to love and serve. The rest of the strong feelings I still have been having are about art, and my guess is they're connected for me, I'm sure I'll get into that later.

There are so many things I don't even know where to start. First off, I didn't really know we were a Christian nation. I grew up thinking we were all movies and sex and capitalism which is true, but I didn't understand, know, or realize the roots and history of Christianity behind and under all that -- and its extent into our value system. I grew up thinking people were trying to take God out of the pledge of allegiance and that! was! bad! so we were being persecuted! In our own land! We were Not of this world (I fuckkkkking hate that slogan / bumper sticker, first F bomb of the mustard seed blog is well-deserved for sure, what is this X-Files? Aliens? I mean it's true in a very transcendental way but not in the way that....well I digress) and America, I though, was against us (spoiler alert: that thought is the heart of the victim complex at the root of systemic racism and other grand evils and social ills, but more on that later). Next, and perhaps most importantly, this is not a new thing -- people have been doing terrible things in God's name for millennia and people have been loving and serving others as God called them to do for millennia as well. In the last 10 years, I've wrestled with the novelty and naivete that comes with being a young adult, and seeing and realizing things for the first time, and thinking that this is when this thing has happened in life, when really this is just when it happened in my life. Thinking that these things I think are new are my causes, my crosses to bear, my savior complex projects (the other end of the systemic racism / oppressive patriarchal structure spectrum, btw) .... when really they are all ours together.

A bunch of really cool people, women mostly, guided my spiritual life through the last ten years online. I am who I am today largely because of this network of bloggers (now twitterers or influencers or something, people with platforms and personal brands) who were wrestling with their faith and what to do with it. There's been #MeToo and the 2016 elections and Rachel Held Evans speaking truth into a harsh world and then dying, and so many incredible people taking risks and being honest and finding ways to listen better, love harder, stand up for themselves and for others and put up boundaries and still forgive. For a while I was jealous of these people -- why did they get to publish books about their female journey through faith-based patriarchy and I just got.... my lame unfamous privilege-guilt-angsty-nobody life? But now I know God uses different people for different things at different times. And he (she? they? I haven't written about God in so long I don't know what I call them. What I want to do is call God "they".... can I do that? Do people do that? It makes sense with the Trinity and all) uses, er They use people who are listening. And if you are listening then They are using you no matter where you are at, maybe it's a book deal, maybe it's just your boring office or your family dinner or your friend's back porch. I have not fully believed that for most of the past 10 years, I have not gone down without a fight. But I am starting to feel that I have finally gone down a little. I am so thankful for people who are stronger, calmer, more grounded, more patient, more knowledgeable, more wise, more gentle, and braver than me who have been in these roles during these times.

I ... one thing I'm proud of over the last ten years is my yoga practice. I think sometime in there I was starting a yoga blog where I started to talk about my connections between yoga and my faith but then I had weird creepy dude stuff and had to shut everything down, have walked this awful line of paranoid of and scarred by the internet and yet still trying to prove myself on it and be somebody for so many years since, because it's been the Snapchat/Instagram story era, ya'll! Anyways, yoga is finally something I do regularly / daily, but it took the better part of this decade for it to get that way. I have enjoyed learning about the stages of change, and how they manifest in my life, and baby steps, and two steps forward one step back (or sometimes ten), and how much energy it takes to do new things and especially to do them unpracticed and imperfectly, and how to have grace with myself and others knowing this.

People say "It's not a marathon it's a sprint" or vice versa and honestly for me it's more like, okay, I ran ten yards today, good job, go me, that's really something, maybe we'll do it again tomorrow, maybe not. I understand why it was hard for me to get to this point as someone who used to be a literal cross-country runner, where I took my abilities and youth and energy levels for granted, and didn't understand why other people couldn't just x or y or z, or why everything wasn't a marathon you just....sprinted.

I am thinking about how to do this same thing in other places of my life -- largely my creative life, how to practice art and writing on my own terms and in my own slow stutter-stepped time, now that I'm away from the MFA and art classes, now that I've detached from social media enough to not try to use it to show off and get validation for whatever I'm doing at any given chance. It's a space I'll have to make at this same desk in this same corner, but not with the computer -- too tempting.

This has become much more of a tirade than I anticipated but I wanted to "break the seal" on what I hope can be a spiritual practice for myself. I just want to check in when I can and see if I can learn what my faith is like now. One thing I know for sure is that faith involves community, and now that not just the internet but now COVID-19 has our ideas of community so turned upside down, I can kind of skip over the whole "should I go to church or not wah" thing (whew, bullet dodged) and think about how to connect with God and others, whether via small groups or Zoom calls or tweets or pews or what have you. What I mean is the reason this isn't just a journal or private blog is because of that aspect of my faith. Like why do it on a blog? I don't know, why write the Bible on paper, you know? We just use the tools we have to try to remember and share.