Photo by David Costa

This weekend’s out-of-town scrimmage got me thinking a lot about the idea of mental game, and recognizing it as a vital component of success. Sports often serve as a microcosm for realities outside of the game being played, and derby seems to be a good microcosm for my reality at the moment.

I’m new to the derby world, relatively speaking. I’ve only been skating since early last fall. I come at the game with a mix of wide-eyed determination and slowly burgeoning confidence. I’m constantly evaluating how I let my self-view determine how I play the game, and letting myself take the ‘out’ of “I’m new, I don’t know how to do that yet” doesn’t do my mental game any favors.

At this last scrimmage, I put on the pivot panty [for any non-derby readers, that's the term for the stretchy helmet cover with the stripe on it] for the first time ever. I mean, ever ever. Never in a practice, never in any other venue had I done that. I let the girls with me know that I was new to this position, and they were so awesome about it. “We’ll do whatever you ask us to,” they reminded me. “You’re in charge. You want us to wall up, you say the word.” I wasn’t so sure I would know what to do.

And then the whistle blew and the jam was going and I honestly don’t remember if we dominated the jam or not. But what I did gain from it was the idea that being a rookie is no excuse for not trying, for not taking the lead. I don’t get the ‘out’ because I’m fresh, and taking it makes me a weaker player no matter what position I’m skating. Every single jam, especially in a scrimmage, is a brand new opportunity to try something new or difficult…and always always always to learn something. No lesson is too small.

I don’t get to take the ‘out’ in the real world either. It’s easy to take sometimes. The mental game of job searching as a freshly graduated counselor is a daily battle. I get so frustrated when I put out application after application and nothing comes of any of it. I’ve been in tears over all of it more times than I’d like to admit.

So this is the inner dialogue I’m working on:
Self. Yes, this sucks right now, and yes it is hard. But you can take a lot more hits than that. You know how to get back up. Sure, you’re tired. Sure those other people out there are bigger and more experienced. But there will always be people out there who are bigger and more experienced. And they might get the glory for a while. But you have to try. You have to get out there, over and over. Learn. Try something new. Fail. Shine. But mostly, remember you’re not alone out there. Look around you.

I’m not in this alone. Ever. None of us is. I love that.

I live way too many days trying to be different things for different people, and while so much of that matters, it puts me in a position to feel like I need the permission of others to navigate my own life.

So I take permission back into my own hands. I give myself permission to be proud of what I’ve accomplished, to be a little (okay, sometimes a LOT) fearful of what happens next, and most importantly, I give myself permission to shamelessly eat my Oreos in my more than slightly psychotic way. I give myself permission to have a bad handwriting day. I give myself permission to obsess over…well, pretty much whatever happens to be holding my fleeting attention at the moment.

What I’m getting at is…permission is part of the process. Without being okay with being a little scared or goofy-happy, I don’t get to move through those things and onto the next moments and adventures. Recently, I had to give myself permission to nitpick my performance at an interview. It’s totally okay to be critical of myself for a little while as long as that critic recognizes the good AND the bad, and moves through the whole experience with some measure of acceptance.

Giving myself permission allows for seasons, and for a chronic Creative with an analytic bent, that’s a good thing. Instead of being caught up in how a recent endeavor endears me to others, I choose to focus on the elements of Self that are revealed in the process. Am I recognizing in myself qualities that I want to cultivate or change?

What is it that you need to give yourself permission to do/think/feel/change/accept? Is there someone who needs a piece of your mind…or to know that you forgive them? What dream have you been keeping on the back burner that you could totally sit down and put on paper? Perhaps most importantly, when was the last time you looked really really silly in public?

That’s what I thought. Now get that tutu and tiara out of your closet and start dancing in the grocery store! And call me up if you live near me. I’m all over that .

I don’t remember where I first heard the idea, but I totally believe in the power of setting goals and having expectations so that you can make your life happen to you. Waiting for life to happen is a really good way to spend a lot of time doing just that…waiting. And, let’s face it, I’m not very good at waiting. Waiting for the right job, the right relationship, the right moment…I get tired of it. So I’m going to set some goals. Right here, right now. Now that I’m done with this last season of my life (school) I have all the room in the world to dream big. So that’s what I plan to do.

I want to stay close to home until my sister makes it through the majority of her teenage years. I believe in the importance of having solid role models, and hell, just people who care enough to keep tabs on you when you’re going through adolescence. I know how important it was to me to have women in my life during those years who I could count on to just love on me and so I absolutely want to be there for my sister. She’ll be sixteen in five years…and I’ll be 30ish.

Five years will also give me time to do two things work-related that need to happen. I need to “pay back” my scholarship from grad school by working in the field. I need to do that for four years. Then I have the freedom to do whatever I want with my degree, whether I use it specifically or not. My short-term goal here is to get a moderately-paying full-time job that I can handle for a few years so I can put some money away and be totally independent from my incredibly generous parents. They have been a huge blessing while I’ve been in school and always willing to help me out when I need gas in my tank and my bank account reads in the single digits.

Now here’s the more personal goal…that I’m wary to share but I’m going to anyways because we’re all friends here. This one doesn’t have a timeline. I want to be in a relationship with someone who shares my passion and my big-dreaming tendencies. He needs to be strong enough and confident enough to hold his own in my world, to sometimes take me by the shoulders and say “honey, breathe” without deflating me. He needs to be a balanced fellow, who understands and lives by the same values that I do, but doesn’t make me feel inadequate. A bonus would be that he’s good at organizing without making me feel like my tornado-disaster is a mark of failure.

I will wait for that man. For however long it takes. And writing those things down helps me to remember that anything less is not worth it.

Five years from now, I want to be planning my move to Manhattan, apartment shopping and establishing connections there. I want to have published at least one thing, whether it’s a book or a magazine article or a novel.

Writing this all down makes it feel more real. I can see it in my mind’s eye, and I feel hopeful. I know that some of these goals may change or be altered by life, and I accept that. Today, though, I’m going to savor the sweetness of dreaming.

Photo by David Costa

Last night was my first mixed-league scrimmage. I’ve scrimmaged with my leaguemates, but it’s different to get together with 50 girls from leagues all over the region. As it stands, only one other girl from my league came to this one, which was about an hour away from our town.

I try to make a habit of doing things on a regular basis that make me nervous–the good kind of nervous. And frankly, until I got in the car and started driving to the scrimmage, I was seriously considering staying home because I was definitely fighting some nerves. None of my girls were riding with me, so I was going solo. I’m no stranger to solo, but solo make it a lot easier to call things off. I didn’t know exactly what to expect, and I’ve only been skating a few months.

Thankfully, none of my excuses to myself panned out, and I found myself at a skating rink at 10pm on a Saturday night, lining up with a whole host of new friends, chatting about how we were looking forward to the first couple of jams to get our jitters out.

And get our jitters out we did. I even put on the jammer panty (the helmet cover that identifies the jammer) during my second jam of the night so I could get my jamming nerves to calm down. I figured this would be a really great venue for practicing jamming as much as possible, because we’ve got a lot of hotshot jammers on my home league so I don’t get to just practice super often.

(If you need a basic rundown of derby, check out the wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roller_derby)

My first sprawling fall of the night nearly knocked the wind out of me, but lucky for me I like to fall (think: gymnast, climber, skydiver…you get the picture) and all it really serves to do is fire me up. The whole night we just rotated through lineups, skating when we wanted to, rearranging teams when girls had to leave to go home. The beauty of a black and white scrimmage is that all you have to do to switch teams is put on a different color shirt.

I also love that in a scrimmage, every jam pretty much stands alone. No one is keeping score, so each new group starts fresh. The one thing about derby that I haven’t learned to love is the drama, and while I love skating with my own team and building those relationships, skating in a group of relative strangers totally minimizes interpersonal drama. Yeah, that girl I knee’d out of my way totally sent me sprawling out of retaliation, but it was still fun, and then forgotten.

The refs called things off when the skaters started to get sloppy because we were so tired. Three hours of late-night skating can take it out of you, that’s for sure. And when girls skate sloppy, people get hurt, so it was a good call on the part of the refs to call it a night.

After a short night of sleep and a church service, today has been a day of ibuprofen, adding new friends on facebook, and checking out pictures from the scrimmage. I’m still new enough to this sport that I’m not agonizing over every mistake I made (not that that’s really my modus operandi anyways) so the whole thing was just fun. I’m glad I didn’t stay home.

Tomorrow’s the cross-town burrito-eating race with my leaguemates, so there is more derby fun to be had before tryouts in a few weeks. I’m so glad to be back on skates with some regularity. Off-season was good for my joints, but pre-season is great for my spirit.

I’m a chronic rearranger. Even as a kid, I moved my furniture around on a regular basis. I probably inherited the tendency from my mom, who moves the garbage can around the kitchen to a new place every time I visit…and sometimes halfway through my visit. My childhood was full of elaborate furniture swaps between the women in our family, and endless redecorating projects. I learned to wallpaper before I learned to shave my legs, and I can tape off a room for painting with the best of ‘em.

Suffice it to say, I come by my compulsive rearranging rightly.

I’ve lived in a lot of small spaces over these last eight years, which puts a bit of a damper on the extent to which changes can be made, but I still manage to freshen the feng shui of my environment a couple times a year. Sometimes I get roommates in on the project and the day turns into an apartment rearranging party, much like today did. On those days, I should be banned from access to craigslist, where I will most certainly be looking for bookcases I don’t need…except I feel like if there’s one thing I need more of, it’s bookshelves because no matter how many boxes of books I put in storage every time I move I still manage to have way too many.

The last three days have been a lot of organizing and re-homing. The instance of returning home from visiting my parents for Christmas and having gifts to put away and laundry to do converged with needing to prepare for houseguests and an altogether occupying need to adjust some furniture…it all kind of happened at once, with a lot of 80s and 90s British punk in the background. And when I mean it all happened at once, that’s how it happens. I let very few friends and family members be privy to my organizational tactics because they are completely bonkers. Utterly, exhaustingly incoherent. Seven tasks all at once, me muttering to myself, with plenty of coffee to tie it all together. Unfortunately, I also seem to have my best hair days when I’m playing the crazy hermit lady, and this week was no different. Ah well.

I love the freshness of new organization. I love when for at least a minute (because that’s about how long I can maintain a clean bedroom) my space feels totally “me”. My bed is made and my books are in neat stacks and my nutella has a new stashing spot and most of my clothes are folded and put away. My world is in order and my overactive mind can rest in my little sanctuary that is decorated with far too much green.

So that’s what I’ve been up to since graduating a few weeks ago. Rearranging. Coincidence? Maybe. Or maybe not.

525,600 minutes – how do you measure, measure a year?
In daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee.
In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife

You know the song. Well, I know the song…and every other line and note in the entire musical. (Rock opera, if we’re being technical about things. But I digress.) Seven years ago, when I was introduced to RENT for the first time, it appealed to my freshman-in-college, whole-world-is-expanding sensibilities, and nourished my musical theatre obsession at the same time. You see, I come from a long history of total dorkiness. Don’t let the climbing harness and quad skates fool you…long before all of that was part of my life, I spent the better part of my energy teaching myself to like coffee–which was a wildly successful endeavor–and listening to my favorite musicals on repeat. Like, we’re talking overdose repeat. At least I can say that I don’t do much halfway.

But that was seven years ago. And here I am. I still love coffee. Even more now, considering I’m two weeks away from a Master’s degree. You don’t get through grad school without developing such affections. And I still love musicals, especially RENT. I try to watch it once a year or so, and it’s one of those things that has a depth that is different every time. Because I’m really NOT just the same as I was seven years ago. At eighteen I wanted nothing more than to move to New York City and be a writer. To put my finger on the pulse of a city with which I was entirely enamored and get lost in its gritty charm.

In the interim between that season and this one, I’ve been lucky enough to build a life that was nothing like I expected. Obviously, I don’t live in New York (though I’ve visited twice), and no one pays me to write, which I’ve learned is kind of how I prefer it since I’m not the most disciplined wordsmith. When I graduate in a few weeks, I’ll have a degree in counseling and a few more grey hairs than I started with. (No kidding about the grey hairs. First one came in a week before I turned 21.)

I guess I’m writing to process the transition. My seasons have been dictated by the academic schedule for my entire working memory, and soon that won’t be the case. That panics me a little, though I know it shouldn’t. During this last season I have been so happy that I’ve hardly noticed it pass by. I was kind of blindsided by reality last week when my calendar suddenly announced the arrival of December.

I love this right-now life. I’m not ready for it to change. But, no matter what changes or doesn’t, I am glad I was blindsided. This season, I have been happy. No-trouble-sleeping happy (which is a cause for celebration when your bouts of insomnia started in elementary school). Dance-like-you-don’t-care happy. I didn’t even notice the season’s end creeping up on me.

And I think that’s all I can ask for. To be a little distracted by the joys of my day-to-day. If I can reflect on a season or a series of seasons and see that, it really doesn’t get much better, and no matter what happens after this, I had a really rockin’ autumn. I plan to hold onto that.

May your December be full of joy and meaning and reflection. If you do find it lacking in joy, however, I recommend throwing (literally) tinsel at your tree (especially a Christmas tree, if you have one, but any tree will do), or a quiet cup of your favorite coffee, if that suits you better. I tried both. Either way, take some time to enjoy my favorite time of the whole year, okay? And let me know how it goes.

She handles life with an innate sense of ambition and balance that is both impressive and intimidating. And does it all while managing to be sweet and likable and resilient. In all of her burgeoning independence, that kid is beginning one of the most volatile stages of growing up and becoming who she’ll be. What she discovers about the world and how she decides to process it in the next few years will have a huge impact on her identity.

And so I have this really unique relationship with an especially unique little sister and that sometimes scares the snot out of me. I love that she is my biggest fan and loves me with a sincerity that only siblings know. I also know that every word I say and every promise I make and every attitude I cop are being watched by this perceptive young woman…and often emulated.

I hope that I can be as real as possible when she’s watching, because I feel that will give her the best opportunity to become who she wants to be. I have this cool opportunity to be part of her family in a way that is not quite parental and not quite the usual sibling setup. Knowing she’s watching has influenced my decisions since the day she was born, whether I’ve been aware of it or not.

She’ll start junior high next year, and I’ll blink and she’ll be graduating from high school. I hope she grows up to be a little subversive, but not too much. I hope that high school and college teach her the balance of working hard and playing harder. I hope she has her first kiss with a boy she really likes, but only when she’s ready and I hope she gets butterflies and fireworks and sweaty palms. I hope she learns just enough lessons the hard way to be gracious and humble always. I hope so many things for this amazing young lady.

More than anything else, though, I hope that our relationship continues to grow and deepen as her perception of her world grows. I want to be the kind of big sister that asks tough questions that make her think and evaluate what matters to her. I want her to call when something big happens, and more often I want her to call for no reason at all.

I love you, little sister, neverending-infinity-plus-sister-plus-God.

This time it’s roller derby, and I welcome this season with open, elbow-and-wrist-guarded arms (and knee pads, and a helmet, and a mouthguard…). I still love to climb and hike and skydive and slackline and run and ride my bike, and I respect and love whatever place those things have in my life whenever they surge. I love the physical challenge of sports, as each one has taught me something different about myself. I love the way new challenges open my heart and stoke my inner fire.

Technically, this one started back before the climbing gym closed when a couple of the derby girls from one of the local leagues dropped by the gym while I was working desk and left flyers about their upcoming bout. Unfortunately, the next one was the same day as the gym closing party AND I was committed to a weekend of babysitting, so it was not great timing.

It wasn’t until August that I finally made it to a bout. Midway through, I finally understood why people watch football, and how much fun it is to understand enough about what’s going on to have something to cheer about. Bren and I yelled ourselves silly, wondering why we’d never gone to one of these things before. The girls on the track played hard and looked like they were having a blast.

Attempting to exercise self-control and good judgment, I consciously put derby on the back burner, promising myself I’d revisit it in a few months. Around mid-September, I put my climbing gym membership on hold since I hadn’t been using it, and that same week my roommate mentioned that one of our mutual friends was going to a derby practice to check things out. That was all I needed.

Last Friday was my first regular practice. Drills and scrimmages and my head is still reeling with all the rules and techniques. Team tryouts are in January, and until then I plan to be collecting skills and bruises a couple times each week to get ready. Along with finding a decent pair of derby skates, I need to come up with a derby name. I have a couple ideas bouncing around, but I will take suggestions…

So, while the whole derby timeline didn’t exactly work out like I had planned, it balances well with the rest of my life. I love skating faster and getting better and steadier and more confident. And I look forward to learning all that derby has to teach me.

I’m a together kind of gal. I get good grades, I generally stay out of trouble, I’m a nice person…but none of those things render me immune to having days or weeks of feeling grossly inadequate and inexperienced. I’m not saying these things to garner sympathy or affirmations…I’m just throwing them out into the void because writing helps me think.

Impending graduation from my master’s program seems to elicit these inadequacies as a way of coping with what I don’t know, which is life outside of the academic calendar. I don’t know what I want to do next, exactly, and the not knowing makes me feel like I’ve failed at something. I’m nearly 25 years old…and yet all of the growth and progress and reality of “yeah, I’m in a good place and I have nothing to feel inadequate about”…gets quiet sometimes.

And what makes it an even less productive frame of mind is my tendency to believe anyone who feeds it. Anyone who makes me doubt my abilities and experiences automatically becomes louder than every encouraging word. To me, pressing through that is what dreaming is about. We laud this idea that it takes something special to be a dreamer…finding inspirational quotes and losing ourselves in stories.

The real truth of it, though, is that the dreaming happens when you can tell those voices to shut up. When you can hear them and acknowledge them, but still have hope and a sense that you’re made for more and bigger things that aren’t based on success or failure. That you don’t have to give up. And I think that’s something we’re all capable of. We’re not special in that capability…instead it threads us together in this tapestry that I love to look at and think about. Sometimes I have to just to keep the cynicism at bay.

Getting rejected from multiple jobs this summer didn’t make me feel good. But it did make me confront my doubts and decide what I was and wasn’t going to let define me from what other people perceive me to be, from my parents to my peers to potential employers. I’ve got nothing to prove to anyone but myself. If that was the purpose of enduring rejection, I’m glad I encountered it.

For the record, I plan to be a kickass counselor someday. :)

Be smart, be strong, be proud, live honorably and with dignity, and just hold on. -page 195

Finished “A Million Little Pieces” yesterday…er, very early this morning. I’m reluctant to admit how connected to James I felt at times while reading the book. And how connected to everyone else on the planet who struggles to make sense of impulse and desire and to learn what it is to take responsibility for beliefs and actions.

“Addiction is a disease” or maybe it is not…I don’t know what I think yet and that does not bother me so much. If there is something that I have learned in my faith journey it is that some things will be mysteries, perhaps for a season or perhaps until glory and so right now I merely aim to seek truth and to make peace with uncertainty. I find addiction to be a thing entirely captivating and entirely relevant to faith.

It seems to me that in recovery or otherwise, one must confront matters directly related to faith…matters of rebellion and responsibility, matters of pain and fear and pride and self-loathing and trust and pleasure. And so then how am I not different, if those are things with which I struggle and sometimes often screw up? One is not required to be acquainted with the depths of addiction to understand or experience those things. To me they are a product of humanity, and so in theory it is not hard to imagine loving the unlovable. In practice, my greatest obstacle is merely my Self…my fears and insecurities and selfishness.

I have been shown great mercy, both in ways I understand and in deep parts of my soul and experiences that I have yet to plumb. By people and by my God. Therefore I want to savor and extend that mercy, and with it learn to embrace righteous justice…not condemning judgment, but to be the kind of person who can honestly and vulnerably ask tough questions because I am not afraid of the answer…my own or that of another.

I have been told perhaps that I am too idealistic. I don’t know any other way to be. I don’t see it that way. I see it as being willing to live with an open heart and I will do all I can to hold onto it because my knowledge of my self is that the alternative within me is not what I want to be. I am young, yes. I have many lessons to learn, yes. I believe myself to be an insightful and relatively self-aware creature…one who is no stranger to the matters mentioned above, despite my meager stores of “life experience”.

I go into this next season with tentative confidence and a healthy amount of stubborn determination. I am not fearful of messing up or being wrong, just of failing to recognize the significance of those moments. I hope that 20 years from now I can still be described by many of the same words that describe me today.