Pressure

Listening to the sermon yesterday, which was on the pressure Jesus experienced in His ministry and the pressures we likewise face, I sat there thinking it was very good, but not exactly applicable to me. “Been there, done that,” is what I was thinking. “Yes, I’ve experienced pressure--experienced lots of it--but it doesn’t bother me anymore. I’m done letting people and their ideas for my life worry or press me.”

Words naively, vainly, blissfully spoken. Er, thought.

I didn’t think much more about it the rest of the day, what with a fun, busy social agenda that didn’t let us come home until 9 PM. But later, in bed, when I could tell from the way the house felt that everyone else was asleep, they came. All the memories of all the instances just that day, just this week, when I’ve felt pressure about my future, about my past. The pressure that my past isn’t good enough, and that my future had better make up for it.

 I get it from people all around me, as I’m sure you do too. My grandparents. My friends’ parents. People at church. Some of my friends. It’s funny though, because a lot of times, the pressure comes just because they are trying to be polite, making a bit of conversation, trying to convey they are interested in my life. Thank you for being interested. Really. But must you be interested solely in what I am doing with my time this summer and this fall? Are there no other questions to ask a 19 year old?

Pressure arises in unexpected places too, in forms you wouldn’t expect. For instance, the nurse taking down my information at the doctor’s office. Are you in college? she asks.

“Yes, um, well, I just kinda graduated with my Associates I guess.”

 Um? Just? Kinda? I guess?

The moment that sentence came out of my mouth I slapped myself mentally. Lack of confidence much? Yes. There, in that small white room, with the fading, yellowed diagrams tacked to the wall, my whole confidant facade made a break for it, apparently. I think a psychologist would have found it mildly amusing, the way that sentence slipped out without my thinking, with all those qualifiers sewn seamlessly between the words. Like a speech. It was perfect. Rehearsed over and over in my brain. Unlike the stilted explanation of “how I am going to spend my life” that I give repeatedly to the people who seem to want to know. The explanation that, though stilted, at least sounds confidant, insouciant.

Even though it’s the explanation I rehearse audibly, it’s not the explanation I rehearse to myself again and again, the explanation that slipped out to the nurse’s verbatim question that she is paid to ask everyone my age. Funny that she--the one who doesn’t really care--got the truth. The uncertain truth, that I doubt what I have done, doubt what I am doing.

 The lack of confidence stems from the pressure. The pressure to perform, to breathe, like everyone else. Late last night (or maybe it was so late I should say early), after a while I gave up trying to sleep and sat up in bed and watched the sleep light on my Macbook blurb steadily on and off. That’s when I realized I was breathing with it. The steady strobe perfectly matches the rise and fall of a human’s breath when at rest. {Freaky, Steve, freaky.}

But it seemed to exemplify in a tangible way what I'm feeling. I feel pressed to breathe in rhythm. Breathe in sync with our culture--American culture, feminist culture, even Christian culture. I know what they want me to do, and I know what I could do, to appease them, to have the answer they are looking for when they want to know what I'm doing this coming fall. I could breathe in rhythm. Not disrupt the pattern.

That's boring though. After breathing with my computer for a while, staring at the little rectangle of blinking light, I got bored and thoroughly tired. So sleep did come...but it didn't help much, because interestingly all my dreams were filled with people, filled with the same pressure, asking asking asking. "What are you going to do with your life?" At one point in the dream, Andrew came up to me and said, "here's a question about your future you can probably answer: Are you going to walk across the Sahara desert backwards?"

I grinned in the dream and replied, "that is one thing I DO know the answer to! I am NOT going to walk across the Sahara backwards!!"

{yeah, my dreams are weird}

Truly, I know a lot about what I don't want to do, and it includes not walking backwards through the Sahara. I also have a vague idea of what I do want to do, if not the exact timing. If not the assurance that opportunity will knock.

But it's still hard, to have to battle through stereotypes, pressure, to remain graceful and calm and less-than-perfect in a world that calls for aggressiveness and perfection.

Over the year, what's been a big help actually is a comment a friend left on my blog a long time ago...it's very fitting, and rather encouraging. He quit blog world a number of months back, and I miss his hilarious cynicism that he somehow always tempered with wisdom....Anyhow, for posterity's sake, here's the comment:
 
It's rough to realize you want to be a "wife and a mommy" and possibly "just" a "wife and a mommy" in a culture that sneers at housewifery under the _guise_ of "feminism."


 It's equally hard to have a God-given desire for a career in one of the plethora of churches that call that worldly, and tell their female congregation that they were all created for the same vocation (or lack thereof).


Here's some real feminism for you. God made you to be exactly who you are and he made you to do exactly what he wants you to do. No matter who discourages you, from snide female professors to well meaning church ladies, He's going to do exactly what he wants with your life, and no one can do anything about it. Not even you. ;)